7th guest is pretty great! i love the hammy acting and pixelated fmvs. the puzzles are fun! the animations between points are so much more immersive than transitioning between static images a la myst, though they do take time. you definitely want to be sure about your movements before committing to them!
i still like ultima underworld 2 over the first game, but i honestly feel like most western rpgs have pretty lousy mechanics and try to make up for it with better world simulation/design
on a side note, reminder that CRPG Addictâs blog is still an ongoing thing
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Yeah, the DOS catalog is lacking in a lot of areas but not RPGs. Nor flight sims. Jesus there are a lot of flight sims.
I actually hate how the transitional animations break flow in these games. I need to wander around and look at different things over and over again to start to form an overall picture in my head of how everything fits together, and interstitial unskippable crap makes that so painful.
yeah like if youâre specifically looking for console role playing games that were not jRPGs on the NES and the SNES, you have to go in for stuff like âSNES shadowrun was good!â which â OK, it kind of was, but itâs also clearly not memorable in the way jRPG contemporaries were and has very little on CRPGs on other platforms, then or now.
japanese SRPGs did get good around this time but the vast majority of those were not localized, and those are still much more analogous to jRPGs than to CRPGs, i.e., not really centred on âroleplayingâ
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on a related note iâve actually been following a japanese playthrough of snes shadowrun, i never got that far in it personally but always thought it was interesting and ambitious and tried things nobody else was doing at the time.
it had an official japanese translation, somehow. even more bizarre: it just left the english text in place and added an overlay on the other side of the screen with the translation. iâve never seen that done in any game before, just videos!
the translation to jp is real bad though. somehow âthose shadowrunners making a racket all hours of the day!â became âbecause those runners are shooting rockets at each other all the time!â which⌠well, itâs not out of placeâŚ
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it helps that the game (7th guest) is set in a constrained interior and there arenât any egregious pixel hunts for interactivity (interactive zones are HUGE in this game. you really canât miss them). you can see what you need to see in most scenes the first time without having to backtrack overmuch. you spend the vast majority of the game staring at puzzles and watching fmvâs, not navigating. otherwise, i agree; just like lengthy and/or unskippable death animations are the bane of difficult platformers, lengthy animations in a typical adventure game are just a recipe for frustration.
however, i will say my spatial orientation in 7th guest is much more fleshed out as compared to myst et al - the 90 degree turns and several-meter steps really disorient me and i have to keep turning the camera and connecting the dots.
Iâve never actually played the SNES Shadowrun, but I count Genesis Shadowrun as one of the great console RPGs. And itâs not that I hate JRPGs. I can admit that some are great. Dragon Quest III-V, Final Fantasy IV-VI, some Shin Megami Tenseis and SaGa games all belong on a list of great RPGs of the era. But for me, the western computer RPGs of the time were overall much more complex and mechanically interesting.
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yeah I mean most jRPGs are pretty bad as roleplaying games and I feel like thatâs something we can just accept and move on with at this point
Genesis Shadowrun is very good and very underrated.
I dont understand why the broader culture only talks about the SNES game when Gen Shadowrun was just so forward thinking.
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shadowrun (snes):barkley gaiden 1::shadowrun (md):barkley gaiden 2 (?)
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megadrive shadowrun is actually a better shadowrun game than dragonfall but the audio is horrendous and it has the extremely daunting open-endedness typical of 16-bit CRPGs
whereas SNES shadowrun is fairly conservative but still a pretty happy and playable medium between jRPGs and CRPGs of the era
its only better in the sense that its the only good one set in seattle which is the setting that works best for shadowrun
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and I suppose the open-endedness helps.
dragonfall is about as linear and mechanically straightforward as witcher 3, it succeeds largely on the basis of being solid and very, very well scripted, written, and realized
There were a few ports at least. At least one of the Bardâs Tale games got an NES port.
wish theyâd done every console ultima like this. or somebody would port the nes graphics to a pc version.
Honestly, I liked Dragonfall and all, but didnât find it nearly as impressive as you seem to. The writing was merely adequate and the combat system was just kind of⌠there. Plus I hated that it turns into a SAVE THE WORLD plot, which is the worst kind of Shadowrun story.
you played it before the definitive edition which added a lot of really, really well-handled mass effect style âloyalty questsâ for each character iirc
the combat is only adequate I agree, itâs no original sin, but itâs still one of the most accessible lite CPRGs by modern standards
Donât really remember honestly.
Maybe I was just underwhelmed by the fact that, knowing absolutely nothing specific about the game, I said to myself, âThis is a western CRPG, the way to both exploit XP gain and see the most written content is to prioritize charisma/speech and lockpick/hacking and then just specialize in sniping to get my way through combat,â and I was 100% right. Canât we get past Fallout already?
I do have to play New Torment, thoughâŚ