Old School Computer RPGs

[makofan]

Yeah, I just run it plain (no DOS Box or anything) but I turn off the sound in the game itself or it crashes at random intervals. Give yourself 4096 EMS memory in the PIF

[Deleted]

Masters of Magic will run in DOSBox fine with audio. I tried it a bit over a year ago and it took some trial and error as I recall with the various settings. The game did not age particularly well for me though, I think played it about 15 mins. Xcom on the other hand is still the shiznat.

Jul 2, 2008 0:41:03 GMT -6 @driver said:

I pretty much lived in the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.

Likewise, and Wizardry 1 is the only 'very old' game I will still pop in a play here and there. I use the NES version (running Nestopia emulator), mainly because I get tired of typing in trap names and it is otherwise very true to the original rom.

A couple years ago I made a party and played it w/o power-recoveries or other cheats. It can be surprisingly difficult and more than once I've had to make a recovery party from scratch to recover the lost party when I get a 'Maelific and 6 Greater Demon surprise you' TPK. That group is in the early lvl 40s now, simply from 15 minutes here and there while watching youtube. Thankfully they are beefy enough to not get TPK anymore.

One odd thing I've noticed, and maybe its my bad luck, but after getting Lords Garbs and Murasama Blade I have never found another on those PCs. I am starting to think that they do not drop if you are carrying the item. I've even lost a Murasama Blade during a TPK/recovery but found another shortly after. Anyhow, random thoughts..

[bigjackbrass]

I spent many an hour typing away on my Acorn Electron computer trying to complete Twin Kingdom Valley... and never succeeding. It was an interesting text adventure with pictures, rather than an arcade-style adventure with moving graphics, ported across to just about every major home computer format in the UK in the mid-eighties. Many of the NPCs wandered off and carried on with their lives rather than always being in one spot, waiting for you, so sometimes it was hard to crack the puzzles even if you knew what to do.

There was also Countdown to Doom, again on the old Acorn, a text-based adventure about a crashed ship on an alien planet, the twist being that you had to complete the game within a certain number of turns before your ship falls victim to the corrosive atmosphere. Funnily enough I just finished running a Traveller scenario based on pretty much that idea. I played this one so often with the same couple of Jean-Michel Jarre cassettes on my stereo that I forever associate certain of Jarre's tunes with parts of the adventure.

A few links, for the interested:

Twin Kingdom Valley
Countdown to Doom
And the venerable Acorn Electron

[Random]

Jul 6, 2008 17:07:34 GMT -6 vladtolenkov said:

So I was wondering if anybody ever brought any stuff from these games to the tabletop? ;D If so what was it?

I ran an AD&D 2nd Edition campaign based on Ultima 7 part 2: The Serpent Isle.

It was completely awesome, although cut short when the semester ended.

[makofan]

I finally won Rogue this weekend after 20 years of off-and-on trying. The secret to success is 3-fold:

By level 20
1) Get past the Rust Monster levels (9-18) with one good suit of armor
2) Be lucky enough to have found a 2-handed sword
3) Have about 5 food

I was aided by a Ring of Stealth. Once I hit level 20, the only monsters I attacked were Dragons and Purple Worms (for major experience points), all others were left alone and I headed straight to level 26 as fast as I could find the stairs. I had Banded Mail +6 and along with my first strike capacity I could win almost any fight. Getting out was painfully long and boring. Now that I have won the game, I think it is more interesting to keep going and see how deep I can get