Gold Box SSI's Gold Box Series Thread

[Skankster]

LCJr, I played the megatravellers, they were good. Hell of a lot to do in them, and those "wanted" criminals were always a blast. I hunted every last one of them down. Good times.

MisterStone, for its time, I thought Space Rogue was a damn good game. There were better but it was the only game that had real space combat mixed in with top down RPGing. Pissed me off when no improved games came out that used a similar system. It would be brilliant having a really good iso or top down RPG for planets and other party exploration areas while having space exploration and combat similar to say the X games, but nobody has connected the dots yet.

Trash, I thought a few chaff grenades would make the plasma launcher useless? I hope so anyway, I am not looking forward to the friendly combat robots later on.

 

[rpgcodexusername]

yeah Buck Rogers was a big inspiration to me, I always thought the spaceship combat could be improved so I made my own (look in strategy gaming section of codex forums)

 

[bgillisp]

yeah Buck Rogers was a big inspiration to me, I always thought the spaceship combat could be improved so I made my own (look in strategy gaming section of codex forums)

The space combat is definately a tad too simple. I recall taking out a battleship in the 2nd game by staying out of range of most of its weapons and sniping its weapons until it had none left, then moving in and blowing it up. Still took a bit of luck as I was never out of range of all its weapons so I had to pray the few that could hit me were the first weapons that I took out.

But overall, I thought both games were fun, though I prefer the 1st over the 2nd

 

[Trash]

Trash, I thought a few chaff grenades would make the plasma launcher useless? I hope so anyway, I am not looking forward to the friendly combat robots later on.

I believe the chaff grenade's only lowered the chance of being hit by one of those rocket pistols. The plasma launcher kinda worked like area of effect fireball spell. Once I had it the game's combat became a pushover.

 

[buccaroobonzai]

LCJr, I played the megatravellers, they were good. Hell of a lot to do in them, and those "wanted" criminals were always a blast. I hunted every last one of them down. Good times.

MisterStone, for its time, I thought Space Rogue was a damn good game. There were better but it was the only game that had real space combat mixed in with top down RPGing. Pissed me off when no improved games came out that used a similar system. It would be brilliant having a really good iso or top down RPG for planets and other party exploration areas while having space exploration and combat similar to say the X games, but nobody has connected the dots yet.

Trash, I thought a few chaff grenades would make the plasma launcher useless? I hope so anyway, I am not looking forward to the friendly combat robots later on.

Hmm, this game is in development and slated for an early 09 release, it seems to have space exploration/combat, and ultima style planet questing. You can find out more baout the game on their forums to.


http://sots.rorschach.net/Category:NorthStar


Other older games that might fit your descrition are

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic -"video game combining both the elements of Starflight and The Bard's Tale, and had some innovations which set it apart from other games at the time. It was one of the pioneers in the budding sci-fi RPG genre. The game was non-linear and allowed players to ignore the entire plot and explore space for as long as they wanted. It also mixed elements of an RPG with a space-shooter, requiring both strategy and tactics as the player would have to dog fight enemy vessels. Players could also choose to venture into trading by mining and harvesting resources on other planets"

Hard Nova "considered the follow-up to Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic. Hard Nova had a character creation element that allowed players to choose their gender, and, unlike Sentinel Worlds I, test your abilities to lead a group of potentially disloyal mercenaries."

 

[Crichton]

Trash, I thought a few chaff grenades would make the plasma launcher useless? I hope so anyway, I am not looking forward to the friendly combat robots later on.

Grenades and rockets (from rocket launchers) explode as soon as they enter a square with chaff. I don't think that effects the plasma launcher, but I'm not certain. I always used rocket launchers (the AI isn't really smart enough to use chaff effectively). The problem is that ammo is tied to the weapon so to carry twice as much ammo, you need twice as many weapons and rocket launchers are heavy. I used four martian cat-people so that every party-member could have two rocket launchers (the two humans could only carry one, but the warrior cat people could carry three).

 

[Crispy]

Back in the 90's I used to work in tech support for a fairly prominent motherboard manufacturer. SSI was one of our customers and I got to visit their (small) offices when they were located in Sunnyvale, CA IIRC. They traded me some of our products for a whole box of their games, and Buck Rogers was one of them.

Good times.

 

[Elwro]

I've played Champions of Krynn and Dark Queen of Krynn. The first one was okay, although it really didn't look very good on my old Armstrad 1512 with CGA and no hard drive.

I had the same model :D I never tried any GoldBox games on it, but it managed to run Bloodwych, a decent dungeon crawl. I also ran Eye of the Beholder from 7 (I think) 360k floppies... I had to switch them a lot, but eventually the intro appeared. I could even create a party. Unfortunately, when loading the first dungeon level I always got the memory allocation failure :-( Still, it was amazing what games you could play on 512 kbs of RAM and no hard disk (Pirates!, for example).

 

[aleph]

I'm planning to play some of the Goldbox Games but can't really decide which one. Should I start at the beginning with Pool of Radiance or rather with one of the newer ones like Gateway to the Savage Frontier?

 

[Saxon1974]

Im my opinion Pool of Radiance is the best one. Not that the others are bad though, all very similar.

I think second best is probably champions of Krynn.

 

[mondblut]

Pool of Radiance is marred with ugly graphics (really awful sprites and combat icons) and ugly interface (no autoheal, no automemorize).

Champions of Krynn is better in these aspects, but suffers from linearity (as the party is a military unit always pushed around by solamnic knights).

I'd suggest the Savage Frontier dilogy as the series entry. They are very polished after 3 years of the engine's shelf life, GSF has a very decent art direction for an EGA game (and TSF is a generally the best-looking goldbox game ever), combat is challenging and exploration very freeform and sandboxy.

