Starker on 11/4/2023 at 16:14
This is a great example of what I'm talking about with regard to genre, as Discworld is and has been one of the more popular MUD's out there. That is, among people who can name even one MUD, they probably know it. I played it for years, but it took up too much time. Like with MMOs you really need to invest yourself in it.
demagogue on 11/4/2023 at 21:40
There are some Commodore 64 games I still play on an emulator on my phone, the two I like being Shogun and Rags to Riches. Then there are some Indie, Itch, & homebrew games I really like like Transcendence, North, Himno, Rogue Light, Survival Crisis Z, Triple A, Aentity, Stacklands...
Jason Moyer on 12/4/2023 at 04:17
I only play super obscure shit like Minecraft and Tetris.
Sulphur on 12/4/2023 at 04:51
Quote Posted by Starker
I was once part of a site called Home of the Underdogs, which was dedicated to preserving and highlighting games that hadn't received the attention they deserved or had been forgotten and swept aside by technological progress. I remember Activision's Portal having been one of the highest praised games there, as well as the Legacy of Kain series. I don't remember Terranigma, but HotU wasn't really the best place for console games in the first place. In any case, I've always considered the site to have been a great education for gaming and was introduced to many great gems over there.
Ah, nice to know you were embedded in that place, it was one of my internet havens for a while all the way back in the early 00s. And it was, of course, the place that introduced me to Portal as well as some of the things I'd missed as a younger kid, like Neuromancer and Dark Seed. I believe it was the first place I encountered Cosmology of Kyoto, which also has the distinction of being the only video game (I believe) that Roger Ebert reviewed. What a fantastic, dark and twisted trip that thing was.
The place looks about the same today, but clearly things have changed a bit. I remember trawling the 'Top Dog' tags to find games I'd probably want to delve into, and that was always reliable for a good time. The titles seem to be weighted more towards strategy and sim games now, I guess? Interesting how memory makes things shift. At any rate, they used to spotlight individual games on a regular basis, and the write-ups were usually worth the read to a curious mind.
Cipheron on 12/4/2023 at 06:55
Quote Posted by Hit Deity
I would also say Star Control and Betrayal at Krondor were definitely not "lesser known" either. Pretty darn popular for their times.
Speaking of OLD GAMES..
I'm currently slogging my way through Pool of Radiance, and the rest of the Gold Box, Silver Box, and what-have-you DOSBox D&D games. Talk about RNG hell and game-ending encounters.. thank goodness you can Save anywhere.
If you haven't, play the gold Box Buck Rogers games, they're my favorite of those. Some nice space piracy and planet exploring, really liked the class and skill system. I had a fun experience the first time through running low on ammo while fighting through the swamps of Venus. While having lots of gear is good, it's the times you needed to scrabble for every bullet that I think are memorable.
For the Buck Rogers games, i actually wrote a character editor which could extract your character's and gear and paste them back in. I ran the same set of characters through both games a couple of times. Second time through the first game, they were able to beat some of the "unbeatable" mega-battle set pieces you're meant to avoid, which include an "Aliens" style swarm, attacking space pirates on their ships bridge, and head-first attacking a miltary output on Mars. In each case you're meant to use a quest or tactic to avoid the fight, but if you got enough firepower those are some amazing fights.
I was also working through the Pools games but got stuck on the slog in Secret of the Silver Blades, there's a lot to map out. There are those and the Krynn series, i think I played through two of those, never had the last one.
Another couple of good ones were the TSR Dark Sun games, they were more realtime overhead. I think the first game was better of the two: characters don't transfer over and the engine is different.
And of course, Eye of the Beholder. But #3 was terrible and i quit. That one got taken over by the publisher and they churned out a sequel. It's really not a good game, and didn't feel like the people working on it really knew the engine that well. Maps felt like 2D Gold Box maps but pasted into 3D, which didn't really work (you start in a big open space and basically have to grind row by row to find all the stuff. mapping a huge open area in a Dungeon Master view isn't as much fun as mapping out dungeons), and some of the sprites look a lot less colorful than the 256 color sprites from the first couple of EOB games.
Malf on 12/4/2023 at 08:28
Never did play
Eye of the Beholder, but I
did and
still do play the game it wouldn't exist without,
Dungeon Master (and its sequel,
Chaos Strikes Back, which was the first time I played a game that let you import your save and team from the previous game).
It can be (
http://dmweb.free.fr/) downloaded and played for free these days, and still has my favourite levelling and magic systems from any video game ever.
I think there's even a fair argument to be made for it being an
Immersive Sim (cat thrown amidst pigeons!)
Grimrock was something of a let down by comparison.
And talking of DM, there was a clone released a year or two later which was my first experience of split-screen, first-person combat, (
https://www.gog.com/game/bloodwych)
Bloodwych. Ostensibly, it was meant to be played co-op... but it had friendly-fire, which meant we'd spend ages essentially playing Deathmatch :D
Thirith on 12/4/2023 at 09:24
Somehow I never got into any of the dungeon crawls at the time after Bard's Tale 3. One of these days I'll want to check out the first two Eye of the Beholder games, mind you.
PigLick on 12/4/2023 at 10:37
Oh man I had Bloodwych on my Amstrad 128, loved it.
Nameless Voice on 12/4/2023 at 13:01
Quote Posted by Malf
And talking of DM, there was a clone released a year or two later which was my first experience of split-screen, first-person combat, (
https://www.gog.com/game/bloodwych)
Bloodwych. Ostensibly, it was meant to be played co-op... but it had friendly-fire, which meant we'd spend ages essentially playing Deathmatch :D
I'm a bit surprised to see Bloodwych mentioned. I have some fond memories of that, even though it was a little before my time and I mostly know of it because my older brother played it on his Atari STe when I was a kid. I think I still have his hand-drawn maps of the dungeon layouts somewhere.
Random trivia: the "turning squares" in my Thief fan mission The Temple of the Tides are based off the ones in Bloodwych, just converted to work in fully 3D space instead of a step-based game.
