pointer
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pointerParticipantSC2/UQM is really exceptional.
– surprisingly deep story, especially the backstory going back thousands of years
– large and dynamic map reflecting recent story developments
– original and fun alien races/species
– great voice acting
– gameplay loop mixing resource gathering, combat and explorationThe club already played the spiritual predecessor Starflight, but there’s nothing like SC2.
pointerParticipantYeah, the Linux port took a bit of tinkering as well.
Admittedly, it’s all written in the readme, but no one reads those..also, who even uses 32-bit these days?
It also still throws a weird error on exit (Gametext: System text block conflict.).
But the hi-res 3d looks rather nice. I think I’ll play it like this.
pointerParticipantJust mounting the CD file worked for me on linux too.
I wish GOG provided the ISO file for DOS games, not just wrapping it in a windows executable. I guess I see why they don’t do it – cost/benefit of the support headaches, but I wish they still did it.
pointerParticipantyozy> I remember that Score review, it praised Albion to high heavens.
pointerParticipantI’m thinking of playing this too, maybe doing a voice message, but damn, it’s not a short game. These deep RPGs are time-sappers, and Albion was a decent one. It was worth it back then, but now? Not sure.
pointerParticipantShoot, I just missed it. Oh well, it’s not that expensive.
Edit on nov 27: It’s on sale again. Thanks to gogdb I was patient enough to wait. Nice.
pointerParticipantYeah, the pretty graphics and realtime combat are probably EOB’s best qualities. But EOB1’s design is annoying in several ways. I suspect this goes for EOB2 and 3 too, though I haven’t played them.
In the voice message I sent, I said I prefer Might and Magic 3: I now started playing World of Xeen and that game is much more fun than EOB. The combat is simpler, but improving your characters, finding treasure and solving quests feels so rewarding. I’m having a blast.
EOB almost seems to take pleasure in punishing you for playing it and not in a good way. Especially the hostile level design/traps and general lack of guidance and explanation suck away the fun. The only thing going for it is more freeform real-time combat, and arguably “smarter” puzzles. But even for those, I think Dungeon Master 2 just did all of that better.
pointerParticipantThanks Hunter, the All-Seeing Eye really helped, I don’t think I would have made it far without it.
pointerParticipantCanageek, what “Top 64k Games” podcast do you mean? I can’t find any podcast like that, or one that covers Captain Blood.
pointerParticipantSettlers 1 seems quaint now, but its “economic dependency tree” was really exceptional back then.
It was also very fun and satisfying to observe the little people perform activities specific to their role as they transformed resources into useful products.
Settlers 2 then improved on pretty much all aspects.
pointerParticipantIshar for me has the alluring quality that several Silmarils games do, it’s that it feels like a real, living world, like the game is deeper than it actually is. Metal Mutant and Starblade also felt that way. It may just be skin-deep, because of the nice graphics and realistic ambient sound, and possibly also the language barrier.
Unfortunately, Ishar also shares the curse of other Silmarils games. They’re obscure, hard to make sense of, player-unfriendly. I never got very far in Ishar, so this is just from reading the walkthrough – there were steps that were important, but also non-obvious.
In general, I got the feeling that the game doesn’t tell you many things you will need to know in order to progress. It might still be worth trying, especially if you don’t mind looking up stuff when stuck.
pointerParticipantAs an oldschool RPG and Might and Magic fan, this double entry was more than I ever hoped for. Too much, actually.
The idea of using one party to complete both games back-to-back seemed great. I enjoyed Clouds of Xeen a lot, and was looking forward to the second game.
But by the time I finally crossed over to the Darkside, I was tired of the mechanics and ready to move on to a different game. Maybe I just lacked the patience back then, YMMV.
pointerParticipantI never played this one, but it reminds me of playing Archimedean Dynasty from 1996.
Maybe the podcast could do an episode on submarine games, or even naval simulators in general. Those were kind of a trend in the 90s.
pointerParticipantTiger’s experience makes me ask – should a game be judged by itself, that Raptor isn’t that great compared to any other games, or should we compare it to others in the genre at that time, that Raptor is still second best of many other shmups?
Because it’s not my genre either, so my experience was lukewarm too. But I still remember being impressed by it back then, both graphically and, if I remember correctly, it being one of those games requiring a 386.
pointerParticipantI played it briefly. It’s a nice mix of arcade-y combat with light RPG elements, but you need to get quite good at the combat to get anywhere. I never had the patience, but from videos it seems once you’re good enough the game isn’t that long.
