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Berk Berkly posted:I remember the first PC RPG that got me to say, "WoW, this is really good!" BaK was awesome because you moved your FMV characters around a crude 3D battleground and it made it not suck somehow. Also read Raymond Feist's Riftware books, which are set in the same universe. Or just read Magician and skip the rest because they get increasingly crappier as they go on.
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Mar 21, 2012 04:20
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And now for the part where I contribute to the thread: Twilight: 2000 You remember that post-apocalyptic RPG that came after Wasteland and featured an isometric view and party combat, based on a well-known PnP role-playing game right? Fallout, schmallout son: I'm referring to Twilight: 2000 by Paragon Software, based on the popular(ish) GDW role-playing game. Updated to include additional cool features Some of Twilight: 2000's awesome features:
Twilight: 2000 was a quirky game on its best days. At its worst, it was actually unwinnable. Here's why.  You build a squad and you choose four characters to go out on any given mission. You only get the chance to create characters at the beginning, and this is your primary source of extra guns and ammunition - not to mention languages. Missions are somewhat procedurally generated, which is to say they're made of up several random elements, including mission objectives (usually "kill enemy troops and get supplies" but occasionally "kill enemy troops and get a vehicle.") Another element is what language of the several dozen eastern European dialects your contact might speak. If a character can't speak the language, you send back to base for the one who can. If none of them can - you're not going to complete the mission.  The game cycled through its several mission templates to the point where you eventually ended up travelling farther across the map (also random) than the fuel you got from any mission - and your ammo stash eventually depleted. For all I know the game is winnable but in the 50+ missions I ran with my well-equipped party I never once fought Baron Czarny or got to the end of anything except "stop the guys in this tank from terrorizing our town! But wait, there's more. You could fast-travel across the map but you could also drive across an extremely crude 3D landscape. Here's a picture:  You also conducted vehicle battles in real time in 3D - usually tank on tank but if you were unlucky enough it was you in a 2.5-ton truck against a tank. It was usually easier at that point to get out and hope you had someone with a TOW-II missile launcher in the party, or just to reload your game. And of course the awesome intro movie. This should give you a good feel for the overall quality of the game: stilted text, World War III being represented by stock footage of an F-14 doing a barrel roll, and of course Baron Czarny's laughing mug. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgts9uPUeQk Update Character creation was straight from the PnP version. What they didn't bother to tell you is that easily half the skills your characters could get were utterly useless in the CRPG. I'll let Capilarean explain: 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. You did get to chose several different "tracks" during character creation which gave you your list of skills: military, school, or jobs (you could switch as well.) Eventually when war was declared you'd be drafted into the military anyway, but if you went to college and were smart you went to officer candidate school. The character creation may actually be the best part of the game and is (as Capilarean mentioned) really useful for rolling characters for the PnP game. The number of turns you get (years in school, military, or the job) was random so sometimes you'd have one "turn" and end up with a young character, sometimes several and end up with an old character. Horse Armor circa 1991 Whenever you quit the game into DOS you'd be reminded that you could mail a check to Paragon for  and receive in the mail an expansion disk with "the Colonel," additional voices (and supposedly game content but I'm not sure what it ever changed.) None of my friends or I ever did this, but the expansion is available on most abandonware sites these days, as is the game. It goes to show you that the idea of game companies charging extra for additional content isn't new by any stretch of the imagination: it's just much easier for them to do it when it doesn't take 48 hours to download a 1.44MB floppy's worth of data from a BBS.Find it! It's on abandonware sites I can't really recommend Twilight: 2000 as a great game but it's certainly interesting as a piece of history, since it blended isometric 2D / turn-based combat with 3D real-time combat. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 21, 2012 |
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Mar 21, 2012 04:56
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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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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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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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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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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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Capilarean posted: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? The only one I know of is the Starflight on the Genesis, which was Starflight with better graphics and a few tweaks. I never played it myself but it's supposed to be a decent port with console-ized controls, which probably wouldn't hurt the game much. The Amiga version had improved graphics as well but was functionally the same game. andrew smash posted:There is no reason to play anything other than ur-quan masters, as far as i'm concerned it is the definitive version of star control 2. I personally thought it was kind of shameful that GOG put up the original SC2 for sale actually, and that's speaking as a huge fan of GOG in general. Good enough for me, thanks!
