[DavidN]

in reply to: Out beyond the new frontier #10111

Oh, and I love the billboards for Chris Sawyer’s Transport Game which I’m going to assume became Transport Tycoon a year later! I recognize that he carried the way that the game assembles people’s faces from photofit parts into that game as well 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Out beyond the new frontier #10110

I’ve been having a good old time ferrying things back and forward between Sol and the Ross systems, and bought myself a Cobra Mk 1 with a much roomier hold and some more beverage cup holders. I’ve mostly been dealing in computers and robots, with an occasional venture into illegal goods.

The Ross 128 prison system is a good place to load up on goods that are banned in most places (animal skins are the ones I’m most ethically comfortable carrying), then you have to make it back to another star system and find someone dodgy enough to accept them (the space station Gorbachev around Earth seems to be a fairly reliable place to find them). Sometimes the police will fine you for carrying illegal goods when you land, but bizarrely, they then allow you to keep them for selling anyway! Although they can get you again if you try to sell to one of the police plants on the bulletin board. In any case, they only get annoyed if you fail to pay your fines before taking off again.

Much was made of the size of the game at the time, and it’s definitely impressive to have made this procedurally-generated galaxy – the size of it is absurd, but… there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to explore very far? You have to keep your fuel topped up, so moving between unpopulated systems is risky – and once you get about a hundred light years away from the start point, all the stars show no registered settlements. Is there something beyond my freelance delivery service that I should be aiming for?

[DavidN]

in reply to: Out beyond the new frontier #10095

I have made a second breakthrough (just by watching the above videos really) – that the state of the star map is important! This is something that’s completely non-obvious visually, but in the early 90s you would have been expected to have discovered in the manual. Scrolling the map around doesn’t really indicate that you’re selecting anything – the star in the centre of the screen highlights and you get some information about it, but if you leave the map with that star highlighted it becomes your selected destination!

This is the key to getting the hyperspace option to appear (it’s also dependent on the amount of fuel you’re carrying, so it can take a bit to diagnose why it isn’t there). With that revelation, I can finally travel between locations. And that means I can make some money by trading – buy goods classified as exports, take them to places where those goods are imports.

So my bank account is going upwards, but at a very slow rate – and it takes so much clicking to go back and forth! Scroll to destination star, hyperspace, call up the solar system map, zoom it in, twirl it around a bit, click around on your destination until it registers, autopilot, advance time, come in for landing. I think I’ll aim for buying a ship with a bit more space in its boot as a first goal.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Magazine Reviews #10087

It’s always great to see these, thank you for providing them! I still want to clear time to read through the entire PC Zone catalogue eventually 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #7109

Just for the record, I found the dialogue that I mentioned above! I’m still unsure how to trigger it – I had remembered it as being what happens when you show the gun to Colonel Priver, but by the time it’s possible to have the gun he won’t talk to you and you can’t get to the normal conversation menu.

text 5 ; "{HIGH} \"Are you crazy?\" ^ {NORS}\"Hand over the weapon immediately! This will have serious consequences for your personal record, Driscoll, I promise you that.\" ^ ^ {INK 001}Priver takes the weapon from Tom."

[DavidN]

in reply to: Your questions for Jurie Horneman #7067

I’d like to know more about how the world was created by the team – modern games tend to have a Director where all the story and world decisions are directed. Was this the process for Albion or were multiple people’s ideas involved in building up the world and setting?

[DavidN]

in reply to: Stumbling around in Albion #7026

I think your assessment is fair! Like I said in the first post on my topic (and affirmed more strongly throughout it), I came to realize I love Albion as a world and story but not so much as a game.

The awkwardnesses you described are all very real – one you mentioned that stuck out at me but that I haven’t mentioned before is the route to the Former building on the first island. You would think that at this early stage, there would be some sort of overgrown path to follow to get you there – but if you follow the path out of the city you instead get to the middle of nowhere! You have to clamber your way behind the city across vines on a narrow little pass and then go in the opposite direction from where you’ve been told for a while, just to get anywhere – and the maps are consistently much larger than they need to be for their content.

