News

Playback.dem

It’s that time of the month again! Where you can read about hot stuff in our corner of PC Gaming and where we seemingly predict the future.

Site News

New Game Pages

New game pages have been added! We’re joined by Test Drive Unlimited and GTR 2, two legendary racing games that have stood the test of time.

Review Incoming

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 is here. We’ve been playing it and you will get a review in 2 days. Sorry the rest of the playback is so short.

Game News

Flash Games Archive News

As reported by Boing Boing the people of the world now can enjoy the Flashpoint Archive! Over 200k flash games have supposedly been preserved already. Time to re-run Stick RPG, that one Bumper Car game or those old Yeti Sports game hacks.

reTHAWed v4.3.1 goes POSTAL

RWS likes to collab these days, so here comes the new reTHAWed update which doesn’t just bring new classic levels and tweaks into the mod, but also adds new skaters based on models featured in POSTAL 2. Yes, you can even skate as the dog “Champ”.

Check out the announcement trailer on YouTube, our the release trailer on YouTube.

Marathon Delays September Date

Bungie has delayed Marathon away from its original September 23rd release date. This means you have more time to replay Marathon 1, then Maraton 2 and Marathon Infinity before that launches.

The new Marathon will be launching on Steam, sometime in the future.

Tech News

Warner Bros. Studios Restructure

Restructuring has taken place at Warner Bros. gaming division who is known for having recently beheaded Monolith Productions. Their roadmap is this: please fans of successful existing properties. This means they’ll be focusing solely on Mortal Kombat alongside non-gaming related franchises in their gaming studios.

Speaking of which, they already have a Trailer out for Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection which Digital Eclipse is developing. That is looking sweet. I still have the old collection developed by Code Mystics, but GFWL went AWOL.

Steam Enables SteamPlay By Default

As reported by GamingOnLinux - which has also turned 16 years old recently - Valve has now made it so any Windows game can be installed now without having to tick an extra check box.

Game compatibility very high these days, with only games using third-party anti-cheat solutions causing problems on the regular. They also collect usage metrics and probably determined that first thing people will do is interact with the switch, too.

Discord Stabs BotGhost

For 7.5 years the people at BotGhost had been serving the users of Discord, and made a nice living doing it too, until now.

There was much outcry, and people complained about how Discord is getting worse, once again. Most of that discourse was of course, on Discord.

Users have also noticed that perhaps a bit too much data was sent out to BotGhost. Oh, what could possibly happen if someone I don’t know has access to my data?!

Please, someone tell them about the third-party doctrine so they can all stop recommending worse options.

If you care about privacy and your rights, you self-host. If you too want to avoid getting burned over and over again, consider reading Chapter 6 of “Unix Without Words”: obtaining and maintaining a personal UNIX guru.

Xbox Handheld Revealed

Yes, the ROG Xbox Ally has been on our mind for a while. We actually have an Xbox Series X at frag-net.com’s beach house, and have quite the fondness for the original Xbox library of games. So what did we expect from a properly branded ‘Xbox’ handheld? A first-class Xbox, however this thing will ship with Windows 11 Home.

The device has not yet launched, so we don’t have a verdict yet at all.

You have the opportunity to create a polished experience with the Xbox library, make a solid device that stands on its own and doesn’t deal with that desktop jank. But instead they’re choosing to compete against the Steam Deck. Fair enough.

If you’re going to do this, listen to the complaints players have about the Deck. Expectations are high. But there’s also problems worth solving. We’re looking forward to the launch of these portables.

But this is a perfect opportunity to address issues not exclusive to the ROG Xbox Ally.

On Valve their Steam Deck with its native SteamOS, players will encounter the occasional jank with trying to force a PC game into being portable and controller oriented. That is by far the largest turn-off for anyone who has been hesistant to get one. There also aren’t any great solutions to it.

And although very rarely do you run into games that don’t work at all, it can happen. This is also not exclusive to Linux or playing via Wine/Proton - not all games were written with the hindsight of modern hardware performance. Then there’s also games that just don’t work on that form factor.

We believe that a more polished experience would be very successful.

