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Mr. Fortitude posted:Come to think of it, Origin Systems had some messed up morals with their games. For all of becoming the Avatar in Ultima 4 there was a lot of murdering children, making deals with demons and even in Origin's other franchise, Wing Commander, winning a war only by committing mass genocide with a weapon of mass destruction against a warrior race who believe in honorable battles. Well, in the case of Wing Commander you should keep in mind that the humans were losing the war and have been for quite some time. They went with the 'nuclear option' when the Kilrathi were about to invade the earth solar system with overwhelming force. It was either that or lose the war for good. It wasn't some kind of WW2 analogy.* Edit: *Well, maybe it was. Just an "improved" one as the good guys had no other option this time because they were actually losing. Tarquinn fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 12:36
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Mr. Fortitude posted:winning a war only by committing mass genocide with a weapon of mass destruction against a warrior race who believe in honorable battles. Am I the only one who heard Ron Pearlman say "War never changes" after reading this?
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Jul 12, 2014 13:52
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ShankyMcStabber posted:Am I the only one who heard Ron Pearlman say "War never changes" after reading this? "In the Gemini Sector as on Earth, war was fought over resources..."
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Jul 12, 2014 14:09
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Also Re: Ultima 7, that game has some badass soundtrack. In our age of pre-recorded BGM it's easy to forget how catchy a raw MIDI can sound if it's composed well, and here it's composed really well. My favorite so far is the gypsy theme, but there's plenty of other hot jams all around the place. The soundtrack's up online in a few places, but it's all been recorded on other MIDI setups and sounds all wrong. Weirdly enough, so do the OGG files in the Exult folder. I guess it plays actual MIDIs for me. Anyway, great stuff.
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Jul 13, 2014 20:29
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As part of Divinity Original Sin's Ultima 7 vibe it has some tunes that are very reminiscent of it which made me happy. I definitely get nostalgic about that old crpg midi style.
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Jul 13, 2014 21:32
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FuzzySlippers posted:As part of Divinity Original Sin's Ultima 7 vibe it has some tunes that are very reminiscent of it which made me happy. I definitely get nostalgic about that old crpg midi style. I noticed this too. Divinity is the first game on a while where the music actually had me listening to it, and not just filtering it out as background noise. I wouldn't say it's brilliant music, but it's certainly unique and does some things you don't often hear anymore.
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Jul 13, 2014 21:44
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woodenchicken posted:Also Re: Ultima 7, that game has some badass soundtrack. In our age of pre-recorded BGM it's easy to forget how catchy a raw MIDI can sound if it's composed well, and here it's composed really well. My favorite so far is the gypsy theme, but there's plenty of other hot jams all around the place. The soundtrack's up online in a few places, but it's all been recorded on other MIDI setups and sounds all wrong. Weirdly enough, so do the OGG files in the Exult folder. I guess it plays actual MIDIs for me. Anyway, great stuff. There's a YouTube playlist of some of them as well. This has to be one of my favourites, wave of nostalgia when I listen to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY_FunMoXqo Memories of every party member running off the screen with this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8nEObbh6BM
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Jul 13, 2014 21:48
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:I noticed this too. Divinity is the first game on a while where the music actually had me listening to it, and not just filtering it out as background noise. I wouldn't say it's brilliant music, but it's certainly unique and does some things you don't often hear anymore. Seriously though, the best part of buying the Beyond Divinity special edition at launch was getting a CD of his remastered music from the first two games. That sounds like faint praise given the quality of Beyond Divinity, but I DID like the game somewhat. Brown Moses posted:This has to be one of my favourites, wave of nostalgia when I listen to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmkzQDLMQ4g Until the first time I tried to find it on YouTube and was like "oh ... wisps. Right." As a result it was my favorite song because I was convinced it was something that only played at random to motivate you to keep exploring. Look I was like 10 or whatever, OK? 
