yeah it doesn’t need anything other than making it behave properly on the resolution/window/platform you want
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I didn’t even know Fallout 1 had mods.
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I just checked this out and it looks very cute! I like the digital motion tweening art style, probably because I grew up on flash games and this look is nostalgic to me. I haven’t played the first one though.
what are good quake custom single player maps? are there like custom episodes like you get with doom wads? this is new to me, i got the link but am not sure what to look for
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Huge recommendation for Arcane Dimensions which is a bunch of levels built around a hub (which is how most quake level packs work, different creators, not really a Campaign-y flow). Also recommend using Quake Injector which makes downloading and installing pretty much any levels/mods a breeze.
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I presume someone got here before me but the Hard Off/Book Off discourse in this got me because sure they’re separate companies but corporates going to corporate and therefore both are part of the Hard Off Group https://www.hardoff.co.jp/en/ please issue a correction posthaste
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There is also a Quake sourceport called Mark V that has the Injector built in so you can look for and download maps from within the game itself.
Most new maps will be based on Quakespasm though so if you’re not already using it you might download it just to have it for ease of use:
https://quakewiki.org/wiki/Engines#Unofficial_engine_list
Quakespasm is based on Fitzquake so you can also use that if you like. There is also an update to Quakespasm called Quakespasm Spiked or QSS which some newer maps and mods require to work correctly so just make sure you check those readme files when trying out new maps. It’s not uncommon to have like a dozen different sourceports in your Quake folder (I know I do).
Here is a youtube playlist of recommended single player vanilla maps:
And another for non-vanilla maps:
Here’s a video on how to release a map which also explains how you go about uploading and downloading maps from Quaddicted:
Here are the links to Quaddicted and Quake Injector:
https://www.quaddicted.com/
https://www.quaddicted.com/tools/quake_injector
And this is Func_MSGBoard:
https://www.celephais.net/board/forum.php
This is one of the main hubs of the mapping community and a good place to find threads about new maps to play.
Here is a recent post from the doom thread about SB recommended Quake maps:
Some other big name projects to peep: Quoth, Warpspasm and Arcane Dimensions which tt_zop already mentioned. Most of these projects stray very far away from the vanilla gameplay by adding new monsters and weapons and abilities and things which might not be something you’re into so if you’re looking to keep the experience pure just look for “vanilla Quake maps” like the ones recommended in the playlist I linked up above.
Welcome to Quake!
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damn things have moved on since 96
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A good place to start if you’re looking for something professionally developed is Dimensions of the Past:
It’s an unofficial “Episode V” from Machinegames, who developed the recent Wolfenstein games.
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BOOK ON??!
I’ve never seen a Book On. There have been Book Offs directly connected with new book stores.
Yeah I haven’t seen one either, but then again I wasn’t exactly looking for those when I was over there, haha
Did OCRemix wipe their database at some point or did F-Zero really only have eight remixes in the site’s 20 year history?
Should I start playing the Cold Steel games? It looks fairly conventional in comparison to Trails in the Sky but is there enough there to recommend a playthrough? Trails has always interested me because it just looks sanded down to perfection and doesn’t lean to heavily into anime tropes? There just seems to be a palpable elegance to that game that interests me but I don’t know enough about the Cold Steel series to make a judgement.
All Falcom games lean into anime tropes, it’s just Sky leaned into the tropes of its era and likewise Cold Steel leans into the tropes of its own. I think Sky comes off better now because 80s/90s fantasy anime JRPGs are now quaint and nostalgic. What do set the Trails games apart is the consistency of world building. Most NPCs in the entire game getting new dialogue after every story event with their own mini-plotlines helps build the feeling that the world is dense. Even though they’re just small things like a mom NPC talking about trying to get her son into a private school and the son NPC talking about how he doesn’t want to go to the private school and their situation progresses across the game, while every JRPG tends to have some consistency in topics among NPCs Trails just does it a lot more. The stories themselves aren’t anything special, it just adds more character to each town.
