I played through Secret Agent again to figure out how accurate my comparisons with Crystal Caves were. Basically, it has more variety than I remember it having, though it also has the same problem as Crystal Caves with levels having potentially unwinnable states (contrary to my memories). Oh well.
On a different note, somebody released a ZZT world in the year of 2017: Atop the Witch’s Tower. It’s good!
Witcher 3’s combat makes the character building completely irrelevant. You can dodge like a lunatic and cast invincibility from the get go. I like the game and all, but CD Projekt is really really clueless about combat.
I also wanted to respond to cuba’s “I could just play invisible inc if I just wanted the natural evolution of fallout combat” line and never did!
invisible inc is fantastic but it’s not so much the pinnacle of CPRG combat as a solution to every major design problem with new XCom (that its own sequel totally failed to resolve) – it’s a game about cautious exploration of spacious levels that relies highly on hidden information and orchestrating your entire team perfectly to resolve scenarios that are as tight as they can go; it’s not minimalist per se (it’s a much better game for how much junk is in there), but it exclusively creates very tight challenges and most of these work because the game deliberately limits your savescumming, so it’s only forgiving or flexible up to a point.
original sin, conversely, is the pinnacle of fallout combat; you have regular ol’ random battles but combat is just relentlessly interesting and well-paced and satisfyingly tuned despite the ridiculous number of possible combinations on hand and things that can go unexpectedly wrong at any given time (my favourite, though I think they somewhat overuse it if anything, is a pool of blood from a dead enemy becoming conductive after someone casts a lightning spell and everyone standing in the pool of blood getting stunned).
I believe Invisible Inc’s tightness would be a flaw in a game as big as XCOM, though. It’s just exhausting at a certain scale.
it’s not that much smaller!
though I was dismayed to find out the expansion (that adds a bunch of fun new characters and items) also lengthens the campaign, which feels like a mistake
i should reinstall it and try to beat the expansion campaign. i was able to do the normal one, but, well, that’s half the length, so…
I actually think it’s too long, the normal campaign is a perfect length, the expansion campaign is like, temptation to cheat because you don’t want to push a single run that far again
i felt like the normal campaign didn’t give some of the macro-level mechanics time to breathe, when i played it, so i was kind of hoping that would be more of a thing with the expansion
Reviving this thread to link to Stunt Island.
It was a Disney game that let you play as a stunt person, and every quest was basically “do this stunt scene”, but the real fun of the game was making and filming your own stunts. Basically, think of an ancient version of director mode for GTA V.
Here’s some dude’s movies.
I keep thinking about Elder Scrolls: Arena for some reason. It really lodged into my brain, even though I played it well after Skyrim was out.
Just gonna post my LP here:
god my thumbnails were awful. so embarrassing
I didn’t even make thumbnails, womp womp
i remember thinking the elder scrolls arena speedrun at agdq was absolutely hilarious
Why would you deliberately put a cartoon-youtuber face dreamworks-smirking in your thumbnails? Clicks aren’t worth going there…
i wanted to be a youtuber okaaaaaayyyy
I actually got the caricature from a friend in trade for a song. She’s a great artist but I think I may have led her too far down the caricature road.
edit: oh, oops this turned out long
I played through most of the King’s Quests(1,2,4+6) when the first cd-rom collection came out, which is a long time ago now, but recent enough that the first entries were already archaic. I still thought there was something enjoyable about them even if most complaints would probably also be valid. Lifting most of the story elements from fairytales give them a kind of innocent vibe and timeless quality, while they also retain the kind of casual brutality that pops up in fairytales, like a witch randomly appearing, capturing you and eating you. I remember being genuinely frightened of parts of KQ4 as a kid, though it likely wouldn’t work as well as an adult. There’s still something to be said for that I think, though It’s likely you’d have to be in a certain frame of mind to be receptive/appreciative of it. You’d also have to be fine with the clunkyness of the mechanics. I don’t know if I would be today. KQ6 is by far the best I think, and feels much more advanced and modern than the earlier ones. I remember it being much less stiff in tone and just having more personality than the others. I think Jane Jensen had a big influence in making that one.
The Quest for Glory games had much more personality and humour in general than KQ, though I only played the first two. They’re among my all time faves still. The second originally came with a physical map of mazelike alleyways you have to navigate, so that’s cumbersome to deal with I guess. What’s neat about them aside from everything else is how they straddle the genres of adventure and rpg in a good way. Maybe not terribly deep for someone coming from the rpg side of things, but still. It works well + feels (or felt when playing years ago) natural
Little Big Adventure 1 + 2 are just very likable for some reason I can’t pinpoint. They feel like of a time when a lot was still up in the air when coming to terms with action-adventures in a “3D”-space (isometric, but also a clean polygonal look). But also just charming and odd.
Marshmallow Duel was the only shareware game I ever actually registered, though imo the full version broke the game by overloading it with features. Functionally it’s like a stripped down Outfoxies. Two player only, with no computer opponent. The moveset and the weapons/powers of the unregistered version work really well together and gives a lot of room for play and surprising turns.
Elastomania/Action Supercross: Action Supercross(commonly originally referred to as across) was already a phenomenon with tons of fanmade levels before it changed name to Elastomania and seemingly got even bigger. I think the Trials series which gained popularity some years ago was likely patterned after it, but Trials went a more realistic route. Elastomania(or across) was initially most notable for the ridiculous physics that nevertheless felt internally consistent, sort of like a cartoon. The goal is much like the Trackmania games to shave seconds off your time, with hitting the quick restart button just as much a part of the process as anything else.
Ugh! (1992) is a pedal driven helicopter taxi game set in some combination of stone age/jurassic etc. eras. Again a game that plays a lot with physics. You carry passengers from location to location, pick up boulders to drop on trees for fruit/fuel or on dinosaurs to stun them so you can get a window for picking up a fare without getting rammed. There’s nuance that comes into play like maneuvering just right to get a time bonus while being careful not to knock into anything and lose a life; Landing quickly nearby a passenger being careful not to touch them and knocking them in the water(Being quick to land in the water so they can swim to your helicopter before they drown if you do); Building momentum enough to dunk the helicopter under a passage filled with water, etc. There a similar earlier game called Space Taxi that I haven’t played, but the physics of Ugh! feels very good.
The Commander Keen series are good, though the last three are noticably smoother to play than the first three. Keen Dreams is sort of an inbetween that’s still closer to the last three. The Fourth is the most diverse in environments and my fave.
I actually really love C-Dogs, so it’s funny that you mention Cyberdogs. I think you can find a currently-working version to play online, the guy went ham with that game.
Funny that I see this thread because I just picked up a Thinkpad 380ED (Pentium MMX @166mhz) with a docking station (so I can get a gameport), a PS/2 optical mouse and am prepping an installation of MS-DOS 7.11 (thanks, China DOS Union). Also am throwing a KingSpec 8GB SSD in there because I’m extra as hell.
I figure I could also just install Windows 95 if I really wanted to, but I actually want to keep this at only DOS games. I’m already brushing back up on all of my old DOS tricks to ensure that different games can run, since some games rely only on the conventional memory and others don’t like it if you have EMM386 running, etc…
the quest for glory 2 remake has a “simple alleys” option
Got my Thinkpad! But, some games crash out just as they start. Solar Winds, for example, will start in every configuration possible, but as soon as it gets to the part where the game has to take my inputs, it freezes within the first second, whether I supply any input or not.
Some other games also crash when the main game routine seems to be loading, like Valhalla / Ragnarok. Memory seems OK, though. Odd.