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My only complete playthrough of Arcanum was with a human tech gunner/thief. I think I spent as much time robbing stores in Tarant as I did playing the rest of the game. By the end I was using a gun that launched daggers (at a cost of 6 bullets/shot!). Mages can teleport across the world, summon level 30 allies at level 5, and instantly kill anything in the game, sure, but tech characters can open locks without alerting the entire town and get to assemble all kinds of sweet gadgets and it's just as fun in a completely different way. As is playing an idiot savant ogre with 20 strength at level 1. It's an incredibly broken game but the variety between playthroughs is pretty incredible.
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Mar 21, 2012 05:51
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seorin posted:I'm definitely interested in that one. Added it to the requests list. Didn't Bethesda give it away for free awhile back, too? Daggerfall and Arena have both been released for free on their website. http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/ http://www.elderscrolls.com/arena/
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Mar 21, 2012 06:00
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Are we cleared to post abandonware links if a game isn't really available anywhere else?
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Mar 21, 2012 06:21
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Arcanum is an unbalanced game but it doesn't matter much since I think the wide variety of build options is so much fun. But yeah, the worst parts of the game are easily the dungeon crawls. Going with a pure melee character is a pretty safe bet but it's also the most boring way to play the game. Going tech-based, gunslinger, that's the good stuff.
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Mar 21, 2012 07:57
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Peas and Rice posted:
Oh, I remember this one. You didn't mention that in the (admittedly pretty cool and involved) character creation, more than half of the skills presented to you were not actually used in the game. The rationale behind that was apparently that you might want to print out the character sheet and use it for the PnP game. Of course,those skills were not labelled in any special way, that would just strip you of the joy of checking the manual for the first time and realizing that half of the soldiers you made are utterly useless.
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Mar 21, 2012 08:20
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seorin posted:Oh, I'm aware they're easily available on GOG, but there are fan patches and stuff you'd want to install for each (like C08 for ToEE). I'll put those up myself eventually when I have more time to go through the patching steps and make sure it all works. GoG actually has a massive fan patch section on the forums for every single game they sell. GoG are cool dudes
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Mar 21, 2012 08:26
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Kharmakazy posted:Is the 9mm better than the 45? The faq I'm reading says to get 9mm, but experience tells me that a 45 should do more damage. There's a Wasteland wiki out there with a list as you already figured out, but it's a waste of ammo and time bothering with pistols and plain rifles. Axes and knives are about as effective as those early in the game. Use melee weapons until heavy weaponry (SMGs, assault rifles, AT weaponry, energy weapons) starts showing up. You can use melee weaponry for most of the game, actually. Mattjpwns posted:Considering the age of the game, they did some pretty neat stuff with it - characters had the ability to take jobs for money (like carpentry, metalsmithing, etc.) which was great for getting essential gear and food, but you were running under a strict time limit of 1000 days on the "normal" difficulty level so that time was always a trade off. It isn't actually a strict time limit; there's a sorceress in the starting castle who can extend the time limit. Even if you're playing for the first time, even the expert time limit of 600 days isn't actually much of a factor even if you ignore that sorceress.
