After showing some uncharacteristic organisation, I think I’m all packed and ready to fly out to Austin tomorrow. The only thing I’m not prepared for is getting up that early in the morning. In the meanwhile, I’ve time left over to line up some posts tonight so here are scans of a review of Longbow from the June 1996 PC Gamer. This is by far the lowest score I’ve seen it get but the reviewer’s only real complaint is that it doesn’t run fast enough:-
One of the first articles on the Roberts Space Industries website was a bio of Chris Roberts complete with a gameography. This happened to give a release year for his Popeye game which was the perfect reason to search through some old BBC computer magazines to see if I could find the thing. I came up empty handed again but I did stumble across something else to share.
So especially for anyone curious enough about Chris Roberts’ first game to click on the RSI link, here is what I would guess is his first (and for all I know only) published game review. The scans come from Issue 4 of Micro User (courtesy of The Acorn Preservation Project) where he gives his opinion on Countdown to Doom. His age at the time (May 83) is clearly given away when describing the benefits of save games.
I’m speculating that this is the same Chris Roberts but this was two issues after King Kong so it has to be a safe bet.
Top 100 games lists are always fun (even if only to disagree with) so I thought today I would have a browse through PC Gamer’s Top 100 PC games of all time and see how Origin fared. This is from the June 1996 issue so will probably have been put together around March of that year. Believe it or not, the publishers saw the need to seal this section of the magazine with 2 stickers to stop people reading it in the newsagent’s without buying it.
The PC Gamer panel had a noticeable bias toward modern games with a deliberate emphasis on titles they saw as being the best “right here, right now”. The result is not a single pre-1990 game with no room for early classics like Wasteland. The likes of Infocom can forget it. This does lead to a slightly skewed list especially looking back at it with 15 years of hindsight. So how did Origin titles get on?
Most of Origin’s major 90’s releases are represented, so considering the magazine I think they came out of it fairly well. They certainly did better than Sierra who didn’t get a single game in the entire list. I did think Bioforge would have made it and curiously it was on the 2001 list at #88.
Oddities (Fade To Black at 13???) and omissions aside, it’s not actually that bad a list. Aside from an urge to replay Dune for the first time in 15 years, the main thing I got out of it is that I really ought to find the time to give Civilisation a go one of these days:-
It’s two articles from PC Home today on the always well received AH-64D Longbow. First a brief preview from July 1996:-
And the review itself from a month later:-
Just a quick post today of an advert I spotted for the first Longbow game in the August 1996 PC Format:-
Also, I had a request for a scan of the C64 Ultima 1 Reference Card which is now sat on the downloads page.