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Mar 21, 2012 21:52
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torgo posted:I agree. I tried playing the PC version as a kid, but couldn't ever really get into it. The Genesis version was more accessible. The inclusion of a hint book, with locations of various special items, helped a lot too. Did the PC have the special items also? Like the(not a story spoiler, but just in case) relic that let your rover automatically teleport back to the ship when it was out of fuel. If it does, anyone playing the PC version might want to look at least that one item up; it does away with what I thought was an annoying gameplay element. I've never tried the Genesis version, even on a ROM/Emulator set up, but the improved graphics and console controls could make the game a better experience, especially if you're not coming from the PC version. The PC version had those items (a whole bunch of them really), and Starflight 2 added even more. I think (if memory serves) the Genesis version ended up taking some of the items from SF2 and porting them back into SF1. Underwhelmed posted:Obviously, in Starflight the view was 2D, but the planets were procedurally generated just like they were in mass effect, you drove a tank, and you searched for ruins, mineral deposits and artifacts, just like in mass effect. Starflight does not have any on foot combat sequences, all fighting takes place in the ship, or on the planet surfaces against indigenous life forms (stun cannon!) but yeah,vditch the 3rd person shooting and the basic templates are pretty similar. That makes me want to try Mass Effect again except I know I'll just be disappointed by the boring three hour tutorial and walk away just like the last 2 times. 
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Mar 22, 2012 15:15
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Armor-Piercing posted:Stronghold is actually my favorite game in that bundle, even ahead of Dungeon Hack. You create one main character and can have several others, but you don't control them - instead, each character is the head of their own stronghold/kingdom populated by heroes of the character's class. The game itself is a simulation where you run the kingdom, building housing and infrastructure (and even doing some landscaping) to attract and support your heroes. The game has seasons, and you need to make sure you're well-stocked before every winter or your buildings will start falling apart and your people will starve. When you've got a solid kingdom running and you've got some decent heroes running around, you can send them off to eliminate monsters and destroy their lairs. Again, you don't control the units directly, but instead set waypoints sort of like magnets where you can choose how many heroes you want to attract to the particular square of land (you do get to watch the fights though, which are pretty spectacular). Removing lairs and running a successful kingdom will increase your main character's rank, giving you access to better buildings. Stronghold was awesome, and I've never seen a game quite come close to it (except possibly Master of Magic, which was closer to Civilization meets M:TG.) I never really progressed very far in it but goddamn was it fun to screw around with.
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Mar 22, 2012 18:22
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Oops I forgot to do the writeup of Bard's Tale because I've been so busy at work. I'll do that today. GOG has some pretty nifty games for 50% off this weekend Including: - Master of Magic - Darklands - Master of Orion 1, 2 - Starcon 1, 2 and 3 (although it sounds like the open-source SC2 is better) Open your wallets here Edit: removed MOO3 since it sucks Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 15:35
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MadJackMcJack posted:There's something wrong with this picture I never played it and only assumed it was as interesting at the other two.
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Mar 23, 2012 17:40
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Camel of the Sea posted:King's Quest II, Populous, Magic Candle III, Might and Magic III, and The Summoning, which I'm not convinced anyone else has ever played. Good stuff. The marketing guy in me took one look at that box and went "how the gently caress did they get all those licenses from different companies to publish that all in one place?"