That problem arose again late in the game for me, when I was going through the hidden path in Umajo – there’s an exit that serves no purpose and will just dump you out in a vast space with nothing to discover or do. And because of the nature of the hidden tunnels, it’s very difficult to find your way back.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6995

The dungeon in this section of the game is actually interesting again, it’s a little clumsy in terms of being able to tell what you’re doing at first but is based around turning a room in the centre around to access four different parts of the tunnels. It’s a welcome change after the featureless warrens of the bonus dungeon on Maini.

The main roadblock is… pictured below. Sixteen Animal3s is the worst of them, but the game starts throwing these absolutely ludicrous piles of enemies at you and it’s very difficult to imagine how you’re expected to deal with them without the high level spells (actually just Demon Exodus, because in an inspired touch, using Frost Avalanche on this many Animal3s crashes the game). Faced with this, I can only see two options:

1. Just hit them with a levelled up Demon Exodus and make the battle trivial
2. Die

I’m really not sure whether I’m cheating around the game here, or if this is the intended way to do it – it feels like there are only about three spells that are really worthwhile in the game, particularly as you have to cast spells repeatedly to make them useful. This is just one aspect of the game where grinding becomes necessary – there’s a lot of busywork getting in the way of just playing the game and experiencing the world.

Anyway. I’ve now retrieved the Stone of Visions from a chest in the deepest part of the dungeon, and have made my way back up only to realize I can’t remember why I wanted the Stone of Visions or what it might be used for.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6993

I think that’s exactly what it does 🙂 And how fascinating that there’s an Albion wiki (and unfortunate that it’s on Fandom, which seems only to exist to host wikis that are so advert-laden as to be completely unusable). I wonder what else I can find there…

I’m on Umajo, the fourth island chapter of the game! Beloveno reused Celtic and Iskai graphics as you would expect, but this area is strikingly different – fittingly, as these are the only people who can construct things from metal. It’s really a nice detail that everything is so different here – you haven’t really noticed throughout the game that metal is absent from the everyday objects lying around the houses, but suddenly you see that bathtubs, tables, and other items of furniture all feature metal prominently. I’m really seeing what I love about Albion emerge again – the exploration of the world and its alien nature.

The exposition dump on Dji Cantos is still a bit much for me to take in, but the storyline suddenly comes back here after mostly being forgotten on Gratogel and Maini in favour of a series of rescue quests. Rainer was skeptical of the idea that the planet is aware and vengeful on people who take from it, but talking to the people here seems to confirm that experience and I’m not going to argue! So if our gigantic mining ship digs its claws in and starts drilling, I don’t think it’s going to be long before all our crewmates start dying in mysterious supernatural circumstances. The urgency of getting back to the Toronto is once again present!

Rations suddenly become ridiculously expensive here, justified in-game in that they have to be shipped from elsewhere due to the desert climate. On the other end of the scale, I saw that there was an item called “hammer” available at the weapon smith for 0.1G, thought that it was obviously going to be part of a puzzle later on and encumbered myself with ten of them weighing 3500g each (it appears only one is needed and I would never have thought to try it out without looking at a guide).

I was surprised at the sudden appearance of a stealth section (which everyone loves) – thankfully it was brief and I was able to overhear the ritual and find out the centuries-old magic password within about two minutes. Now I’m spending absolutely years walking down a maze of boring passageways that are blatantly far too long, solving puzzles that involve going to one end of the map then the other – DOSBox-X’s fast forward feature has come in very useful.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6983

Right then

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6982

I took the bonus from the pillars in the Former building right after Sira joined the party! A bonus of 10 to three different stats at that stage of the game is significant, and I decided I’d rather not wait until this late in the game even though it meant a couple of characters would miss out on it. Actually I wonder if that’s made the difference for me compared to the bad time jefklak is having…

It never occurred to me that you had the opportunity to take both Siobhan and Kunagh, with free space in your party! I imagine that Sira and Mellthas won’t agree to join unless there’s room for both of them? It’s an interesting opportunity, but I don’t think I could survive the rest of the game without Frost Avalanche 🙂

Moving around the maps is still awkward even with fast travel, the caves always seem to dump you miles from anywhere and the view isn’t quite zoomed out enough to have a clear picture of where you are. Nevertheless I’ve taken the chance to go back and learn spells I wasn’t high-level enough for before, stock up on free healing potions, and have uncursed the Shadowsword. That last one isn’t a real option in the game as far as I know, but clearing the fourth byte of the inventory slot containing it sorted it out.

