Archive for the ‘Retro Reviews’ Category
Retro Review: Theme Hospital
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, it’s time for a refreshing dose of Retro Review, the half-column blog-thing which takes the very best of the worst of computing history, regurgitates it a little bit, and spits it back out.
I’m pretty sure you’re all going to remember this one, today I’m taking a nostalgic look at Theme Hospital. For those who decided they preferred the shade of a large bolder during the late 1990′s, Theme Hospital was a simulation game that, as the title suggests, allowed the player to build and run their own hospital.
The game was developed by Bullfrog Entertainment, who had huge success with an earlier title, Theme Park. Creating and running your own theme park, of course, is a very appealing idea. Theme parks are, by their very nature, creative places. Bold, colourful, musical, loud, and in general, designing a theme park is quite a lot of fun. I’m sure we’ve all at one time or another caught ourselves daydreaming about an idea for a theme park ride that we’d like to create.
So, to build on the success of Theme Park, Bullfrog decided to create a new game in the same vain, and what better place to set your much anticipated sequel than…..in a hospital…. the one place nobody ever wants to go. I don’t think many people daydream about designing their own hospital ward, as a general rule of thumb, except perhaps Katie Price, but there wasn’t a “disastrous plastic surgery” ward in the game, so that doesn’t count.
Despite this initial setback, Theme Hospital does actually provide some fun, with it’s strange surreal humor. Patience who come to your hospital suffer from all sorts of strange illnesses, including Bloaty Head, Slack Tongue, Fractured Bones, Serious Radiation, Hairyitis and Baldness, something I’m suffering from quite badly at the moment.
The layout of this hospital is dumb.
Unfortunately the size and shape of the hospitals in the game are so bloody awkward, I often feel like killing the patients instead of trying to cure them. All rooms have to be a certain size and shape, and invariably there’s either too much or too little room to fit everything in. The result is strange dead ends, blocked areas and passages that Bloaty Head sufferers get lost down, before they curl up into a ball, and die.
But never-mind, there are some other awesome aspects to this game. Did you know for example, all the competing hospitals in the game are named after famous computers, mostly fictional ones? There’s one called Deep Thought, from ‘ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and then there’s ‘Colossus’, the British supercomputers used to break German codes during World War II. My favourites however are HAL, named after Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Holly, who is of course the computer in the British sitcom Red Dwarf.
There really isn’t a lot to say about this game. You basically just keep building rooms and treating people, with increasing difficulty, until you reach the final level, where you’re instantly swarmed with 20,000 patients, an earthquake, and have to build a hospital in a building shaped like a hideously deformed penis.
Just incase that isn’t enough hospital fun though, Codemasters and DR studios released their rip-off version, Hospital Tycoon, in 2007. Basically a Theme Hospital for the 21st century, it features almost identical gameplay, but with fancy graphics, no sense of humor, and a lack of nostalga value. And that makes it worthless. And that’s why you’ve never heard of it before.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
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Retro Review: The Oregon Trail
Line up, line up, come one and come all, it’s the Retro Review, the column that likes to take the best of the worst, chew it up, regurgitate it back out and present it on a plate for your enjoyment.
Today we’re looking at The Oregon Trail, Third Edition for Windows 95 Pentium PC and Macintosh Power PC. I first played this game in 1997, on what was then my state of the art Windows 95 machine with 133mhz processor, 16mb of ram and a 4GB Hard Drive. The fact that my wristwatch beats these specifications today however should not detract from one important fact; at the time, the graphics on this game were the shit. And by that I mean, shit.
The box for this game makes many bold claims. “Top Selling”, “Used in Schools”, and, most interesting of all, “Internet Linked”. The internet was just starting to become a household thing, but online play and interactive applications were still in their infancy.
The Oregon Trail 3rd edition was no exception, however, since all it really did was create a shortcut in the Start Menu to a website, the contents of which have long since been washed away by the tides of Internet change and are to be anybody’s guess.
So, after installing from the 3 CD-roms (Yah. Why this game is 1.6GB in size is anybody’s guess. DVD’s didn’t exist at the time.), the game proper begins. We start out picking our team of five intrepid explorers to join us on this quest to Oregon City.
This basically just involved creating five people with rude names. There was no real skill to the selection, no special abilities or powerups, merely a choice of name. Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug and Jane however, are missing one thing. Supplies, of course!