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Mar 21, 2012 08:35
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Oh hello there, you got the jump on me. What oh this it's nothing really I mean seriously don't worry about it- Ok, you caught me. Yes that's an ancient boxed copy of Dungeon Siege, but its got a long history with me that I'm going to force you to all read through now. When I was in elementary or middle school some kid teld me all about this 3D Diablo clone called Dungeon Siege. Being a huge Diablo fan at the time I told him he was full of poo poo and the game was probably trash, this ended with said kid crying soon after. I didn't think anything could compete with my golden calf that was Diablo and battle.net multiplayer at the time and really didn't think much of it for a while. A few years later I saw a marked down copy of "Dungeon Siege:Legends of Aranna" sitting lonely at a EBGames in the local mall on what was becoming the dwindling PC gaming selection, back when PC gaming actually had a wall in a games store anyway. and when PCGamer magazine didn't suck nearly as bad I think either.  When I booted it up and played it for the first time I was blown away by, well, the 3D! Crazy poo poo at the time when the other 3D games I played were either Quake 2 DDay mod or Half-Life and its mods, and EQ sometimes. Besides the 3D aspect of it I was really blown away by the charming soundtrack it had going for it which I would of course learn later was composed by gaming soundtrack staple Jeremy Soule. A lot of those tracks play in my brain years after I ever played the drat thing, they just fit the mood right. In most games of the time background noise was simply music or explosions, fighting sounds and stuff, maybe some eerie music or something. But the old 3D world of this game had birds chirping in the trees as well as pine and oak trees swinging, rustling with the wind. Simply chilled me to the bone back then and give it an immersion that was hard to get anywhere else. Game was a hack and slash Diablo clone to the core with its selling point being "a tactical fantasy slashy-RPG mashup" or something. In the end a lot of this worked against it and made the game unplayable for some people (or simply boring to watch). The camera controls were hilariously wonky sometimes but they were some of the first of their time if I recall correctly. They tried a lot of new and weird stuff that really hadn't been ironed out right yet in some instances... but all in all it was a functional game with some outstanding soundwork and 3D modeling for the time. And as an aside I'll mention something- Yes, I played Dungeon Siege 3. I had a lot of reasons for why I didn't care much for it but I'll let a screenshot comparison show you one of my biggest reasons why:  A female character from Gas Powered Games Dungeon Siege in the 1990's.  A female character from Obsidian's Dungeon Siege 3, 2011. Besides the game coming quite a bit too late and really just being something to push out with their new in-house engine it really wasn't much to call home about. It had great combat from what I remember but that was it really. The laid back light fantasy design aesthetic was gone and replaced with belts and high heels, and a particular lack of armoring and item pimping in most cases. The DS I knew was really just an excuse to sit back, get 8 bored friends on the line and drink and talk while one person clicks "follow server host" and presses the potion button over and over again when the time calls for it. It was chill as gently caress and the environments really let that soak in, well, when I was a kid I guess. It was more an armor and weapon shopping mass critter slaughter simulator with 8 player coop and an excuse to see steam powered goblin chainsaw grenade launcher death machines in action. To this day I won't say its a GOOD game but gently caress if I can't get it out of my head. I was horribly saddened when copies of the game were sold on Steam and then it turned out they didn't have multiplayer compatibility for some reason. gently caress, that was like the only reason to play DS back in the day. Also apparently goons REALLY hated the original game when the Obsidian thread rolled around, besides that its all I know about this kinda scuffed up piece of copper of a game. Thought I'd finally let my thoughts on it rest with an effort-post in a PC gaming thread dedicated to ancient RPGs of the long gone times, hopefully I'll be able to shut up about it now and it will leave my brain in peace.
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Mar 21, 2012 09:03
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Updated the OP: Mentioned sexual rickshaw's IRC channel under 'other resources'. Added Betrayal at Krondor to the main games section. Added a couple games to the 'other' section. Added andrew smash's advice on mac gaming. Thanks a bunch for all the contributions! Rhandhali posted:Are we cleared to post abandonware links if a game isn't really available anywhere else? AxeManiac posted:2c. What about Roms/Abandonware We allow whatever is allowed on the underdogs to be posted here (within reason). We also allow anything that isn’t commercially available or easily purchased, within reason. Check with a mod before hand. However we do not allow rom sets or random torrents and anyone REQUESTING files will be punished. This is not a file forum.
