Memories of BASS

[AndrewT]

#8932

Hi guys, love the podcast.

I first played Beneath a Steel Sky on the Commodore Amiga in 1994 at my cousins house.

Wanting a copy myself I asked him how many disks I would need for X-copy. Imagine my surprise when the answer was 15.

15 disks for a single game? madness! However, many spare and old cover discs were found and overwritten that day.

I had a lot of fun with the game and loved the setting and characters, but being young I did not get very far and most of those disks never even got used.

Around the same time I had been playing on a friends IBM PC. Games like Alone in the Dark and Wolfenstein were opening my eyes to what was possible on PC but were not possible on the Amiga.

Looking back at Beneath a Steel Sky it was a time of transition in gaming for me. This game was really pushing the capabilities of the Amiga and juggling up to 15 disks per game was starting to get ridiculous. That Christmas I was lucky enough to get a 486 PC with a CD-ROM drive from my parents. For me, the days of the Amiga were over.

[OfManNotMachine]

#8971

My memories of this game are much more recent. I am a HUGE fan of the Broken Sword series, and wondered if Revolution Software made any other games besides the Broken Sword games, so when I saw Beneath A Steel Sky, I had to play it!

Great story, excellent gameplay (for a point n click) I felt the ending was a tad sudden and abrupt, but the journey was what mattered.

Then, I just had to play the recent sequel, Beyond A Steel Sky, and I personally enjoyed it greatly and felt it brought the story full circle.

I look forward to the podcast discussing this great classic DOS game!

[Dreamkid]

#9004

I never knew about this game until 2012, and didn’t get around to playing it until just last year. At the time, it seemed sort of meh to me, but it’s seemed better this playthrough…

[Pix]

#9010

I must not have played BASS until it was supported on ScummVM, still a long time ago but I think this will be the first time actually on DOS. It’s not a game I remember much beyond a few plot points. I played through most of it last night and think I’m only about 30 minutes off the end. I’m less keen that some of you guys to be honest. It’s a decent game but nothing about it is outstanding for me. They may have a famous artist involved but I wouldn’t say it looks better than other games of the same era. The dialog keeps things light hearted, with obvious thefts at times from the likes of Blackadder, but doesn’t give much depth to the characters. The voice acting might be the strongest point, it’s all well done for the era with some appropriate regional accents. I feel like I should be drawing up a list of adventure games with Northern English accents in them at this point as I seem to keep running into them this year.

There is nothing particularly wrong with it. The puzzles are OK and I’m not finding it too hard or easy. I need to remember to save more often as some of the deaths have caught me without a recent save. BASS came out the same month as Sam and Max though and can’t really compete. Still a fun game and definitely worth playing, just not a classic. I’d be with that PC Zone review I posted in the 70-80% rating.

[ropie]

#9233

I can’t remember when I first played this one, but I’m fairly sure it was the DOS version sometime in the 1990s. When I played it in 2017 I was somehow already familiar with it so I must have already played it!

I quite enjoyed it the last time I played it. The locations are nice, the atmosphere is OK but the story is fairly trite and the puzzles are not great, with too many deaths. For a few years I actually had this game confused with Delphine Software’s Future Wars – which is absolutely a game that should be covered – as they share some graphical similarities.