As if I didn’t have enough games in pile of shame, I’ve been looking at a few classics from the bygone age of gaming… namely, the pre-Windows XP era.
There’s a game store site out there called GOG.com (GOG stands for Good Old Games) which sells DRM-free copies of older games from the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Fortunately, the games are either bundled with DOSBox (a DOS emulator) or recoded to work with newer versions of Windows. I had looked through the site, and came across two games that had piqued my interest back when they came out.
The first game, BloodNet, is an odd little adventure game that came out around 1993. I couldn’t get it at the time, as I wouldn’t have a game capable of running any sort of normal game for the time for another couple of years. BloodNet combined two genres I was (and still am) very interested in: vampires and cyberpunk. The story is that the main character (a hacker/private detective) is bitten by a vampire who runs one of the top megacorporations, but is only saved from being turned into a vampire himself by the neural implant he has. The player then has to defeat the vampire leader and his megacorporation and find a cure for his condition before he becomes a vampire himself.
There are two things that would turn me off getting this game. The first is that I’m frankly no good at adventure games without any sort of hint book, though I’m hoping that the fact that the game has RPG elements might make it slightly more tolerable and easier to go through. The second is that twenty years later, the game looks a little hokey, especially when it comes to the “cyberspace” sections. There have been more than one times where I’ve seen gameplay screenshots and videos and wanted to facepalm. Still, I may get it at some point.
The second game is an adaptation of a White Wolf RPG: Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. Vampire: The Masquerade was the first tabletop RPG I had really been able to get into, and as such holds a special place in my heart. Redemption came out in 2000, well after my core RPG troupes had disbanded, and offered me a chance to play in that universe again. The player plays as a Crusader in the Middle Ages who falls in love with a nun who helped heal him after battling a vampire, but soon finds himself turned into a vampire himself to fight in the political battles between vampire clans. Through the game, he fights to save his humanity and the woman who he fell in love with, while contending with a the plots of an evil vampire lord craving dominion.
Admittedly, there’s a pretty good reason why I wouldn’t buy this game: I already have it. I got it when it first came out. However, I’d like to play through it again, and my current PC won’t play it. The game was written before Windows 2000 or XP came out, and while it kind of worked under XP, it won’t work at all under Vista or 7 64-bit. The version on GOG.com has been rewritten to be able to play on 64 bit machines, so I would have a version that’s not a coaster anymore. :-)
Fortunately, the prices for both games are reasonable ($5.99 per game) and even if something happened to GOG.com, I would still have the games downloaded and playable. It’s more likely I’ll get Redemption before BloodNet, but that’s simply because I feel I have a better chance of finishing that game. Either way, it’ll be an extra two games in my to-finish queue. :-)