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Mar 21, 2012 10:41
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Every Arcanum character should have the first two levels of the Herbalism tech discipline, which lets you make healing and stamina potions from herbs you pick off the ground or buy from Herbalists. This will massively improve your survivability in the early game, especially since health and stamina potions (the latter being very important to casters) are so goddamned expensive. Also, the quickbar in Arcanum isn't just a quickbar. It's a quickbar that also happens to be storage. So yeah, throw potions there, but if there's a huge thing that can be put in the quickbar and you need the inventory space? Dump it in a quickbar slot. Goddamn, but I loved Arcanum. E: A lot of the fun of Arcanum comes from how insanely open the leveling system is. I remember standing around at work with a friend bullshitting about what would be cool Arcanum builds. "Stealthy mad bomber! Teleporting backstabber! Hand to hand combat mage with all the buff spells!" Pope Guilty fucked around with this message at 10:49 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 10:47
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Arcanum was just amazing. There's nothing quite like getting run out of technological shops and forbidden from boarding the train as a mage because your very presence distorts the laws of nature. It's a great game once you patch out the armada of bugs and look past the piss-poor balance and interminably long dungeons. The retard playthrough had some good lines, too: >What's your name? 1) Nobody calls me names, you DIE! 2) me stupid
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Mar 21, 2012 10:57
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Heavy neutrino posted:Arcanum was just amazing. There's nothing quite like getting run out of technological shops and forbidden from boarding the train as a mage because your very presence distorts the laws of nature. Speaking of great old school CRPG dialogue Baldur's Gate had this zinger: Confronted by a group of bandits. Bandit leader: 'Draw your daggers and spells and let's have at 'er! You've crossed our employers and this is as far as you're going to go, my friend. Should've known that lazy bounty hunting rabble wouldn't get the job done. Never settle for second best, I always say!' Player character: 'You want to know what I always say? "Always kill the mouthy one." That's what I always say.'
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Mar 21, 2012 11:22
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Kraustofski posted:When I was in elementary or middle school some kid teld me all about this 3D Diablo clone called Dungeon Siege. Being a huge Diablo fan at the time I told him he was full of poo poo and the game was probably trash, this ended with said kid crying soon after. Well, middle school you was kind of a jerk but he was also right.
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Mar 21, 2012 11:40
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Heavy neutrino posted:Arcanum was just amazing. There's nothing quite like getting run out of technological shops and forbidden from boarding the train as a mage because your very presence distorts the laws of nature. Oh god, now I'm remembering Lukan the Witless, whose vocabulary was most expanserive.
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Mar 21, 2012 11:43
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Twilight 2000! That reminds me of another of my first PC RPGs, coincidentally based on IP from the same company -  I found my copy in the software section of Bud's, at the time the dumping ground for all of Wal-Marts returns, overstocks and rejects. It's based on the firstest, densest and simulationist-est sci-fi RPGs of them all - Traveller. It could also be subtitled "Retirees in Space!" Experience the joy of computers with whole megabytes of RAM and portable radios that weigh several pounds. Create a party of five PTSD stricken veterans to travel the reaches of the Imperium to save it from a threat from within. Traveller is notable for the fact that you can in fact die during character creation. After rolling basic stats you take your characters and put them through at least one term of military service. During each term they will gain certain benefits, skills and training. They might also get wounded or die from service or even of old age if you drag out their character creation enough. Of course, characters also age during this process which means that their physical stats might deteriorate somewhat and they'll be forced to retire from the service. The longer you stay in the more skills and rewards you got, but your chances of something bad happening also increased. This has the upshot of meaning that can have a party consisting entirely of pension-drawing retirees. You can also create many more characters than you can actually use in your party - this is important, as we will see later. Traveller also uses hexadecimal in its character stats, meaning that character attributes will range from 0-F, with F representing 15, A representing 10 and so on so forth. It seems kind of strange, but it actually helps make things a bit easier in a big numbers good, letters better kind of way.  An example of retirees in space. Unfortunately, the game also punishes you for being too skilled and requires you to decrease your total skill levels to your intelligence+education combined. The game itself is pretty open-ended. You're approached at the beginning by someone who works for one of the megacorporations in the Imperium for help stopping the traitor, Konrad Kiefer, from betraying the Imperium to their psionically gifted enemies, the Zhodani. After that, you get to raise 2 million credits to upgrade your starship, the Interloper with a jump drive capable of sending you on to the next system and continue on with the main quest. How you accomplish this goal is up to you. Smuggling, trading, raiding, mercenary work and piracy are all viable options. You can go where you want, when you want within the capabilities of your starship and your financial ability to keep it fueled.  