Looks like one of the games where most of the playtime is spent failing and dying until you’re good enough not to.
pointerParticipantCaptain Blood had a truly unique dialogue interface with a fairly large predefined set of words/terms that presented the illusion that the player had the ability to express themselves in complex ways and actually be understood.
It straddles the divide between static/predefined lines of a dialog tree (which limits queries to a fixed set) and full free text parsers (which limits queries to simple keywords).
It’s implemented as an interpreter with scripts for each NPC with a large number of responses, that are linked to queries in specific ways – it’s roughly keyword based, but just a bit more complex than that.
The result… doesn’t really work I’d say. You are still left to guess what to say to prompt a response, and the responses range between tangentially related to what you said and entirely random, and are usually hard to understand as well. Mostly, it’s the worst of both worlds.
But dammit they tried. On some days, I still think the system has potential to be revolutionary… if you tune it just the right way… and write the right scripts… in the right contexts…then maybe?
More details of their implementation at
http://bringerp.free.fr/RE/CaptainBlood/main.php5
pointerParticipantI faintly remember playing this one. Maybe I just had the demo.
I think in some ways it was above average, but it came out in the great RTS craze of the mid-90s, so in my opinion it struggled to really stand out.
pointerParticipantIn Cryo’s tradition, this game had beautiful VGA graphics. Those smooth palette transitions were incredibly mesmerizing back then and generally the game looks amazing for 1992.
Beautiful music too, Spice Opera is one of the great videogame soundtracks.
The gameplay is decent, especially for Cryo. The straightforward management of resources works well enough, but it’s really the package as a whole that makes this game memorable.
pointerParticipant
pointerParticipantClassic Silmarils greatness/weirdness, probably more approachable than the rest.
I had the French version and didn’t understand a thing, just stumbled through most of the game somehow. Oh, and damn those spiders.
Halfway through the game I got stuck on a strange obstacle and to this day I never figured out whether it was a bug, copy protection or I just didn’t do what I had to.
pointerParticipantThis one’s kind of my favorite. You design your colonies, you design your spaceships, you even design your diplomatic contracts, allowing for some pretty interesting negotiations.
The ways to deal with opposing factions were just as varied, from covert spy sabotage missions, through overt attacks with ships and swarms of missiles (some nice variety there too), you could even drive whole colonies/asteroids into one another.
Not an easy game though, and the fixed realtime meant alternating calm downtimes with panic-filled chaos when everything went wrong at the same time.
This game taught me basics of hex edit hacking for money. Not having to sell your key resources helps a lot, but even when cheating, the game can be a handful. And autohotkey scripts to automate common tasks were a godsend.
pointerParticipantGood one, the multiplayer in this one was a real threat to friendships.
pointerParticipantYeah, the thing I remember about this one (aside from being a great shooter) is the distinct aesthetic. Visually it was both smooth and jagged, dark and light, and used a very strange effect for “reflective” surfaces. The whole game had kind of a dreamy, surreal quality to it, but was also going for comedy at times.
Smooth feeling to the gameplay. Impressive zoom distance in sniper mode for the time, although I think the levels were mostly linear and enclosed, more like an arcade.
Well done sounds and (I think) music, it was almost like a spectacle fighter.
pointerParticipantAs I remember the story was the classic “big evil corp against noble natives”, but the world and characters were well crafted and the 2D/3D combination was very exceptional.
It was a great RPG. “great” as in good, and “great” as in quite long. This is a game you dive into.
And yes, the graphics are lovely, the 2D art is especially beautiful to this day.
pointerParticipantThis game had a realistic feeling to it, probably thanks to the backstory and the simulation of the entire solar system. The distances were real and you felt like you were a pioneer breaking new ground.
The ship orders and pipelining system was also quite novel, useful for automating resource transfers.
And the manual planet exploration satisfied the innate drive to gather resources yourself, it was quite enjoyable.
pointerParticipantGood tip.
As far as I know this is the first mouselook game. Also one of the first to have had actual 3D enemies, including humanoids. Also the amazing intro theme, and in general the atmosphere was pretty good.
I remember the oppressive mood, especially in some of the indoor areas. Those damn missile turrets hit hard like it was going out of style.
Looking at some gameplay now, it’s more freeform/open world than I remember. The Daggerfall xngine roots are clearly visible.