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Jul 13, 2014 23:49
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Mr. Fortitude posted:Come to think of it, Origin Systems had some messed up morals with their games. For all of becoming the Avatar in Ultima 4 there was a lot of murdering children, making deals with demons and even in Origin's other franchise, Wing Commander, winning a war only by committing mass genocide with a weapon of mass destruction against a warrior race who believe in honorable battles. Honorable my rear end, they were TOS Klingons in fur. They flattened Goddard colony without warning, using what would become the prototype for the Concordia's phase-transit cannon. There was also that business with their using stealth fighters to destroy the Tiger's Claw and almost all hands aboard without warning, not to mention Hobbes being retconned into a deep sleeper agent, which was an even bigger wait, no, seriously, what the hell moment than realizing they cast a porn starlet as one of your potential wingmates/fuckbuddies in WC3. The Kilrathi may have self-identified as honorable, but the upper echelons of their government and war machine were anything but. Ultima though, man. I remember a dungeon room in U5, split into four quadrants with two narrow passages going in the four cardinal directions. Each quadrant had an identical chamber filled with children, and so being the Avatar I started throwing magic axes around in hopes of finding the trigger to open the chambers so that the kids could escape. I did, and then I discovered that they were hostile children when they swarmed my party. This was before I discovered the 'make everyone invisible' trick for making enemies flee a combat screen, so I literally had to carve my way through to one of the exits. Jesus H.
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Jul 14, 2014 00:17
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Mr. Fortitude posted:Come to think of it, Origin Systems had some messed up morals with their games. For all of becoming the Avatar in Ultima 4 there was a lot of murdering children, making deals with demons and even in Origin's other franchise, Wing Commander, winning a war only by committing mass genocide with a weapon of mass destruction against a warrior race who believe in honorable battles. Pagan's where things started getting really hosed up in Ultima. The entire goal of the game was to eat demons to become a supergod. Granted, it was to escape, but the things you had to do in the process were pretty lovely for a so-called Avatar of Virtue.
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Jul 14, 2014 02:54
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I think before Ultima 9 went sideways that was supposed to be part of the arc of the 7-8-9 games. Presumably the original vision of 9 would have been a good finale coming from the issues raised in 7/ SI with the avatar and the virtues and then with all the murkiness from 8. Instead we got a terrible action game with a nonsensical plot and some leftover cut scenes from the original direction. I had the collector's edition box of Ultima 9 preordered and I think it's probably my top gaming disappointment. Did anyone ever play through the 9 mod that changed it to some of the original script? Did it make it any better?
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Jul 14, 2014 06:44
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Bieeardo posted:Honorable my rear end, they were TOS Klingons in fur. They flattened Goddard colony without warning, using what would become the prototype for the Concordia's phase-transit cannon. There was also that business with their using stealth fighters to destroy the Tiger's Claw and almost all hands aboard without warning, not to mention Hobbes being retconned into a deep sleeper agent, which was an even bigger wait, no, seriously, what the hell moment than realizing they cast a porn starlet as one of your potential wingmates/fuckbuddies in WC3. The Kilrathi may have self-identified as honorable, but the upper echelons of their government and war machine were anything but. Yeah, even at the end of Wing Commander 3 after you blew up Kilrah the surviving Kilrathi came to the conclusion that the upper eschelons of their society were corrupt and even if they had won the war against the Terrans their society would have been unsustainable in the near future. I just think blowing up their entire homeworld is a war crime in itself and makes the supposed good guys look just as bad if not even worse than the Kilrathi. Ultima's just odd. 3 had the best way to grind being to slaughter innocents, then 4 tried to go with the moral high ground, only for 5, 6, 7 and especially 8 to show that the ideals of the Avatar are flawed and you must do awful things for the greater good or something. Kind of like Wing Commander 3's ending now that I think about it.
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Jul 14, 2014 09:39
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Speaking of Ultima, did any of you try any of the remakes? There was an Ultima 4 or 5 remake in the Dungeon Siege engine, I think. Didn't someone redo Ultima 6 as well? I never played 4 or 5 back in the day, so a faithful remake could be cool.
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Jul 14, 2014 12:45
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It was Ultima 5 and 6 that got remade and yeah, they're okay. They lose some features that the original games had because of it being on an entirely different engine but there are added features too.
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Jul 14, 2014 14:33
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Ultima IX remains the only game whose ending brought a tear to my eye. There, I said it. Actually I think I said it years ago too BUT NOT HERE And no, not because it was bad  I appreciate all the things that were wrong about the game, yes. But it also basically created the open-world-awesome-3D-exploration CRPG genre that has produced some amazing games in the interim, and if you were one of those amazingly fortunate people whose game was stable (being mine and ... just mine, apparently) it was actually a pretty decent experience. I still remember getting chills when I walked into whatever the hell dungeon room that was that had the dragon 10x larger than normal dragons off in the distance, just waiting patiently for you to get closer, while some sort of intense ambient sound loop played from crystals nearby or something. IT IS LIKE I AM DESCRIBING A DRUG-ADDLED NIGHT
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Jul 15, 2014 02:05
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Just a quick heads up to the RPG folks, there's a new goon IRC channel for old games at irc.synirc.net, #oldgames. Drop by sometime to shoot the breeze about how fantastic old RPGs are! 
