My only regret is playing the game over and over again and not buying its sequel, Zoids: Fuzors. Sigh. The Game Boy Advance and the Zoids: Legacy cartridge are long gone from my hands, but I can still relive the game through the dozens of videos on the Internet.

Take these videos, for example. They feature the final battle of our heroes against the Death Meteor. Enjoy!

Post from: EveryJoe

Zoids Legacy: Final battle versus Death Meteor

Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of the most unforgettable video game developers and publishers.

Strategic Simulations Inc. was founded by war games enthusiast Joel Billings. He hired two notable computer programmers to start the company’s reign in video gamedom: John Lyons, who wrote Computer Bismarck for the Apple II and later the TRS-80 in 1980, and Ed Williger, who wrote Computer Ambush. Both games, Bismarck and Ambush were written in the Basic language. Come to think of it, almost all games in that era were written in Basic.

With its founder being a war games fanatic, SSI naturally launched mostly strategy games in its first two years of operations, from Computer Bismarck to Southern Command. Interestingly, SSI also developed and published sports video games, such Computer Quarterback, a football simulation game for the Apple II and the Commodore 64, and Computer Baseball.

No, not all SSI titles had the word “Computer.” In 1982, SSI launched the RapidFire line of video games, which included Cytron Masters, Cosmic Balance, and Galactic Gladiators. Don’t ring a bell? How about Epidemic!, a real-time strategy game dealing with a global plague?

SSI’s more memorable games, however, came only in 1987 with its acquisition of rights to develop and publish Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video games from TSR. The first such game, Pool of Radiance, came out in 1988. Oooh, Alias and Dragonbait! Oh, wait, that’s Curse of the Azure Bonds, another SSI title.

Of course, who can forget SSI’s powerhouse of strategy games, Panzer General, which spawned a host of other “General” games, like Allied General and Pacific General.

So what happened to SSI after all these successful titles? It was acquired in 1994 by Mindscape. Later, it became part of Mattel, and later still, a division of Ubisoft. Unfortunately, Ubisoft retired the brand name, and thus the world had been robbed of the legacy of SSI.

Post from: EveryJoe

Whatever happened to Strategic Simulations Inc.?

I think the very pinnacle (at least for the moment) of this new age wonder is the Super Robot Wars, a series of tactical role-playing video games produced by the Japanese gaming company Banpresto, a division of Bandai, for various video game consoles and video game handheld consoles.

From the title alone, you should be able to guess what the game features: giant robots or mecha from multiple Japanese animé and manga titles. Super Robot Wars is made even more exciting by the fact that the battle simulation between the robots is supported by the melding of storylines from the different animé series, including characters and backgrounds.

What’s even more amazing is the mix and match of the robots found in almost all titles under the series or franchise. In what other game can you play old school robots like Mazinger Z, Getter, and Daimos, and make them go head-to-head against today’s generation of robots, such as Evangelion and Gundam?

Well, enough of my prattle. Sit back and enjoy this video on Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, which features some of animédom’s most famous and beloved robots:

Post from: EveryJoe

Super Robot Wars: The old versus the new

Before I begin another mind-numbing round of Dungeon Keeper, which is, to me, one of the best games ever produced by Bullfrog Productions, I’m going back to the basics of the game in hope of retrieving as much useful information that will help me through my relearning phase. No, it’s not cheating. Let’s call it a reconnaissance.

Well, Dungeon Keeper’s interface is pretty much like that of real-time strategy games. For a more detailed, if not accurate, description, I turn to Wikipedia:

The player uses a mouse, represented in the game as a hand, to interact with a bar on the left-hand side of the screen, allowing him to select which rooms to build and which spells to cast. Rather uniquely, the player can use the hand to pick up creatures and objects in the dungeon and carry them around, allowing for tactics such as gathering an assault force and dropping off the creatures en masse once a beachhead has been established.

The hand also allows the player to “slap” objects and thereby interact with them: creatures will hurry up when slapped, chickens in a hatchery will “splat,” and some traps will be triggered. Prisoners in the torture chamber can thus be treated with a hands-on approach.

The main game view is in isometric perspective; however, this view can be zoomed and rotated. The player also has the option of possessing one trap or room section. A smaller part of the map is shown as a minimap in the top left corner of the screen.