It’s interesting that the data about weapons seems to be split between the inventory and elsewhere – equipping this purified Shadowsword gives a huge bonus to stamina and makes you really good at lockpicking for some reason, and it can be removed from your hands freely, but the message about it being cursed still appears when you equip it. So the fact that the Shadowsword has those bonuses and is expected to be cursed must be in a table somewhere else in the game data – but it’s the data in the bytes of the inventory item that actually define the effects of the curse. This implies that there might have been (or still is?) some way to uncurse items in the game, or otherwise change their effects.

Inventory slot +0 bytes: Quantity
+1 byte: Spell value – number of charges left
+2 bytes: Enchantments value
+3 bytes: Bitmask:
0x01 for an item having been identified (allows the “More…” menu in the inventory screen).
0x02 for an item being broken.
0x04 means the item is cursed – this seems to reverse any bonuses defined on it and makes it unremovable when equipped.
(Possibly more in here as well!)
+4 bytes: 2 bytes for the item type. Shadowsword is 74 01

I’ve noticed that over the last few games I’ve joined in DOS Game Club I’ve grown to love pulling things around and seeing what happens, solving the puzzle of how the game works as well as the actual challenge of the game itself 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6976

To the Dji Cantos island! I love the scenery in this place, it really feels like a reward to explore this incredible hidden palace after all that drudgery above – something about the architecture and environment reminds me of the less annoying parts of my recent exploration through the Myst games. I can see why Rainer wants to stay here instead of spending another weeks-long stretch in a cave being chewed by small aggressive mammals.

This reminds me that I haven’t mentioned that the sprite work in this game is absolutely beautiful – after spending a long time in the 3D sections it’s easy to forget it due to the monster sprites and environments’ incredibly ugly scaling and monotony, but all of the 2D sections just look wonderful. I love how detailed they all are, with so many different object sprites for books and drinking horns and cutlery and containers lying around, and little touches like irregularities in the tiles or carpets on the floor. The environments look very realistic in the sense that they’re being lived in.

The level of information dump is… intense here, with you learning a lot about the relationship between Earth and Albion and their respective deities very quickly, tying the history of Albion in to the history of the ancient Celts, Greeks and throwing its own mythology in there as well. It is possible, but not guaranteed, that I might understand all this by the end of the game.

The other really important thing is finally getting access to the “world map”, you can now access all the places in your so-far linear journey as you like and go back and learn spells and collect things that you’ve missed. I’ve immediately used it to retrieve our two snugglewumps from Srimalinar – I wonder why the game has them leave for plot-related reasons when you can recruit them right back again.

I switched back to the game while writing this to discover that I had boosted some statistics by standing around on some flowers – on repeated tries it says that the energy of this place needs to be recharged, but I wonder if I could just raise everyone to their maximum limits given enough time here.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6952

This whole episode has made me want to work on Phobian Odyssey again, a dungeon crawler I wrote last year based on the Doom universe – https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/125587-phobian-odyssey-episode-1-doom-dungeon-crawler-for-nanowadmo-2021/ . It was mainly an experiment in writing a game on the GZDoom engine, but I wanted to make a dungeon crawl style game where the environments were much more unique and memorable rather than monotonous – even games like the modern Etrian Odyssey dungeon crawlers have very featureless dungeons for the sake of nostalgia.