It’s Over

That’s it! Shoo! Now go play something, or do something useful! We are back to playing THPS 3+4 to bring you our review, soon.

Playback.dem

This was May 2025 in a nutshell.

Site Updates

• Data oriented redesign. Most bits of information from games came from a single sheet of HTML - now the individual header categories are dynamically put together from multiple sources of data.
• We have started adding notes to certain games. Like on the page for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, you can read bits specific to the PC version. It’s like trivia, but often more technical.

Game News

Giant Bomb Goes Independent

This was quite a saga. We’ve watched the transition of ownership of the legendary videogame site Giant Bomb a few times.

It was previously owned by Fandom, but had now found independence. After fans and staff made it clear that recent changes at companies run by Fandom would effectively kill the site, the people in charge were kind enough to sell the business.

This means that no one is funding Giant Bomb now, except for people like us.

They have a vault of great video content, including some high quality game tape rips. If you sign up for Giant Bomb Premium you’re allowed to download it all too.

R1Delta released

Sales of Titanfall were halted back in 2021, leaving the game abandoned by its developer and publisher. While some of the infrastructure is still up, no one is really playing due to the threats constantly ruining the game.

Now, there’s an answer to your worries - and that is R1Delta. With its full guts on display over on GitHub it promises an open source, custom server framework for Titanfall. It allows you to host dedicated servers and modded servers as well. You can even view a list of games active at any given time.

Great work on preserving one kickass multiplayer game. Our hats off to our friends at R1Delta.

Overturn Network Test

As reported earlier, a playtest event took place that tested the network performance of Overturn. We were debugging some network anomalies where also seeing how the elaborate entity work performed over the network. You can also still download and play Overturn: Operation Deathmatch Test and see what all the fuss was about.

One of the maps had lots of visual effects, like beam type entities (and lightstyle color switches) for the King of the Hill mode that we were worried about might be heavy on the networking. We had some issues with client-side state/prediction misses, but nothing that detracted from the fun. We thank everyone again for their participation - and I have word from the core development team at Bloodbath Software that an update will be out this June (or July, at the latest). As there’s lots of things going on in the industry this time of the year, some of our staff will be extraordinarily busy too.

Valve Stops Counter-Strike: Classic Offensive

After years of waiting, the Classic Offensive mod for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive had announced that their project is not allowed to be distributed. Watch the video by ESCalation for the direct source.

Valve was blocking them from releasing it, unless they rebase it on top of Counter-Strike 2 or on top of the older (but still supported) Source Base 2013. On a technical level this was understandable because the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive branch was no longer being maintained and thus no longer receives security updates. Valve would only make themselves more work by endorsing it in the long run by letting them use it.

Unfortunately, when you agree to the SDK license agreement put forth by Valve you are at their mercy. Maybe we’ll see a port to Counter-Strike 2, but it seems morale had hit rock bottom. We are hoping for an eventual happy ending to this saga.

You can see the credits and development timeline here.

The Tekken Waffle House Saga

Waffle House has been ghosting Tekken 8 lead Katsuhiro Harada. Fans of the franchise want to be able to fight inside a Waffle House franchise but they won’t seem to get it.

IGN reports this passionate cry for a cross over.

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That is it for our AAA game industry coverage for the month.

The Golden Parrot: Against All Flags v2.2 released

Probably one of the most creative modifications for Wolfenstein 3D is made by fraggeur and it’s titled The Golded Parrot: Against All Flags. This sequel to The Golden Parrot continues the mix of of action and role-playing game.

With an all new episode in this update, you’ll find plenty to plunder on this adventure. Even if you’ve played an older version, you might want to replay it with the newly added skills.

Read the release announcement on ModDB.

Holocron Challenges v2.0 released

Love duels? Love Star Wars? The PvE mod Holocron Challenges for Jedi Academy adds a new game type for you duel/tournament lovers:

Masters of Tera Kasi

Fight 8 enemies across 8 stages in this ladder mode, before meeting a boss character you need to fight. Every time you play it’s different, as it’s all randomized.

Basically, if you crave variety and want something you can pick up and play? Look no further than this mod by Plasma89. No need to choose a map every time, this mod just picks some variety for you.

