The now Defunct Bullfrog (Nostalgia can rock, truly)

[AntiNaba]

Not too sure if some of you whippersnappers remember the good ol' days of isometric real-time strategy and control, when you couldn't pan around tricky buildings to view your units and the occasional mouse-mainpulation of your troops was an occasional irritation.

Back in the days before EA chewed up everything, there was a tiny little company that got big. And good. Very good. They decided to immerse heavily in a series of games that spawned a spiritual successor by the name of Evil Genius. They gave us Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital and Syndicate. The former taught us that evil is fun, the middle taught us that sick people with exploding fat-heads are funny, and the previous one gave us a gritier, nastier Shadowrun to play with. And also let us imagine Robocop for the other side, blowing apart Policemen and civilians with Gauss guns and Flamers.

My friends, today Bullfrog is dead, but it lives on. Some of the design team live on in EA, or the side-producer Lionhead studios. There are petitions (That you can find yourself, gits.) for their games, and a legacy that brings happy memories to any experienced gamer.

Share your thoughts, your inspiration.

Honour the Bullfrog. Honour the Horned Reaper, the Agent, the Demon and the Cyborg.

Here and now.

[Psystorm]

Never played Dungeon Keeper, more's the pity, and had forgotten that they did Theme Hospital, but I remember my days in the Syndicate with pride, what there is of me that hasn't been replaced with cold, unfeeling, superior metal ;) .

Although, I didn't play them when they were popular, at least not on my machine, we were a few years behind the times in computer tech - I think at that time we still had the 286 - but I played them on friends' machines, and bought them in the optimistic hope that one day, I may have something capable of playing them - and with DOSBox slowing down my computer, now I do!

As an aside, do you know if any of them had anything to do with Triumph Studios? Only Overlord has some of the 'feel' I ascribe to those games (when I can get it working, on a friend's machine - haven't I been here before?) - although that may just be that it's acutally fun, in a way that all too many games of today forget to be. The only person I know of that I can currently ascribe that too is Terry Pratchett's daughter, Rhianna.

[AntiNaba]

Ahhhhh... Dungeon Keeper. You don't know what you were missing, mate. It was like a cross between Age of empires, Dungeons and Dragons and Leisure Suit Larry, all in 1997.

And yes, Syndicate. I've heard that a Third Online MMORPG is planned... for China. And China only. General reaction to the news was: 'Hooora-! Wait, what?'. Something about those Miniguns... and a laser that obeyed conventional physics (No red beams!).

Triumph Studios? Nope, never heard of them, and I'm not familiar with Overlord, although that does sound similar to DK and DKII.

I don't catch the breeze on the Rhianna joke.

[Tempest Kitsune]

Overlord is a game for the 360 that basically makes you the Overlord of a rather diminished Evil Empire, which is your job to rebuild being as "good" or as "bad" as you want, which affects certian things in-game like how peasants react to you and the nature of the final set of spells you acquire, along with other things that I won't spoil for you. You have four varieties of minions that you acquire as the game goes on, and various spells that you can use after you find the artifacts that hold them and have your minions transport them back to your castle. And Rhianna was the one who wrote the script for the game, which had me in stitches at several points.