Perhaps, as I’m enjoying this game less and less, I might use the engine for the basis of an Albion game of my own eventually – something set in Albion the world that I was so fascinated with, separate from the awkwardness of Albion the game 🙂

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6950

Right. So I’ve done the optional treasure cave now – I see what you mean, and I’ve got to admit that I was wrong about Maini. I described it as awful – it is instead absolutely wretched D:

The treasure cave is… something else. Hundreds of little nooks, all of which look exactly the same, made virtually innavigable with the decorative stalagmites and the supremely awkward constantly looking up and down to see the ceiling or floor to travel between the pits. The monster parties are just relentlessly boring and Angel Summoner Sira can deal with them single-handedly between rests and an unhealthy number of potions.

I counted what I think are exactly 38 pairs of pits to fall down/climb across five floors of monotony, noting them down until I had exhausted the English alphabet and used a few letters from Greek and Cyrillic as well. Anyone is welcome to use my map – I never want to see it again. (This isn’t even all of it, I ran out of room and had to draw a further seven caves on the back of the sheet.)

Did you also notice something strange with the movement in the 3D worlds in this chapter of the game? Between the three earlier dungeons and the Kounos basement and here, the viewpoint height is adjusted to make spaces seem smaller or larger without actually altering their scale. This also (feels like it) comes with altering the speed at which you move through the dungeons, making it difficult to judge where you are without referring to the map constantly. It’s very strange.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6948

Oh dear god this part of the game is awful. You have to go back and forth so much searching for the one little action that will make the game progress, over three spaced out locations in the most awkwardly laid out path ever. It’s infuriating how the hitboxes of everything on the world map are a bit too big, meaning you have to detour around large areas that look like you should be able to walk on them. And if you get the order of your actions wrong the game dares to make characters angry at you for being a bit slow. Aaaaaaagh!

It took me looking at all three available guides on GameFAQs, plus an article on LPArchive with some additional commentary at https://lparchive.org/Albion/Update%2007/ , to understand what to do! (The playthrough there observes that suddenly, you can’t ask anyone about the Toronto in this section of the game – as if the game has forgotten about your objective, or is hoping you will so that you don’t realize this part of the plot is completely irrelevant to your mission.)

I believe that this is the complete list of actions you need to take…

– Talk to everyone in the council house and learn about the various members of the council: Herras, Perron, Gard and Riko.

– Talk to Kariah, who will tell you about a rumour of an assassination. You’ll only have the option to reply incredulously.

– Possibly talk about every available option to the drunk man and talkative old woman in the tavern, I don’t know if this matters.

– Go to Kounos, the village at the top of the mountain. Get to the basement by whatever means you prefer, mess around in the dungeon for however long you like, then go and talk to Kontos.

– Go to the hut slightly to the north and find Mellthas’ friend. He’ll talk about some doubts he has about Kontos getting too extreme.

– Go back and talk to Kontos and he’ll act much more impatient to you, talking about the Iskai and their shrine, and will invite you to go and talk to the Iskai in Srimalinar.

– Go back to Beloveno and enter the council building again. Observe that tensions are higher, with Gard and Riko being very annoyed that you’re there. Perron and Herras will talk about talks with them being tense and unproductive.

– Go to Kariah again – your options will be a bit more believing of her. Tell her you’ll see what you can do.

– Trudge your way to the north (you have to turn south to get down the vines after going north of the village) and wind your way to Srimalinar. Talk to the Iskai behind the bar in the tavern and pay him for his information.

– Go to the residence in the northwest part of Srimalinar and verify your new information with Arrim. Mellthas will recommend going back to talk to his friend in Kounos.

– Go south to Kounos and DO NOT TALK TO MELLTHAS’ FRIEND! Instead, a new character will be wandering around outside the houses – talk to her and she’ll tell you to hurry back to the city, not to stop for anything.

– Go to the council house in Beloveno again. Gard and Riko will be gone and Perron will be even more nervous than usual. You now have to talk to Herras about “assassination” – this isn’t an option that appears in the list, you have to type it in specifically. He’ll tell you he’ll make arrangements – Herras is now safe.