Half-Life Dreamcast Manual, Correcting Misinformation

The SEGA Dreamcast Info site by Comby Laurent had posted a full scan of the manual of the cancelled Half-Life on Dreamcast as well as inserts for the case from an authentic copy.

Staff of Frag-Net preserved the authentic Half-Life Dreamcast box many years ago already. Combined, we are all able to see what Half-Life Dreamcast would have been like on our game shelves.

Another rumor and bit of misinformation was being put to rest, and we could now confirm that the original scene release of Half-Life on Dreamcast was not modified.

HRPG v3.0 released

This is Heretic but with more RPG elements! With adjusting monster spawns, new classes and powerups this is a fresh new way to experience Heretic on GZDoom. Made by ThePunKing.

Download for v3.0 on ModDB

Tiberium Resonance v0.2 released

This mod by Nozuki_Guardian17 is an attempt to remake Command & Conquer 4 on top of Command & Conquer 3. You will also need the expansion pack Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath in order to play this mod. Grab the latest full version on ModDB.

You should definitely also check Tiberium Chaos if you’re into some chaotic, unbalanced, feature-filled skirmish for the same game, by the same mod author.

Clone Wars Era Mod v2.5 released

Listen up, Star Wars: Battlefront II players: The full version of Clone Wars Era Mod v2.5 by Benoz was released.

reTHAWed v4.3 released

Of course there’s always more reTHAWed. There’s so much we have a dedicated mod page now for reTHAWed. We also added one for THUG PRO.

The launch trailer for reTHAWED 4.3 shows off that they’ve indeed ported the entire set of levels from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 into it, complete with details such as cutscenes attempting to be preserved.

As always, lots of customization had been added too. Hats off to the folks at 10K Rising.

Forgotten Hope: Secret Weapon v0.73 released

A new full release of this fan-continuation of Forgotten Hope for Battlefield 1942 had been released.

See the full versions of the above renders on this release article for Forgotten Hope: Secret Weapon v0.73.

Tech News

SteamOS Kicks Ass On The Legion Go S

If you have a Lenovo Legion Go S and want to install Windows on it you’ll come to shoot yourself in the foot. The benchmarks “destroy Windows in peformance and battery life” according to GamingOnLinux and Dave2D. Read all about SteamOS on the Lenovo Legion Go S here.

Waffle House Index getting DMCA’d

Yes, we have to keep talking about Waffle House this month, but it’s serious this time. The Waffle House Index had received a Cease and Desist order.

What is the Waffle House Index?

“If you’ve never heard of the Waffle House Index, you’re in for a bit of weirdly fascinating disaster response lore. The Waffle House Index is an (incredibly) unofficial tool used by FEMA to gauge the severity of natural disasters. Why Waffle House? Because they’re infamous for not closing even during the worst of storms. If the House is closed, that means things are getting real.” – Jack LaFond

So Mr. LaFond set up a site for displaying his scraping of that data, in order to help people. Of course, Waffle House did not like their trademark being used like that and shut it down. We hope for the safe return of the Waffle House Index.

Over & out

And that’s it!

The Overturn Playtest concluded earlier today!

We want to thank everyone who showed up!

When ModDB has done authorizing the post, you can learn more about it here:

Ping! Playtest Over! - Overturn mod for Half-Life

You can also still download and play Overturn: Operation Deathmatch Test and see what all the fuss was about.

This is the first playable release of a game using the new iteration of Nuclide with its new networked object-oriented inventory system.

What does that mean? Well, it’s a bunch of systems that allowed the original development team of Overturn to give you this prototype, which only took a few weeks to make.

The mod had been dormant for over a decade, but thanks to not having to write a single line of code or programming the team implemented the weaponry, item and game object work in record time using the new SDK.

How does that work? As stated, a lot of subsystems are at play there, so we encourage you to simply throw yourself at it. Open overturn/pak000.pk4 like you would any ZIP archive, and look around the decls/ directory specifically.

In the end, the only custom code resides to handle the Heads-Up-Display and additional multiplayer modes. However even items like the flags in CTF are handled via text files. The client and server code is still vanilla Rad-Therapy.