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Mar 24, 2012 01:11
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The Bard's Tale Come hear the tale of Skara Brae. A God returned to have his way... Overview Bard's Tale was Interplay's response to Wizardry and Might & Magic. It was a party-based 3D(ish) fantasy RPG set in the town of Skara Brae, overrun by monsters and waiting for a group of adventurers to free it from its woes.  You start by rolling characters in the Adventurer's Guild, choosing from a traditional Gygax stock of Warriors, Paladins, Monks, Hunters, Bards, Rogues, Conjurers, and Magicians. Each class has its strengths and weaknesses, although some are generally better than others. Conjurers and Magicians can eventually multi-class and learn additional schools of magic not available at the beginning, becoming Sorcerers and Wizards.  You travel through the city with a window showing your progress through the 3D streets. The map provided with the game shows some locations you might want to visit: various taverns, the Adventurers Guild, and temples (including a certain temple to a mad god.) In the first game you're locked in the town of Skara Brae, and there are four main dungeons to crawl through: the wine celler and sewers, the catacombs beneath the mad god's temple, Baron Harkon's castle (and the archmage's tower), and finally Mangar's Tower, the seat of the evil mage who has enslaved Skara Brae. It's a dungeon crawling game where you fight monsters over and over, map dungeons with graph paper, and record clues that you find while leveling your characters up and getting them better equipment. In other words, it's very true to its PnP RPG roots in the early to mid 1980s. Why It's Interesting Spells are "incanted" by four-letter codes found in the game manual. Additionally, the map of the city shows where the Review Board is. You'll need this to actually level up: it doesn't happen automatically, only if you know where the guild is. Also Skara Brae is a neolithic village in the farthest northern part of Scotland significant for its state of preservation. This has nothing to do with the game but it's interesting to know where the name came from. Oh yeah, you can save your characters for the next games too (and a shitton of other games as I discovered in this thread). Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight  What's so great about one city when you can explore six, and a vast countryside? The Destiny Knight has you assemble the seven pieces of the Destiny Wand to finally defeat another evil magic user. In The Destiny Knight, mages take the center stage: progress through all four caster classes and you can multi-class into the Archmage, learn a whole new batch of spells, and eventually remake the Destiny Wand.  There are seven main dungeons and the overland map, which is far larger than in the last game. And you can save your characters for... Bard's Tale III: The Thief of Fate As featured in the Smithsonian, settling once and for all the question of video games as art. Or something.  You return to the now-ruined Skara Brae, and rather than the dungeon crawl with minimal plot of the last two games, Thief of Fate features of a much richer plot (written in part of Michael Stackpole of Wasteland fame), alternate dimensions and - yes - more dungeons. And you could import your characters as well.  Although I never finished, Bard's Tale III is probably the closest to modern C-RPGs: you can start to see the shift away from "it's a dunegon crawler like the plotless poo poo you play in your early 1980s D&D game!" to "it's an interesting story that actually has a strong narrative structure!" Even though the underlying mechanic was still "dungeon crawl across a grid." It also paved the way for... The Bard's Tale Construction Set Interplay decided to sell what we'd now call mod tools as a stand-alone element called The Bard's Tale Construction Set (for the low, low price of $50!) The BTCS let you design your own cities, dungeons, puzzles, monsters, and clues: essentially to build your own Bard's Tale game from the ground up. It was about 5 years ahead of its time, because even if you were one of the 0.5% of the population who had a fast enough compuserv or BBS connection to actually upload your dungeons, it would still take you several days - and anyone interested several days to download them. So you could either pass your masterpiece along on floppy disk or just play through it yourself over and over and over and... Get your mitts on it So far the only place to find the games (and the BTCS if you're so inclined) is on abandonware sites. Are they great C-RPGs? Not really - but they're interesting as historical artifacts if nothing else. They had great animated portraits (others didn't), but were otherwise fairly unremarkable - the grids, enemies, puzzles, were fairly generic until Bard's Tale III, and even then it was echoes of future RPGs like Baldur's Gate. Update You can get Bard's Tale I and Bard's Tale II bundled with the iOS Bard's Tale release! Bard's Tale 3 coming soon! http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-bards-tale/id480375355?mt=8 But hey, in 1987 it was pretty much the only game in town apart from Might & Magic. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 30, 2012 |
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Mar 24, 2012 05:23
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rope kid posted:This poo poo blew my mind in 1985. Seriously. I still have my graph paper maps of the various dungeons and (somewhere) the hint book for the Destiny Knight, which cost about as much as buying graph paper and had maps already drawn out for me.