That said, Cold Steel doesn’t have an original bone in its body and you need to be playing it for that junk food to like it. The broad concept can sound like it has potential: you get one game entirely about school life and taking field trips to all the towns in the game map so you get to know everyone on campus and in the towns. And this is all just setup, because (spoiling in case you want to know absolutely nothing about premise of the series) war breaks out and everyone you know scatters to the winds. In the second game you then have your wacky RPG adventures and gradually find all those school classmates/NPCs living in the towns you previously got acquainted with before, and you have to help them out of their situations to get the gang back together to help in the fight. But it’s a modern magic/fantasy school anime. Since the games have no originality you already know all of the characters’ personalities, histories, relationships, and upcoming plot lines solely based on their anime character archetype.
There really isn’t anything new or particularly interesting about the Cold Steel games outside that Trails quirk of consistent world building, even if it’s building a world of characters you’ve seen a million a times. But after all the recent new Trails news I have actually been considering going back and finishing Cold Steel 2 instead of playing a good game, so sometimes you just want to eat some junk food.
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I hear this brought up whenever someone recommends Trails games and I am both fascinated by this because obviously a lot of work went into it but also I cannot understand who this is for. Who plays JRPGs for the npc townsperson dialogue? Are you like expected to go back to old towns to see how things are progressing amongst the townsfolk just for fun? Or is it one of those things that is just like kind of cool for the first little bit and then you just forget about it?
This isn’t meant to be snarky so I hope it doesn’t come off as such, just something is shorting out in my brain when I hear “the best part about this game is how many times you get to talk to npc townspeople” but enough people have given recommendations on this merit alone so there must be something there.
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“go back into the village and talk to everyone again to see if one of them will have new dialogue that triggers the game to move on to the next part of the plot” is a common enough strategy in JRPGs that it is nice when writers take the time to actually make something interesting happening when you do this, instead of just having 9/10 of them still say “The weather is so nice today! I’m afraid to go into the forest because of the MONSTERS.”
then once you realize this is something that is possible, it becomes kind of fun to revisit old places and see what has changed.
JRPGs can be something that is slightly more like actual world building/role playing than just a dumb turn based battle system attached to a generic anime plot, but… most of them aren’t that good.
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Now I’m imagining a JRPG that basically has like a handful of towns that you keep bouncing between throughout the game with a real cast of characters for NPCs instead of the standard “visit a town once and then maybe again at the very end of the game for a chance at a secret item” like most post 16bit JRPGs, and I can totally see how this might be cool. Appreciate the response! (I’ve been trying to psyche myself up for a legend of heroes playthrough for years, maybe 2021??)
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I would never use it as the selling point. No one in their right mind would talk to every NPC in the entire game every 30 minutes for 70 hours, and to be honest there are probably more efficient ways in which to update NPC dialogue based on where exactly the players are likely to travel to wherever they are in the game. I think most JRPGs already did that; they’d just update NPC dialogue at times where you’d probably be going to their region already for quests and side quests.
Then again, I did go walk through the entire game world and talk to every NPC in the game after every single story event. Was it worth it? No, but I can confirm that there sure are a lot of NPCs that have a lot of writing. By the end of Sky FC I was playing at 2X-8X speed via Cheat Engine to get me from place to play, and I burned out so much that I was using Cheat Engine generously in Sky SC and not talking to NPCs as much, so I probably missed the occasionally Actually Cool NPC Interaction in the second game. Apparently there’s some priest who’s dialogue towards the end of Sky SC implies out of nowhere that he’s probably thousands of years old and this never comes up before or afterward? I’d believe it though. That place was sketchy.
That said,
This is literally the Trails games. Sky has like 4 towns? Cold Steel maybe 5 (at least in the first game)? The first games of Sky and Cold Steel introduce you to the towns and their people, and the second games just has you revisit those same towns for new story and adventures. And they all have same NPCs continuing their same mini-plots or having some new ones. So if you’re into the anime junk food, the world building here has a consistency that isn’t often attempted.
I’m sure that saves a lot of money on designing sequels, though maybe the amount of writing cancels it out? I don’t know how the project management costs work there.
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The Trails wiki has 425 named NPCs for Sky FC and each one has a biography page. Many are longer than you’d expect (maybe they were more involved with side quests?).
I was gonna say that you probably just missed checking the entries for the various sequels in the series besides the SNES originals but looking it up and I guess that just brings the grand total up to… 11