Right. Treat it like an RTS. That not only speeds up my understanding of the game, but also my reaction time. Time to research the shortcut keys and a good build order.

Here’s another cool Dungeon Keeper video. It’s actually a review, but since it’s in Deutsch (German), I can’t really understand much. Watching the video helps, though. I’m learning how to make rooms properly. Hurray!

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Going back to basics

After a few hours (yeah, right) of playing Dungeon Keeper again, I still can’t make heads or tails of how the game works, despite having played it hundreds of times in the past … way baaack in the past.

So my knees finally buckle (or my eyes finally give way to Morpheus’ sand) and I sleep on it. While dreaming of Dungeon Keeper, I get this idea of doing a little research to help speed my understanding of the game.

Still groggy from 12 hours of sleep, I head straight for the computer and drop by YouTube and gamefaqs, my favorite haunts for video game tips and tricks. I’ve found a video!

Labeled Dungeon Keeper Beginner, my first thoughts were of a fantastic step-by-step guide about the game’s basics. Unfortunately, the video failed to help much as the player or the one who recorded the video apparently isn’t a beginner at all but a seasoned veteran.

Well, I can’t really spend too much time learning about the game’s mechanics from web sources. The only way I’ll learn, I guess, is to get down and dirty and just play the game. Here’s to 16 more hours of groping in dark and musty dungeons.

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Trying to keep up

Dungeon Keeper is a PC-based strategy game released by Bullfrog Productions in 1997. Gosh, has it really been a decade? Going back to the topic, the game puts you into the role of (what else!) a dungeon keeper instead of a knight in shining armor or a muscle-bound warrior in search of good booty. Yes, pretty cool, huh?

Your goal as Dungeon Keeper is to 1) build dungeons, 2) recruit monsters to your cause, 3) set traps, and 4) fend off or eliminate computer-controlled heroes (this is the good part).

To whet my appetite, I viewed about a dozen videos. The result: I am thoroughly convinced that I need to play this game, again … and again. Time to chuck my MMORPG characters for a few days and then grab the godstick and wave them at silly adventurers trying to penetrate my lair.

As for you, content yourself with watching this video of the introduction to the game while I put on my work clothes before diving off into my game vault for the Dungeon Keeper installer.

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Being nasty and lovin’ it

My Apple IIc may be dead (may the computer gods bless its merry electronic soul), but the games I loved playing on it live on in this day and age—and The Bard’s Tale trilogy are among these.

Don’t know anything about this granddaddy of RPGs? Read on.

The Bard’s Tale: Tales of the Unknown is a fantasy computer role-playing game developed by Interplay Productions in 1985 and distributed by, whoah!, Electronic Arts. This brainchild of game designer Michael Cranford is based loosely on traditional Dungeons and Dragons gameplay (yes, the tabletop, pen-and-paper, roll-the-dice type of game).

Here’s an excerpt from a short review on the trilogy:

Ever since the original Dungeons and Dragons board game came out, role-playing games captured the imagination. But with RPG board games there was always a lot of calculating, making notes, rolling dice, collecting cards, etc., involved. There were many things you have to take care of, but would prefer not to have to. This was where computers came in.

The computer took care of all the complex calculations, of all the variables, and the most important thing was you didn’t have to worry that it would try to cheat you, like some human players tend to do. Thus, the RPG genre got transferred to different computers quite early on.

Although The Bard’s Tale is a classical RPG, it’s somewhat different from other RPGs. First, you don’t get to customize characters. You need a party to go on a quest, like with every classical RPG, but you only get to select the races and the positions of party members. There are no skills, wisdom, magic or any other points to distribute either randomly or intentionally. You only create characters and make up a party to go on the quest.

A pretty gloomy review, yes, but from a 2008 perspective. If you look at the three games with the eyes of a child living in the 1980s, you’ll see that The Bard’s Tale is quite advanced. Character sprites are animated. Almost everything you see on screen is in color and rendered in 3D.

I’ll write a more detailed account about my adventures in The Bard’s Tale in a few days. For now, let me crawl the streets of Skara Brae and wait for wandering monsters to ambush my party.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You can download these games, demo or full, from any of these sites. The Bard’s Tale, however, seems to be protected by copyright, so be sure to download only from legal sources.

Post from: EveryJoe

The Bard’s Tale Trilogy: Turn-based fun