MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries is downright unforgettable. 

They didn't just take out anything they licensed from other sources, they took out the art they hired Victor Musical Industries, Inc. to make for them too even though they had full rights to it. For anyoen curious Sarna has a listing of all the affect designs and where they were lircensed from.

It's on my list, definitely.

Mechcommander 1 is so, so good. I much prefer it to 2.

I've yet to play the Mech Commander games. I knew a guy that had it, but I never really went into his dorm room to play it. I didn't want to impose and I didn't have a computer of mine yet at that time and this was in 1999. MechWarrior 2 for Mac was my intro. I cranked up the visuals and music and it ran smooth, like even over 30 fps. I was young and didn't know about those kinds of things to well and couldn't have gauged it at the time, but I could almost swear it was 60 fps, it was that smooth, and I can't think of a machine in the late 90s that could do that. It had a monster, and I mean that, of a graphics card and the sound made you feel like you were in the cockpit. And this was a desktop.and my mom's computer. Mine wasn't nearly as good as hers and even fully expanded, ran it choppy and was nearly unplayable if too many enemies were on the screen. And the sound began to bleed together and forced me turn it way down of suffer permanent hearing loss. My computer finally died and I went through most of college using the library computers even to type up papers. I finally bought another one in 2002 but that blasted dome Mac is trash.

@@OasisTypeZaku mechcommander 1 (and 2 i think) is abandonware, you can find it for free online with a quick search if youre interested. good luck with the launcher, i got it working with little issue but your milage may vary

Tried replaying mech commander during the pandemic couldn't get it to run on it ;(

I certainly can't wait to get into it, I've been playing MW2 for three weeks now and certainly it'd be nice to see the next step. I found a way to get it working on modern systems too, so that's going to make for minimal hiccups in sound and whatnot.

@@KeiNova Not to mention - as you implied you already understand - it's unfortunate that while video games would seem to be the most prominent media of Battletech, they're....not canon. :( It's kind of crazy having gone through all these MechWarrior experiences and having all these memories, but they're all just imaginations, possibilities, unreliably told stories, or maybe just imagine them as legends/fiction/alternative universes. But if you're a lore person, it really ups the pressure to focus more on sourcebooks, novels, and of course, the TT game.

@@Sp3ctre18Gaming MW2's missions are from the Trial of Refusal. For example, you take part in the battle on Twycross that culminates in the death of Clan Wolf Khan Natasha Kerensky. MW3 and MechCommander take place during the Inner Sphere's invasion of the Clan home-worlds and ultimate annihilation of Clan Smoke Jaguar. And, as mentioned in the video, MW2 Mercs has you take part in the defense of Luthien. While you may not be playing as Phelan Ward or Jaime Wolf or other BT legend in these games, you're certainly getting a fair bit of canon.

Thanks for the lore tidbit, I'll remember it when I play real battletech.

I'll have to really try and get the most I can out of MW3 and try my best to do the story justice!

I'm going to have to try this down the road, I used Windows 95 on a 86 Box setup (which is a lot to type the specifics of on my phone) so I'm not really one hundred percent sure if that was the issue - but it probably was. Older games were so temperamental like that.

This is me. Not a Mecha fan really at all (I played BioWare’s Shattered Steel and that’s about it), but for some reason I’m watching all of this guy’s videos as they come out!

I'm glad you enjoy what I'm doing 😁

A huge compliment to me, thank you so much!

you a mecha fan alright, you just don't know it yet :p

I saw that deal too; I never took advantage of it though. I barely have time to read these days, so 40 plus books is a bit much lol

Thank you, I try and make this more of an exploration rather than just taking a head role. This way everyone can be along for the ride with me. Though certainly expect some talk about outdated design tropes as I go along - I'm sometimes a bit direct about those.

@@KeiNova I wouldn't be here otherwise. PC gaming is one of the few mysteries still remaining to me from this time period. And since mechs are the most polygon budget friendly humanoid forms around, this genre and this franchise seem helpful as a kind of base measuring stick/timeline? Your descriptions of they actually feel to play helped me understand the evolution of other games too, like Armored Core.

I never got to use them that much 😕 These games are great but you are right, they are still old and can be flawed too.

