The Local Ditch Update: The Features section is finally open and the first game is 1994’s classic: System Shock.
I’ve posted the first game in the “Features” series: System Shock. As with the new Deus Ex page, it’s a bit of a review and retrospective all wrapped into one. Go check it out.
In very-related news, the Features link at the top of the page now goes somewhere. It’s serves as in intro to the features section, but it’s really a manifesto, listing all that I’m trying to accomplish with them. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to accomplish much.
As expected, there’s been a few parts of the site that broke with the new look, most notably every page that linked to the home page. Nothing spells fun like breaking links on hundreds and hundreds of pages. Good news: that should be fixed.
More good news: the Q&A has been updated. I know, I know… sending a message to me is like a game of roulette: there’s no guarantee what’ll happen. Will your question be answered in the next few days? Months? Years? If you sent a message recently, it’s answered. If you sent one back in February, I apologize for the horrible response time, but it’s answered, too.
Activision’s I ’76 Wallpaper has been added to the site, thanks to a generous visitor.
The Deus Ex page has been updated with a new look and more info. Really, more than anything else, it’s just a ramble about my experiences with the game, plus all of the old info.
The “Features” section is going to be very similar to this – more of a review/retrospective on a particular game rather than a ton of stats, files, cheats, etc.
Lastly, the search box is up and working well. Prior to this, it was working (mostly) from the news page, but not too well anywhere else.
Updates:
Q&A – More questions, more answers
Interstate ’76 Downloads– Wallpaper available
Deus Ex – Better looking with actual content
Once again, there’s a new look to the site – a little refresh that’ll hopefully make reading and navigating the front page a tad easier.
To the side are some quick headlines with recent news about some of gaming series covered here. The games can be found at the top, as usual. There’s a comments section now, which’ll add another way to interact with the site. That is, if my 6-month late responses to the Q&A section weren’t enough.
I’m sure there are a few bugs that need to be ironed out, so expect to see a little tweaking and refinement over the next while. I’m hoping to do a new “Features” section for the site where some of the legendary games of the past and near-past are covered. I’ve got a little bit written (from as much as a year ago, actually), but hopefully it’ll be up shortly.
After all of the hubaloo about Tripd.co.uk going down, another major player in the free homepage market is coming to an end. Geocities, one of the first homepage providers has announced that they are no longer accepting sign-ups and will be shutting down by the endof the year.
Long time visitors (are there any?) will know that this site started off at Geocities, back in 1997. At the time, they had a different approach to to website categorization – that of neighborhoods. So, all of the sites about games would go in the TimesSquare/Arcade neighborhood. After that, everyone had a number (7891 for me), much like your homepage was an apartment on the block. You could browse sites by streets and addresses and check out your virtual “neighbors.”
Perhaps it wasn’t the most useful way to organize sites, but it was an interesting interpretation of how these homepages should be structured and really showed off some of the early unique approaches to the internet at the time.
Eventually, Geocities succumbed to an overload of ads and pop-up banners and was bought out by Yahoo!. The old neighborhood categorization was gone and instead replaced with the more standard geocities.com/username approach.
Most people, however, seem to know the place as a location for horrible web design with pages that say little more than “Welcome to my corner of the internet. Here is a list of my favorite links.” Maybe time hasn’t been so kind to the site, but I’ll have fond memories of the place, figuring out this whole html thing and looking at the random homepages of my geo-neighbors.
In other news, the I ’76 FAQ has been reordered and had some parts rewritten, just to explain things in a tad more detail and offer clearer solutions.
Updates:
Interstate ’76 FAQ – Reworded and reordered
Lycos Europe is finally shutting down its Tripod.co.uk servers on February 15. If you’re still using the old address (members.lycos.co.uk/localditch/) to get to this website, then please update your bookmarks and links to https://www.localditch.com.
I’ve been working on a Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries Walkthrough/Strategy section, so expect that to pop up in a few weeks. There’s really a lot more to the game than I remember, but it’s a fun trek down memory lane.
Lastly, as usual, there are some small updates scattered around the site, mostly behind the scenes.
As usual, I’m back to updating things bit by bit. So we’ll start with the biggest news first: the Mechwarrior pages have been redesigned. As with the rest of the site, it’s gotten a fresh coat of paint that is strictly html 4.0 compliant and tweaked up a little bit. The navigation scheme should make it easier to find whatever your looking for as well. The content is mostly the same at this point, but you can bet that in the near future, there will be more up there.
Also, I’ve added preview movies of Interstate ’76, Nitro Pack, and Heavy Gear in their respective sections. All were pulled from other Activision game disks.
Updates:
Heavy Gear Downloads – New preview movie
Interstate ’76 Downloads – New preview movie
Nitro Pack Downloads – New preview movie
Mechwarrior – Entire site redesign
For the most part, there are just a few tweaks to the site here and there, but there are a couple of big updates.
Updates:
Interstate ’76 Tips – Lots of good info on car design has been added
Nitro Pack Downloads – The XP fix for the Nitro Pack can be downloaded here.