Cipheron on 17/4/2023 at 10:09
Quote Posted by driver
Yeah, I played LoL 2 and found it a bit aimless and disappointing, never played the third game. GoG packages the first two games together, so you can give the sequel a go and if you enjoy it you could pick up the third. The voice acting is very good in the first, but it does suffer from the Bethesda problem of having their biggest star (in this case Patrick Stewart) vanish after the opening. The sequel fell into that late 90s trap of FMV and the acting was... less good.
Oh damn, the issue of having a whole CD worth of space but 10 floppy disks worth of actual game, so they fill it up with cut scenes.
driver on 17/4/2023 at 12:38
Speaking of all space and no gameplay, I recall playing Creature Shock (Obvious disclaimer: no relation to System Shock) and Iron Helix in the md 90s when CDs were becoming the format of choice. Lots of pretty FMV, not much gameplay, though CS was basically a lightgun game you played with the mouse, so kinda fun.
Cipheron on 18/4/2023 at 06:21
Quote Posted by driver
Cipheron, wasn't meaning to criticise your party choice for EotB, it's a solid party for most D&D games. It was more that when I thought about it, thieves seemed under-utilized. Had there been, say, treasure chests that could only be lockpicked or traps that could be disarmed, they'd have had a bit more use. As you say, they're more use as quick-levelling archers than much else.
Heh, I didn't take that as criticism at all, it's a fair point. But my thinking was what does someone want to do in a first playthrough of EOB. See all the things first, then let the player decide what they want to drop in order to double-up on magic or anything else. The same with the racial languages.
Basically, if I replay the games I *always* get annoyed if I can't read the inscriptions or can't use the lockpicks. Doesn't matter if it's less optimal than some super-party that is OP. It's annoying if your party is excluded from interacting with things.
Cipheron on 19/4/2023 at 06:34
Been clearing up my own backlog and asking whether I really want to jump into some grindy RPG series such as Pools, Beholder, etc.
Digging through my notes I came across something else that I could jump into that won't involve a lot of level grinding etc - text adventures.
Specifically for me,
Mystery House for the Apple II. Murder mystery in a mansion, did the butler do it? Or the maid? I have no idea. Saw this on school computers, never owned a copy, never got that far in it. It's one of the first games by Roberta William et al, who created the Sierra Online company.
The Secret of St Brides for the Spectrum. Kept seeing this in magazines, can check it out now. Never had a speccy. The reason this got so much magazine attention is clear if you read about the general weirdness the of creators - they were some new age feminist cult who also ran "St Brides", a mock Victorian boarding school for women to cosplay as schoolgirls. So they eschewed all modern technology and lived like in Victorian England, but somehow also had computers and wrote games to make extra cash.
Gremlins the text adventure. Follows the movie. It's pretty fun, but I just never managed to beat it. I'm usually good at working these ones out, now.
Discworld - there's a text-adventure version of the Color of Magic, I think, the first Discworld novel. Want to try that one.
The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings: classic text-adventures. Never had the series past Fellowship, so will get the entire saga to try.
The Boggit, Bored of the Rings: absolutely ridiculous parody text-adventure series. A lot of fun.
Then after that, polish off the games of Level 9 Computing.. These were the best and most prolific of the British text adventure companies. The ones I played, they were all really good.
After that, onto Magnetic Scrolls and Infocom games.
Thirith on 19/4/2023 at 07:14
Level 9 Computing... That's a name I've not heard in a long time. I remember getting Level 9's Silicon Dreams trilogy (Snowball, Return to Eden and The Worm in Paradise) when I was a kid, but I never got very far. No idea if the problem was that my English wasn't good enough at the time or I simply didn't get the logic of these games sufficiently, but I felt completely lost at sea. (I did slightly better with an Interceptor Micros text adventure called Heroes of Karn, but that one always crashed after 10-15 minutes.)
