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Looking for AWESOME old mech game goodness
DaveTheWave
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Ok folks, I've got a hankering for some old-school, customisable, strategic mech-exploding goodness, and I distinctly remember you guys talking with much fondness in your voices about some old games in particular which would sate an appetite such as mine. I don't know for sure, but maybe it was Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries or Heavy Gear or something.
So which game should I go for? Which ones are best? The harder the better, but not cheap-ass hard. I'm no stranger to strategy games or PC games in general, I've beaten things like Wizardry 8 and Jagged Alliance 2 on the harder difficulties multiple times, just so you know the kind of thing I'm after.
Help!
So which game should I go for? Which ones are best? The harder the better, but not cheap-ass hard. I'm no stranger to strategy games or PC games in general, I've beaten things like Wizardry 8 and Jagged Alliance 2 on the harder difficulties multiple times, just so you know the kind of thing I'm after.
Help!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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You mean Starseige, by Dynamix? Not Starseige Tribes, right? (thank you google)
Thanks, guys. I've got the demos of Mercenaries, MechCommander and Starseige on the way. Keep 'em coming
If you want strategy in that universe Missionforce Cyberstorm is not to be missed.
MECHWARRIOR 2 MERCS!
MECHWARRIOR 2 MERCS!
MECHWARRIOR 2 MERCS!
It is the greatest customization game ever. Hands down. Straight from the BT rulebook, awesomeness. Graphics a little hard on the eyes now, but it's just fantastic.
Mechcommander is one of your better bets, and the Front Mission series on the Playstation (Front Mission 1 received a remake on DS.)
On the PC front, Metal Fatigue would be perfect. Its not turn based, but it involves highly customisable robots shooting, smashing and flying around shooting and smashing each other. 3 factions, each which have specialised kinds of weapons and gizmos, like stealth pods, jetpacks and missle pods built into the legs/arms/torso.
Also, sometimes when the mechs fight each other they'll blast or lop off an arm or leg, which you either reattach to your mech or drag off so you can research it and mass produce for the rest of the game.
And It'd be wrong of me not to recommend Zone of the Enders 2 if you're a fan of any sort of giant robots. Less customising, more awesome robot fighting.
I've also played Metal Fatigue and ZoE2 and can recommend both to you. Zone of the Enders 2 has some really fun combat with dozens of enemies in a 3D space.
Well, I meant Starsiege because it's the one I played and enjoyed.
[edit] dunno if it qualifies as 'old' though
Seriously, this is one of my all-time favorite games.
That's an action game/sim, though. It's not clear from the OP whether a strategy is specifically what's wanted here. If that's the case I'd second MechCommander. MC2, not so much. Missionforce: Cyberstorm is fun, but definitely on the easy side; Cyberstorm 2 just wasn't very good.
Does anyone play Megamek? I haven't looked in at the state of that project in at least a year.
Old-school: check
Customisable: check
Strategic mech-exploding goodness: hells yes!
Thats if you can find it of course, or afford it off of Ebay.
League of Legends (your friendly neighborhood support): PAPRPL8
i played megamekNET a few years ago. Havent had time in almost 2 years or so. Its a big timesink. And the people there play so much, you are pretty well guaranteed to get your ass kicked.
Just cant wait for the boys to get older so i can break out the battletech from the box down in the basement.
I just realised that I downloaded Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries demo, not 2. Mech 2 is the one to find, then?
Which of these awesome sounding games will be easiest to run on my very much non-DOS friendly machine? Thanks guys, great responses.
It's been ported to many different platforms so as long as you're running any of those OS's, you can play whatever DOS games you want.
I remember that it still had trouble with games like Tie Fighter and TES:Arena, but I haven't tried the program on my new dual core beasty.
In MW:2 Mercs, customization was only limited by space on your mech, be it weight or 'crits'. No hardpoints here, just good old fashioned You got space, slap it on there. You can do ALOT of cool things with the builder, and the game itself is just completely badass, which you tend to not find these days. It had a nice difficulty curve, and you were only limited on money and skill. If you can find it, pick it up.