Why not? Its fantastic

You are welcome! I love the soundtrack too, thats why I used it for my videos :D Thats the one benefit of it never been legally copyrighted (to save cost, probably). I am glad I didn't discover that exploit, I might not have had any footage - just me skipping through to see the ending. Just kidding, I slaved through this whole thing! I didn't even know there were cheats until after I was done. I have to say, probably one of the most brutal experiences ever.

The voice acting was really great, I should have mentioned it. I just wish there was more overall.

Thanks for this, I was probably just hitting the cockpits here and there without realizing it. It just is really hard to be precise here, so I could never really fully tell.

I'm glad you are part of this little channel of mine. Thanks for the sub! On Windows 3.1??? Holy, I can't even imagine. It can't even pull off the right amount of colors, I don't think. Well, I'll be working through all of them and then the spin off stuff. I just had a huge issue with Pirates Moon and now I have to put that off a week. Then finally MW4, so I hope it's as good as everyone says!

Sadly it doesn't, not in this version. I was blowing off the legs of everything, and it didn't count as the Mech being destroyed unless I blew both legs off. Maybe it's because this has the dynamic system?

@@KeiNova I remember going after legs too. You do have to get both of the legs to destroy the mech. But legs are easier to replace than everything else in the torso and legs usually don't have anything in them other than heat sinks (To take advantage of water.) And hitting two legs is lot easier than hitting the head. All these Mechwarrior games as far as I know go that route of both legs destroying a mech rather than having to simulate mechs falling down or going prone, which is a thing in table top. I know why they do it because the juice probably isn't worth the squeeze but it does always feel weird to have mechs outright destroyed when they lose both legs instead of just being crippled. On the plus side losing a single leg is not as debilitating in this series of games. IIRC In tabletop if you blow off a mechs' leg it instantly falls down and you have to make piloting checks to get back up. Blow off both legs and it can't get up period but it can still fire from prone by using one of it's arms to hod itself up and firing with the weapons from the other arm and torso. They're still basically dead though since they're absurdly easy to hit and most pilots would eject at that point anyway they're doing very well in the battle otherwise.

I'll agree there! The lore is outstanding and requires literally several novels to be read to even get what is happening at some points. It can be played without, but yeah... that is the biggest flaw of every MW game aside from MW3.

I think it's mainly because my playthrough didn't give me many Light/Dark missions honestly. I only played like two, total. I'd definitely suggest the Titanium version of Mercs! It makes the game much better, but the glitches do still happen with Clan Mechs. Still have to suffer the amber hue of thermograph though, ugh. Thanks for watching so much of my videos! I'm going through Pirates Moon too, just finished MW3. So, here is hoping that video is good (if not better).

​@@KeiNovaYeah I think that's part of my super-dark memories - I tried to avoid the thermal view lol. In my first playthrough I also didn't think much about missions I might have been missing, so that was an important detail I picked up from your review and reason to try it again! And no, thank you. It's always a treat seeing people discover or re-discover MechWarrior! Good luck with PM! Steps up a bit in difficulty, huh?

@@Sp3ctre18Gaming it definitely does. Everything is way faster.

Ah, that is horrible! I'm so sorry!

That had to be amazing to see when everyone else was playing the DOS versions!

MechWarrior 3? Definitely this coming Saturday!

The atmosphere of mw3 is so good. Definitely underrated. The cockpit and sounds and details like missiles causing craters in the ground, or cockpit hits cracking the glass, shoot even the newer games don’t have that stuff

I tried my best to recreate the PC games cover but the red wasn't working for me, so I used a brushed metal one off adobe. I mean, it isn't surprising they might be similar since there isn't much art for the game to go around. Thanks for clicking my video then! I'm glad YT is giving us small fry a chance.

Would you believe this game is my first experience with it? 😂

I'll look it up. As I was reading Decision at Thunder Rift - I realized that certain sentences in the kindle version I have were missing? So, guess I'll have to look into this and see about going from there.

I just got Decision at Thunder Rift based on a suggestion. It's been a good read so far. But you aren't the only person to tell me the Warrior Trilogy is great. I'll have to try and grab it, because I am liking Decision at Thunder Rift - and if the Warrior trilogy is better, that can only be a good thing.

