So, recently, because of my incredibly out of date computer, I've gotten back into some really sweet old D&D, and D&D esque, games.
Of course, there's always the obvious Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment... (all of which should be reviewed in full if you're ever wanting to make a good, fun, RPG; either on paper, or digitally)
But then I've been getting into some crazy old ones: God of Thunder, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, and the Golden Axe (Not D&D, but still good) series on my Sega Genesis.
I just wanted to share. :)
Quote from: Matney XSo, recently, because of my incredibly out of date computer, I've gotten back into some really sweet old D&D, and D&D esque, games.
Of course, there's always the obvious Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment... (all of which should be reviewed in full if you're ever wanting to make a good, fun, RPG; either on paper, or digitally)
But then I've been getting into some crazy old ones: God of Thunder, Ravenloft: Stone Prophet, and the Golden Axe (Not D&D, but still good) series on my Sega Genesis.
I just wanted to share. :)
Nearly all of these games are available on http://gametap.com, if you are looking. Icewind Dale I and II. Baldurs Gate I and II. Planescape... and then also The entire Ultima series, Might and Magic, and tons of other stuff. I keep stumbling across games I have a vague memory of playing 20 years ago.
Are there any reasons you couldn't play these older games on a newer machines? What would it take - is it even possible?
If you want to run old games on a Windows machine, there's DosBox to emulate MS-DOS. (Other operation-systems like Linux probably also have DOS emulators available, but I don't know of one off the top of my head.)
Quote from: Matney XGolden Axe (Not D&D, but still good)
It's a classic. I still admire the 80s barbarian movie aesthetics.
Quote from: Abyssal MawNearly all of these games are available on http://gametap.com, if you are looking. Icewind Dale I and II. Baldurs Gate I and II. Planescape... and then also The entire Ultima series, Might and Magic, and tons of other stuff. I keep stumbling across games I have a vague memory of playing 20 years ago.
Not the entire ultima series, just the ones up to U6. Which is fine really, because they're the onl ones worth having. After that was when Garriot declared RPGs were "dead" and started dumbing down the series.
And Gametap is fuckin' awesome.
Warriors of the Eternal Sun was good fun as well, at least what I remember of it. High School involved lots of angry punk and mild-altering substances, so the game might have sucked for all I know. But me and my homie Joe played it a lot.
-=Grim=-
Quote from: J ArcaneNot the entire ultima series, just the ones up to U6. Which is fine really, because they're the onl ones worth having. After that was when Garriot declared RPGs were "dead" and started dumbing down the series.
And Gametap is fuckin' awesome.
Nonsense. Ultima VII was anything but dumbed down. Streamlined interface, yes. Dumbing down, no.
Quote from: James J SkachAre there any reasons you couldn't play these older games on a newer machines? What would it take - is it even possible?
You can... DOSBox only works so well, but with Virtual PC and an old copy of Windows 95 or 98, you can run actual dos. In my case, I can run actual dos in it, because I'm still running the same hard drive I had when my computer WAS a dos machine (okay, that's a lie... sometime around 2002 I copied my old hard drive to a newer, more reliable, one. But it was a complete copy, so it still works.)
Some games, like Elder Scrolls 1: Arena, 2: Daggerfall, and BattleSpire only work on the older machines. I don't get why Bethesda wrote BattleSpire specifically for Windows 95 when it was released in '97 or '98. It seems that most of the people that bought it, myself included, couldn't play it.
I had to frankenstein a windows 95 machine together just to rock those old classics.
And I've never checked out Gametap, only buy stuff really cheap off Amazon and eBay.
Quote from: MelanNonsense. Ultima VII was anything but dumbed down. Streamlined interface, yes. Dumbing down, no.
THe combat was an awful real-time affair that worked for utter crap, the size of the game world was shrunken considerably, and it was significantly more railroaded than previous games. In some cases almost literally, because the tiny size of the areas, combined with the giant size of that damn horse cart meant that some portions of the game meant you could literally not do anything but wander down the prescribed road path.