Mech4 is the better multiplayer version, weapons are more balanced, chassis's are more unique, and electronic warfare actually works (passive vs active radar, beagle probes, narc beacons) and such. Sadly, Microsoft Gaming Zone is dead, and so MEch4's multiplayer is pretty much also dead.
Heavy Gear 2 is another good suggestion, a bit hard to get running, but it was a very well done game. Though it failed to become effective due to a serious balance issue with "Fire Control" settings on mechs and the point system. It's one of my favorite single player games though, and very good multiplayer if you force standard mechs and don't allow customization unless your at a Lan just playing with friends.
Heavy Gear 1's multiplayer was actaully like COD4's, you had to gain ranks to access better equipment. But it also allowed you to do co-op missions with friends to gain these ranks (4 people join 1 team, select a mission, AI will take over the second team). Me and my friends had a blast playing it way back in the day, but I would agree with skipping it now, it's engine was a modified Mech2 engine, but mech2 worked out alot better for it.
The customization in MW4 isn't that bad, either. If you can live with what you get in space action sims like Freespace, Wing Commander 3/4/Prophecy or Independence War, it's basically the same thing.
I do believe you mean Dire Wolf, you spheroid stravag.
Honestly I really liked Mech4 Mercs. The hardpoints thing never really bothered me, and the rest seemed more balanced and fun.
Mech4 though really opened up the gameplay to realistic terrain and allowed the smaller mechs alot of room to manuever compared to the slow heavy and assault mechs. I generally played a shadowcat all through the year or so I played online actively, and it wasn't uncommon for me to place well in the scoring (though their scoring formula still didn't give enough bonus's to the light weight class in my opinion, with alot of their kills having to be kill steals due to such poor weapon options).
I would love to see a mech5 come out with alot of the teamplay and electronics that the Xbo 360 mech game included (capturing radar/comm towers to use voice com, radar ranges and scout units being helpful in a group that works together) and such. Alot of multiplayer Mech4 on public servers was just watching people in assault mechs stand still and shoot each other, with not very much team work.
I also feel that there hasn't been a good "game style" for mech multiplayer games. Deathmatch is just for fun, but not immersive in the universe. We need a killer-app for giant robot games akin to how "Coutner Strike" was the killer-app for FPS's. With no mechwarrior/heavygear/starsiege game ever releasing an SDK, it makes it almost impossible for people to really generate this though. If they had even made an SDK for Mech4 I swear we would still be seeing Game on's for it.
There is hope for that yet, as someone has picked up the old FASA licenses from Microsoft. http://www.virtualworld.com/ Third news item on the main page, the one titled "Smith & Tinker News" Also, for those with the hyperconductive thinking aluminum and denimite mem-shards needed to run Crysis, Mechwarrior: Living Legends looks very promising.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Oculus Rift: Sir_Grinch
Not bad, but not really great. It was popular on Live for a while too, but I don't know if that lasted. My biggest problem with the singleplayer was that the actual missions lasted about 20 seconds each and while they were fun, they were still only 20 seconds long.
Anyway, I just want to add that Starsiege is the greatest mech game ever made.
I'll second the MW4 recommendations, mainly because the hardpoints thing was to de-cheesify multiplayer, quiaff?
The Dire-Wolf ERSL mentioned previously is one of the main reasons I hated MW2 in multiplayer.
What I -really- want to do, is play through the MW4 campaign in multiplayer co-op with someone, because I feel that would be made of so much awesome and win. You could even go for some voip and be all 'They're firing at me!' just like Isis or whoever it was in Mech Commander.
I have my CDs, and it runs on XP decently. So fucking seconded.
Just the sheer amount of shit they had going on in the universe was pretty surprising. Did anyone else read ALL the news posts?
Hell yeah I read the omniweb, everytime I play it I always read all the posts.
Earthsiege 2 was also a lot of fun back in the day. I could never get ES1 to run properly, but it made my eyes bleed when it did.