Good ol' Abandonware

[Grayswandir]

Abuse is awesome, but the sound effects really bug me now.

EDIT:
I did some more research about SheepShaver and Basilisk II. Basilisk II emulates OS 7.7.5 and below, so you're going to have to use SheepShaver. FutureCop LAPD needs at least OS 8.x.x to run.
Note: if you have classic skip all the way to the next step.

Here's a link on steps on setting up SheepShaver:
http://macmegasite.com/node/2810

Now, once you have SheepShaver set up (Or, you're using Classic), you need to download a few things. First off, you need to get a system extension called "OpenGLide". If you wanted, you COULD run FutureCop LAPD in RAVE/OpenGL, it does support it reasonably well, but in Classic, you're going to get some really horrible lag and it'll be barely playable. Besides that, 3Dfx/Glide looks so much better with this game (No really, running RAVE through Classic is really crappy with this game).

Download the most recent version of OpenGLide here:
http://openglide.sourceforge.net/

Now, go here, and get the game updates. Yes, you could get the most recent update from MacGameFiles or MacUpdate, but (in Classic), you get graphical problems and occasional freezes when you go to the pause screen. All the newest update does really is add GameRanger support.

Get the v1.2 update here:
http://vintageware.orconhosting.net.nz/ ... index.html

This website also mentions that v0.10 of OpenGLide doesn't work well, but I believe a newer version is out (I downloaded whatever the most recent version was and it ran buttery smooth).

Open up FutureCop: LAPD, set up your graphic settings (max out everything, you may have to mess with resolution sizes a bit, if the game has problems with it, it'll give you a "not enough memory for that resolution" error).

[Renegade_Turner]

Who else fucking loved The Settlers II - Gold Edition?

[Blorx]

Never liked the Settlers series all that much, tbh. I was more of a Civilization guy. The first is still the best, imho.

[Renegade_Turner]

Never liked Civilisation whatsoever. Boring.

[invertin]

Tell that to The First War of the Jibberish Empire and the five nations conquered during it.

Though Civ does tend to drag on too far and too peacefully. Wars always end in either stalemates or I have to spend a couple hundred years preparing, and then it just isn't as fun.

Oh well, still conquered a quarter of the planet in a few decades.

And I gotta say, maybe I didn't get into proper computer gaming early enough in my life, because I do not recognise most of these. Best get started.

[Endoperez]

Civilization combat sucks. There's no combat tactics beyond "I should attack with this unit, because it has bonus against X". That means wars are basically down to preparation: amount of units, and where they are. Defender usually gets to choose where he fights with the units he has, and defender gets bonuses any way, so basically attacker has to be crazy prepared. It can take a hundred boring turns to prep for war... and then the war itself is either a boring success (you had enough stuff to conquer what you wanted) or an inevitable defeat (you didn't). The only way to avoid a loss would have been to prepare before the war started.

In Settlers 2, though, you not only have to wait forever to get the soldiers where you want to, and enough of them, but also once you start the war you have to wait forever until some dudes walk to stand on a road, until anything gets done. You can also run out of metal permanently, which means you're totally screwed over - pretty weird for a game that otherwise encourages unbearably long-drawn games.

I haven't played newer Settlers games, but the old are full of design flaws and unbearably boring. They hold some charm, thanks to the graphics design, but that doesn't quite manage to cover the faults. The graphic design would have worked better as a screensaver, something like Johnny Castaway.
I have played Civ 1, little Civ2, Civ4, Master of Magic and Alpha Centauri and FallFromHeaven 2. The last is a mod of Civ4, and does well enough to have modmodmods, which are mods modding its mods. Any way, IMO the basic civ-design has several problems that are detrimental to enjoyable to singleplayer gameplay. Multiplayer is a different beast I don't know about.

This doesn't mean that the games aren't good, or haven't ever been good. It's like saying that Lemmings doesn't have rewind mode that lets you correct that last mistake - of course it doesn't, that was impossible back then. The lack makes the gameplay frustrating, and it is a real fault.

[Renegade_Turner]

I mainly liked managing my little towns and watching them at work. It's like The Sims for people who aren't female/simpletons.

[Blorx]

Eh...nvm.

[Endoperez]

I mainly liked managing my little towns and watching them at work. It's like The Sims for people who aren't female/simpletons.[/b][/color]

The fact that you can permanently run out of resources makes it a bad game for that, and as I said, the "watching them at work" the art design supported would have worked as a screensaver.

