driver on 12/4/2023 at 18:45

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Another shoutout for Grimrock 2. I enjoyed the first but it did have the feeling that nothing had happened since Eye of the Beholder, LoG2 was a huge step up from there.

Malf on 13/4/2023 at 09:17

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I did, but it still didn't live up to DM for me. But that's a tough proposition in the first place. DM is one of my foundational videogaming experiences, much like Rebelstar on the Speccy, so any challenger is going to struggle to live up to it.
Suffice to say, even with its improvements over the first game, I found the systems in Grimrock 2 to still be too... rigid when compared to DM.

In DM, one of the things I discovered was that by giving a Fighter character a mana amulet, who had no mana whatsoever and therefore no ability to cast spells, I could give him some artificial mana, then level him in spells almost effectively as a dedicated Wizard or Priest character.
The game was full of little tricks like this, which at the time I didn't know, but were what would now be called "Emergent Gameplay".
Stuff like forcing monsters to stand in the same tile as a door, then slamming the door on their heads whilst you fought them to add some extra damage (something so foundational to DM, but even Grimrock 2 got wrong), or being able to throw absolutely anything as a weapon, leveling up the focused character's Ninja levels.

You could also take less characters than expected in your party, which would then open up even more emergent gameplay.
The game had a party formation arrangement, where you could put your heaviest fighters at the front, keeping your spellcasters and ninjas in the back. Two up front, two in the back.
Now, only characters who were in the front row at the time of an attack would get hit by melee. If you were quick enough and say only had 1 character up front, if a melee attack came from the left, you could move the character to the right and avoid the damage. If you had 3 characters, the one in the back row would get hit instead.
However, if you then took two characters, one up front and one behind, you could dodge all damage, spells and missiles that came from one side.
And the ultimate was to take one character and actively move them around in combat, dodging anything from either side. It didn't make them invulnerable, as there were still a lot of sources of damage that would go down the middle and hit everyone in your party no matter their position, but it was still very effective if you were good enough.
You'd also end up with a kind of super-character with levels in everything, because they would be the only character receiving experience.

I don't know if any of this was intended by the developers, but it was exhilarating to think I'd come up with new tactics by using the interlocking systems of the game; that same feeling I would later get in games like Thief and Deus Ex.

Cipheron on 14/4/2023 at 04:23

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Oh cool, another Amstrad person.

And Malf, I also played the shit out of Rebelstar, but the Amstrad version. Lots of Spectrum games made their way onto that system due to the technical similarities, both had the Z80 CPU.

Another cool Amstrad/Spectrum game is Nether Earth, which is one of the earliest real time strategy games, and has a lot of cool design features.

In that you build robots and give them simple commands, to try and beat a much more powerful AI doing the same. The robot construction system is modular, so you have to decide whether to invest in a few powerful robots or many cheap ones, and you can mix and match propulsion systems, weapons and electronics. There are a lot of strategic resources to capture, and you can arm a robot with a nuke and get them to blow up the resources instead of capturing it. IDK if that's a good choice, but it's a choice and having a nuke robot around to blow up a bunch of enemy units MAY be a good strategy. The point is, there are so many factors going on in this game that there's no one right way to win - but winning is VERY hard.

Plus you fly a hovercraft and can dock on top of the robots (they're building-sized) and control them manually. But the problem is that if you're at the front micro-managing the robots you can't also be at the base ordering more robots to be built, and there's a definite time-delay between ordering reinforcements and these making it to the front, so you have the added pressure of having to move between your base and the front lines, while also efficiently producing and deploying the robots, and giving them ongoing commands which are going to achieve your aims. You get radar, but it's limited in range so there's a lot of fog of war and uncertainty when you're going back to create more units.

It's a very difficult and complex game with a lot of different factors to juggle.

Cipheron on 15/4/2023 at 15:13

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Beholder I is great. The 2nd one is good too but the first one is really tightly put together.

Only a few head's up:

Party design, to avoid mistakes later:

Non-humans can multi-class, but there are also racial level limits for non-humans. This kicks in with the 2nd game especially, so you need to check the 2nd game's manual if you want to push a party fully through and you take advantage of the multi-class options (higher level limits were not explained in the manual for game 1. Check the 2nd game's manual for which high-level cleric and mage spells need which levels). I go with one single-classed character and one dual class, in the frontline, and two triple-classed characters in the backline as support. You need multiple clerics, especially.

Jason Moyer on 16/4/2023 at 02:47

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I'm surprised GOG never got those when they were releasing most of the SSI catalog. I wonder what kind of legal hell the Buck Rogers rights are in.