Retro Games
- page 3TA3D: Total Annihilation in 3D
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 9th, 2010
Total Annihilation is a strategy game released back in 1997. It is one of those games that can make you forget about the time, even if played today. The original version is fun and complete, but what if you want to play it with 3D graphics? That’s why there is TA3D, (Total Annihilation 3D) which is a source port of the original game.
TA3D, as you might have guessed, makes it possible to play Total Annihilation with 3D graphics and some other improvements. For comparison, here are two screenshots, one is from the original game, and the other is from TA3D:
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Retro Review: Shinobi (SMS)
Posted by Dimitri | Dec 1st, 2010
Shinobi is an action game released by Sega in 1987. In this game, the player has to control a ninja called Joe Musashi, which receives a mission to rescue children hold as hostage by the ‘Ring Five’ terrorist organization. The game was originally released in the Arcades, and later ported to Sega’s 8 bit home console back in 1988.
The Master System version is much more slower and the action more paced than it’s arcade counterpart, but that doesn’t make the game any easier. In fact, the difficulty is the first thing one notices while playing Shinobi. The learning curve is steep and the game is ruthless: your timing has to be almost perfect to defeat the enemies on the screen or just avoid getting hit by bullets, boomerangs and other enemy attacks. The Bonus Stages are also very hard but can give Joe a new spell to aid him. It is a hard game even for the 1988 standards.
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Retro Review: Death Rally
Posted by Dimitri | Nov 16th, 2010
Death Rally is one of those games that appears to be simple, until you realize you have played it for hours. It is a racing game with a top down view and cars equipped with weapons used to destroy other racers. The player earns money for each completed race, and the more difficult the race is, more money the player gets. This way, an easy race pays a lot less than a hard race, although is difficult to survive til the end of a hard race with the first available cars. The game has also a global difficulty setting, if you feel it is too easy or too difficult. Money earned from the races can be used to fix your vehicle or upgrade it with engines, tires and better armor, or even buy a new car.
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How to add shaders to Ocarina of Time
Posted by Dimitri | Oct 21st, 2010
This post explains how to add shaders to 1964, a Nintendo 64 emulator, meaning that it is possible to emulate N64 games with effects like bloom, HDR, or even sepia. It can be done without high resolution texture packs, but if you want to learn how to replace the original game’s texture for better results, check out this post: How to play Ocarina of Time with high resolution textures.
The first step is to download the 1964 emulator. By the time this post had been written, the latest version was the 1.1.0, found at: 1964 Download Page.
The 1964_11.rar file comes with the emulator executable and source code. The emulator executable is at the bin/release folder. Extract all contents of the Release folder to some place you can find later.