The main view is top down - when in combat the blue man representing your party would split up into individually controllable people from your party. The interface was mouse driven, and the actual combat took place in real time which was pretty unique for the time. Other fun features include permadeath - once a character is dead, they're dead for good. Not all is lost however as it is possible to visit recruiting stations on every planet and replace lost party members with new ones. It is entirely possible to complete the game with a completely different party. Individual characters also have personal funds and there is a separate party fund, meaning you can take a character who has a long service and choose nothing but cash for the retirement benefits. Add them to your party, drain their retirement account, deal with them quietly and replace them at the nearest recruiting station. A sequel was made, Megatraveller 2: The Quest for the Ancients, but I haven't really ever played it. From what I understand it was prettier and bigger in almost every way than it's predecessor and had a better user interface, as well as sound and music. In all the game holds up pretty well if you can get over the PC speaker sounds and the glory of VGA. No music, just beeper noises for gunshots and walking sounds and those are optional. Playing around with character generation is kind of fun in and of itself. If you don't care to push raw your newly minted high school grads through the meat grinder of the various services the game comes with a pre-generated set of characters to allow you to start right away. You really are missing out on a lot of the fun of the game though. I never actually finished the game because it is known for a somewhat hilarious bug. Basically, savefiles or party files can be corrupted. This has two outcomes one of which means your game is trashed. The other outcome, however, means your entire party gets "battle dress", a sort of power armor and the best combat armor in the game, on top of six or seven figures worth of credits. I got the latter and spent too much time screwing around with exotic spaceship upgrades and high end equipment to bother with the main questline. Today, Traveller is working on it's fifth iteration and a modernized, revamped original is currently in print from Mongoose publishing as a generic rules set for both the Traveller universe and other settings such as Judge Dredd and Strontium Dogg. You can get a copy of the game and manual at Abandonia. It runs beautifully on DOSBox using DOSShell as a frontend. GameBanshee did a nice little writeup with some play video as well. Rhandhali fucked around with this message at 11:56 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 11:47
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Heavy neutrino posted:The retard playthrough had some good lines, too Arcanum posted:Idiot: What we do now, Virgoo? Pope Guilty posted:Oh god, now I'm remembering Lukan the Witless, whose vocabulary was most expanserive. I still remember him fondly. As I do much of Arcanum, apparently.
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Mar 21, 2012 12:15
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Man, I'm getting the bug to play Arcanum for the third time. The first time I played was years ago and I tried to make a gunslinger without any prior knowledge about the game and at that time I wasn't reading any RPG forums or anything like that. I got so frustrated with my almost cartoonishly bad attempts to kill people that I uninstalled without a second thought. Second time through was years later when I bought the game on GoG. I made a mage and it was the exact opposite experience. I did just the tiniest bit of grinding in the early game and now I had a character where not even halfway through I could disintegrate any enemy and stop time. I blew through it and playing a harm or lightning bolt guy just gets old. This is supposed to be a setting where magic is getting weaker and technology is getting stronger, which pissed me off because that's not represented in game at all. I'd love to play a tech or crafting character of some sort. Guess I know what I'm doing with my weekend.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:17
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I really like the sound of the tech route in Arcanum: is it a pain to play? I'm not a power gamer by any means, but I don't relish the prospect of making things very difficult for myself.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:21
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There's a highly regarded balance mod around that's supposed to make tech a viable choice.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:24
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Chas McGill posted:I really like the sound of the tech route in Arcanum: is it a pain to play? I'm not a power gamer by any means, but I don't relish the prospect of making things very difficult for myself. For a tech character, molotovs are an effective and reasonably cheap weapon to use early on - you only need like one rank in the tech skill for it, gasoline can be bought in a general store, and rags in the junk shop and trash bins. Also, does anyone actually use the turn-based combat in Arcanum? I remember thinking it was pretty awful, but admittedly I haven't used it in forever.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:26
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Armor-Piercing posted:Also, does anyone actually use the turn-based combat in Arcanum? I remember thinking it was pretty awful, but admittedly I haven't used it in forever. Huh? I assume you mean "does anyone use the real-time combat." Turn-based is pretty much the only way to play.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Huh? No kidding. Real-time is so stupid fast you get attacked twice per second.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:38
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Real-time combat is mostly useful for when the computer shits itself and spends over a minute running everybody else's turns between yours. Drop into real-time, back into turn-based, and everything's okay again.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:39
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It definitely is stupid fast, and I did use turn-based for things like grenade placement. I think maybe I used it more as a tech character? But that was a long time ago, and I can't really remember. As a mage though, being able to spam Harm as quickly as I can click, it never really mattered how fast the combat was. I'm getting a serious urge to play the game again anyway (my backlog  ), so maybe when I get around to that I'll try going through the whole game turn-based.