– Go back to Kounos AGAIN and this time, visit Mellthas’ friend. He’ll say that the Kounos cultists are heading off to the shrine, then tell you he has something important to say (these appear to be the wrong way around…)

(I found that a third piece of dialogue appeared, overheard snatches of conversation, if I had messed up here and the assassination had taken place – it didn’t appear when I had finally got the order of actions right, but I’m not sure if that’s related at all or just a coincidence.)

– Go back to Beloveno and talk to Herras in the council house (who you will notice is still alive). He’ll give you the key to the treasury, and therefore FIVE HUNDRED GOLD PIECES plus a few jewels.

– Turn your computer off and go to sleep!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Stumbling around in Albion #6939

Oddly enough I share a lot of your complaints except money – I’ve never found myself short of it, but then I’m not really buying anything beyond the essentials. I loaded up on blue potions on the first island, and am overusing Frost Avalanche to freeze enemies which makes combat much easier (in some cases trivial). You can always rest at an inn regardless of your party’s tiredness, and it doesn’t consume food either – on top of that, you only pay for characters who are conscious when you come in, so the more knackered your team is the cheaper the stay is 🙂

Sira’s “View of Life” spell adds an HP meter, but you have to cast it on every battle, so I rely more on just vaguely being aware of how many HP each monster type has and how much I’ve damaged them (it isn’t easy to keep track of that either, because the damage display at the end of each round only counts the most recent attack!)

I imagine the combat skill penalty is to reflect the axe’s heaviness? But I’ve really no idea – information on the actual game mechanics seems extremely rare!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6937

There is a series of sketches by UK comedians Mitchell and Webb that are about the adventures of superheroes Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit. In every scene, BMX Bandit comes up with some elaborate plan involving spins and wheelies, and Angel Summoner just conjures up an army of angels to do everything for them. Eventually, with his partner fed up of not getting to do anything, they go instead with a plan made up by BMX Bandit, who immediately dies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw

What I’m getting at here is that Sira with her Frost Avalanche is Angel Summoner – it makes battles that would be dangerous into very easy encounters, and ones that would be impossible into just medium difficulty. And the trouble is that I can’t imagine the game being playable without it – on the third island, you start getting gigantic hordes of 10+ enemies at once which would quickly overwhelm you without being able to freeze them all and pick them off without them retaliating. I can’t make a guess at how much grinding it would take to make the game feasible otherwise.

There really isn’t a lot of direction in this part of the game beyond “talk to everyone and see what you can learn”. And it sounds odd for me to call this a drawback after praising just about the same thing in Jirinaar at the start of the game… it feels that this time, you’re just searching for something to do, as opposed to exploring (and I’m almost certain part of it is that I just find the furries much more interesting!) The whole political storyline would be much more involving if you had had any kind of introduction to these characters at all – as it is you’re just trying to find a quest for the sake of having a quest.

Speaking of which, I’ve just left a dungeon that was just there for the sake of having a dungeon! You talk your way past a guard (you can fight him instead but I really didn’t want to kill him, it’s so out of character for your party), then it pointlessly switches to a 3D section which has a load of doors and traps and monsters without any explanation as to why it’s there or why you’re exploring it.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First Steps #6933

Well that’s what the game thinks but it hadn’t anticipated my hex editor 😀 It’s astonishing how punishing older games used to be – it was absolutely enraging the first time I got that notification!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6930

Yes, the third island definitely slows the game down a lot, for the reasons you mentioned and just for it being so large with the points of interest taking a lot of time to move between. I’ve picked up Khunag, who I have renamed to Treguard of Dunshelm, https://alchetron.com/cdn/knightmare-18a34109-a5b5-4a38-9b02-ffd5845396c-resize-750.jpeg , and have been encouraged to assassinate some goverment officials. It feels like he doesn’t really have a plot reason to be there so far, he’s just tagging along for something to do, but his magic is useful.