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Jul 15, 2014 07:39
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Quarex posted:But it also basically created the open-world-awesome-3D-exploration CRPG genre that has produced some amazing games in the interim, I think Daggerfall beat it by like 3 years, didn't it?
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Jul 15, 2014 07:49
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Quarex posted:Ultima IX remains the only game whose ending brought a tear to my eye. There, I said it. Actually I think I said it years ago too BUT NOT HERE Daggerfall came out in 1996 and had a huge open world, and while it used sprites, the dungeons were fully 3d shapes (to the point of being annoying). And in terms of being open, searching early internet for character suggestions involved digging through a lot of fan fiction about characters who played hundreds of hours of the game without really doing any of the main quest. I never played Arena, so I don't know how much of Daggerfall was just advancements of that.
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Jul 15, 2014 07:56
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Feels pretty hard for me to credit U9 for much as there were plenty of open world games before it. Certainly Arena predates it by quite a bit and the TES games in general seems like the most influential 3D open world games outside of GTA3. I also don't remember U9 being terrifically non-linear. I've never returned to it but at the time as hyped for U9 as I was I really tried to enjoy it. I endured a lot of crashes, performance problems, and had to restart because of quest bugs. I was in the crowd that liked U8 so I wasn't opposed to major changes in Ultima and I was an early U9 defender on usenet but reaching the end was pretty disheartening. Beyond the technical the poor dungeons and incoherent plot seem hard to overlook. U9 did have a great soundtrack though. Maybe returning to a patched and modded up U9 might be a different experience though.
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Jul 15, 2014 09:01
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Quarex posted:Ultima IX remains the only game whose ending brought a tear to my eye. There, I said it. Actually I think I said it years ago too BUT NOT HERE yes but you forgot to answer the important question. WHAT'S A PALADIN?
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Jul 15, 2014 15:58
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Eh, my Avatar constantly says "Name?" even to her close friends. I think it's been established long before Part 9 that Av has long-term memory problems.
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Jul 15, 2014 17:39
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FuzzySlippers posted:I think before Ultima 9 went sideways that was supposed to be part of the arc of the 7-8-9 games. Presumably the original vision of 9 would have been a good finale coming from the issues raised in 7/ SI with the avatar and the virtues and then with all the murkiness from 8. Instead we got a terrible action game with a nonsensical plot and some leftover cut scenes from the original direction. I think I read something to that effect from one of the writers or a fragmentary story bible. You had the Age of Darkness comprising the first three games, the Age of Enlightenment with the rise of the Avatar (and the unsettling revelation of what that did to the Gargoyles in VI), and the Age of Armageddon with the Guardian's corrupting machinations. Mr. Fortitude posted:Yeah, even at the end of Wing Commander 3 after you blew up Kilrah the surviving Kilrathi came to the conclusion that the upper eschelons of their society were corrupt and even if they had won the war against the Terrans their society would have been unsustainable in the near future. I just think blowing up their entire homeworld is a war crime in itself and makes the supposed good guys look just as bad if not even worse than the Kilrathi. Good point. They blew up, what was it, two planets during that scheme? I've heard some people describe Wing Commander as a sci-fi adaptation of World War II, especially in light of the movie. I don't like to think of it that way, because when you do, using two super-bombs to defeat the inscrutable, honor-driven Kilrathi changes from a bizarre Star Wars homage to... something really kind of uncomfortable.
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Jul 15, 2014 18:07
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woodenchicken posted:Eh, my Avatar constantly says "Name?" even to her close friends. I think it's been established long before Part 9 that Av has long-term memory problems. JOB BYE
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Jul 15, 2014 21:23
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I grant that I totally dropped the ball on describing what I think Ultima IX innovated and was appropriately shut down by Chairchucker and Skwirl and FuzzySlippers. But if I could actually talk about MMORPGs for a second (albeit just to borrow the terminology), Ultima IX in my mind created the first open-world 3D "theme park" CRPG as opposed to the previous open-world 3D "sandbox" CRPGs like Arena and Daggerfall. Yes, I realize the innovation there is "3D," given that it was hardly the first CRPG with things to see all over the place; all I was really trying to get at is that to me dozens of subsequent games were fairly directly trying to emulate Ultima IX's look/play (while fixing all the things that went wrong with it). I mean, before Ultima IX, I hated every single game with third-person combat, and I think it took a few more years for me to find a second one I liked. I think Gothic was the next to do it right, and then there have been many since.