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Mar 21, 2012 16:48
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Capilarean posted:Oh, I remember this one. You didn't mention that in the (admittedly pretty cool and involved) character creation, more than half of the skills presented to you were not actually used in the game. The rationale behind that was apparently that you might want to print out the character sheet and use it for the PnP game. Good call - I actually realized I forgot another interesting piece of gaming history too - that you could purchase "expansion disks" that added additional voices and content to the game. It was basically DLC Horse Armor but you had to mail $10 to the company and wait for the disk to come (or find it on a local BBS and wait 48 hours for it to download using ZModem  )I'll update my post. Edit: I'll do posts on the Bard's Tale and Starflight at some point today, both of which are much more playable and interesting than Twilight 2k. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 17:03
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Not only did I never beat MegaTraveller, but I never technically even played it. I spent hours and hours creating parties like that was the whole game. Granted, creating a party does take longer than many games take to beat... On that note, watch a Wasteland speedrun sometime. If you know exactly where to go to find a certain cache of weapons I believe you can beat it in something crazy like 15 minutes.
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Mar 21, 2012 17:10
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So Abandonia recommended another post-apocalyptic RPG from 1988 I've never heard of: Visions of Aftermath: The Boomtown. Has anyone played this or do a writeup of it? Looks intriguing (although the graphics are bad by 1988 standards)
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Mar 21, 2012 17:29
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Been playing some Might & Magic 3. First time through, so no nostalgia. I was actually surprised how well it holds up. There are some interface quirks and some annoyances here and there, but the important stuff works. The game is fun. It's a really unpretentious game. It's all about exploring the world with your dudes, clearing out dungeons and generally kicking rear end. The battle and character system is straightforward once you "get it". I suppose the loot could be more exciting since so far it's (material) + (weapon type) + (magic effect). Oh, cool, another Steel Sword of Farting, throw it onto the pile. No exciting BG2 style weapon stories here. So far no sight of the main plot, just going from town to town solving problems. Interestingly, the game has an "exposition" button, that tells you the backstory of your current location. It's good to take notes sometimes, because while the game keeps your quests and maps for you, you sometimes find passwords and bits of information that might be helpful down the line. The great thing is that when your dudes get hit by a status effect their facial expressions change accordingly so you know immediately that something went horribly wrong:  In this case, my party is attacking some giant rats while shitfaced. I don't have a screenshot of Insanity effect but it's classic too.
