Timberwolf's Stuff is a glorious hoard of old and slightly dusty junk, presented by a not so old but definitely slightly dusty host.
Join me in my study as I wander through the oddball games and accessible hackability that is PC gaming both ancient and modern, celebrate the less-told story, shine a spotlight on the obscure and the forgotten, worship at the altar of the Mono Original Pressing, and spend a lot of time making a fool of myself on video. All with gentle narration, the Timberwolf No Mic Clipping Guarantee and standards of production quality best described as "attainable".
tl;dr: I place objects upon my head to entertain people.
He/him, ally, don't be a dick in my comments section. It's not retro, I've just been playing it a while.
And then the humble PC speaker was deleted in favour of a sounder which could just about beep, if you got one at all. I remember PC speaker driver on Win 3.1, setting up the volume with a test piece of the Trumpton fire brigade call
I think Polish train simulator SimRail has a similar vibe with the fully interactive cockpits, live weather and a full timetable on multiplayer servers. It really feels like you’re playing on a live rail network, much more than any other train sim.
Telling myself, "you don't need more simulators, you don't need more simulators, you don't need more... oops how did that 'Add to Wishlist' button ever get clicked"
RCT1 is one of my favourite games of all time. I never bought 2 until the era of OpenRCT2. When I was 13 when RCT2 came out and honestly I couldn't justify getting it when it looked so similar to the original. Obviously having played it now, its brillian, but I could only get so many games at that age and no matter how shallow this may seem, 2 didn't seem like much of an upgrade from a casual viewpoint.
There is one underestimated reason, why we often feel that these games looked better when we played them in the past, than they do look today. When someone programmed a game, they aimed the graphics to look as good as possible on a crt screen. The pixelation of crts was used to create subtle shades, nuances and softer pixels in the games graphics. With todays super clear, bright LCD screens, these effects are not visible anymore, making the games look more simple, blend and pixels are crisp and sharp and as a consequent more visible.
I just stumbled upon this, great video. I made a bunch of the cars seen here, I went by Slayer back then. I haven't played C2 in years, but there was a few cars I started to make and never finished that every now and then I think about going back and working on if I could get car-ed to work on windows 10 lol. Were you on the CWA board back in those days?
Ah, it's improved a lot since the early days! Still a pain when you get one on a year-old video where it's like, "yes, this might have been useful 11 months and 29 days ago" but hey, they're drowned out by all the positive ones of people sharing their memories with these games and software.
Rockstar should never have bought the company that develops the world's best racing games, open world building and game engines. The fact that it was a company that paid such attention to details even under the conditions of that day explains why these people are developing the entire technical infrastructure of GTA IV and RDR 2 today.
Great video. Fantastic game, cant wait for the Foundation 4 uodate to be done, its shaping up to be an even bigger upsate than Simulator or overhauled.
My only beef with Dungeon Keeper was that the last few levels seemed to be designed as such that the only way to win was to train up a high level monster, poses it, and then head-shot the enemy dungeon heart. And that's just a cheap way to play IMHO... I want to train all my creatures, and then have a massive fight on the doorstep of my enemy, pushing deeper into their dungeon, taking it room by room. But that just doesn't seem possible in the late-game, and people tell me I'm playing it wrong. I appreciate the reason why gold is limited, and you need to get on with it, but also I'd love a version where you can play a long-game.
Superb! Myself and a friend (Simon Chamerlian) in 1993 wrote shareware called 'OLGA' Off Line Games Application. In simple term, back then, it interacted with bulletin board to send email packages. Essentially, it used the email to send the state of a graphical game and if you have the OLGA control centre you could read the emai packages and it would translate into a graphicak game, you move and then package it up and send the email etc. We were intervied on a few national bbc stations... they were the days.... I carried on myself with TGC (the game creators) and other things, writing apps that would be #1 on the apple istore for years. Sadly Simon is no longer with us, but hs memory lives on.
I have a similar story with Warcraft III. I stomped the game as it shipped with Huntress rush before I had good internet. Got good internet, thought "Oh wow I should play against real people" and suddenly my huntress rush as night elves didn't work so well because they got nerfed early on. Took me a while to figure it out.