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Mar 24, 2012 18:53
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rope kid posted:The Destiny Knight hint book was pretty cool in how it was presented, even if the dream story did end with a rape. What? That can't be right. *Digs out cluebook* The Bard's Tale II Cluebook posted:... I am enraged at the liberties he takes with Gethsah while she is unconscious and unable to defend herself... Welp. 
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Mar 24, 2012 21:42
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Genpei Turtle posted:Also when it comes to the music, basically with any really old CRPG (or game in general for that matter) made before 1990 or so you shouldn't expect to get much in the way of music at all. Those were the days before sound cards where the best you could get was blips and bloops out of your speakers. Back then the tinny music from DOS games you got with a dedicated sound card was mindblowing. What Bard's Tale (and especially BT2) managed with the PC speaker was loving awesome. The theme song to BT2 is so catchy I still find myself whistling it from time to time. Of course I also hum the soundtrack to the NES game Willow when I'm hiking so take that for what it's worth.
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Mar 28, 2012 00:33
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Boldor posted:The pinnacle of PC speaker music was the original Secret of Monkey Island. I thought you'd know this with your avatar. Monkey Island was one of the first games I played with my best friend's brand-spanking-new AdLib card (on his machine I should point out). I'm not actually sure if I've ever heard the PC speaker music.  Castlevania 3 had such a great loving soundtrack. That was actually the game that made me realize just how much more a developer could squeeze from a console or a set of hardware if they were really truly innovative. Limited options, but by god if you were good at making games you could really push the graphics and sound and gameplay to do some incredible things. Edit: quote:The first game I ever played on a computer that had a sound card was King's Quest V. Somehow, the game so utterly failed to impress me that I spent more time being fascinated by Encarta's "spoken encyclopedia entry" feature than playing that game. That's not really surprising because it was a really bad game, especially compared to KQ6 (the high point of the series in my opinion.) The voice acting on the CD version is so hilariously atrocious - if you ever get a chance to listen to it, try to see how long you can last. I'm pretty sure they had the people who packed boxes in the warehouse reading lines at some points and were using someone's handheld mini tape player to record them. quote:Oh no, my whole life revolves around things I got into around 1991 1988-1996 but yeah. 
Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Mar 28, 2012 01:05
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BadAstronaut posted:Quest For Glory series (yes they can fit in here don't argue rarrrrrr) I did a Let's Play of the entire Quest for Glory series on SA about three years ago (it's what produced the  smilie) - if anyone's interested it's still all on YouTube (complete with the video annotations I did):http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF5B8EAEE0742C714 I never did finish off any of my other LPs on my channel (Loom on the FMTowns or Under a Killing Moon) because my old computer died and I lost most of the videos. Maybe I should get back to that someday. Edit: Jesus my videos have more than 330,000 views. WTF.
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Mar 28, 2012 17:52
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eithedog posted:It's a real shame they didn't VGAlize part 2, as due to that I've skipped it (can you skip it? I definitely played QFG4 as paladin at least once, so I had to import it and I don't remember the quest for becoming a paladin in part 3). ADG Interactive did a Quest for Glory II "fan VGA-ization" project that's actually incredibly loving awesome. They had Lori Anne and Corey Cole's blessing, added a mini-game that was cut from the original release due to disk space constraints, and generally did a stunning job all around. There's a few stupid easter eggs in there (pizza elemental) but as a fan project it's the best you could possibly hope for. http://www.agdinteractive.com/games/qfg2/ E: FB /\/\/\  E2: came out in 2008 or so? I remember finding the one internet connection in whatever town I was vacationing in at the time and downloading it over the course of several hours. Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Mar 28, 2012 20:07
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I keep secretly hoping they'll do a VGA demake of QG5 but I asked the dev team at the time and they said something along the lines of "absolutely loving not."