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Mar 21, 2012 17:36
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edit: ^^^^ Yeah, M&M3 holds up great, and if you like that, you'll LOVE 4/5 (they're essentially one game, do the World of Xeen install and you essentially play both simultaneously)Peas and Rice posted:Edit: I'll do posts on the Bard's Tale and Starflight at some point today, both of which are much more playable and interesting than Twilight 2k. Including Starflight 2, I hope! I'll do a write-up for The Magic Candle series later tonight, because I am determined to get more people to play it. precision fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 18:07
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precision posted:Including Starflight 2, I hope! Yup, I'll do Starflight 1 and 2. You can get both of them from GoG, they were $3 for both of them on sale a few weeks ago. If there's any game that needs an update.. it's Starflight. Goddamn. I've got a 4 hour conference call today where I won't need to say anything so my plan is to do my writeups then 
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Mar 21, 2012 18:10
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Peas and Rice posted:If there's any game that needs an update.. it's Starflight. Goddamn. Pretty sure that said update is called Star Control 2  In all seriousness though, star control 2 is a fantastic PC RPG and one of my favourite games from the 90s. It's definitely in the mould of starflight but with much more interesting aliens:  There are also plenty of subplots that give the game a fantastic non-linear feel in true starflight style. The really great thing is that is has been completely overhauled, with a sometimes-great new soundtrack (I don't care much for the new Ur-Quan theme, personally): The Ur-Quan Masters
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Mar 21, 2012 19:54
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Starflight - AKA the best game you've probably never played or if you played it it's the best game you've ever played. I'll grant that a good deal of my love for Starflight comes from the fact that it was breaking ground in a way that no other games did at the time. Before the terms "sandbox" and "open world" were common, Starflight defined what these terms meant to the industry. Intrigued? Let's begin. Overview Starflight was, on the surface, a sci-fi space exploration game. Set several hundred years in the future, humankind has rediscovered interstellar FTL travel - and is surprised to learn that their home planet, Arth, is not their home planet at all - it was a colony. The player commands the first FTL ship to go out and explore the galaxy. The entire direction the game gives you is "create a crew, outfit your ship, and go discover what's out there because none of us have any loving clue."  You start exploring the Arth star system, with its half-dozen planets to land on and roam over. Each planet features fractally-generated terrain displayed in a topo map, and if you were to take off and land on each planet to fully explore it, it could take you weeks of game time to map the surface of each planet.  Then you leave the Arth system and discover that there are hundreds of star systems, each with their own planetary systems with equally complex planets, to explore. And aliens to meet, trade with, fight, flee, or destroy. As you progress, you start to uncover a larger story: an awful entity called the Crystal Planet has left a series of devastated planets and civilizations in its wake, and it's now headed towards Arth. You can completely ignore this (and eventually Arth will be destroyed - but you can keep playing even though you can never go back to spacedock), or save Arth and then keep playing. For all you kids out there so proud of your 3TB hard drives and blast processors and whatnot: All this came on two 5.25" floppy disks and was made in 1986, by a team of 5 people. First step: your crew You've got several choices for crew races: humans, Thrynn (dinosaurs), Elowan (trees), Androids (robots), and Veloxi (giant insects). Races have different traits, and some are better at certain areas of study than others - the Thrynn are great communicators for example. You can spend money to train up your crew, but they have maximum skill levels so you can't train a Veloxi up to 250 (the max) in communications.  It sometimes helps to have crew members who can pull double duty: your crew can be injured or killed on away missions, either from alien attacks, electrical storms, or ship-to-ship combat. Elowan are notoriously fragile but they also make the best doctors. At the beginning if you spend all of your money you won't be able to train your crew all the way up, so do what you need to do at the beginning and plan on upgrading the rest later. Navigation is the most important skill for landing on planets, so if you need to choose a skill to invest in at the beginning, that's the one. Second Step: your ship Before you leave spacedock you at least need to name your vessel of exploration (or war.) But there's a lot of other stuff you can do to outfit it.  