Any game worth it’s salt needs a shop to buy upgrades, items and junk from, and this game is no exception. The EMH from Star Trek Voyager seems to run the ”general store” at the start of the game, which makes me wonder from the offset weather this is just a holographic simulation.
All manner of interesting items could be purchased from the Doc, including, but by no means limited to, the 5 month package, and the 6 month package. The contents of these packages remain a mystery, but supposedly they contain “basic supplies for the size of your party and the trip you’re travelling on.” I wish my local Co-Op was that comprehensive.
Oh, and for those who like a challenge, you can opt to “No Thanks” and attempt the trip without any supplies whatsoever. Clever.
So, now we have our band of intrepid explorers, miscellaneous supplies, Large Farmwagon, and four random Oxen that appeared from nowhere, we’re ready to set off on our trek across America. The game promises “human drama” which unfolds with events such as “dust storms”, “thirst”, “bartering” and “cholera”.
Say what you want about Modern Warfare 2, it just isn’t in the same league without a cholera feature.
One of the first obsticals to overcome is a river. There are several techniques to this, which including caulking the wagon and trying to float across, waiting for a ferry, attempting to traverse the shallow parts, or just praying that oxen make good life-rafts. This part of the game is generally quite annoying, since the ferry option is usually too expensive and your team die of starvation due to spoilage and dysentery before it arrives. Caulking the wagon is your best bet, and the only real option, however 90% of the time this fails and you’re greated with several messages telling you Cockface, Dickhead, Arsewipe, Buttplug, Jane, Danny, and Four Oxen have died.
Should you be lucky enough to get across the river, you’re ready to go hunting! That’s right, this game promotes to young children the need to mame and slaughter young animals for food with a shotgun. To be honest this is a bit more like Duck Hunt than a hunting simulator, as rather unconvincing sprites of lions, deer, birds and so forth move across the screen. As the difficulty increases, the animals move quicker and quicker until they’re so ungodly fast that it looks like the animal kingdom’s version of an acid party.
Still, what food you do gain is quickly lost to spoilage anyway, and things like broken axles, food poisoning, thives, drowning, broken legs etc. se
rve to make this game unrealistically difficult to complete for anyone, nevermind someone “Age 10+”. Ultimately this leads to the untimely deaths of your crew to various forms of illness, the most popular of these being;
- Dysentery
- Typhoid
- Cholera
- Exhaustion
- Measals
- Snake Bite
- John Cena Championship Match
A funeral is then held for the poor dearly departed, until eventually there’s nobody left to bury you. Strangely, you always seem to be the last one to die. Misfortune clearly being on your side, dying lonely and from the shits in the middle of the American desert.
I’m not entirely sure what happens if you make it to Oregon. I’m not entire convinced you can make it to Oregon. I did manage to get to a random fort once, where I discovered, to my amazement, that the Holographic Doctor had somehow beaten me there.
This game is actually kinda fun though, and of course, it launched a thousand T-Shirts. Which is always cool.
DANNY’S RETRO RATING:
Retro Review: Geordie Racer
Welcome all to the Retro Review, the column that likes to take the past by the balls, pin it up against a British Rail lavatory door and give it a bloody good buggering. Today (or whatever day this was written), we’re looking at Geordie Racer, a BBC Look and See (educational programming) series, which involved Geordie’s (people from Newcastle-upon-Tyne), Pigeons, and strange noises, in no particular order.
The first thing to note about the TV series of Geordie Racer, is that it’s almost impossible to understand what any of the characters are bloody saying. Trying to decypher the random dialect of Geordie people is nearly impossible, so to save the embarassment of trying, we’ll just assume for the rest of this review that the programme is filmed in a forigen language, and subtitles are required to fully appreciate the plot.
Oh, and what a plot it is. Setting the scene of Geordie Racer, the townspeople are currently 50/50 split obsessed with one of two things, either, the Great North Run, or the Great Pigeon Race. Now the reason for this, I can o
nly assume, is that half of Newcastle is stupid enough to run through the North of England, and the other half are stupid enough to try and get a pigeon to do it for them.
The main protagonist is named Spuggy Hilton, a name that has all sorts of dodgy connotations throughout the series, the many references to “Spuggy in his bird, like” – which is Geordie for “Kevin is with his pigeon” – well, the sexual inuendos speak for themselves really. Anyway, Spuggy is the only person in his family who takes an interest in the Pigeon race. The rest of his family are nutters obsessed with long distance marathon running, and the thought of “The Great North Run” is making them “spuggy” in their pants.
