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  • #13,420
    Saw someone on another forum talking about MSDOS games that were multiplayer over network connection and that made me remember this: https://www.quaddicted.com/files/idgame ... erve02.txt

    I knew James from college but at the time, we were working at the same company (after graduating) and I lived in the apartment right above his. I made a long null modem cable and ran it out my window and down into his apartment. That way, he and I would connect via null modem and we could both dial out with modems to friends to test four player. Good times but I played Doom II so much that I literally got sick of it and have never played it since.
     
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  • #14,213
    I didn't like the Intellivision's controller, mostly because it seemed to have sluggish response and I had problem indexing on it. Frequently, I'd try to change directions quickly and end up going in directions I didn't intend... of course, I was also a kid at the time so my dexterity and hand/eye coordination may not have been that great. I was in the 10yo to 12yo range when we had one.
     
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  • #17,988
    malor said:
    Artichoke Sap said:
    Papageno said:
    I played the original Wizardry on the Mac (a Mac Plus as I recall) but never got all that far. The last encounter that I remember was one against "Creeping Coins" and they wiped my party. Are you saying that I couldn't have just gone back to a save game in that case? Hell, even Might and Magic 1 would let you do that. I do realize that that was a slightly more modern game though.
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    The game disc with your characters was also the world state. It wrote to disc after every single action; it's part of what made the game so slow to play. Your only "save game" backup was if you physically made a copy of the discs which required you two have 2 disc drives, and wasn't quick.
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    I think part of the slowness was using Pascal; IIRC Wizardry ran under a flavor of the UCSD P-system, which was a heavy runtime for a 6502 to drag around. Writing to disk constantly may have been an artifact of not having much memory available for programs.
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    IIRC, Universe II for the Atari ST (and maybe others?) was written using a UCSD Pascal (IIRC, I actually had that Pascal compiler). It was kind of slow but the main slowness was that so much of it was like overlays that it had to load from floppy. Get in your ship? Load an overlay. Launch into space? Load an overlay. Warp to another system? Load an overlay. Go into orbit around a planet? Load an overlay. etc. and also if you had to fight something in space, yep, Load an overlay.
     
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  • #21,459
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  • #32,451
    I was thinking about it more and I think I remember a red dragon on the game box so I looked through some images and I'd swear it was M&M6. I thought I still had the box, somewhere. I looked around and couldn't find it. I did find a bunch of old games that I forgot I had... Forsaken, Spore, Warcraft, Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and some others. The main thing I remembered about playing the game (M&M) was that the golden sort of egg shaped flying robots near the end of the game because they were such a pain.
     
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  • #32,531
    Yeah, I actually played The Bard's Tale when it was originally released (it's still one of my favorite games from that era) ;) Ultima III, as well. I did get the modern The Bard's Tale a while back and played it for like an hour and never fired it up again. I didn't know they did a 4. I played Moria a fair amount way back in the day. Moonring and ADOM both look promising. Thanks. Mostly I was looking for something with a fantasy setting that's easy to pick up for like 15 minutes, save, and go do other things and come back to it... with, of course, the carrot of stats/items/power to keep me wanting to play just a few more minutes.
     
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  • #32,532
    Mental Gear Reduction said:
    The Bard's Tale trilogy had a remake a few years back, which I played through last year. The beginning of BT1 is a little easier (you get a little more gold so you can afford healing without looting starting characters), and they have automaps now, but they're basically the same games.
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    Yeah, the thing that was annoying about that is they flagged a few larger encounters as a one-time-only thing... for example the 99 Berzerkers, 99 Berzerkers, 99 Berzerkers, 99 Berzerkers room. In the original, once you could handle that room, it became the leveling room. APAR +5 Up, +12 East, +5 North.... (two Monks up front with LO AC... and a Bard with topped out AC, and three Archmages... or two if you have a level 1 you are leveling up) D)efend, D)efend, D)efend, C)ast MIBL, C) MIBL, (and either D)efend or C)ast MIBL depending on that 6th). Teleport to another floor and then back here until your mana runs out, then go level everybody up ;) I still have all my hand-drawn maps from when I played the game when I was 16 :)
     
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  • #32,535
    Mental Gear Reduction said:
    Oh, that's right, I'd forgotten that annoyance. In the Amiga version, that was a great spot for leveling, but god the fights were slow. Still well worth the time, but sloooow.
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    Yeah, the scrolling had a limiter on it. It was the same on everything... C64, Apple2, 8088, etc. I'd just set up my first round and then do something else for a few minutes, when it stopped scrolling, it was mostly just stragglers.

    Nekojin said:
    I fondly remember beating both Ultima 3 and Ultima 4 back in the day. I enjoyed Ultima 3 more overall, but I think that Ultima 4 was a much better game all around.

    And after beating U3, I went back and played/beat Ultima 2, then tried Ultima 1 and decided that it wasn't worth playing to completion.
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    I played 3 first and then 2 and 1 as well as Akalabeth. Ultima 4 came out and I bought it immediately but it was at a busy time for me... I just didn't have time to play it so I put in probably 20 or 30 hours into it but never finished :(
     
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  • #32,544
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  • #32,570
    I added all the suggestions to my wish list so I won't forget. I did get Caves of Qud last night. It definitely has the old school Moria/Hack feel to it. There are multiple modes to play the game... Roleplay, for example, is similar to those older game. If you die, you can reload at a last checkpoint and checkpoints can only be made in a town (this is more forgiving than the Moria I played back in the day). There are other modes like if you die, the character is dead and you have to start over (which is more like the Moria I played back in the day). It has a tutorial but it is extremely thin... like five minutes of stuff... but it goes over the bare minimum basics, I guess. Food is annoying, of course, but then it was in those other games, too ;) I'll play this one a bit and maybe try out some of the others.
     
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