Game Price Hunter

GamerDad’s Extreme Makeovers

Back to the world of GamerDad gaming. Just in case you’re unfamiliar with the term I shall offer a quick reminder: GamerDads are gamers who have succumbed to womenly wiles and become married with kids. This results in a reduction in both gaming time and games money and as a result purchases become less frequent but possibly of higher general quality (as you become a lot pickier!).

There’s lots of fun to be had trawling the bargain bucket, especially once you consider some of the community modifications which have been painstakingly developed while you’ve been busy changing nappies etc. Here’s a few examples of my recent faves:

Morrowind, aka Elder Scrolls 3 was an utterly massive (quite literally) game at the time. Those who’ve come to the party late with younger borther Oblivion (or even distant cousin Fallout 3) will notice many familiar traits. Same sort of open ended world as the other titles with a compelling plot and multiple side quests, guilds to join, etc. Even better when you consider the two expansions which came out after it - Pick up the whole lot in the “Game of the Year” Edition for under a tenner.

If you’re already familiar with this little beauty, you may be wondering why bother? Well, since the initial release there’s been a whole host of community created quests, graphics and even whole contintents added to the game. The game is slightly crunky looking compared to the more recent bretheren, but this can be dramatically improved thanks to the efforts of the gaming community - check out this article for a selection of some of the best mods to give the game a quick facelift.

If you’ve never played this before then take a punt - it’s easily worth a fiver (for the standalone version at the time of writing)!

Planescape: Torment - This was, in my opinion, the best of the Forgotten Realms games which were put out by Bioware and Black Isle. If you liked Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights or Icewind Dale you’d probably love this. It’s definitely a little less ‘dwarfy’ than the others - as an example: an amnesiac corpse and a chopsy floating skull as the first two party members! And probably a fair bit wordier than the others, so make sure you you’re wearing your reading specs.

Since its release over 10 years ago there’s been a whole slew of modifications which make the game run at higher resolutions (original max was 800×600), enhance the gaming experience using discarded and unfinished content hidden in the code and even remove hundreds of bugs. This page lists the three most useful mods. I’ve had a ball running this new and improved version at full 1280×1024 res with no crashes on Vista.

Hardwar was an elite-inspired game based on the planet Titan. You piloted a Moth hover-ship between craters playing off the various factions for quests and cash.
Sadly overlooked at the time, it can probably be found for free download if you look hard enough (now classed as abandonware in some places since the Software Refinery went under). Once again, there’s been a whole host of additional functionality added by fans including an entire graphical uplift and a persistent world server with multiplayer capabilities!

DOOM/Heretic Last but not least - Doom-Engine games. Many conversions of this have been made, from Java-powered browser versions to full 3d conversions. Check out this thread for a discussion of some of the more interesting ones. Heretic was my fave of the bunch back then. Loved those little imp dudes!

Hopefully this has given you an idea of the fun to be had from dusting off those old games and reliving past glories. If you don’t like what you see through your rose-tinted specs, then the odds are you can now swap them for a different pair.

Happy retrogaming!