The game is currently urging me to remember to talk to people multiple times so unsubtly that it’s almost like a comedy at this point, with the woman wandering around Beloveno who talks about her asking her neighbour about borrowing his stepladder or something. I assume that means there’s going to be one crucial conversation somewhere across these three cities that moves things forward.

I still haven’t been annoyed by any issues with the translated script, exactly, but I’m noticing a fair amount of little bugs in it where the highlighting isn’t closed, or someone’s name gets dropped, or once when someone remarked “Wrong text number (PC speaker beep)”. I also enjoyed that a zweihänder sword was overtranslated to “two-hander” 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Stumbling around in Albion #6925

Were you carrying any food when you were unable to rest? I know that you can’t regain health from resting if you’re not carrying any – I’m not sure if it actively prevents you from selecting the option, though.

I had a look at the manual, which is almost completely unhelpful – it talks about some of the setting and the basics of the UI but there’s absolutely nothing about how training your stats help, or what you need to do to keep your party healthy! So there really is a lot of trial and error involved – I had to consult an FAQ to get an understanding of what I was doing.

So I can only help out from my own research and gathering of information:
– Search junkpiles and chests and sell things that you aren’t going to use! There are a lot of useless objects, but weapons and potions can be bartered.
– Selling monster bits and pieces that you gain from combat will give you a decent cash flow as well.
– If you’re really hard up, go and visit the healer in the Dji-Kas building (southwestern building in Jirinaar) and talk to her repeatedly – she’ll occasionally give you a high-tier blue health potion that can be used or sold!
– The lack of a map can be a huge disadvantage, especially at night. Explore slowly, learn landmarks and ask the man herding cattle near the city for directions if you need them!
– It seems to be generally agreed that it’s worth training yourself up in close-range combat as much as you can in Jirinaar (though as mentioned above I have little idea what difference this specifically makes!)

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6917

I’ve retrieved the embarrassing medicine (which turned out to be a bit more of a quest than it sounded, didn’t it?) I was planning to go back and pick off some of the huge wave of monsters that opens near the end that you’re meant to block with the gate, but they were a bit far beyond my level even individually so I’ll go back to them later.

I’ve now reached my next stop Beloveno, and this game is getting less exotic all the time – I’m just in a town that could have been in any RPG in the last four decades now. It’s another affirmation that what I actually like is the first hour of Albion – the idea of discovering a new world and just being left to explore and converse in this town of naked cat people. I remember it feeling so big and momentous on my dad’s colossal 17″ CRT monitor.

Playing this again has made me want to go back and record one of my earliest songs, also called “Albion” – but as I’ve played through it I’ve realized the original lyrics missed the point so atrociously that I actually want to completely rewrite it. At that time, my understanding was limited to “humans destroy things, catgirls that live in balance with nature must be saved” – and while the game does have an environmental theme to it, there’s a lot more going on than that.

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=61823

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6910

“if you move your mouse to the very bottom of the 3D view, the arrow changes and you can look down (same goes for up)”

It doesn’t help colourblindness but thank you 🙂 Actually, when I switched back to the game after writing that post, my torch had gone out – and because of the VGA palette, the green tiles now appeared grey in the darkness, making the task much easier!

I remember this section very vaguely – I actually thought it was much later in the game, but I do remember some workaround, a spell that just obliterates all Animal types and makes the apocalyptic encounter incredibly trivial.

I think you’re right about the 3D sections’ oppressiveness – I had been thinking of the awkwardness, limited visibility and mobility as an accidental feature, but it makes a lot of sense if it’s by design 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6906

Is this a good time to mention I’m colourblind

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6904

The dungeon beneath the great library made me ask myself questions about why Albion has both 2D and 3D environments. The first part of Drinno is unusual in that it’s played from the top-down perspective that you’ve so far used for wandering around and talking to people – your characters have never been in danger in this mode before (unless you count trying the local Iskai alcohol).

