I was thinking about how I remember Maxis fondly, and I got to wondering what other people’s experiences were like!
Is your favorite still around? Are they still the same, or did they “change directions under new management?”
Valve is the only one of mine that’s still around as more than just a brand name used by EA.
Bioware, Maxis, Bullfrog, Westwood, and more… All gobbled up and turned into shit by Electronic Farts.
Others that just died on their own include Black Isle and Interplay, Sierra and LucasArts. Some of these might be around in some capacity, though afaik they’re just used for the names.
I grew up with tony hawks pro skater 2, need for speed 2 se, and prince of persia sands of time. So no.
ID tech
Psygnosis, later known as Studio Liverpool.
Sony shut them down a few years ago. Man seeing that old owl logo hits me hard in the nostalgia bone.
Drakan :D
Harmless games, also bought and shut down by Sony.
They seem to consider only massive franchises like GoW and TLoU and Horizon worth their time… But most gamers need variety outside the mainstream game genres, so I don’t see why they are shutting down anything with a smaller fanbase.
Maybe those smaller teams create tools or assets (or maybe it’s the team itself) that they want.
Capitalists can’t let anyone have fun when there’s profit to be made.
Some I haven’t seen mentioned yet are Interplay and MECC.
Fighting Fantasy books
Have most of them still! I think all of them into the 20’s, and hit or miss after. There’s been a couple of reboots.
Frontier for Elite
Psygnosis for Lemmings and a bunch of other fun games on the Amiga.Elite was a game changer for a lot of people. Lemmings was super fun, as well!
Fun fact: Rockstar (back then DMA) developed Lemmings.
The 3 Bs, baby. Blizzard, Bioware, and Bethesda.
Blizzards dead to me, Bioware fell off after dragon age 1, and Bethesda refuses to take its limiters off anymore (no drugs)
I’m enjoying heavily-modded DA:I, but I do feel like DA1 had some better writing and direction.
Any recommendations for mods? I’m putting together a new build for it ahead of my semi-annual replay of the trilogy
Yeah, definitely!
I’ll skip the skins, because I assume you’ll want to pick your own that fit your tastes, but you can find all of these at NexusMods. Some of my favorites are:
- Speed Launch
- 60 fps in cutscenes
- No fall damage
- Infinite Respec Amulet
- Party At The Winter Palace
- Shorter War Table Missions (75%)
- Party Banter Time (5-10min)
- All Bard songs for CC Music
- Stay still in CC - Natural Edition
- Face Ash Begone
- Bugs Be Gone
- Skills Enhanced by NinjaReborn
- Inventory Capacity
You’ll also need Frosty Mod Manager to set all those up (they seem to work for me in the order I listed) and Frosty Fix.
- Set up the mods and load order in FrostyMM, and close.
- Launch Frosty Fix.
- Choose the profile/pack you want.
- Mash go.
- FrostyMM should open back up.
- Open the pack you created.
- The game should launch automatically with the mods correctly enabled.
All these mods feel “vanilla-ish” and shouldn’t spoil the original experience to any significant degree.
The only thing I can remember from inquisition is trudging through some high level desert looking for high level rocks (which very blatantly cut their drop rate from earlier zones) so that I could make an armor and weapon that still sucked and looked like pajamas.
also that the party loves to litter
Novalogic - Loved the earlier Delta Force games, and Tachyon: The Fringe
Maxis was the one that came to mind for me, too! I played everything of theirs that I could get my hands on. Still playing The Sims after all these years!
Will Wright is a genius, and deservedly so, but just did some reading on what he’s been up to, and I’m not sure if this new venture will fly.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/20/will-wright-voxverse-gala-gallium-blockchain
Sounds like SecondLife (another of his creations) with NFTs, or the various failed attempts at a Metaverse, except rich crypto-whales get to be the Lords, and the rest of us are the surfs. Then again, maybe there’s some aspect to it I don’t understand.
How has no on said this yet.
B U N G I E
Booting Halo was my go-to for like 10 years as the first three games came out. Literally 10s of thousands of hours.
Bungie gave me some of the best gaming childhood memories.
So much Halo. I was obsessed with it as a kid. The gameplay, the story… It was a SciFi gaming masterpiece. Super fond memories.
I’m also a HUGE fan of classic Marathon and Pathways Into Darkness. People don’t give these games the credit they are due, and everyone should play them. You can find the Alephone engine, open-sourced by Bungie, and play all of the Marathon games and community scenarios completely free. A well-respected community member even ported Pathways to the engine.
Depends on people’s age! I was beyond childhood when that came out, but it was a game changer for me getting to play a FPS that was couch co-op. All FPS games to that point were mostly (all?) multiplayer competitive. PvE was always a solo experience until then!
Maxis, Bullfrog, Westwood, Origin… basically any studio that EA bought and destroyed.
Red Storm of OG Rainbow 6
Acclaim of N64 era, Turrok in particular
Time to login to mplayer to see which games weren’t using the heartbeat sensor 😔
Ah, yeah. Acclaim did some good work from that era
Level 5, I still go back to play dark cloud 1 and 2 every couple years. Now if they’d just make the third one I stead of another professor Layton or yokai watch that’d be great!
LK Avalon.
