Lucas' 260 RPGs Corner

[octavius]

There's another chronological maniac playing the same games (and also Adventure games) and blogging about it.

 

[Sigourn]

There's another chronological maniac playing the same games (and also Adventure games) and blogging about it.

His dedication is commendable, but felipepepe was right. Understanding the games is good enough, there's no need to "play to win". Even now I'm wondering what "understanding" actually means. Playing through Baldur's Gate once and winning it is nowhere near as close as actually knowing everything about Baldur's Gate by playing it multiple times.

So far it's been pretty easy, as the games I've played are so basic you only need one playthrough to get to know all about them (memorizing the mechanics is another thing). One way or another, I made PLATO games the exception since I honestly don't feel like winning some sort of multiplayer experiment for college students. Look up that guy's blog, it took him a fucking year to beat dnd, and he even said something along the lines of "I don't feel better".

On commercial RPGs, the ship has already sailed, and I would feel "bad" for at least not winning those in my list. If I can't make it through hours of repetitive dungeon crawling in Dunjonquest, then certainly I won't be ready for Wizardry IV.

 

[felipepepe]

Even now I'm wondering what "understanding" actually means. Playing through Baldur's Gate once and winning it is nowhere near as close as actually knowing everything about Baldur's Gate by playing it multiple times.

Exactly, that's a key point. How much playtime one needs to write about complex RPGs properly? How many playthroughts of Fallout 2 do you need? How many party compositions in BG2 (+solo, +mods?).

IMHO (and I want to write an article about this to contest "too many games" claims), knowing most RPGs (and games in general) is something like this:

The first few hours, where you get past the tutorial, form your party, battle, get gear, level up a bit and explore the world & mechanics are where you learn like 50-60% about the game. Then there's a huge plateau, and a final spike as the game ends (althought it's usually a narrative spike, not gameplay one). For subsequent playthroughts the formula repeats, as you ty new party, builds, etc... you're always learning, but there's diminishing returns.

Of course, since 90% of modern games use the three-act structure there's a mid-game point where things change - talking to Ravel, learning of the Master & its super mutants, going to Spellhold, ringing the two bells, etc.. - usually these are mostly narrative twists that one NEEDS to know to talk about the game (and also changes objectives, party composition, location, etc), but rarely they introduce new gameplay mechanics, so the plateau quickly returns, until the ending when we get the final twists and maybe a "A OR B?!" choice or ending slides.

Starting over again leads to a new spike, as you try a new build / party and usually try to "break stuff", but then the plateau returns and diminishing returns strikes heavily. OR it's a shitty RPG and you've seen everything already.

Point is, the key moment are the first hours. After playing like 2-3 hours or any game you can say you have an idea of how it works.
From there, you'll likely need 20-30hs to simply finish, and possibly over 80 to truly know and understand it. Possibly more, for games like BG2, JA2, Dwarf Fotress, etc...

This gap is ridiculous, it's unreasonable. IMHO, if you want to learn about games, play a few hours of every game you can find. Then come back for the ones you find worthy - or just read the major plot points & late-game gameplay changes in a good wiki / review. You won't become an expert in that particular game, but you'll have played, read what it's about and spent all those hours in a better, more deserving game.

 

[Sigourn]

Point is, the key moment are the first hours. After playing like 2-3 hours or any game you can say you have an idea of how it works.
From there, you'll likely need 20-30hs to simply finish, and possibly over 80 to truly know and understand it. Possibly more, for games like BG2, JA2, Dwarf Fotress, etc...

This gap is ridiculous, it's unreasonable. IMHO, if you want to learn about games, play a few hours of every game you can find. Then come back for the ones you find worthy - or just read the major plot points & late-game gameplay changes in a good wiki / review. You won't become an expert in that particular game, but you'll have played, read what it's about and spent all those hours in a better, more deserving game.

Yup, that's exactly how I'm feeling right now. I don't know, I'll beat Hellfire Warrior and see how things proceed. Honestly I'm feeling this way because these Dunjonquest are unnecessarily long, repetitive, and boring. Maybe my perspective will be different with games like Wizardry I-III, as at least those are fun.