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Jul 16, 2014 01:23
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Bieeardo posted:I think I read something to that effect from one of the writers or a fragmentary story bible. You had the Age of Darkness comprising the first three games, the Age of Enlightenment with the rise of the Avatar (and the unsettling revelation of what that did to the Gargoyles in VI), and the Age of Armageddon with the Guardian's corrupting machinations. I think it'd have been better if the golden ending had you on the losing path and everything's all gone to hell in the Sol system, but if you were skilled enough you could actually win it and take out the Prince and Emperor right there and then which would cripple their chain of command and at least you wouldn't have committed a war crime in doing so. Then again, Chris Roberts also made Hobbes turn out to be secretly evil because he didn't like the idea of a Kilrathi good guy and he also claimed the terrible Wing Commander movie was what the series was supposed to be like so that's really all on him.
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Jul 16, 2014 17:07
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Quarex posted:I grant that I totally dropped the ball on describing what I think Ultima IX innovated and was appropriately shut down by Chairchucker and Skwirl and FuzzySlippers. Well said. Ultima IX is easily available on GOG, and haven't years of fan patches and fixes made it playable? I'm sure it's still at best a mediocre RPG, but by now haven't third parties rendered it stable and winnable?
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Jul 16, 2014 19:45
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JustJeff88 posted:Well said. Ultima IX is easily available on GOG, and haven't years of fan patches and fixes made it playable? I'm sure it's still at best a mediocre RPG, but by now haven't third parties rendered it stable and winnable? Unrelated, when am I going to learn that I hate EBay? This is only the 10th time in a row I have decided I should raise my bid on something and then not managed to get back to my account before the auction ends. Sigh. Oh well, whichever one of you got that copy of Shadow of the Comet, well done. I have never seen it go for less than $50! I do not think. I did pick up a copy of Hound of Shadow for $8 at Gen-Con though, maybe this is karmic payback.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:51
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It's been a while since I posted here about my Grid Cartographer program. I thought you might like to know that I've just released a new version today with a ton of new stuff in it. The major new feature is what I've called 'regions' which are basically additional map stacks within a file. You can rename them and they look a bit like tabs in an excel workbook. I think this will be a good feature for a lot of games, e.g. Might and Magic, that have separate towns. You can download the update here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/gridcart/ Hidden Asbestos fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 11:01
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Quarex posted:Unrelated, when am I going to learn that I hate EBay? This is only the 10th time in a row I have decided I should raise my bid on something and then not managed to get back to my account before the auction ends. Sigh. Oh well, whichever one of you got that copy of Shadow of the Comet, well done. I have never seen it go for less than $50! I do not think. I did pick up a copy of Hound of Shadow for $8 at Gen-Con though, maybe this is karmic payback. Are you looking for a mint copy with the box and everything? If not, there are still a few copies for cheap on eBay. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2047675.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xshadow+of+the+comet&_nkw=shadow+of+the+comet&_sacat=0&_from=R40
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Jul 22, 2014 11:11
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I like this search result: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINCENT-LAW...=item3f39c9af96
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Jul 22, 2014 13:03
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Hidden Asbestos posted:It's been a while since I posted here about my Grid Cartographer program. Oh nice, I like the CJK support. Definitely going to try to make some Japanese or Chinese maps when I get the chance. Haven't been following development for a while, has the ability to copy or move tiles from one layer to the other been put in yet? I hate spending time on a map only to learn I've accidentally drawn half of it on the wrong layer and have to start all over.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:03
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Genpei Turtle posted:Oh nice, I like the CJK support. Definitely going to try to make some Japanese or Chinese maps when I get the chance. I look forward to hearing how you get on with the CJK stuff. I put a bunch of what seemed like appropriate unicode blocks into my font but I know so little about these languages that I could easily have missed out something fundamental like vowels  I've not had any complaints yet though but as I can't even access the Korean forums that show up on my Google Analytics I have no idea.And sadly no, you can't move custom tiles from one layer to another just yet. I'll put that on my todo list for the next version since I have let that one slip for a while now. It'll be a lot easier than some of the major low level changes I've needed to work on lately 
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Jul 22, 2014 20:22
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This has little to do with anything, but after reading the amazing Ubisoft BLOG retrospective on Japanese Might & Magic games, I am sort of endlessly amused to picture discussions about Might & Magic occurring in Japan along the lines of discussions about Final Fantasy in the USA. "How come it goes right from Might & Magic 1 to Might & Magic 3?" "I don't know, but the fourth Might & Magic is my favorite!" "You mean Day of the Destroyer? You know that was actually Might & Magic 8 in America?" "What? That doesn't even make sense!" Actually I am sure this conversation never really happened but whatever, I was amused by the seemingly-arbitrary decisions made as to which games to localize (or localize again).
