I love this game since I played the demo in 1998. At that time it was quite revolutionary. The voxel engine made huge outdoor levels possible and the tactical gameplay was something new. You could kill and die with one shot and had to play tactical to complete your missions. GPS navigation and team members with radio talk gave an early impression of what tactical shooter could be. Sure this one was very simple and straight forward. You can kill an enemy with an MP5 over a range of 1km while running because weapons weren't spreading at all. Theres a variaty of missions but mostly it's about killing all enemies first. The graphics are very dated and more than 800x600 isn't possible so this one is for nostalgia only. But I still like it. The GoG version works fun but so does the anniversary DVD edition and a free fan version online. If you want to play online look for a facebook group. They still organize matches from time to time.
I've played a lot indie adventures, survival horror and walking simulators but this one is really special and enjoyable. It has 12 chapters and 15h of playtime (depending on how much time you spend on exploring and hunting for collectables). You have a nice and realistic forest setting with hiking trails, sightseeing places and so on and later explore a lot of bunkers and caves, too. As it's a psychological game the reality alters during the game and becomes more surreal. The story is quite complex and told over multiple ways. There are NPCs, documents, voice memories and a diary that reveals it's pages over time. The last chapters feel a bit too long and steamy and repeat places and textures too often. But overall it's a great journey and for tgis price and the fact that it's built by two people, it's simply a masterpiece.
In 1995 great arcade racers like Ridge Racer or Daytona USA were exclusiv in arcade halls. Home consoles and PCs mostly had pseudo 3D racers were most objects were sprites. Screamer (or Bleifuss in Germany) brought the arcade feeling to the PC. It's a fun racer with a bunch of cars and colorful track with a lot of animated stuff around like helicopters or moving cranes. But compared to the arcade hall games it's quite lame. The music is uninspiring. The physics are weird and the cars move to the side like dune buggies. I guess it only became a classic because it has no competitors on the PC for quite a while. The later Daytona USA port was a disappointment. It has three detail levels for graphic and the hightest demanded a powerful Pentium processor back in the day and still provides problems to DosBox for emulation. In "High Detail"-Mode a lot of players )including myself) experience problems there with the GoG version as mine always crashes after a few rounds. Mid or low details work fine. A great feature is the cloud saving for this one.
My buddy and I got our first PCs xmas 1996. The first game you bought was Archimedean Dynasty (called "Schleichfahrt" on german market). Unfortunately we were too dumb to play it. Used to simple action games like Doom we didn't read the manual and just drove around without a plan. We were soon frustreded because there was nothing to see and nothing happended. Now that I've bought the GoG Version, I have a second chance to play it and it's still a blast after all those years. The adaption is great. It included the 3Dfx patch so you can use nGlide. The story is great. Controls are easy to learn (hit "H" to see the mapping when driving) and the missions are fun. Some YouTube videos helped me to start off because the game is not very self explaining (which was our problem back then). I give only a 4-star rating because the manual and the weapon handbook are missing here. Fortunately you can easily get them on the internet.
Wrath is a nice oldschool shooter based on the Quake engine with Darkplaces mod. The first version of the early access release contains two levels with about an hour of gameplay (if you look out for secrets and items). Although it's in dev I could find any major bugs or glitches. It's a 90s classic shooter by all means. It's fast as hell (I have no idea how this will be playable on PS4, Switch, etc.) and has all the classic gameplay features retro gamers are looking for like health portions and a double-barrel shotgun that deals huge damage. Unfortunately it doesn't really come with an own character. It looks like a mix of Quake, Hexen 2 and Blood. For all weapons and enemies you feel like you've already seen them somewhere else before. For me it looks like a hommage to all the great games from 1996 to 1998 but doesn't spread an own vibe for now. I hope the final release will change that.
Although it isn't written in the gog.com Description but you can choose between english and german language in the game. It's a little bit like Hitman, just with a little evil satanic boy. Awesome! I just wonder why you can't change the gamma. The contrast is to low so dark passages are really black and you can't see doors for example.
When Ultima IX came out in late 1999 it created a huge shitstorm because it contained a lot of bugs an was poorly optimized for that times hardware. EA wanted it out before christmas no matter what. A few patches later it ran pretty good on a Pentium III 500 with a Voodoo 3 card. I've never played any other Ultima game before so I can't judge it as a part of the series. To me it's just the most lovely and adventurous opel world RPG of the eraly days of 3D games. The places are handmade and you can just run around for hours, explore hidden caves and stuff. It doesn't have that generic look of the hundereds of places in Skyrim, for example. There's no interactive map, no quest marker and the quests are just noticed in a hand written journal. You have to listen carefully to NPCs and explore the world. In this way you really get sucked into it. I love it.
