Welcome to "The Play Room"

(aka my Games Page)

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Games

I'm one of those players, that plays just enough to get a taste, but never excels at anything much. I don't have the time to sit down and bash away at a game for hours on end, until I beat it, so for me, a game has to be either quickish, or pick-up and put-downable. I've got no staying power, and have yet to find the game that REALLY captures my imagination. A few have come close, and it is these that will feature here. Some of these have even got me to the stage of purchasing the 'official' version!

Our favourites in the Smith household are... SimCity 2000, SimTower, Lemmings, Oh No! More Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, and a couple of current contenders - Z, and Settlers II. I got these two (for my kids!) for Christmas. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get them off the computer since, so I can have a go myself! Shame my portable for work doesn't have a CD drive, although on second thoughts, it's probably a good thing, else I would NEVER get any work done.

			SimCity 2000 Simulation type games are probably my personal favourites, and this one held top position for a long, long time. It has taken me quite a while to get the hang of generating enough money to keep all my sims happy, and to be able to continue development in my cityscape. I don't use SCURK, or any of the cheats (well not normally), but I also leave the "Disasters" switched off.
			SimTower This one is a bit more complex. It's all about scheduling the lifts in your skyscraper according to the requirements of the residents, workers, shoppers, hotel guests, etc. A successful tower needs careful planning of all the various transport mediums used within the tower. Good fun, but the sound effects of the lifts going up and down can get a little wearing.
				Lemmings and Oh No! More Lemmings
Two of life's Classics. I never got all the way through either of them - I kept losing my bits of paper with access codes for each screen, or copying them down wrong, so I would have to go back and start all over again. Too time consuming, but it's great fun 'nuking' them all when you realise you've missed something, making the situation hopeless. Lemmings 2: The Tribes More of the little blighters, but in Tribes now. Each Tribe has different skill sets, like the Beach Bums have surfing Lems, while the Space Tribe has Lems wielding lasers, and using jet packs. An added twist is that now, you only move forward through the levels with the number of Lemmings that you managed to save from previous levels - cunning huh?
				Z In this action packed strategy/war game, you control platoons of robots, attempting to take control of various landscapes. If you ask them to do something they consider a little risky, they'll tell you "No Way!", and insults are hurled at you when you aren't doing so well (Once you get beaten, Cmdr Zod consoles you with "Well, you did a little better than last time, but still ABSOLUTE CRAP!"). Great video clips between scenes, and brilliant sense of humour in the two star robots - Brad and Allen.
			The Settlers II Imagine SimCity 38BC, throw in a bit of war-mongering with the neighbouring vikings, and you've got the idea of "The Settlers II". Send the Geologist into the mountains to search for Coal and Iron Ore, while other citizens build huts for a woodcutter. Of course, once the woodcutter gets going, you need a forester to replace the trees, and a sawmill. But you need a quarry before you can build the sawmill, and you need meat to feed the miners, one your Geologist finds a suitable site. Train your soldiers, and place barracks at the border, to increase your land ownership, but look out for the neighbours!

Well, the old PC finally got outpaced by today's games requirements, and we have bitten the bullet and shelled out for a new one. The new machine has a Pentium III running at 450Mhz, 128Mb of RAM, 4Mb Video, and 10Gb of disk space. We should be able to play anything that the games people can throw at us now (for the next month or so, anyway). Unfortunately, it has an SBPro 'compatible' sound card that isn't (compatible, that is), and we also have lots of older DOS based games that we can't run under W98, W98 Dos mode, or even when rebooted from a Dos boot disk! Quite why the kids still want to play such crud games in the first place is beyond me, but I would have expected the operating systems to retain a certain amount of backwards compatibility. We got Microsoft's CART racing game with the new machine, which makes a brilliant demonstration vehicle for the processing speed and graphics ability, but unfortunately, none of us can actually race competitively on it yet. We'll have to see what Christmas brings - I am really keen to get a decent Flight Simulator (but not a combat type), but the prices are too high at the moment, and Fly! appears to take up huge amounts of disk space too. Does anyone know where I can get hold of older flight sims cheap (or even download free)?

Games Links

General Links

Maxis / Sim Links

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