Lately I've been mostly trying to find ways to kill time before Lost Judgment gets here since I haven't really had anything new to play lately and I have to take breaks every once in a while from Guitar Hero due to the extreme pain it inflicts on my fingers. Mainly my ways of killing time lately have consisted of reading Berserk, rereading Dune (which I finished rereading the other day, might squeeze in Dune Messiah as well maybe), and randomly playing some older stuff. Since I've still been in a bit of a Dune mood lately I figured why not try playing some of the games?
First one I tried playing was Dune 2, since I had actually played tiny bits of it before many years ago after stumbling on it on an abandonware website (it was actually my first exposure to Dune in general). I figured maybe I'd do okay at it since as one of the first RTS games it'd probably be simpler than most of the ones I'm familiar with but I didn't get very far. It's not a bad game by any means and the soundtrack is amazing with MT-32 emulation turned on, but the gameplay winds up being extremely clunky since you can only move one unit at a time. I might try one of the fan-made remakes of the game at some point since they likely have some quality-of-life improvements like being able to move multiple units at once.
When that didn't work out I decided to check out the Dune game by Cryo Interactive, which I've never played before. I was kinda hesitant cause I knew it had strategy elements in it (which I always struggle with) but so far it's actually really interesting! The gameplay is actually more of a point and click adventure and strategy hybrid that also doesn't throw you into the deep end right away. The start of the game is pretty linear since you're told where you need to go and more or less what you need to do. Early on you also don't really have to focus on managing troops, you're told to focus on spice production and since the early parts are linear it's relatively easy to start to grasp how to set the Fremen up for spice mining (and later on for military training once far enough). My only real complaint so far is that the game is timed. Spice isn't unlimited, and the Emperor will obviously demand more and more spice. There's probably enough spice to last a long time in the game but I can see it being possible to render things unwinnable if I'm not careful. I'll just wing it and see how it goes.
At first I was trying to play the floppy disk version since I felt like the CD version's extras would just feel like bloat, but the copy protection quickly drove me nuts. It's the classic "where is this thing in the manual" where a picture comes up and it asks you for the page it's on. Half the time I just wound up getting it wrong even though I swore it was right. Turned out it was cause I was using the CD version's manual instead of the one for the floppy version! Not only that but the copy protection question always would come up every time I'd run the game so I figured I'd just give the CD version a try instead. Surprisingly I actually like the CD version a lot. Same soundtrack as the floppy version (which is great btw, and the CD version even has sound blaster pro support which likely sounds a little bit better than the standard sound blaster option found in the floppy version) and the extras it does have actually add to the game rather than distract from it. Has the obligatory voice acting that CD games usually had at the time (it's decent!) along with better visuals for the ornithopter travel sequences which are actually really nice and quickly grew on me. There's even clips of the 1984 David Lynch film that you can view in the in-game codex, I don't have the highest opinion of the Lynch film but the clips they use do a nice job illustrating those parts of the codex.
Now I wish DosBox had Adlib Gold emulation so I could hear the best version of the soundtrack in-game. ;-;