You can upgrade any part of your ship: engines, lasers, shields, armor, and missile launchers. You can also buy cargo pods to expand the amount of fuel you can carry and loot you can bring back to sell. Engines make interstellar travel more efficient and reduce the amount of fuel you use to land. They're also faster in combat. Lasers do less damage to an enemy but are way more accurate and use less energy. Missiles are more powerful but aren't guaranteed to hit, and suck a lot of energy. Armor offers some protection but can't be repaired and doesn't use fuel. Shields can be repaired but guzzle fuel like a mofo, and if you're in hostile territory you don't want to be caught with your shields down. Third step: exploring the Arth system So what the hell are you supposed to do? A good first step is to stay in the Arth system and have a look around to get a feel for the game. Your ship will use fuel (Endurium), which is expensive, to travel between systems or land on planets, but you can cruise through a solar system and not expend any. A planet's gravity affects how much fuel it takes to land so find a planet with low gravity and take a peek. Your science officer will scan the planet and give you a report. Landing near an ocean or body of liquid increases the chance of finding lifeforms - which you can sell. Landing in mountainous areas increases the chance of finding minerals - which you can sell (or in some instances use to repair a broken ship).  Planetside, your terrain vehicle has a limited charge (luckily it doesn't use endurium) and takes a lot more fuel to drive in a storm than in clear weather. It's also worse over certain kinds of terrain. It's a good idea to fill it up with minerals before you get half-empty, then return to your ship, otherwise you leave it planetside, walk back, risk dying and pay to replace it. Oh yeah, you can't land on gas giants or supermassive ice/rocky planets. Your ship will be crushed. Actually you CAN land there.. it's just a quick way to end your game. Fourth step: dollar bills So pretty much everything you want costs money: upgrades for your ship, training for your crew, the fuel you need to explore. You can get money in three basic ways: Picking up minerals to sell, including Endurium. Most of the time you'll be doing this from your terrain vehicle but occasionally you'll do it when you navigate through the debris of a ship you just blasted into oblivion. You can be as warlike as you want and attack everything and everyone, and sell their remains if you choose. Picking up lifeforms to sell. Lifeforms tend to be worth a lot and don't take up much space. They also have a nasty habit of attacking your crew, and are way more dangerous (and harder to find).  Recommending planets for colonization. If a planet looks like it will make a good colony, you can recommend it and you get a nice bonus check proportionate to the Arth-like-ness of the planet. If it's a close match, you can make $50k at one shot. If it's a tiny rock with a thin atmosphere and no life, maybe $20k. Either way it's a good way to make some money but colonizable planets are relatively rare. Once you get money you'll want to make sure you're spending it on stuff to help you make more money, faster: cargo pods, better engines, shields and armor for protection, and eventually lasers and missiles. Step five: boldly go There's a massive universe out there full of planets to explore and aliens to explode. You can treat other species however you want: making peace with everyone, or simply just being a massive dick and attacking everyone in sight. If you attack a race once or twice you can try to make friends with them again, but attacking repeatedly will cause them to become enemies forever, and most of the time they'll just ignore you and open fire. They'll also send better-equipped warships to hunt you down.  Some species don't give a poo poo about talking at all and will just open fire on you regardless, so even if you're playing a peaceful exploration vessel you'll still get the chance to shoot your way out of battle. You can keep exploring, playing, contacting, blasting, etc. to your heart's content. Eventually you'll have to deal with the crystal planet and the game's plot (or just let Arth be destroyed and strike out on your own.) Step six: the plot So you'll eventually piece together why Arth is called Arth and not Earth - and what happened to the Ancients and the previous human spacefaring civilization. In fact, you can even find Earth again although it seems like there's no life present (the ruins however are in the locations of major cities.) You'll get a chance to blow up the crystal planet and destroy one of the most warlike races' homeworlds as well. The game never really "ends" - you can keep exploring, upgrading, until you get tired of the game. The plot is there to give you direction.  Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula  Starflight was a very successful game, and was followed up in 1989 with a sequel, which featured an even larger galaxy, way more races (some spacefaring, some not), a new mystery, and more stuff for your ship. It introduced the idea of trading with species planetside to make fast money - races had different goods they produced, and in turn specific goods they wanted, as well as individual economies (sometimes they varied planet over planet, making it worthwhile to explore different homeworlds to find the best deal). It also added: Crew exchanges with other species. Time travel. Further upgrades to your ship. Several more kinds of lifeforms and minerals to pick up. More artifacts and ways to customize your ship / terrain vehicle.  Starflight 2 takes a little bit away from the "you're the first ship to explore the galaxy" storyline and instead puts you in the captain's chair of "the first ship to establish trade." It's a slightly more evolved galaxy with a lot more to explore and do, and if you've never played either game you might want to skip right to SF2.  