Now that Halloween is coming up, it's zombie time. Last year, I took a peek at the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead. Thanks to Humble Bundles, I got some more at the same time as the others. This is more of the same.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a complicated game. It came out broken, made some people angry, and caused hardware upgrades. Having sunk 100 hours into this over a near 100% playthrough, and halfway through another, I'm still not sure what to make of this. When I realized that the next blog post would be the 256th one, I thought it would be a crime to not have it be this. So let me get this out of the way before going into something seasonally appropriate.
Some time ago, I asked a friend if I could borrow a few games to play on Twentieth Century. Even though he was born in the latter 90s, he's a big fan of 90s games from id and Blizzard. He presented a few Quakes and WarCrafts. I tried playing WarCraft 1, but a few missions in, I got annoyed by the lack of build queues and a 4 unit select limit. I got a bit further in WarCraft 2, but sometimes ran out of resources before getting an army off the ground. Back in the bad old days, I had downloaded and played the WarCraft III demo quite a bit, and I remember liking it a lot better. While the base Reign of Chaos game installed and ran fine on Twentieth Century, the Frozen Throne expansion refused to install, complaining about hardware requirements, even though it ostensibly met them. So I installed these on my main rig, and this article is about the originals; not about the new Reforged remaster.
This game has quite the story behind it. When Supreme Commander 2 turned out as a dud, some of the people behind it left to form another company, and put together some ideas for a spiritual successor. Since the 2012 crowdfunding rush was in full swing, they launched Planetary Annhilation. After being quite expensive in early access, it came out to mild praise some time later. In 2015, they launched an expand-alone, Titans. This was a substantially discounted paid upgrade to existing players (original backers got it for free), and they discontinued sales of the original.
Once upon a time, I saw a preview of a trippy game called The Museum of Simulation Technology. It was a puzzle game where you changed the sizes of things by placing things closer or further away. They were local, and it was in a contest at a local college, but I don't think it won any prizes. I signed up to the newsletter, but everything went quiet. I got my hands on the initial preview game, and wondered if this was still happening. A name change to Superliminal and one Epic Store exclusivity period later, it came out on the other game stores.
I had a gaming fail. You know how I sorta remember that Halloween is coming up a week before, and scramble to play a spooky game in time? That sort of happened again. I didn't know that this game took place on Christmas Eve until I started playing it. The problem? I started playing it the day after Christmas.
No, this game isn't a mispronunciation on "Oregon Trail". Organ Trail is what you get if you cross that with zombies. This was a Flash game made around 2010, then it had a Kickstarter. I got this in a Humble Bundle. Don't be fooled into thinking this "Director's Cut" massively upgrades the visuals. This one looks like the original Oregon Trail from around 1980. This one doesn't have deluxe VGA graphics, but they are sufficient to get the job done. While it has pixel art graphics, it doesn't render in low resolution.