21 replies to this topic

[Xetelian]

Really loved Star Siege, remember playing that back in the day on Windows 3.1 or whatever.

Played the hell out of Tribes 1 and 2 and even put 1000 hours into the HiRez games Tribes Ascend. Paid $19.99 to buy unlocks with credits, then they came out with an unlock everything for $19.99 and I needed only a couple unlocks so it wasn't worth buying the new package. Ultimately I stopped playing because I ran out of people to play with and because of the lack of retroactive unlocking when I already spent $20.

Dynamix was a huge part of my childhood and I never heard what happened to them.

[ice trey]

JediPanther, on 30 December 2016 - 11:16 AM, said:

I've gotten a new-ish laptop for the holiday. New as in new to me and since I'm currently poor as heck and unemployed I'll take all and any tech I can get.

Here's the specs on the new(not really) laptop:
Presario CQ57
win ten pro
64xbit
amd E-300 APU Radeon 1.3ghz cpu?
8 gig ram with 7.60 usable
180 gig hard drive
cd-rom drive
three usb ports

I'm planing on using it for job hunting and making a ms-dos,snes,genesis and c64 retro emulation machine. I've found most of the earlier Mechwarriors and then I found another robot shooter series called Metaltech:Battledome and Metaltech:Earthseige. It looks to be fun and not a clone of mechwarrior.

Any one else remember playing the first Mechwarrior or Metaltech? Have you emulated them? How similar and/or different are they? I never did play them back in the day but then I had the Commodore 64 and games on it like stealth. My first ms dos games were x-wing and doom.

Link for the ms dos mechwarrior: http://www.myabandon.../mechwarrior-p8

My mechwarrior palette is broad, but I only ever played Earthsiege 1 and 2. ES1 was brutally hard, but ES2 was a really nice game for it's time, and took a different route to Battletech's customization system. Rather than salvaging or buying mechs, you pieced them together from bits of battlefield scrap, and had to wait a number of missions before it was ready.

Interesting tidbit is that ES1 was made with lots of the same staff as Mechwarrior 1, and they reworked the engine of that game to bring us Earthsiege 1. The downside to the Metaltech series is that, though it was riding the coat-tails of the Battletech universe's popularity, it was a computer game first and foremost. I think there might have been a Starsiege P&P game, but it was very badly marketed and horribly obscure.

The Earthsiege franchise didn't die; it just mutated into something really mundane. After metaltech's earthsieges came Starsiege, and almost immediately afterwards, Starsiege: Tribes, one of the first multiplayer shooters with all sorts of driveable vehicles. Tribes became wildly popular, and Metaltech pretty much ceased to exist. Why would they bother making a mildly-successful mech sim when they could make a wildly successful multiplayer-only FPS?

It was the beginning of the end for the great mech games.