@@KeiNova The Grey Death legion books have good mech action, but the writing in general is everything you expect of 80s military sci-fi. Particularly when it comes to the few female characters. What the Grey Death Legion series does well is the on-the-ground action. The Warrior trilogy does all that, too, except the characters are far better rounded, and you get a solid taste of the aristocracy and the space opera elements. I think it's a much better example of the Battletech universe. It did kind of spoil me, though, because the next series I started reading wasn't by Stackpole, and it really wasn't anywhere near as good.

Thank you! It hasn't been too easy though, a lot of work and late nights.

Ah, I thought there was a reason like that. It seems like there is a lot of meticulous design choices in these games that really stick as close as possible to the lore. The more I play them, the more I see they were made by actual players and fans of the series. I can't wait to see how MW3 fares. I haven't ever played anything after Mercenaries at this point.

Is something like PCEm or 86Box out of the realm of running on your system? It doesn't take much; you could emulate Windows and be playing a 'slightly' better version. But really, the DOS one is ok.

@@KeiNova Actually, I can never seem to get a useful amount of performance out of directx when using emulators. I am more familiar with DOSbox. That, and my favorite abandonware site has pre packaged the DOS version. So there's that. Years ago, when it was new, I played the windows version.

I really wish it was more possible. Because of the multiple versions and how the game was developed, its a strange piece of software - all of them are. Many have told me its really difficult to put anything into the game, probably because of it being developed long ago on multiple frameworks and with GLIDE files that aren't able to be used anywhere, because they were automatically overridden with further versions - and the changes caused a lot of these games to be unusable in some ways. Its odd, and interesting. It'd be really cool though, if it could be broken and others could work on HD mods and whatnot.

You might want to look into Mechwarrior 5 Mercs. There is a big modding scene for this title.

Wow, really appreciate that!

I didn't think of that, thank you.

Sadly, no. I didn't get a PC or PlayStation until my school gave it to me in grade 4, and I didn't even know what Battletech was at the time. I'm 35 and I think the muse one came out when I was 4-6 years old. That would have been awesome though!

@@KeiNova Wow, thanks for the reply :) Very cool. Yeah I"m old lol. My best friend and I came in early in the tenure and ended up running into the guy playing Haak Magnusson and were helping him run the FRR potion.

It is what it is, I suppose!

I didn't even know they made X-Wing books, I'll have to give those a look. Thanks!

Lethal heritage is one of the best battletech novels imo. Highly recommend.

It had a few editing mistakes, I'm reuploading it right now. Sorry!

95 was good, but this was Mercs and not released until years later.

@@KeiNova Sorry meant a 95 mercs edition player.

@@Jerad2142 You mean the DOS version, right? Mercs wasn't released in 1995.

@@KeiNova Mercs was released September 25, 1996, my 1.05 CD is labeled MS-DOS/Windows 95.

@@Jerad2142 Oh, I'm stupid. You meant 'Windows 95' version. My bad!

Always.

Thank you so much for sharing. It's really impressive how much lore there is!

@KeiNova there is an insane amount of Lore for the Battletech/Mechwarrior universe. Tons of books, tons of supplemental material for the tabletop game as well. It's a good time 😁 I remember playing MW2 on a Gateway 3000 with my dad's flight stick with pedals and being absolutely entranced from the get go.

Despite a 300 year head start in technology, I'd say the Inner Spere probably would have won. You get really good at warfare when you practice it on your neighbors for 300 years. I'm assuming we'll find out soon or later with either MW5 Clans or MW6 Clans. Either way, I'm looking forward to throwing the Clans a beating, taking their mechs and tech, and perverting it to amuse myself.

