There seemed to be considerable surprise in gaming circles that a hardcore title like Demon’s Souls could gain some measure of critical and commercial success given the industry as a whole seems fixated with the casual games market.

Personally, I’m surprised people would consider Demon’s Souls a hardcore game. It’s a game for mewling kittens. For Care Bears. For little Smurfs, la-la-la-la-la-la-la-ing as they flounce around in meadows.

You want hardcore? Play Torchlight. In Very Hard Hardcore mode. Torchlight fans dub it VHHC mode. I call it “Lessons in Humility”.

You die in Demon’s Souls, and you get an opportunity to recover. How adorable.

You die in VHHC Torchlight and it’s all gone. Your expensively-outfitted avatar resplendent with purples and golds, heavily laden with money, equipped with powerful spells … gone, existing only as a ghostly memory.

This is hardcore.
Continued…

In Mass Effect’s future, soldiers do battle with guns, laser rifles and grenades, and are protected by shielded armor. All of these can be customised so squad leaders are able to prepare loadouts to fit any and all mission requirements. Squads may also acquire items on the battlefield by engaging in the time-honoured tradition of frisking bodies of recent victims for loot which can then be stored in a shared stash capable of holding 150 items.

Items surplus to requirements can be sold to vendors — a time-consuming affair since tragically, sometime between now and 2183, humanity has lost the crucial ability to “sort inventory items according to item type” while selling goods — or magically reduced to goo called omni-gel. Aside from alleviating storage concerns, omni-gel can also be used as vehicle repair material, electronic lockpicks and possibly as a personal lubricant during intimate cutscenes.

The one thing omni-gel cannot magically do is fix problems with the PC port of the game. Past experience with BioWare’s products have taught me never to get one of the company’s RPGs until two patches have fixed the biggest bugs and completed post-release playbalancing but exasperatingly, Mass Effect still has problems even with patch 1.02.
Continued…

Being always in tune with the gaming mainstream, always with my finger on the pulse of what’s hot now, always keenly aware of current trends in gaming, I got myself the BioWare RPG everybody’s talking about: Mass Effect.

(Image source: BioWare.)

The main reason I got the game now was that sultry siren of a digital service, Steam, batted its eyelashes in my direction and seduced me with a 50 per cent discount recently. Frankly, USD9.99 is about the price I’d want to pay for Mass Effect. I’m a big fan of Baldur’s Gate II — for better or worse still one of the finest single-player RPG experiences in terms of story and charm — but subsequent BioWare releases have cooled my ardour.
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The game was conceived after lead designer Jim DuBois watched one of his units in The Settlers II going about his business.  (Source.)

The original design document was done in 1996 but Cyberlore had trouble finding a publisher for this unusual game. (Source.)

The Wizard’s cry of “Abderrazzaq!” was a tip of the hat to (then) Hasbro Interactive producer Marwan A. Abderrazzaq.  (Source.)

The peasant woman (“I serve with pleasure.”) is actually a man.  (Source.)

The tax collector’s voice was inspired by Paul Lynde.  (Source.)

The highest level heroes are apparently Wizards in the 150s. (Source.)

The music composer also worked on Sacrifice.  (Source.)

Computer Gaming World awarded Majesty the Pleasant Surprise of the Year in 2001 but the game lost out to Sacrifice in the Best Strategy Game of the Year category. (Source.)

There’s a browser-based role-playing game inspired by the game.  (Source.)

By 2007, the game sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.  (Source.)

Majesty: the Fantasy Kingdom Sim is a curious RTS. It certainly has all the genre conventions. There is a build queue and a tech tree, micromanagement and resource management, and for the most part the game plays out like a conventional RTS. You explore the map, exploit your sources of wealth, expand your base and exterminate your enemies.

Majesty’s major break with the standard RTS formula is the player has no direct control of individual units. You do not command and conquer in this game; you cajole and hope for the best.

Although you may rule, the heroes roaming your kingdom are not yours to command, being more private military contractors than servants of the realm. Instead of directing them hither and thither through royal edict, you provide heroes with monetary incentives to attack or move. Perhaps a 200 gold reward for the brave explorer who will venture to that undiscovered land over yonder, perhaps a 300 gold bounty on the head of the troll rampaging at the marketplace.

The unpredictability in this game, which may delight as much as frustrate, lies in the fact the heroes may not take you up on your offer, deciding instead to return home for a lie-down or do a spot of shopping. They display individual behavior that can be both charming and aggravating. Groan at the Warrior scarpering away at the first sign of danger; gape at the Paladin valiantly standing her ground despite being surrounded by foes; chuckle at the enemy Rogue who eagerly destroys his own guild for your gold.

Similarly, playing Majesty on a modern machine may involve equal amounts of delight and unpredictable frustration. While getting this quirky game is relatively easy these days as it’s available on multiple digital distribution services and playing it is mostly an enjoyable experience, you may have to get past some technical issues first.

The main problems plaguing the Steam version include freezes and frequent crashes-to-desktop. There are various folk remedies to get the game to behave itself. Deleting or replacing the Bink video player did nothing for me. Upgrading to the latest nVidia graphics driver or reverting to a much older graphics driver had little effect. I didn’t bother deleting the music but apparently it works for some.

The workaround that worked in my case was setting the CPU affinity to a single core. To do this in Windows XP, Alt+Tab out of Majesty once it’s running (be sure to Alt+Tab after bypassing the opening videos or the game will crash), hit Ctrl+Alt+Tab to bring up Windows Task Manager, switch to the Process tab, right-click on Maj.exe (or MajX.exe if you’re playing Northern Expansion), select the “Set Affinity…” option then set the CPU affinity to a single core.

The game still crashes on rare occasion even with this fix so I’d strongly recommend enabling the Auto-Save option.