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19day

2007-01-14

Nostalgia just isn’t what it Used to Be

Filed under: General — 19day @ 22:29:05

My friends and I finally exchanged christmas gifts. It was delayed by going home for christmas and not having a chance to meet up beforehand, and then by the plague I contracted and other general delays. But the exchange was made, and I got some very nostalgic gifts. I also got a watch, which is very nice, too nice for me, heh, but I need to take it to a jeweler to shrink the band a bit. But that’s not the nostalgic bit.

I got the Space Quest Collection (the latest one, I read there was another created by that name years ago), containing the 6 games, for the PC. And I also got the Activision Anthology, 45 Atari 2600 games, for the PS2. Lots of nostalgia. Oh, also, the title is just a joke, in and of itself, but it’s not meant to imply I don’t like the nostalgia I go into detail here.

I played Space Quest I today, I was a little dissapointed to see that the version provided was the VGA version. See, Space Quest I was originally an EGA game, and that was the version I knew and loved. They remade it a few years later, redoing all the graphics and changing it from a text parser game to a mouse-action game like some of the later creations. Still, I had never played that version, and I managed to beat it today, being a relatively short game when you know what to do (and I still know most of the puzzle elements by heart). But it was funny to be stuck on the little differences made to the VGA version, most frustratingly being the copy-protection they introduced. Most of their games have that kind of crap, and you have to refer to the manual, which they provided… as a PDF. They also recommend printing out the PDF as well. Heh, no thanks. But as all the games run in a licensed version of DOSBox, it’s easy to ALT-Tab out. I already had a version of the original EGA version of the game as well from a couple years back, so no matter.

Space Quest I EGA

Space Quest I, the EGA version

Space Quest I VGA

Space Quest I, the VGA version

I had played Space Quest 2 and I think 3 in the past, so I’ll play them again here, plus I’ll have 4, 5 and 6 from this collection, so it’s pretty kickass. The real selling point is that it’s all supposed to work flawlessly in Windows XP. Well, they cheated and used DOSBox, but still, presumably they tested it. I did discover a weird bug in Space Quest 2 during the save screen, it sort of screws up and leaves a bit of the screen on the game screen, which gets refreshed as you change it (like walk over the corrupted area, or just leave the screen and reenter). I hope in the damn police guys in the arcade (vaguely remember it from one of the Space Quests) are managable, as running it directly on a fast computer tended to make it impossible.

The Activision Anthology is actually kind of interesting. You pick from the 45 games from a rack, and play them on a TV (by which time it goes fullscreen). There are a lot of good classics on there which work as well as I remember them, like Plaque Attack, Crackpots, Dolphin, Oink, and my personal favorite, StarMaster. Those are some of the ones I used to have way back as cartridges. They also included some decent ones like Kabobbler and Pitfall, and some trash as well, heh.

StarMaster

StarMaster – The Great

Plaque Attack

Plaque Attack – The Good
Demon Attack

Demon Attack – The WTF

It includes a set of 80’s songs that play in the background of everything, which repeat just a little too often, but still add a lot to the nostalgia factor (though ironically most of them are songs I liked much later in life, not in the 80’s). They also offer some interesting things to unlock, like commercials for some of the games, and patches (which I assume are graphical renderings of the real patches you could win by submitting proof of score to activision for certain games). The lamest attempt of value added crap to the collection are different viewing modes, like playing games where the game screen is textured on a rotating cube, or rotates slowly or zooms in and out. These games are meant to be pretty damn hard because there’s no ending for most of them.. you play until you die. I can’t imagine why you’d want clouds or stars interfering with your Dolphin run. But fine, they are there.. and they are turned off, heh.

The thing is with most of the early Space Quest games, and with all of the atari games, I doubt most people could just sit and play them and enjoy them. They are archaic, the atari games especially, playing for points, most of the time no ending, graphics quite startling at times… even I look at some of them and go “wow” because I remember them being so much better, but I’m sure that’s just because back when they were new, anything was amazing. The nostalgia power is high, I can still enjoy such games. Can you?

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