 

[Sigourn]

9) HELLFIRE WARRIOR: COMPLETED (GOOD RIDDANCE)
Automated Simulations, 1980 (Apple II)

At least the ending lived up to the cover art, right...? NO.
​

This is a rant post. If you want to know why this game is terrible, keep reading. Otherwise, wait for my next update, where I'll play Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure.

After my rant the other day, I decided I would complete this game. Hellfire Warrior was not going to beat me (and that's the last time I type this game's name). In the end, I resorted to AppleWin's speed-up feature to get through the 7th and 8th levels. I can't stress enough how slow this game is. It takes ages to load one single room; it takes ages to kill an enemy, especially if it's one of those that hit you multiple times; it takes ages to turn around; it takes ages to move; it takes ages to advance through the written sections of the game. Everything in this game takes ages, plain and simple. It's so stupidly slow it makes Pokémon Ruby seem like the fastest game ever made when I first ran it at 10% speed on a computer that was old as shit. That's how slow this fucking game is.

My thoughts: felipepepe has it right in his handbook. The Temple of Apshai is worth talking about. It's worth playing, definitely, if only to see what games were back then. But the sequel is essentially the same game with not much to write home about. I won't talk about the features I previously talked about, other than to say the following things:

- If you add potions into your game, they should be useful. At the very least, the manual should tell you what do they even do.
- In any videogame, a level has to be as long as possible assuming the player isn't bothered by that longness. For example, I really wanted to play more of Gothic. I really wanted to play more of Fallout: New Vegas. I really feel this game is two levels too long. There's nothing new to see. There's nothing new to do. Enemies are all basically the same, with different sprites and names. So why play through four levels of this shit? With this in mind, I'm officially not playing the expansions to these two games. All I needed to know was given to me by the first levels of Temple of Apshai. Everything else was an absolute waste of time. And a waste of time indeed, because I didn't even had fun with the games.
- There's barely any progression, unless you consider enchanting your equipment all the way to +9. Essentially, the game always offers the same challenge, with the exception of the beginning of the game. There aren't really any huge jumps of difficulty at any moment. And that is because once you pretty much map one level, you are absolutely ready for the next game. I never felt like a strong character, because every. single. enemy. was always trying to fight me, making my progress through the game much slower than it needed be.
- The last part of the fourth level of this title is the worst ending of any game I've played. My Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Famicom videogame had a far better, most interesting ending than this piece of crap. You are expected to find a ring in the middle of a big ass room that takes ages to explore, but the game never gives you any hint you need to find that ring. You only find that out by reading the appropiate HINT ciphered in the game's manual, but why should I read that hint to begin with? Shouldn't there be a clue somewhere? One way or another, after you find that ring, you are meant to go west, go through a shitload of traps and filler enemies, only to encounter a Demon that was a joke at that point of the game. You get to defeat the Demon and rescue the warrior maid Brynhild, who sadly looks no different than the rest of the "treasures" in this game. Afterwards, you make your way out of that section, once again, pursued by one enemy per room, and if you kill them, they spawn another one anyway (this is the most common thing in this game, and why I stopped giving a shit about fights altogether once I noticed most enemies couldn't even damage me). Make it back to the start of the level, and you win.
- Why this game uses a weird "press 1 to 9" movement system instead of tile-based movement like that of Pokémon or Ultima sincerely baffles me. Few things are more annoying than overshooting the entrance to a room, or falling short of it.

I honestly want to talk to the people who made this game. I want to know what were they thinking. Were they solely concerned about the money? Did they actually think this was a great title that needed to see the light of day? We will never know. I really didn't want to come to the phrase "If I find a game is shit, I will simply leave it", and I hope the Dunjonquest series is the huge exception, but this game leaves me no choice but to call it literally unplayable.

Screenshot gallery:

Spoiler

Fighting the "deadliest creature" ever made, according to the manual.

The Demon from the cover. A shame he looks like the rest of the fiendlike enemies.

Treasure #10 is Brynhild. This whole enterprise was so pointless she doesn't even have any value.

