HeadWillCollapse

Your host, Fat Conan, has just been lucky enough to witness some of “Britain’s Sexual Fantasies” on the UK’s premier television channel. For those of you who missed it, it was a deep and wholly “scientific” exploration of the minds of UK perverts as they shared their deepest erotic fantasies with a small bald man.

Inspired by this and in a moment of unparalleled openness, FC thought he’d follow the example of the “actors” (portraying the “real people” from whom the stories were harvested) by sharing one of his own. (more…)

Although the weekend consisted mainly of hangover and head-butts, Fat Conan was able to rescue a little time from the gaping jaws of apathy to revisit some classics that had remained untouched in his cavern of gaming for far too long.

First up was Dreamweb, which is mainly remembered for the “sex” and “violence” that landed it with a 15 certificate when it was originally released. It’s an unfortunate stigma as the game itself is reasonably good fun and its use of sound for atmosphere still impresses to this day. On the down side though, the voice acting is mainly awful and the storyline doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense despite the snipets gravelly narrative provided to guide you through it.

Providing the miracle that allowed a game designed to run on a 386 to play on (fairly) modern hardware was DOSBox, which is perfect for playing all those games you loved “back in the day” at slightly slower speeds than you remember. That’s a little unfair, it ran Dreamweb flawlessly, and F.C.’s sure that it runs a fairly large percentage of its compatible games at a perfectly reasonable pace. Just don’t expect to be enjoying greats like “Syndicate Wars” or “Tie Fighter” at full speed any time soon.

In fact F.C. dabbled with the latter shortly afterward but couldn’t quite squeeze enough out of the machine to make it properly playable. He also had a pop with “Subwar 2050“, a game he’d always liked as a concept but never really got into on account of some incredibly difficult to calibrate joysticks in the past (the veer, the dreaded veer). Sadly Subwar could not quite run at playable speed either, a fact that was made worse by the perfect calibration the X-Box joypad was able to achieve.

Lastly, he turned to a favourite that could have been made entirely for lazy Sundays: “Day of the tentacle” running on the once great, now ace, ScummVM which seems to have undergone a facelift since the last time he’d seen it. What more could you want? The old point’n'click classics, on modern versions of Windows and now with an interface that doesn’t look ass. Bliss.