As a keen Pigeon fancier, Spuggy (or the Spugmiester as I shall now call him), manages to aquire a pigeon all of his own, named “Blue Flash” – one of the best birds in Newcastle. Then some random bitch called Janie turns up, and along with the Spugmiester witness a spate of local art robberies, (I know, it’s hard to figure out what the fuck is going on at this point). Just how Bonnie and Clyde here managed to witness several acts of people stealing paintings, and what that has to do with racing people OR pigeons, ugh, I don’t know anymore.
The fact they had to witness these people stealing paintings on THREE seperate occasions to cotton on to the fact they were stealing them speaks volumes.
So rather than call the police, like most sane people, they decide to go and spy on the crooks themselves, using their pigeon and other stupendously dangerous methods. This is such a good message to give out to kids, isn’t it? I really gave up trying to decypher the plot at this point so you’re just going to have to make up how this thing ends in your own head.
BUT WAIT, there was more to Geordie Racer than a bad television show. That’s right, there was GEORDIE RACER, THE GAME, FOR THE BBC MICROCOMPUTER.
The game was released on a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk, you know, the kind that actually flopped and took ten minutes to load, the video game version of Geordie Racer actually was kinda cool, but purely because it beat the endless handwriting and Italian lessions that my primary school forced upon us.
The BBC Microcomputer had the graphics of the old style Teletext, and this is pretty much what this game offers. After a very badly rendered title screen with one-bit rendition of the theme tune, players are treated to the main game, which consists of…. “Part 1″ and “Part 2″.
Comprehensive.
After selecting one of these, you can choose to go to a “Metro station”, which is funny, because Newcastle-upon-Tyne has no form of underground or overground tram system. It barely has bus routes. It’s also funny how this tram system conveniently has stations named “Home”, “Shoe Shop”, “Chemist”, “Bank”, etc. – I sure wish that the GMPTE would build me a tram system that only went to the places I went too!
After you visit the bank to get “£20″, the chemist to get “Foot Cream” and the “Shoe Shop” to get shoes, you can start the race. This involves answering questions, each one you get right progresses you 1 mile, each one you get wrong earns you a blister. Too many blisters and you’re out!
The questions are basically asking about things that happened in the TV show, so without watching it, you’re pretty stuffed to actually complete this game, and as such, I have now eaten the floppy disk.
Well, that was painful. Time to tally up.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
Retro Review: Microsoft 3D Movie Maker
Welcome to Issue 2 of the Retro Review, the column that loves to take old software by the balls and give them a good shake. Today, we’re looking at that no doubt memorable classic:
The game allows the user to choose from a wide range of scenes, then place 3D characters into those scenes and animate them in any way they wish. They can add speach bubbles or, with a suitable 16 bit sound card and microphone, record their own dialogue. The completed movie could then be saved and even shared online.
Now, of course, during 1995 the third dimension was still very much in it’s infancy. The Playstation was just about starting to make some inroads, but most 3D games still consisted of sprite-based bad guys in limited perspective environments. This was especially true for PC games, which lacked the gaming hardware that computers today take for granted. Back then, if you had more than 64mb of ram you where considered the elite.
For the time, then, the graphics and features available on this game are quite impressive. At first glance, anyway. The scenes are actually pre-rendered, and the 3D models have about three polygons each, but this is of course forgiveable. It still looks quite pretty.
Then shit starts to move, and the whole thing falls apart. Any attempt at walking by any of the characters results in some bizzare stepping motion while the entire upper body remains motionless. Any other form of movement is erratic and somewhat strange, and it’s all too easy to use the motion tool to make the characters appear to hump each other.
Infact that last bit is the most realistic animation on there. Then there are other issues, like the ability to make the characters randomly hump their way into the sky and off into no-mans land. The scenes are set in place so the characters just seem to wander off forever. Combine this with a frame rate of 8, and you can see why this game is probably a bit strange.
Now I do love the fact I can make a fat old sailor shag a Japanese lady at complete at total random at 8fps, but this does bore after a while. You can, if you want, make a proper movie with this thing I suppose, although I doubt it’ll become a timeless classic.
Strangely enough this game has a bit of a cult following, though. As recently as 2005, modifications and expansion packs have been released for it, as well as new tools and things of that nature. That’s a whole decade of unleashing terror on unexpecting kids of all ages.
This game then is, for all its faults, random quirky fun, and the ability to make anything have sex with anything from the street to a telephone box is nothing short of win.
Danny’s Retro Rating:
