Another change of address

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Moving this website around is becoming a habit this year and after a brief absence I’m back up and running once more on a new host. The previous provider decided that the amount of bandwidth I got through from 7-8am Saturday morning constituted a denial of service attack and blocked the site. Given the levels involved this seemed more than overzealous, I mean I can download 3 times more than that in an hour single-handed. Suffice to say, I asked for a refund and at least got most of my money back. The service was so cheap in the first place I was bound to run into something like this sooner or later but I had been hoping for later.

Moving everything around has gotten old so this time I’ve gone the full hog and the site is now running entirely on its own VPS. This is complete overkill and took an age to set up from a blank slate but I intend to use the server for other things so it will come in handy now I have it. It came with a hefty bandwidth allowance so feel free to download to your heart’s content. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything but please let me know if things don’t work.

Wing Commander Prophecy – Preview Screenshots

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I thought it was about time I posted something on here so I had a search through a few cover CD’s looking for an Ultima Online 2 demo video I remember seeing. I didn’t find it but did spot a disk with some early Wing Commander Prophecy screenshots (most of which are pre-rendered). These come from the September 1997 PC Gaming World which should date them to about 5-6 months before WCP was released. It’s a pity they aren’t larger but these were probably hosted on the Origin website originally and would no doubt have been considered high-resolution back then:-

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Top 100 PC Games in 1996 – PC Gamer

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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?

  • Wing Commander gets the whole series bundled together in at #88 with the usual complaints any regular reader of this blog should expect from PC Gamer. Privateer never gets a mention at all…
  • Shadow Caster gets an unexpected place at #82. It’s not an awful game but I doubt it would have got anywhere near my own top 100.
  • Crusader No Remorse is at #52 and described as having the best name ever but lacking the gameplay to back it up.
  • Strike Commander is at #39. Wings Of Glory is a lot more fun to play if you ask me but I did like the cut-scenes and general ambience of Strike Commander.
  • Ultima 8 is at #34 with the rest of the main series not getting a mention.
  • Underworld 1 & 2 are at a criminally low #21.
  • Looking Glass’ Terra Nova gets a very surprising #16.
  • System Shock gets the highest place with a #9 spot

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:-

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Ultima Patcher 1.41

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I’ve uploaded a new version of the Ultima Patcher. The changes are:-

  • Support for Beautiful Britannia. Due to the size of this patch, you will have to either download it inside the patcher or manually copy the zip into the Files folder (Thanks to Ken at the Ultima Codex for hosting the download).
  • Fixed issue when adding the MT-32 ROM’s where the install/uninstall MT-32 button wouldn’t necessarily appear depending on which game menu you were in.
  • You can now change your Avatar name when using the Ultima 9 dialog patch (Well done to Natreg for spotting that the renaming utility ran in DOS).

That’s everything I can think of so barring any more bugs/tweaks, this should be the last release outside of keeping up with new Ultima mod/patch releases.