My end-game stats. I will never enter the pit again.

Level 7 map. Level 8's is so straightforward but at the same so pointless I won't even upload it here.

 

[Sigourn]

10) ODYSSEY: THE COMPLEAT APVENTURE: PLAYED
Robert Clardy , 1980 (Apple II)

A game tainted by terrible design choices and questionable level scaling
​

Let me preface this by saying something important: from now on, my only objective is to play all the games in my lists. In the case of the sequel to Temple of Apshai, I won the game but decided I wasted my time. From now on, I'll play the games, but only to get used to the mechanics, and I'll only finish those which aren't a complete bore. This way, if you see me complete a game, it is worth your time. If you don't see me complete it, it's a game best left forgotten. I wish I could edit the OP to reflect these things, but alas, I cannot. In other words, this thread will pretty much work like my own "CRPG Addict" blog, except without his charisma, his passion for the genre, and certainly not his patience, as this review will show.

Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure is essentially a sequel to Wilderness Campaign, which I played and won before. Wilderness Campaign improved on Dungeon Campaign in almost every way I can think of. Odyssey, however, is a complete step backward. The game plays fairly similar to the previous title, with some notable, and regrettable, differences:

- Landmarks aren't visible in your map from the start of the game. In a world where moving takes a lot of time and food, this is a problem. I'll get on that in a minute.
- Level scaling makes its first appearance in the series, and in this thread overall. As you get better equipment, the enemies get better equipment. You get stronger, the enemies get stronger. Your party size increases, the enemy's party size increases too. Essentially, you can never get stronger in this game. In Wilderness Campaign, you could get ridiculously strong. It made the game a joke. But level scaling wasn't the solution to that problem, at all. It only made Odyssey infuriatingly frustrating.
- Encounters have been overhauled. Now you can encounter parties of warriors, and it's up to you to decide whether to wait for them to do something, attack them, or try and befriend them. If they are friendlies, they will join you. If not, they will attack you. This is a good addition to the game.
- Alignment is introduced in Odyssey. It works like you would expect: attack friendly groups, your alignment goes down. Be nice, and it goes up. There's one flaw, however: the game clearly isn't designed around you behaving "properly". Getting treasure is such a pain in the ass you will most likely end up attacking friendly groups just to get as much loot as you can. This is something the CRPG Addict notices as well.
- Random hazards can now be surpassed depending on the things you have on you. As opposed to Wilderness Campaign, you can now use items such as nets to help recover your men trapped inside a pit, for example. A simple, but nice addition that adds some complexity into the game.
- Combat has been "dumbed down" by quite a bit. First, because of the level scaling. Second, because the interface isn't nearly as complex as it used to be. One needs only to compare the pictures from this gallery to the pictures I posted earlier.
- You still can't sell your stuff. Moreover, you don't get the stuff your fallen foes were carrying. Did you manage to defeat 20 warriors who had Plate Armor? Tough shit, you best buy that yourself from a shopkeeper.
- Unlike in Wilderness Campaign, every location you can explore has just one treasure to be found. Couple that with the fact locations don't appear in your map, and that travelling requires food packets, and you are trapped in a cycle of "I haven't found enough treasure -> I can't buy Food -> I can't explore for more treasure". Oh, and you also need to gather around 2500 Quadroons to be able to buy the ship to advance to the next stage of the game. Which brings me too...
- The sailing portion of this game is the most frustrating scenario I've ever seen in any videogame I've ever played. I'm trying to remember anything like it in a commercial game, but I just can't. The CRPG Addict made a pretty good description of this portion of the game, so you may want to read it from him. In few words: you have to set your sails to accommodate for the wind direction, you have to properly pull your anchor up or down, the wind is shifting all the fucking time, you encounter different enemies and the game never makes it clear how to actually fight them (as, for some reason I don't undertand, fighting overseas doesn't use the same window as fighting on the land), meaning I had to repeatedly tap "A" (for Attack) and "F" (for Firing your cannons) just in case. Eventually my ship crashed into an island (because it's practically unavoidable) and I gave up on the game, as who knows how much work it would have taken me to solve that section of the game. It didn't help that I had to adjust my sails while my ship kept moving, meaning I had to consider where the wind was coming from while making this decision. In addition, so much can happen overseas and messages pop up so fast you miss 50% of the things you are being told.

