Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Vangers is a driving game developed by Russian company KD Labs. It was released in 1998, and the above friendly face is what greets you when you begin a new game.
Once you're out and about on a planet, things look something like this:
As you can see, Vangers has a style all of its own, from setting to story via graphics to the wonderful soundtrack. PC Format actually listed "Too weird, too creepy" as their main point against the game. But if you take the time to get to know it you can have a great deal of fun traveling from world to world, buying new cars and upgrades, transporting goods and participating in races.
The pace is pretty slow, and the worlds are pretty bumpy places full of life, hidden corners and strange looking structures. Vangers is more about exploring and taking in the atmosphere than zipping around shooting stuff. There are plenty of weapons and shooting, but it takes a while before you really become able to cause damage to your enemies so Vangers doesn't feel like an action game.
Back when I played through the game I had a decent PC with a really nice joystick, which was a great thing to have for Vangers. Suddenly, out of the blue a guy from Russia contacted me on ICQ and asked if I'd be interested in playing some multiplayer Vangers some day. But of course! But how? I'm all Mac-based now, and installing Boot Camp and doing reboots to play still felt a bit too bothersome. Happily, only a week or so later Parallels desktop was released in a version supporting Direct X!
I upgraded, installed Vangers and started it. And it worked!
But hey ... it looked wrong!
Clearly, something was wrong colour-wise. Plenty of fiddling with all (emulated) hardware settings I could think of followed, to no avail. The solution turned out to be much simpler. All that was needed, as Martin discovered for me on some forum, was to jump over to the control panel and re-set the colour depth to 32 bit or so.
Victory!
Thus, on June 21st, 2007 I played my very first multiplayer games of Vangers. On Windows XP running on Parallels Desktop on Mac OS X. Against a bunch of wild Russians. I have plenty to re-learn, but I managed to get my bearings and also re-assign necessary keys so I didn't invoke Exposé instead of chatting all the time.
It crashed once, but that apparantly happens sometimes. So it seems the game is really nice and stable on Parallels. Modern emulation/virtualisation is truly a wonderful thing.
Show the world you're a vanger!
