The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard

After playing with DOSBox settings I was able to get this game running rather smoothly. That said, even when the game runs smoothly it can still be a clunky mess because of the awkward way your character turns, runs and jumps. So much of the games dungeons is platforming and you will die because the camera moved at a weird angle and couldn't see the floor, because you can't control the distance of Cyrus' jumps and because you just straight up fell through the floor after climbing to the top of a platform. Problems with the controls can be limited by rebinding the keys to modern WASD movement, E for action, Q for free-look/blocking. I did like the story and I appreciated that game did not hold your hand with glowing arrows telling you where to go. The puzzle at time could be hard but mostly fair if you took your time and in some cases, took notes. There are some puzzles where poor collision detection made it hard to operate and I had to reload several times because I got stuck in a jumping or landing animation. Reloading because of being stuck in an animation, stuck in a wall/floor/enemy/conversation was common in my playthrough. Combat suffers from the same complaints along with finicky movements, bad camera angles and cheesy animations when fighting larger enemies. I want to recommend this game because it has an interesting story, a bit of mystery and it explores a time in Tamriel when Tiber Septim was still growing his empire. But it is a bad game. Some people make excuses for this game because of it's age but it 1998 saw the releases of "Thief" and "Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time." In the end this game feels like a "Tomb Raider" rip-off with worse controls and worse platforming.

Let me preface this review by saying that I am a huge fan of the GOG platform. I'm a console player by trade, and would have otherwise missed out on some classics and must-plays. I have almost 200 games in my library, and have never had to so much as tweak any of them to get them to run smoothly on my Windows 7 machine. That is, before Redguard. From the default download, the game ran at 8-12 frames per second, the cutscenes stuttered and froze, and the controls were delayed by a solid 2 or 3 seconds. I spent a night fiddling with various fixes on the forums, but to not much avail. It was better for sure, maybe 20 FPS, but at best it's still just too choppy to be fun to play, and any real action on the screen reverts the game to molasses. I was really looking forward to playing this game and would have loved to give the game itself a positive review, but the emulation quality of this release means that I won't be able to. :(

Think Tomb Raider with lots of jumping puzzles, repetitious clunky sword fights and long dialog trees. If that sounds fun to you, you may like it. It's a 1998 game so graphics are what they are but the controls are awkward and clunky. The story is there but you have to sift through tons of garbage conversations with mostly bad voice acting to get to it. I'm a big fan of the Elder scrolls world but this was just not fun.

I haven't seen this one suggested anywhere and it's the one that finally worked for me, so I figured I'd share it for posterity. Open dosbox_redguard.conf in the installation directory. Find the line "cycles=max" and change it to "cycles=51000" (without the quotation marks). It's not perfect, it requires tweaking in-game using cycle up and cycle down (ctrl+f11 and ctrl+12), but it is miles better than how the game comes from GOG. The magic number seems to be somewhere in the range between 50000 and 80000; this might depend on your PC as mine isn't very powerful. For me, as the cycles approach 80000, the framerate gets smoother but the audio stutters more and more, especially during combat and dialogue.

This is a great game. I never played it until now and despite the framerate, it's pretty good. The problem with the game performance comes from the emulation of VoodooFX's GLIDE renderer. Unlike most WIndows 95 games, this one was uses an engine that was built for DOS and adapted but not optimized for Windows 95. Natively, the engine runs in Windows 95 DOS mode with features from Windows added in like the VoodooFX GLIDE library. However, since we've moved passed the days of both DOS and VoodooFX it is almost impossible to get this game running at a good framerate. Like most software rendering modes, it just isn't compatible with todays technology. Heck, try running Half-Life 1 in software rendering mode and it will crash. This current port emulates the VoodooFX GLIDE library so that it can be at least somewhat playable. However, if you want this to run smoothly, you better get a vintage Win 98 (98's more stable) computer and put a VoodooFX card in it. Otherwise, this is the only way to get it working without having to re-port the engine code, which I assume either Bethesda lost, or GOG doesn't have the time to do a proper re-code, which could take months or even a year or two which is something GOG doesn't do anyway. But if you don't mind the very choppy framerate, this game is very good.