In history Starflight influenced a shitton of other games. Offhand, the most notable ones are probably StarCon, Privateer and the Mass Effect series, although the open-world gameplay and "do whatever the hell you want but there are consequences if you're a dick" are better implemented than many games even today that claim to feature the same aspects. It also featured some crazy stuff: copy protection was based on a code you had to enter from a wheel (or from the map in SF2), and if you entered the code incorrectly, the police would come and pull you over. If you failed the code again, they blew your ship up - game over. You had to enter the code every time you left spacedock. In the first Starflight, like many large-scale games, the game world data was saved over as you went. This meant that if you played off the disks that came in the box you could never restart - so you had to make backups and play off those. If you quit the game without saving, it hosed up your game (hope you don't lose power!) If you died (ship destroyed or crew all killed on an away mission) then it was realdeath - your game was over and you could lose months if not years of progress. So backups of your backups were necessary every now and then as well. Hope you like copying disks! Play this game dammit! If it's not obvious Starflight is one of my favorite games ever and you should go play it right the hell now. Good news: you can buy both games from GOG for the low low price of $6. Seriously, it's worth playing just for the historic perspective (although I will admit, the graphics and UI are VERY dated). Still, $6 for games that have months of playability if you get into it. You know you want to. E: Disnesquick posted:Pretty sure that said update is called Star Control 2 You know I've never played it but always heard it was influenced by SF. This might be the perfect chance to give it a try. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 20:00
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I'm working on Divine Divinity and I'm having a real hard time with a Bow Survivor in the Catacombs. Ahahah, it's fun at least.
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Mar 21, 2012 20:41
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Skeezy posted:I'm working on Divine Divinity and I'm having a real hard time with a Bow Survivor in the Catacombs. Ahahah, it's fun at least. I had trouble in the Catacombs until I realized that you can just sell any one of the 5+ Axes you find down there and then use the money to buy out the potions from every shop in town. Also meteorstrike even as a non-magic character really helps for the first dungeon, you can use it about 10 times in 1 second if your manabar allows it.
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Mar 21, 2012 21:02
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Peas and Rice posted:You know I've never played it but always heard it was influenced by SF. This might be the perfect chance to give it a try. I'm not exagerating too much when I see it is basically an update of starflight. It pretty much has the same explore/mine/combat mechanic (I find star control landing sequences a bit smoother and combat is a lot more fun). There are also some really clear nods to starflight, if you can spot them. The game is now legally free and open source so well worth grabbing.
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Mar 21, 2012 21:06
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 Does anyone have any positive things to say about Lionheart? I've always been intrigued by the game ever since I saw it in a magazine many moons ago. I know it's supposed to be some sort of Diablo clone, but most reviews have poor impressions of it. Are there any fan made patches that improve the game, or can people chime in with their own personal experiences with it?
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Mar 21, 2012 21:08
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I'm trying to play Arcanum but the camera keeps getting stuck for some reason. Normally it'll let me look anywhere but every so often it gets stuck to the character and occasionally won't move at all. I'm using all of the fixes linked in the OP. Anyone have any idea how to fix this? edit: Looking around it seems like it's actually bugged when it lets me look anywhere. That's a bummer. Phoix fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 21:10
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Disnesquick posted:I'm not exagerating too much when I see it is basically an update of starflight. It pretty much has the same explore/mine/combat mechanic (I find star control landing sequences a bit smoother and combat is a lot more fun). There are also some really clear nods to starflight, if you can spot them. Does the sourceforge project you linked work well enough or is it worth tracking down the original game? !+@ are only $6 on GOG as well, and I don't mind paying - it looks like the project is more of a fan update, but I'd rather play an original game without bugs. Which one should I try ? 
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Mar 21, 2012 21:16
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UQM is the real deal, not some halfass fan project.
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Mar 21, 2012 21:18
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I noticed there are some ports of Starflight into another systems,which seem to be quite different from the PC version. What's the opinion on those? Improved or ruined?
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Mar 21, 2012 21:42
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