It was the beginning of the end for the series, and almost infuriating as well, because for some reason it became the one everyone spent the following decade trying to copy, especially that godawful combat engine.
Everyone says the Megatraveller games are very good--sorta crude and grainy precursors to Baldur's Gate. I wouldn't know, I'm too dumb to get Dos Box to run, but those less challenged than me might want to check them out. They're downloadable on Freelance Traveller and on Underdogs IIRC.
Quote from: Pierce InverarityEveryone says the Megatraveller games are very good--sorta crude and grainy precursors to Baldur's Gate. I wouldn't know, I'm too dumb to get Dos Box to run, but those less challenged than me might want to check them out. They're downloadable on Freelance Traveller and on Underdogs IIRC.
The gameplay has a serious learning curve that without the manual, you're just not likely to figure out on your own.
However, the upshot is, MT2's character generator is fully in line with the tabletop rules, and can even output to a text file, so you can use it to make characters for the PnP game.
Quote from: J ArcaneTHe combat was an awful real-time affair that worked for utter crap, the size of the game world was shrunken considerably, and it was significantly more railroaded than previous games. In some cases almost literally, because the tiny size of the areas, combined with the giant size of that damn horse cart meant that some portions of the game meant you could literally not do anything but wander down the prescribed road path.
It was the beginning of the end for the series, and almost infuriating as well, because for some reason it became the one everyone spent the following decade trying to copy, especially that godawful combat engine.
I just don't see it. The world may have been smaller, but at least half of it wasn't
empty. Everywhere you went, there was something interesting... and NPC in the wilderness, or at least a hidden treasure cache. WRT railroading, it was rather light. The main plot of confronting the Fellowship was fixed (but the same was true for Ultima VI. - the flow of information pretty much required you to follow a track), but the abundance of side quests, most of them quite intelligent as opposed to simplistic Fedex affairs, more than made up for it.
WRT horse carts, of course horse carts could only move on roads. Jeez, try going off the beaten track with a real horse cart and see where it gets you. :rolleyes: Besides, if you are offering examples, why not go all the way and offer the other two: ships which could take you almost anywhere on sea, and the flying carpet which could take you almost anywhere on land (provided you found a place to land, which made for an interesting drawback to an otherwise "uber" mode of transport).
Was the game perfect? No. Britannia was still too ren-fairy (which had also been the case in U6), and the combat lacked the interesting tactical opportunities of U5 and U6. But the rest was pretty much close to perfection. Environmental interactivity, and the sheer complexity of the world, in particular, wasn't even approached until much later... and continues to be a high point even when we compare it to current games.
In short, nonsense.
(Now Serpent Isle is more problematic - it had the better world and plot, but it was burdened by serious railroading and a few incomprehensively stupid puzzles.)
Quote from: MelanI just don't see it. The world may have been smaller, but at least half of it wasn't empty. Everywhere you went, there was something interesting... and NPC in the wilderness, or at least a hidden treasure cache. WRT railroading, it was rather light. The main plot of confronting the Fellowship was fixed (but the same was true for Ultima VI. - the flow of information pretty much required you to follow a track), but the abundance of side quests, most of them quite intelligent as opposed to simplistic Fedex affairs, more than made up for it.
WRT horse carts, of course horse carts could only move on roads. Jeez, try going off the beaten track with a real horse cart and see where it gets you. :rolleyes: Besides, if you are offering examples, why not go all the way and offer the other two: ships which could take you almost anywhere on sea, and the flying carpet which could take you almost anywhere on land (provided you found a place to land, which made for an interesting drawback to an otherwise "uber" mode of transport).
Was the game perfect? No. Britannia was still too ren-fairy (which had also been the case in U6), and the combat lacked the interesting tactical opportunities of U5 and U6. But the rest was pretty much close to perfection. Environmental interactivity, and the sheer complexity of the world, in particular, wasn't even approached until much later... and continues to be a high point even when we compare it to current games.