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Jul 27, 2014 23:34
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Quarex posted:This has little to do with anything, but after reading the amazing Ubisoft BLOG retrospective on Japanese Might & Magic games, I am sort of endlessly amused to picture discussions about Might & Magic occurring in Japan along the lines of discussions about Final Fantasy in the USA. Actually that article isn't comprehensive. All of the M&M games got localized into Japanese (except X, which I dunno about) I think that's just sticking to the console ports, which I'm less familiar with. For example, looks like Hudson soft did that console port of III, whereas Starcraft did the PC ports. Starcraft in fact did I-V.
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Jul 28, 2014 01:45
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AW DANGIT my post is useless now Oh wait ... it already was  Interesting though. Now I want to see lists of every American RPG translated to Japanese. Particularly because I am convinced that every single RPG I like seems to catch on in Japan and then get random sequels that I never heard of until this thread.
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Jul 28, 2014 03:48
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Quarex posted:AW DANGIT my post is useless now Only two series meet that criteria as far as I know, or at least can think of off the top of my head--Wizardry and Phantasie. I actually think most or at least a lot of American RPGs got translated prior to the advent of Windows 95/8, and even a little after then. During the DOS days it was more standard for companies to revamp the game from top to bottom a la Starcraft (the game company, not the Blizzard game) and once Windows 95/98 came out, straight text replacement became more the norm. Compare, say, Japanese M&M 4/5 with Japanese MM&6 for example. Actually just pulling up the list of stuff Starcraft ported shows a lot of American RPGs they remade. Ultima 2/3, M&M 2-5, the Phantasies, Magic Candle, Gemstone Warrior, etc. Actually it looks like they did the port of Dragon Wars too, which is weird since EA did the Japanese PC ports of those directly. Most of the E->J translations from that era were as poor as the J->E ones were from my experience, though.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:29
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Thanks for that post Genpei. You are so good at finding information even if you just downplay your own abilities as "looking at one of a dozen pages you already looked at before," haha. Meanwhile, this happened to me: Genpei Turtle posted:Actually just pulling up the list of stuff Starcraft ported shows ... Gemstone Warrior,    
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Jul 29, 2014 01:51
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Quarex posted:Thanks for that post Genpei. You are so good at finding information even if you just downplay your own abilities as "looking at one of a dozen pages you already looked at before," haha. It's just typing words into Google in Japanese, honest. Learned the language for academia purposes, but drat if it isn't a handy skill to have for gaming. quote:Meanwhile, this happened to me: Ahahaha that's hilarious, is that PC-88? It's actually amusing, companies like Starcraft "Japanified" US ports the same way that the US "Americanized" games. Often it was just box art and the like, but sometimes they went all out--I rented one SNES fighting game back in the day that was an awful piece of garbage, only to learn much later that it was based on some anime or manga series and sold on its name recognition--only when they brought it over they replaced all the characters with robots or something since nobody knew whatever series it was based on.
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Jul 29, 2014 02:46
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Genpei Turtle posted:
Hoy cow! Sorry to derail, you awakened a long dormant memory. The Japanese game was based on Ranma 1/2. The Americanized game was the hilariously generic Street Combat. It was terrible. http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.com/2011/07/ranma-12-chunai-gekitou-hen-street.html
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Jul 29, 2014 03:02
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Wamdoodle posted:Hoy cow! Sorry to derail, you awakened a long dormant memory. The Japanese game was based on Ranma 1/2. The Americanized game was the hilariously generic Street Combat. It was terrible. Oh yeah, that was definitely it! Don't know why the robot stood out in my mind, how could I forget Guile With A Katana or Horrifying Clown? Those seemed ridiculously dumb even before I knew the origins of that game.
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Jul 29, 2014 14:56
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