Thankfully Chet explains what happens at the end, and I feel I haven't really missed anything.

If you know what game suffered from being way too similar to its predecessor, Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure suffers from being drastically different, trying to "fix" what wasn't broken to begin with. The combat in Wilderness Campaign was a joke at a certain point, but aren't cRPGs suppoed to be like that? It's needed for that sense of progression to be there. In this game, however, I actually felt punished for getting stronger, as fights became really a roll of a dice (Luck) with me hoping it would give me the slight edge I needed to pummel the enemies. It was particularly frustrating to see the "recruit" mechanic was removed from the previous title. Now, your best hope to recruit warriors was by trying to befriend random enemies which, if they turned out to be bandits, caught you by surprise and negatively affected your chance in battle.

Overall, I can't recommend this game to anyone. Not even as a significant piece of "RPG history", because Wilderness Campaign was truly the pinnacle of the three games, and a surprisingly fun experience at that. The only positive aspect to this game is that it can theoretically be easily won in one day (I played it for around 3 hours, which was enough to reach the sailing section). Because I've already mentioned the CRPG Addict's blog, look for images on this game over there. You will see there's actually not much to see that you haven't already seen done (and better) in Wilderness Campaign.

Once again: I would rather extensively play only the games I find interesting (Akalabeth, Wilderness Campaign, and many more to come, and play enough of the shit games (such as this one) to know how they worked. If someone has something to say about this, feel free to leave a comment explaining your thoughts.

EDIT: Before posting this entry, I gave the ship section of the game another go. At one point, I waited FIVE MINUTES before the wind or the current was favorable to me. Those favorable conditions never came, and thus, this game was deleted forever from my computer, never to be seen again. I didn't want to start a trend of "it sucks so I'll skip it", but in retrospective, playing a game and beating it, when a) It sucks, and b) It didn't really move the genre forward, is sort of pointless. However, I am a patient person, and I will definitely be patient through other games, provided they are worth it. Spending two hours trying to solve a stupid section in a game just because the programmer had a brain fart doesn't count as "worth my time", however.

I made some tweaks to my lists. I've moved a few games to the bottom. Those are games I won't play, but that were previously in the list. I've also color-coded with Red games that I don't recommend at all, and in Yellow games that I "sort of recommend", if only because in some way they are useful to understand certain things (for example, Dungeon Campaign is a good game to play to see how much progress did Wilderness Campaign do by comparison). In light blue are games present in felipepepe's cRPG Handbook.

With that said, now I'll be playing Rogue (1980), a game that's been waiting for me a while already.

Official list.
Extra list.

 

[octavius]

How long till you get to Wizardry 1?

 

[Sigourn]

How long till you get to Wizardry 1?

From now on I'll do the following: play chronologically, official list first, extra list second. (Technically I've been doing this with the past few games, but now I leave it for the record)

So that leaves us:

- (1980) Rogue - The Adventure Game
- (1981) Ultima
- (1981) Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
- (1981) Swordthrust

Two games until I get to play Wizardry, woohoo!

 

[felipepepe]

In light blue are games present in felipepepe's cRPG Handbook.

Uh, you've skipped a lot of them that were bundled together. For example, I don't list all Bard's Tale games individually, but the review covers the three main games.

 

[Sigourn]

In light blue are games present in felipepepe's cRPG Handbook.

Uh, you've skipped a lot of them that were bundled together. For example, I don't list all Bard's Tale games individually, but the review covers the three main games.

Oh, that's good to know! I thought "mention" stood for "just mention those games exist", not in a "talk about them too".

 

[Sigourn]

11) ROGUE - EXPLORING THE DUNGEONS OF DOOM
Epyx, 1985 version (IBM PC)

The beginning of the roguelike genre​

Rogue has one of the most interesting premises of any cRPG I've ever heard of. It shines because of its simplicity.

