Crusader: No Remorse - The latest giveaway from Origin

EA's ongoing "On the House" promotion has been rolling along since February 2014.  In that time we've been treated to free game titles ranging from DeadSpace  to Battlefield 3 for nothing more than an Origin login. 

While the value of these giveaways is debatable it's hard to argue with the a price of FREE.   After all, if you don't like it all you're out is a few minutes of time to download a dud.  On the positive side, even a bad game gives you street cred in those heated BS sessions with your gaming buddies. 

"You don't know!  You weren't there man!"

Which brings me to EA's latest giveaway that showed up on October 31'st.  While others may have had this info early I can tell you with certainty that the promotion didn't show up in my personal Origin client till Halloween.

That said, what's the value of this latest FREE offering from EA?

I'll be brief....

It's worth exactly what you paid for it, that being nothing.

Crusader: No Remorse is a third person shooter produced by Origin Systems in 1995.  It harkens back to the days when the box art was more exciting than the game. 

Considering the game is almost 20 years old it holds up well (not really) especially with Origin conveniently providing a runtime environment courtesy of DOSBOX.  By the way,  if you dig deep enough you can find the DOSBOX.conf file in the game's configuration files and modify it if you feel the need.  

I had the need...

Here's a pro tip when capturing DOSBOX game videos with FRAPS.  I ran into this while producing the footage you'll find below.  Set your FRAPS capture to 75 Frames per second and in your DOSBOX.conf file make sure the "output=" parameter is changed from "=surface" to "=openGL"

Otherwise you won't get anything but a video of your idle Windows desktop.

Remember, this game has to run in a virtual DOS environment and DirectX was still half a decade away from being useful when it was produced.   Meaning FRAPS is completely lost without DirectX to hook into. 

These were the "good old days" of EMM386 and figuring out what order to load your hardware drivers in your config.sys file. (Google it if you don't know what those are) 

DOSX and OPENGL were the standard, de facto or otherwise, in high graphical gaming content.  Plug and play anything was still something you did with a power cord.

That said, this game is laughable and hardly worth the effort to suffer such indignity.  Still, for a few it may be intriguing enough to suffer through the awful controls, vague hit registers and ancient graphics for a bit of nostalgia.

If you're younger than 30 you may want to try out the free download just to see what all of us "old guys" keep going on about. 

The "Good Old Days" weren't that good and after spending a few minutes with Crusader you'll realize just how fortunate you are to have missed the "golden age."