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

You may also consider getting FRUA (Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures). You should be able to find it on one of the abandonware sites. Basically, its construction set that can be used to create Goldbox games. Someone has pretty faithfully recreated Pool of Radiance with the engine, which has much better graphics and UI than the original, plus you can use the Paladin and Ranger class. There's also dozens of other modules available, many that are hacked in order to expand the original engine's capabilities. In addition to the standard AD&D setting, there's sci-fi, superhero, and oriental settings.

You can find a comprehensive list of available modules here:
http://frua.rosedragon.org/modulelist/file.php

 

[Saxon1974]

Pool of Radiance is marred with ugly graphics (really awful sprites and combat icons) and ugly interface (no autoheal, no automemorize).

Champions of Krynn is better in these aspects, but suffers from linearity (as the party is a military unit always pushed around by solamnic knights).

I'd suggest the Savage Frontier dilogy as the series entry. They are very polished after 3 years of the engine's shelf life, GSF has a very decent art direction for an EGA game (and TSF is a generally the best-looking goldbox game ever), combat is challenging and exploration very freeform and sandboxy.

Well I think that while they have the most improvements in the interface and technical since they were made last, I think the Savage frontier was probably the worst of the gold box games. That being said, they weren't that bad and still fun.

I felt the atmosphere and fun factor was the best in pool of radiance and the Krynn games, but then again thats 1 person's opinion.

 

[aleph]

There's quite a lot of FRUA stuff out, even if only one in ten is good, it is still alot.

Anyway, I will start with GSF, mostly because I read some old AD&D stuff about this part of the realms recently and am in the mood for some classic, standard ad&d adventuring there.

 

[Zomg]

There's always the Countdown to Doomsday option.

 

[Gold]

I actually really liked the Savage Frontier games. They weren't difficult and a good starting place for diving into the rest of the goldbox games.

 

[Disconnected]

There's always the Countdown to Doomsday option.

I wish I could get that fucker to work

I've tried messing with the config & install location, but the damn thing just can't save/load.

 

[mondblut]

I've tried messing with the config & install location, but the damn thing just can't save/load.

Try removing trailing slashes in paths. Or adding if there aren't any. Make sure they are dos-compatible (8 characters), which is fairly obvious. Don't make them too long, try root directory. Try C drive.

Edit: i downloaded it just for kicks from http://www.thehouseofgames.net/index.php?t=10&id=309. It worked fine without dosbox, saving and loading and all. Default save path is c:\buck\save\

 

[Disconnected]

I've tried messing with the config & install location, but the damn thing just can't save/load.

Try removing trailing slashes in paths. Or adding if there aren't any. Make sure they are dos-compatible (8 characters), which is fairly obvious. Don't make them too long, try root directory. Try C drive.

Yups, that's how I've gotten other gold box games working in the past (DL trilogy, POR, DS 1&2), it just isn't working this time.

Thanks though. If you've got any other suggestions I'd love to hear them. I mean.. Other people have gotten the damn thing working, there must be a way.

 

[mondblut]

Thanks though. If you've got any other suggestions I'd love to hear them. I mean.. Other people have gotten the damn thing working, there must be a way.

Check the link above.

Heh, that Sega version looks fun on mobygames. Too bad it can't transfer party to PC sequel.

Come to think of it, if you use dosbox, it could feed the game a virtual subst drive letter instead of the real path. Like when I was playing Celtic Tales recently, the dosbox console said the path is "y:\celtic", not c:\games\celtic it really is. Try to look into it. That's 'mount y "c:\games" ' in the game's dosbox conf file.

 

[LCJr.]

There's always the Countdown to Doomsday option.

What Zomg said.
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/23884/Buck+Rogers+-+Countdown+to+Doomsday.html
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/23885/Buck+Rogers+-+Matrix+Cubed.html

It's been a year or two but I didn't have any problems with them in DOSBox. Check the threads on Abandonia for help. Grasping at straws but it might be one of those games you have to create a folder named "Save" or "Saves" in the game directory.

http://www.abandonia.com/en/forum?url=showthread.php?t=16906

This is the thing about SSI games, they're too picky on paths when games are installed.

According to this line in the buck.cfg file;
C:\DOOMSDAY\SAVE\
And the contents of the zip file, you need to directly unzip the game to c:\

Look at the config file and edit it to match where you've installed the game.

 

[Wyrmlord]

I did everything with config file.

It's. Just. Not. Working!

The save folder is in the path C:\Doomsday\Save

The config file also writes C:\Doomsday\Save

Could it be because of Vista? It happens with Champions Of Krynn as well.

I just can't get the Gold Box games to work!

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

I just tried loading a saved game from Countdown to Doomsday in DosBox, and didn't have any problems. I'm using XP. I've got the game files in c:\games\buckcount, and the save folder is c:\games\buckcount\SAVE. In DosBox, I use mount c: c:\games. The config file looks like the following:

V
S
N
C:\BUCKCO~1\SAVE\
F
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0

 

[Carlos' Bitch1]

They all work fine here. Windows XP.

 

[mondblut]

I've got the game files in c:\games\buckcount, and the save folder is c:\games\buckcount\SAVE...
C:\BUCKCO~1\SAVE\

It can understand a non-dos-compliant path? That's surprising.

Anyway, for me all GB games run perfectly in pure XP (and windows 98 before) without dosbox or anything. Well, they probably have no sound, but they have no sound worth hearing in the first place If anything about old games really aged badly, it's the sound.

Dosbox users must apparently supply the game with the virtual path dosbox mounts the game on, not the real file system path.