I think Sims actually takes about as much tactical thinking as Settlers 2, perhaps more. In Sims the main resource is money, and it's used to get resources to satisfy the sims' needs and to manage time.
In Settlers the main resource is the map itself, and the layout then defines what resources you have to satisfy your kingdom's needs. This means that the map defines the strategy, and there's not much you can do to change that.

[invertin]

Sims requires no tactical thinking beyond "Oh hey, he's hungry and therefore needs food"

They need to get money, but money is very easy to earn. Fulfill their needs, raise their stats, send them to work, return from work, fulfill their needs, raise their stats...

You can occasionally mix things up by having a child- I.E Another bunch of bars that require filling, or by buying new furniture, making it take slightly less time for you to fulfill their needs.

Sims is problematic because of the way that it creates a cycle. And repetitive gameplay is not a good thing.

And that's why cheats exist. :D

[Renegade_Turner]

lol @ saying The SIms involves as much tactics as The Settlers. It's been a long time since you played The Settlers, it seems.

[Endoperez]

Sims requires no tactical thinking beyond "Oh hey, he's hungry and therefore needs food"

Well that's about the level of tactics I remember Settlers 2 taking. "Oh, there's a farmland, I'll put in a farm. Oh, I'm out of trees, I'll make a forester."

Yes, it's been a while since I've played Settlers 2. Reading through a few reviews like in here, it seems like there might be something more to it, but I don't even remember the AI attacking me. Is it even possible to lose/be forced to restart a map other than through running out of metal? Perhaps I just didn't play it far enough, but there wasn't much to do, I was just going through the motions and not thinking about anything.


Also, http://squakenet.com/ . It's kind of a hub that allows you to search through different abandonware sites at once.

[Renegade_Turner]

Reading through a few reviews like in here, it seems like there might be something more to it, but I don't even remember the AI attacking me. Is it even possible to lose/be forced to restart a map other than through running out of metal?

Yes. Being slaughtered. To be honest, I always had enough natural resources to get by. You were probably dilly-dallying. In real life would resources like metal have been never-ending? Nope. You had to use what you had while you could and kill or be killed, that's how I played it.

[Endoperez]

The fact that you'll run out of metal does two things, at least.
1 - It forces a time-limit of sorts to you. You can't play indefinitely. Once you're running out of metal, you'll have nothing to do but attack the AI. This is good for the gameplay - otherwise, one iron mine and one coal mine might eventually let you to grind yourself to victory.
2 - It means it makes this game a very poor SimCity experience. You'll make a city and a system that works, but it will die. This is the bad side - as you said, it can be entertaining to look at the little guys working, but the game is designed so that you can't do that, not forever.



Sheesh - it takes more than three hours to play half-way through a Settlers 2 campaign mission (4th Roman mission). However, I didn't really do anything for the last hour or two. Ships are horrible - they're very slow, and then often take off with one man or one log and carry it all over the map to the other harbor. There's no way to scout the place you're going to settle into without building a port there first. I didn't have any iron, so I landed to the first place that had mountains, and there is indeed some iron ore in there. However, I quickly found out that both the other players were near there, and expanding towards my new settlement, which basically means that the best thing I can do is demolish everything and move all the units away so I won't lose their tools, and then find the iron from somewhere else.
I'd much rather play Dungeon Keeper or HoMM2. Both have their troubles, but at least I have something to do... In Settlers, I spent more time waiting for space to get cleared than building things in the newly-cleared space. Build woodcutters to clear out a forest, quarrymen to clear out stones, demolish their buildings and wait several minutes until they've burned down and disappeared before you can use the space for anything else... One decision/action per minute is toooo slloooow.

[Blorx]

It probably took you three hours because you were dicking around trying to get yourself absolute victory.

Come on now, complaining that you can run out of metal? No game has infinite resources. Hell, if you wanna play that way, you'll run out of resources in Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Age of Mythology, etc, etc. You can't just grind wood, gas, minerals, etc forever.

They're strategy games. You're supposed to think of the most efficient way to use said resources. There would be no point if the resources were endless because you could easily replace anything that ever got destroyed, and unless someone amassed an army that was exponentially larger than the next guy's, you'd just be at a standstill forever.

No offense, Endoperez, I usually can see more than a little validity in your arguments, but this one is just weak.

As far as being a slow game goes, I could see that argument, but that's different. It's supposed to have an element of realism. The designers purposely made it that way. However, you have to do the exact same thing in games like the Age of series. It just takes less time.