It's amazing game! Since my dad showed me this game when I was 6 I like it and play it, when I have time. This game is about 2 years older than me, it's still getting updates!
Oh yes! It's infuriating when a town builds a warehouse, you rely on that for goods acceptance, and then it gets replaced with a "Goods (1/8)" office building...
All I remember from QBASIC was playing Gorillas. I didn’t even know you could program stuff. I was just 8 in 1994 and as Windows 95 took over and simplified things I never properly learned DOS or Windows 3.1.
Ah, that's where I started with it! I used to wonder why this one game was so complicated, where if you messed up any of the instructions you'd been given to run it you'd end up staring at a blue screen with all this code. Until I found that screen let you edit the size of the explosions...
Never understood why Catacomb Abyss has better pixel resolution in weapons used (hand) and Wolfenstein 3d use same pixel resolution for textures on weapons
even the first game's destruction physics was awesome. alien somewhere in the 3 foor building? Blow out the first floor and let the whole thing collapse. The feature's absence from all the "inspired" titles in the 2000s was felt hard. Glad they reintroduced the mechanic in the 2009 re imagine
I wrote a stat program to display population 3d histogram of data in QBasic in 1985 in MD training. Used a AT&T PC with 2, 360k floppies. My program was easier to use and more functional that the Training program mainframe. Still have that machine in my attic.
Most of the online stores have a version packaged with DOSBox which will run on modern PCs fine. It's currently on sale at GOG as I write this, only 75p or so!
Space Hulk. Megalomania. SPX turbo pascal library (I could rip the .voc files from the Syndicate: American Revolt demo, and play a jet strike through my PC speaker). Hell, considering stuff like M.U.L.E has voice files on the NES, way before 16bit, etc, I'm not sure you've really covered the beeper properly. "Welcome Yellow Flapper!". As true now, as it was then.
10:20 - I remember that time I opened the Duke Nukém 3D configuration file in notepad and found RPG Blast Radius and damage. Turned it into a nuke that'd wipe entire areas :D
I have fond memories of A2 Racer and its sequels and spinoffs. Davilex even did a racing game with speedboats in the Amsterdam canals at some point called Grachtenracer, and a very weird paid Doom mod called Amsterdoom.
Apocalypse is the X-Comiest of all X-Coms. It has real time or turn based, it has large squad sizes, procedural maps, destructible environments, and air-to-air combat. Not just some limited radar screen approximation of air-to-air, no! Geoscape combat which you can micro-manage! I very much enjoy the factions and the dome city setting, which is kinda Falloutty, Cyberpunky and RPG-lite. Why? Tell me why! Why can't we get a faithful recreation of this title? The wikipedia page says production of Apocalypse was a disaster akin to Coppola's Apocalypse Now! A disaster which resulted in a masterpiece.
I was pleasantly surprised when I tried the PlayStation version of London Racer. It's cut down quite considerably from the PC version (yes, that is possible) but it's actually a reasonably enjoyable arcade racer. And the series beyond that has some interesting titles, too; USA Racer on PlayStation 2 in particular actually veers fairly strongly into "quite good" territory. It's a shame that London Racer II was a bit underwhelming; it was very obviously a cheap cash-in using most of USA Racer's assets and a disappointingly small amount of new tracks.
You did a great job! I immediately recognized the M25 - it ressembled 95% of the M25 I experienced two weeks ago on my visit to the UK! Only differences: Mercedes C Class AMG and (would you believe it!?) no rain! 😂
I like your writing, thank you for the video! My history with budget racers was playing the EA published but Pocketeers developed Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed for the GBA. Tho now that it's in my memory I kinda wanna go and look at it's very early 3D graphics. I remember alot of 28x28 textures making up very large surfaces, and vertices would jump around alot.
Yeah, I was expecting much worse going back to it but it's very much "they did their best within the constraints" rather than "who cares, it's going on spinner racks to be bought by people who go 'we have Gran Turismo at home', all it has to do is compile and run"
Something I've wondered about before is whether it would be possible to convert all the content of the Frontier expansions into 8-bit color format and apply some color correction so it better matches the Simon Foster style. I don't know a thing about RCT modding but it seems like it would be a simple thing to do. 🤔
