raycevick
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Randomly Mine: PC Master... Archive
🕑 Added 2020-02-14 09:21:10 +0000 UTC
I've been meaning to cover Homefront: The Revolution for years now. The original's a game I actually hold lots of affection for, mainly in its Multiplayer that struck a beautiful balance between Call of Duty's infantry combat and Battlefield's large scale Warfare. It's campaign... is dated to say the least. So it's unfortunate then that The Revolution was not just exclusively PvE, but fraught with development & publisher troubles.
As different as the games are, Dambuster studios used to be Free Radical, makers of Timesplitters and there's clearly still some reverence for them, because... 
One of the Easter Eggs in Homefront: The Revolution is a cabinet running Timesplitters 2, and its first two levels, Siberia & Chicago. Porting two-levels of a multi-decade old console exclusive to PC seems like a lot of effort for an Easter Egg, too much. So it makes sense that from what I've been told, Dambuster successfully ported the first two levels of Timesplitters 2 as a way to pitch the investment in a full-port, akin to Nightdive's work with Turok & System Shock. After being turned down, the team focused their resources into completing Homefront: The Revolution, and its subsequent DLCs.
Now, I bring this up because ideally, Dambuster shouldn't need to be desperate for investment anyways. Because PC is the number #1 platform for something the industry often neglects...
Preservation.
Porting games to PC isn't as easy as its assumed to be, but it's really been established in the last few years, especially with games that no one ten years ago would assume to become playable with Mouse & Keyboard, like Halo Reach.
Games are still young, but they are aging, and we've now in an era where most in the industry grew up with gaming as a valuable part of their lives, rather than simply venturing into this wacky sub-section of the tech-world. Through that, we know a much smaller group of people are going to be able to dust off Atari 2600's for Pong, and PS1's for Metal Gear. It's better for developers, publishers, youtubers, and history itself, to have gaming's history be archived onto a flexible platform.
I've been seriously considering building a Windows 98 or XP machine for experiencing older games that haven't found their way onto GOG.
At the moment, there's only a handful of companies risking their employment and existence to preserve games; when this should just be standard, law, or both.