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Mar 28, 2012 20:22
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eithedog posted:Ook, that's weird then - on the other hand I don't pay as much attention to gaming as I did, so no wonder this passed me by (god, that sentence made me feel old) It's not that I felt QG5's graphics were bad per se, but it didn't quite feel like a QfG game: it felt like more of a Diablo semi-clone rammed into QfG's clothing. The thing is, I can see why they wouldn't want to demake it (it would be technically quite challenging and way harder than up-rezing painted scenery like they did in QG2). The other part of me that wants a demake is the part that actually wants to run the drat game. It's a bitch to try and get to run - if you look at the last video in my playthrough, you actually have to pause the game during the final fight every time the dragon makes a sound because if you don't it will crash, and even then it still crashes randomly. It took me the better part of 2 days to get a version of that scene without a crash for the final video. It's really buggy to try to run on a modern machine, so a demake could potentially fix that.
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Mar 28, 2012 21:14
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I don't know any better way to link to it than the iOS store, but if you buy Bard's Tale on iOS for the low price of 2bux, it comes with Bard's Tale I and Bard's Tale II. Edit: I just tried it and it plays OK on an iphone all things considered. The sound is different than my old DOS version though.
Peas and Rice fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Mar 30, 2012 |
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Mar 30, 2012 18:05
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poo poo, the Zork games are all on sale too. I tried Arcanum several times when it first came out and could never get into it, but for that price I'll give it another try.
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Mar 30, 2012 20:17
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Quarex posted:Anyway, I saw in the "before you play" thread that Rogues are useless--is this true? Is it unambiguously better to have an extra spellcaster instead of a Rogue? I suppose now that I think of it my Rogue has literally done nothing the entire game, being unable to attack from the back ranks and having encountered nothing to disarm or whatever it is they do. You need a Bard to complete the game. And yes, Rogues are useless in BT1 and 2. They are (like the Bard) required to complete BT3 though so if you're ambitious enough to play through all three, it doesn't hurt to make a Rogue. The pro party structure is Paladin, Monk, Hunter, Bard, Caster, Caster.
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Mar 31, 2012 05:57
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There's something goofy going on with the iOS Bard's Tale: it's treating every door in the wine cellar as a wall (giving me the "ugh!" message if I try to walk through one.) I'm either forgetting something really obvious about the game or doors are bugged as walls.
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Mar 31, 2012 16:29
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jerkstore77 posted:I'm playing the port of Bard's Tale 1 on the iPad, and holy gently caress, how did my 8 year old self ever manage to make it all the way to the final dungeon of this game? There are no loving healing spells so in order to be able to afford healing, I keep running away from everything that isn't a small group of conjurers or spiders or something weak. And if I get boned into not being able to run away from a group of 8 barbarians, I just reload. So painfully slow, but pretty rewarding when you finally level up. Yeah, I'm wondering if the IIGS version is somehow tougher than the DOS version because I'm in the same boat as you. Finally hit Level 4 a couple of days ago and I can still barely make it into the Wine Cellar. Any Barbarians / Nomads means it's pretty much a guaranteed reload.
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Apr 3, 2012 22:42
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AlmightyBob posted:I killed the samurai at level 1 what the gently caress is going on? What version? Maybe we're all just scrubs who can't handle our own old school memories 
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Apr 3, 2012 22:51
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AlmightyBob posted:DOS. Did you guys not take the ATEAM's equipment? Even without the fire horn (which 1 hits everything I've faced without going into the winecellar) I don't have a problem with anything. Godfuckingdamnit I forgot to loot the ATEAM's equipment and deleted them. And I wrote the stupid "HAY GUYZ PLAY BARDS TALE' post too. I fail at classic gaming.
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Apr 4, 2012 02:38
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So for anyone else working through Bard's Tale: Level 5 is definitely the turning point: once you have two casters that can damage multiple groups (and your Monk should be a one-man asskicking machine by this point) the game becomes much easier. That plus shield and the traveling bard song are the perfect buff combo for the earlier levels. Money's a problem. You're probably going to be making throwaway characters just to pool their starting gold and then deleting them. Likewise, you're going to let your game idle a lot while your guys restore spell points in the guild. The thing is, I can't see a way to play that doesn't involve that kind of lame poo poo, especially the money part because it's scarce and you're going to spend most of it on healing in the beginning, not spells. How I ever managed to play this as a 10 year old probably speaks to the fact that it was good that they didn't routinely test for aspergers back then.