When I finally got around to playing the Magnetic Scrolls text adventures (mainly The Pawn and Guild of Thieves), my English was better, but I was still crap at text adventures, mainly because I never knew what I was supposed to do. (Chances are that this would've been spelled out in the manuals that I didn't have, because the pirated copies I had of these games didn't include the manuals.)
I always liked the idea of text adventures, but my early experiences with them meant that I never seriously played any of them. I sometimes think that I should remedy this now, but looking at my backlog I'm not sure if this is likely to happen any time soon.
Sulphur on 19/4/2023 at 08:00
Well, text adventures are always going to be there for you. I don't think it's possible to relive the heady time of first having all those strange new worlds to explore and bang your head on in frustration, and many of them aren't classic literature (or need to be), but there's a class of experience with them you simply can't get from any other form of video game, be it the puzzling or the narrative flow. Some of the more modern authors I love just for their ability to render visions in prose, like Andrew Plotkin (take a peek at anything in So Far), or just creating a vivid narrative, like Adam Cadre's stuff (Photopia has always been a standout for me).
And heck, there's so much great stuff being made even today. It's nearly impossible to sort through, but the annual IFComps make it slightly easier to figure out where to spend your attention.
Thirith on 19/4/2023 at 08:07
If I ever do another long-distance flight, I'll come with a bunch of IFs installed on my tablet. Perhaps that'd be the perfect opportunity to get into the genre: noise-cancelling headphones, some good music, being locked into a metal tube for 8+ hours with no way of escaping. :cheeky:
Cipheron on 19/4/2023 at 13:45
Quote Posted by Thirith
I always liked the idea of text adventures, but my early experiences with them meant that I never seriously played any of them. I sometimes think that I should remedy this now, but looking at my backlog I'm not sure if this is likely to happen any time soon.
I've beaten Snowball before, that's one of my favorites. Personally, I never had the sequels though. But ... this shall be remedied.
As for one to check out, i highly recommend "Lords of Time" which is a one-off. You're basically a time-traveler and have to work your way through a number of time periods. It's non-linear so you get to explore bits of every era, but you'll need bits and pieces from different eras to solve the puzzles in each time period.
I think the puzzles in that one are a little less obtuse than trying to play something like a Zork game.
And as an update, I just played and beat Mystery House. I will admit i did use 2 hints from the net, at points in which I got stuck. However, i probably could have got past that by being more methodical.
Just had a playthrough of Gremlins to get a feel for that again. So I was definitely right, these old text adventures are a lot quicker to knock off some backlog than RPGs.
Mystery House, and Gremlins both feel pretty short. The Level 9 ones are on the longer side.
demagogue on 19/4/2023 at 16:50
I was going to mention some IFs, but I figured it was too deep a well. Not that they're too obscure, but there's too much to try to pick from. That said, I have good memories of Anchorhead, Losing Your Grip, and The Edifice, but so many others as well.
As Sulph intimated, a lot of the best stuff is homebrew through the competitions or just self-releases. I feel they're kind of like the original fan game community, before Doom & Tomb Raider & ourselves, people were making IFs and figuring out how stories and gameplay fit together. I'd also recommend, if anyone is into writing fiction generally, to try making an IF. It's fun & creative because you can really create any setting and situation that you can imagine and put into words. Also FYI the best commentator on the whole scene I think is (
https://emshort.blog/) Emily Short's blog, which I'm happy to see is still chugging along.
The Magnetic Scrolls games were important to me when they came out, The Pawn and Guild of Thieves, and I still have a half-made Darkmod level for Guild of Thieves, which is such a perfect fit for a Thief/Darkmod FM except it's hard to build something that big. I didn't get into the Infocom games until a lot later in the era of emulators, but those were cool too. I think Trinity is my favorite of those.
TheRealSlimGarrett on 19/4/2023 at 21:52
The Saboteur, I have it on PC and PS3
The Godfather on PC and PS2
No One Lives Forever (1&2) on PC and PS2