Lol, Comstar didn't play dirty, they played normal combined arms as defined by the Ares Conventions. All those years of ritualistic combat made everyone outside of hell's horses forget what a tank was an all of them forgot that artillery exists. It's covered a lot in the source books and fiction but the fatal problem with the Clans is they spent their almost 300 years of training of away from the inner sphere not practicing how to wage war butt how to win ritualistic skirmishes. Yes, they managed to not lose tech this way but the force they created was ill suited to fight an actual war. In clan battles you generally show up with both forces at the bargained time and place, usually with mechs, you have brief skirmish, collect your spoils, then you pull back and go home and rest up and rearm and get ready to do it again. When the clans invaded the Inner Sphere any and all supplies would take at best 9 months to get there. That's about 6 times longer that it took sailing ships during the colonial era to go from the UK to America. And the Clans were not operating under ideal conditions as they were fighting with each other during the invasion and more than one clan destroyed their merchant caste supply chains in the name of glory for the warrior caste. When illKahn Leo Showers leading the invasion was killed by Tyra Miraborg's kamikaze attack in her Shilone aerospace fither over Radstadt in 3050 the entire clan invasion had to stop for an entire year so so the kahns could all go back to Strana Mechty to pick a new illKahn. That is absolutely bonkers. That kind of bad decision making permeates everything the clans do in this era. They have top of the line gear, some of the most sklled warriors, but their tactics are tied into Zellbrigen, resupply is the better part year away so logistics is hell, but the real killer is after all that the industrial base that is making those supplies. It's *much* smaller than the Inner Sphere forces they're fighting. And they are trying to field a military made out of the most expensive state of the art hardware in the universe. To steal an example from Tex, for the price of one 75 ton Timber Wolf / Mad Cat you can buy 3 80-ton Awesomes. And the Inner sphere can afford way more than just 3 Awesomes for every Mad Cat the the Clans can build. And they don't have to wait 9 months for resupply. They don't have to send messages back home by courier ship either and can take full advantage of Comstar's HPG network. So yeah, the clans invasion was a doomed to fail before it even started. All Tukkayid did was put a nice bow on it. Well, that and they were doomed to fail because the story demanded it. There's a reason the clan invasion era is so fondly remembered and it's not just nostalgia. It's the first sort of "balance pass" from the old original Succession wars designs which really swings the balance to be more offense oriented. The Truce at Tukkayid period is also one of the perfect eras from a gameplay perspective in that it creates a large stalemate situation with lots of interesting factions and forces locked in skirmishes which makes it very easy for players to run very interesting campaigns at all those conflict points. Everything is like a powder keg waiting to explode and there's lots of fodder there to create stories in all those borders.

@@Furluge War is a game of deception. Playing dirty is the rule. Clans believed it was the Olympics.

Yes, I'm trying to find a way to get it going now. It seems to lock when I start it.

All the Mercenaries games or the MechWarrior ones? Like a tier list? That would be interesting 🤔

A MWO Trailer!

It really was the worst, wasn't it?

IIRC there was a decision tree that meant you either got the hovertank, or, you got in a light mech and had to escort the hovertank. But it kinda sucked too

I am going through all of them, every single one hopefully. I'm hoping to get a Joystick by the time I get to MW5.

@@KeiNova Best to get it for the games except MW5, as MW3 and 4 were more built for a Joystick in mind while MW5 does have a more refined control scheme that makes it better for mouse and keyboard since they figured not as many have joysticks anymore in the 2010/20s. Although if you do want to use a joystick for it, I'm not gonna stop you, as that certainly seems like a vibe I can get behind.

@@HawkTheRedI had an MS Sidewinder 2 and I just could never really get into it. I WOULD always go back to it once in a while, for the feel and lore-accuracy, but mouse was always superior for MW3-MW5. MW2, however, I always played with keyboard only lol. I could never get the mouse sensitivity to feel right, or something like that.

Yeah, they play the same but there are a bunch of graphical differences! Interesting but likely really bad for consumers in 1995-1998.

They should, at least, re-release it remastered on PC for those who enjoy it.

I have a missing front tooth and I speak several languages, sorry.

I understand that, totally!

I certainly plan on it.

I explained a bit of it here, a bit at the start and more near the end when I talk about the story. It's going to take quite a bit for me to really get it all down pat. Though, I'm definitely up for the challenge.

Oh the setting is very good, it's just that the lore to Battletech is extremely expansive. It has grown over 4 decades and ranging from the tabletop to pen and paper rpg, dozens of novels and sourcebooks and can without a doubt challenge Warhammer 40K in this regard. If anyone is interested there are some extremely well researched, produced and narrated episodes about the general history, individual mechs and important persons by the Black Pants Legion here on RU-vid, really highly recommended.

@@wolfmanjackxl1691 have to agree, I highly suggest them

Yeah, especially because they make them very entertaining while being highly informative and Tex has a great narrator voice. 😄By the way, keep up the good work! I have more of a Mechwarrior, Earthsiege and Heavy Gear background so I find it very interesting to see games like Gungriffon that flew under my radar. @@KeiNova

I really wish I could do that, I do know the original MW2 still has a small online community. I will have to give the mauler a shot, that sounds really fun.