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Apr 6, 2012 20:10
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precision posted:It's not even just RPGs for me, I sincerely never considered BattleToads as being a very hard game until it became an internet meme to say that it is. That happened to me when I went back to try and play Ninja Gaiden from the NES somewhere after college. I'd love to say "hey I was really good and dedicated!" but the truth is.. well.. Maybe my priorities have changed enough that I just can't imagine wasting that kind of time routinely failing at something to finally become good enough to pass a level on a video game. I will still grind out achievements though.
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Apr 6, 2012 20:17
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prometheusbound2 posted:Quest for Glory IV is-or was-very buggy. I'd definitely read an FAQ and download fan patches to fix old problems, and new problems that arise from running it on modern machines. It's awfully, awfully good, and the talkie version wasn't too bad in terms of bugs - there's one gamekiller that's been patched out, in the swamp. It's easy to get the talkie version to run without a CD-ROM drive too if you hack the config file and copy the resource.aud that's like 400 MB into the game directory. 5 on the other hand is a nightmare to try to run on modern machines. It took me days to get a runthrough where you kill the dragon and the game didn't bug out and crash. This is also a good opportunity to pimp my Quest for Glory Let's Play where I did all five games as a Paladin.
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Apr 12, 2012 18:18
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prometheusbound2 posted:I think QFGIV might have been the first game that I really enjoyed for the sake of the story. This is shallow of me, but the thees and thous of Ultima really messed with my ability to get into the storyline. I'm totally with you. Sierra games could be really hit or miss in terms of story (see my LP videos of Codename Iceman if you really want to experience how truly terrible they could get) but anything with the Coles involved (QfG) or Jane Jensen (KQ6, Gabriel Knight) was excellent as interactive fiction.
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Apr 12, 2012 20:12
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Fintilgin posted:Is QFG V actually worth bothering with? I've played the first four a bunch of times, but I always heard awful things about V, and when I finally did get a copy it seemed really weird and clunky and I couldn't get into at all. Do you love the rest of the series? Can you ignore the diablo-clone combat and subpar game design and bugs to stick it out? Then yes. If you're invested in the series and the story - then yes. If not, you can stop with QG4.
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Apr 12, 2012 21:55
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Fair warning: the end is epic and awesome, but the last battle is bugged to poo poo on most modern hardware. Good luck!! 
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Apr 12, 2012 22:40
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BadAstronaut posted:Hahah AWESOME - I had no idea you could do that. The only fighter-only exclusive that comes to mind is joining the Eternal Order of Fighters in Quest for Glory II, and various solutions for puzzles (use muscles to smash things instead of open spell or fetch to open or move things). And your marriage options in Quest for Glory 5.
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Apr 13, 2012 17:05
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zachol posted:There was a Ravenloft game? What's it like? You didn't even get to kill Strahd in the Ravenloft 3D fighting game.
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Apr 20, 2012 15:34
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It's not 100% applicable but Amazon recommended to me this 700-some-page tome that is a stunning history of graphic adventure games. There's a great chapter about Quest for Glory and an interview with Corey Cole in there, and it covers pretty much every other graphic adventure up to and including Machinarium. They may need to update it now that DoubleFine's adventure has sort of revived interest in the genre, but as a comprehensive look at the graphic adventure genre you could do way worse. It's also less than on your kindle if you don't want the dead tree edition.
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Apr 25, 2012 18:20
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There's apparently a Ravenloft "MMO" of sorts for Neverwinter Nights that's huge and has a pretty healthy community but I wasn't able to get all the mods required to make it work on my Steam copy of NWN. The concept sounds loving awesome though, and Ravenloft is my favorite D&D setting so a Ravenloft game done right would totally own.
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Apr 25, 2012 20:43
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 04:40 |
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Nothing really new here but the Wasteland 2 Facebook page just linked to a picture essay of the history of computer RPGs that's worth flipping through.
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May 7, 2012 15:38
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