In short, nonsense.
(Now Serpent Isle is more problematic - it had the better world and plot, but it was burdened by serious railroading and a few incomprehensively stupid puzzles.)
Dude, it's not just that the horse cart was big and awkward and littered with obstacles designed to force you down those roads, though that was certainly part of it. It was that significant portions of the game have you going through areas that are literally just thin corridors of land with often, barely enough land on either side of the road to even fit the horse cart even if you could go off road a bit.
And even once you got fed up with the thing and ran off on foot, you could explore the better part of a continent in no time at all, beause the whole game world was pathetically small, and had basically nothing of interest in what little off-the-beaten path area remained in the game.
I played U4 and U6 for ages, and never even bothered with the main story, because there was so much to explore and do, but I didn't get any of that feeling at all from U7, because there simply wasn't really anything to explore.
It just wasn't up to snuff with the previous games, felt entirely too constrained by comparison, lacked the open feel, and on top of that, the gameplay itself in the form of combat and interface was completely and unacceptably awful.
It's not a bad game, but it was supposed to be an Ultima game, and that entails a far higher standard than U7 manages to live up to, and the ideological nonsense that had infected it's creator is all too readily apparent.
Well, preferences and differences and all that, but...
Quote from: J Arcanethe ideological nonsense that had infected it's creator is all too readily apparent.
...this is the Truth. Granted, I was also annoyed by it in U6, and preferred U5, where it wasn't so out in the open...
to explain a bit more by what I meant by that statement:
Richard Garriot, around the time of Ultima 7's development, made a very famous statement, in which he declared that "RPGs were dead", and that action games were the wave of the future.
The ensuing development of the Ultima series is a direct result of that rather boneheaded philosophy. Ultima Underworld's completely real time nature, Ultima 7's awful real time combat system, Ultima 8's Mario Bros-esque jumping puzzles, and the final apotheosis of Ultima 9 as nothing more than a mediocre platformer game with almost no remaining RPG feel, are the direct result of it.
U7 I sort of look at as the beginning of the end of the series, the start of the dumbing down that killed not only the series, but dragged the entire CRPG genre down with it.
Literally, if it wasn't for Richard Garriot and what he did to Ultima, the CRPG genre would be as much of a top dog, frontline position in the spectrum of PC games as RTS and FPS are. A lot of people forget that, in it's day, Ultima was THE PC title, and it could've remained so, with the rest of the CRPG genre continuing to thrive in it's influence, if it weren't for Garriot being a goddamn idiot and declaring the very genre that was making him millions to be "dead".
It's one of the biggest black spots in the entire history of video gaming.
I just don't see it. The decline of CRPGs occured a few years after Garriott's comments - hell, I wasn't even aware he uttered them. Also, Ultima was far from dominant; in the same period, Might & Magic, Wizardry and one-off titles like Lands of Lore and Betrayal at Krondor also enjoyed popularity. The fall in the number of titles coincided with
a) Doom, which everyone tried to (unsuccessfully) emulate in an effort to cash in on a runaway success (forcing studios to make a game 3d and "rendered" even if it didn't benefit from it), and
b) advances in multimedia technology, which prompted developers to finally realise their dreams about interactive movies (a concept which, unfortunately, sucks).
Second, your appraisal of Ultima Underworld is entirely off base. It was not the degeneration of Ultima, but rather an entirely new approach to doing CRPGs - just like Wizardry I. represented a different way of doing things to Ultima I. It gave rise to a small but enduring game form, mostly associated with Looking Glass Studios: System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex and Bioshock. These are often classified as shooters, but the way people approach them is often very RPG-like - just not the "stats on screen" variety.
A party starts in my pants whenever a thread strays to mentioning Deus Ex. Seriously, that game is amazing. I'll wing a pumpkin off a motherfucker's head should they disagree. Then I'll cry... like a schoolgirl. Ever seen a grown streetpunk cry? No? Good, you don't want to.
:raise:
-=Grim=-