One gift the magicians make available to true seekers of the amulet - and to them alone - is the gift of life after life. Yet even this gift is tainted with a curse by the Lord of the Dungeon. For each time I sleep the sleep called death, I find myself carried, unknowingly, back to the very first room of the highest level of the dungeon, from whence I must again begin the tortuous, unpredictable journey time and time again.

if we are to read between the lines, being a "true seeker of the amulet" means this Rogue of ours is unable to abandon the dungeon, meaning he is in a perpetual state of death until he finally gets the amulet and makes his way back to the surface. In other words: he is unable to say "I want to leave". With this basic idea in mind, "I can't leave until I complete my objective and I'll die permanently until I achieve it", it could become a movie I would definitely watch. Incidentally, the film Source Code sort of follows this premise. A shame the ending was shit. And about Rogue... it really is a hit or miss.

The game is certainly revolutionary for its time. It places you in a dungeon with levels populated by progressively stronger enemies. You need to get to the end of the dungeon, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, and make it back to the surface. There are a number of factors that make this task particularly difficult:

- Once you die, you die forever and have to start back at the beginning. Permadeath is one of the most common characteristics of Roguelikes.
- The items you pick up on your journey are all unidentified, until you find an Identify scroll (which itself isn't identified). Once you have identified any particular type of potion or scroll, your character will now from now on what he is about to quaff or read.
- Your Rogue requires food to survive, much like in Akalabeth. However, unlike Akalabeth, you can't just exit the dungeon, buy food with your hard earned gold, and return to the dungeon. In Rogue, there's no leaving the dungeon, no backtracking to earlier levels until you find the Amulet of Yendor. Moreover, though it is possible to find food at every level, reality dictates that will almost never happen. Food is your primary concern in Rogue. Without food to take care of, the game would be piss easy. Just grind and grind and grind on the upper levels of the dungeon before moving down. The CRPG Addict admitted to beating the game in part thanks to a magical ring that diminished his Rogue's need for food. I wasn't that lucky.

There are other elements, like some levels having rooms that don't automatically "light up" upon entering (and thus require you to explore every inch of them), or traps that can put your character to sleep and leave him vulnerable to monster attacks, but honestly those are the lesser problems. Another no less important factor is impatience. It's easy to just move straight from one corner of a level to the other, but if you are not careful, you could get yourself surrounded by enemies. Spamming the wait button ("." in my game) is also a sure way to get you instantly killed by a foe who you didn't notice was there until it was too late.

Honestly, there's not much more to write about this game, other than it is hard, it is punishing, and most importantly: either you love it to death, or you dislike it to death. I will not lie: I find myself playing these old cRPGs out of curiosity and interest more than out of fun. First person shooters aren't fun to me, so it doesn't surprise me that a game like Rogue, pretty similar to a FPS in scope, isn't fun either. And since I've already adopted the attitude "play for a few hours, and only complete it if you actually like the game", there's no need to keep on going.

However, If the idea of dying repeatedly due to poor luck seems interesting to you, I really recommend you give this game a try. But who am I kidding: if you are here, you've probably played this game already.

Screenshot gallery:

Spoiler

I find myself in the entrance to a treasure room. As I learned later on the Internet, not every version of Rogue had these.

Inventory interface of Rogue. A variety of commands allow you to interact with the items you pick up. Among others: q lets you quaff potions; P lets you put on rings; W lets you wear armor but you need to take off your current armor first; w lets you brandish a weapon; r lets you read a scroll; and e lets you eat something.

Dying is fairly common in Rogue. I named one of my many characters Riskbreaker after Ashley Riot's rank in Vagrant Story.

Admittedly not my finest hours.

I do not rule out to tell this project to fuck off if this streak of "I'm not having any fun at all" continues, so I am wondering if you guys would still be interested in me posting my rambling about different cRPGs I play in the future. At this point, I'm considering maybe only posting about the games I have really enjoyed (like Eamon), so you don't need to read "Game #20, played this game for three hours, hated it" all the time.