If you want to make prototype a Half-Life mod or a whole standalone game, yours too can be developed in a few weeks, editing nothing but plain text files.

Playback.dem

It’s our Playback for March 2025.

Frag-Net Status Update

Site updates

We’ve been adding more game pages. You’ll also notice some file sections getting added to. Some of those things aren’t quite done. But to make up for it we’ve updated our magazine racks for various games.

Check out a few game pages! It’s like a time machine, dude.

We missed: Map Center’s Quake 3 25th Anniversary Pack

We completely missed this in February on LvlWorld, but there was a 25th Anniversary Pack for Quake III Arena, released by the Map-Center community (who keep blessing us with levels, more on that in Mod News below).

Levels vary in theme. From the classic themes present in the original game, as well as classic community themes. Go check them out, a server ought to be hosting them somewhere! If you know of a server that does, let us know and we’ll add it.

Here’s the complete list of artists who contributed, taken from the readme (nicknames only):

Screens

Look at these sweet screenshots:

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault community now served by 333networks

As of the beginning of March, our friends at 333networks are now serving the Medal of Honor community:

Another great title now joins the list of games supported by 333networks. After a brief development-and-testing period, our friends at xNull trust 333networks to be a highly robust and reliable masterserver service to be adopted for their community. Our passionate team of retrogamers are committed to providing a reliable online experience for legacy games.

We thank the Medal of Honor community for their trust in 333networks and we will remain dedicated to continue providing the best multiplayer support so you can continue to enjoy the game without interruption. We also thank @ldvc and @Todesengel for their (continued) help in making 333networks ready for Medal of Honor Allied Assault, Spearhead and Breakthrough!

Note to server owners: if your server doesn’t appear in the server list after the update, restart your server so it reconnects with the new master server. This should resolve any visibility issues.

Game News

sc2kfix

We’ve not yet talked about this cool project which will breathe new life into your copy of Sim City 2000 Special Edition.

It is called sc2kfix and it doesn’t just make it run on modern versions of Windows but it also fixes longstanding bugs, improves compatibility when run under Wine, as well as introduces the python-esque language Kuroko into the mix, which will allow you to add scripts to modify your game.

You can find instructions on how to get everything configured on their website.

Unreleased 1984 Demo from 1999

The name was MediaX and they tried to develop this title between 1996-1999, as some avid readers of Computer Gaming World might recall from their memory banks - this demo of a game with the license and endorsement of George Orwell’s estate is a 3D, first person adventure game adaptation/sequel of 1984, the book.

The book as you may know, has since its release become the template for many stories about authoritarianism. This is where we tell you about all the games that are obviously inspired by it. If you really want to know what could have been - then check no further than the Internet Archive page for the disc containing a build plus some sources for it.

Hide your Jams

Here’s what wasn’t on your 2025 bingo card: Acclaim is back!

What will this mean for the Turok videogames? Will they try to re-acquire those from Nightdive?
BMX XXX Remastered when?

Get your jokes and references out of your system people.

We’ll be watching this development closely.

Here’s to hoping that the ASSEMblergames disc dump will get some use!

Bloodlines 2 Delayed Yet Again

Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed again. We’ve reported on this before. Let’s see if Paradox can deliver on this very anticipated game.

THPS 3+4, then Bam Margera

Pro Skater fans rejoice, as THPS 3+4 has been announced!

Blues News announcement

What? It doesn’t play like 3 or 4, but instead only has the classic mode with the 2 minute time limit?
Okay, whatever - but considering they’re basing the gameplay on 1+2 - which was practically perfect - How could one complain?

If you’re salty about them being different and not being able to relive the ‘old’ days, don’t:
We actually put pages up for the various THPS games and how to play on-line with the latest patches!

For Pro Skater 3 or Pro Skater 4 respectively you will find that PARTYMAN managed to make those play smooth. Those patches are even available under the MIT License. Sweet!

In related news, Birdman hung out with Bam and was stoked to see how well he’s holding up. Hooked him up with a last minute insert into the game.

We still miss Vicarious Visions. Did you know that they originally had their own version of 3+4 in production?

Kotaku report Video Games Chronicle report

RoboCop - Unfinished Business

Up and coming darling of 80s movie videogame adaptations Teyon Studio dazzled us with a trailer for RoboCop: Rogue City - Unfinished Business, which is a follow-up to their beloved game RoboCop: Rogue City.

It’s a stand-alone game that focuses around you taking on the threads inside OmniTower. A tall housing complex that also happens to be infected with crime of the highest caliber.

It’s store-page is live already, but you’ll have to wait until late Summer to play it.

We’re Head Over Heels

Get a load of this: the store page for Head Over Heels: Deluxe went live and we have yet to get it. It’s a certified classic.

Reality Settles In

Are we making too many games? Perhaps we should be smarter about what kind of games we should be making.

Could the problem be that the industry just doesn’t know what to aim for? Like what happens when there’s nowhere to go. Are there any technological challenges left to solve? Surely, but perhaps it’s easier to chase fads in the era of late-stage capitalism. It appears that big developers are clinging onto any safe bets they have, while of course still punishing the talent when things don’t perform.

At least some try to avoid creating such a mess for themselves in the first place..

Considering the controversies of recent years, it seems not surprising to see some pushback: We saw the first videogame developer unions form last year although it’s far from being established. Especially now in with the state of the current economy, we will only see these issues accelerate.

In other news, UbiSoft was being nibbled on and subsequently sold 25% of a new company that will house their biggest franchises to Tencent. That’s rough.

Modding News

Command & Conquer 3: Alien Prophecies

Requires Kane’s Wrath, but Alien Phrophecies is in Early Access now with a full release scheduled later this year.

Get an overview with the original announcement post and see the latest update post to get dazzled by glowing screenshots.

Dawn of the Tiberium Age for Tiberian Sun update

Now check this out, this stand-alone mod just got a big update that took them about half a year to develop. It mixes Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert together in the engine for Tiberian Sun. While it sports an impressive (70 or so) amount of original missions, all the original Tiberian Dawn campaigns are designed for co-operative multiplayer now too. Sweet!

In Mute Witness Stand - Promising Half-Life mod

We have an update post to a mod on our radar titled In Mute Witness Stand. This mod is a co-operative multiplayer horror game in the trenches of the first world war. Very promising!

Map-Center blesses us with Mine Jam - Quake II

Every month there seems to be another jam release by the folks at Map-Center! This time it’s for the re-release version of Quake II.

However, this isn’t your regular Jam of random levels made by different people, it’s a proper expansion pack, with custom textures, cutscenes and everything.

The release announcement has wonderful screenshots of some very tasy areas.

We’ll keep this short since, you should just read the damn announcement.

Speed Devils is back on-line

Got a fix for UbiSoft’s racing title Speed Devils on Dreamcast this month. Sweet! We can all thank Shuouma and flyinghead.

Tech News

GIMP THREE

The world rejoiced when it was graced with GIMP 3.0, followed up with 3.02.

Finally us users have non-destructive editing, and just better interactions with layers in general. It’s been a boon to everyones productivity. Re-evaluate it now if you’re still stuck on Adobe’s PhotoShop.

Also, obscure bugfix to those who work with palettes (which affects games like Quake and even Half-Life with its 256 color per texture restriction): That pesky bug where random black pixels would turn greenish has finally been fixed. A lot of the palettization has been reworked and should result in higher quality results in general.

I myself have used GIMP 2.X’s palettization features for years and couldn’t tell initially that something was off, but we were able to reproduce it quite easily.

Hyperkin Cleans Up

The news is that Hyperkin is reaching out to discuss their wrongdoings, a rare sight of humility in the industry. They do good stuff every once in a while, the folks at Hyperkin. If you ever produce that Mega-Drive handheld? Hook us up with a review copy.

Wine updates, Wine Mono released

We got blessed with two new releases of Wine: 10.3 and 10.4 released. Noteworthy game fix: It fixes the Tiberium in C&C 3 being invisible when playing the Kane’s Wrath addon.

Over at WineHQ you could also read about the new release of Wine’s Mono - Framework Mono.

This was the first release since the big migration, having shifted hands over from Microsoft.

The release post also includes a refresher on what was going on during the time.

All in All

That’s it. We’re done with March 2025.