But it highlights that the 3D mode isn’t really necessary – every switch and floorplate puzzle works arguably better from this perspective because you have so much greater visibility and agility. Just turning round on the spot to face a different direction is so slow in the 3D dungeons, and you never feel like you have enough awareness of what’s beside or behind you because the field of vision is so low. The maps are obviously based on a rigid grid, and I wonder if it would have been better if you were also confined to grid movement to make things easier to navigate.

I’m surprised to learn that monsters don’t respawn in the 3D dungeons – once you’ve cleared them out once, you don’t have to worry about them coming back. Given that, I was able to get to the third floor basement of Drinno before looking at a walkthrough – when I discovered I was meant to raise a portcullis directly without looking for a switch despite that never having been possible anywhere else! Grrr.

Also finally encountered a fourth monster. There really aren’t very many.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6897

Time to set sail for celts in space! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXICetXfDac

I remember the game a lot less clearly from here on – I do remember all the recommendations to stay on the first island for a while, but I’m not sure if this is to give the player an advantage over the intended balance of the game, or to make the game possible due to astonishing lack of balance. I’ve gone to a halfway point and got Sira up to the point where she learned Frost Avalanche, and I’ll see where things take me from here.

And at the moment, where it’s taking me is the king whispering to ask if I could go round the pharmacy and retrieve an embarrassing medication on his behalf. It seems a bit unglamorous compared to my last quest. (No, I don’t know why it’s green either.) Hail Hoots.

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Your questions for Jurie Horneman #6896

How much of the Iskai language has actually been written down? It’s not spoken often in the game beyond a couple of key terms, but we hear Rainer and Gira say a few words in it just as Tom is waking up. Did those lines have a definite meaning or were they just made up?

(I remember being disappointed that the game contained no actual Iskai language reference, when Rainer said that he would give Tom a training course 🙂 )

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6895

Okay, I’m at the stage where I have to ask Rejira for a ton of potions – that should do it.

Characters are stored somewhere around A5BA in the saved game (I’m not sure whether it can vary, but search for the string “Tom”) – after the character name followed by a ton of nulls, the inventory seems to be in a pattern of [1 byte for quantity][3 bytes for ???][2 bytes for item type]. Blue healing potions are type 4E00, and even though the game normally only lets you stack 99 items in a space, you can edit them all the way up to 255, which is displayed as ** – I think this is used to denote items that are infinitely buyable in shops, but when in your inventory they act as the number 255.

Of course, it isn’t practical to be this greedy – Rainer (or Dieter as he is now known due to some other experimentation) is unable to move at all here as he’s loaded down with 510 potions with a combined weight of 0.2 metric tons.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Magazine Reviews #6893

I’m interested that PC Gamer called out the translation as being poor! I can identify a few awkward points in it, but the game has an absolute mountain of text and I really haven’t found all that many places that bother me.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6892

I’ve now gone through the game’s first significant dungeon! I remember this being a huge roadblock to me when I first played the game, but it really isn’t anywhere near as bad as I remember. Perhaps spending gold on combat training made all the difference – I had a couple of points where more powerful enemies knocked Rainer out cold immediately, but I had enough healing items to keep going, occasionally going back to the world map and resting. The 3D view doesn’t really do the game any favours, though – it’s so hard to swivel round and see where you’re going even when you have a torch lit (and it’s nice that putting Drirr in the lead raises the light level more as well!) I find myself bringing up the map after just about every movement to make sure I’m going where I think I am.

But what is it with PC RPGs and the comically low hit rate in combat? Typical fights have both sides just flailing around uselessly and only occasionally landing a hit, a frustration that I remember from the Eye of the Beholder games. It makes me feel that my characters are less effective than they actually are, because in most other game genres, missing this much would be a serious problem! It seems that enemies suffer from the same, though.

The gun is an incredible advantage, more than I had remembered – I thought that it would suffer from the same hit rate as the close range weapons did, but it really makes a huge difference when you can take so many hit points off the bigger enemies at once. The way that they need to stay still during a turn for it to hit them is a bit of a disadvantage, but not enough to balance out the massive damage it can do.

Having completed the dungeon, I find myself not really sure what to do now – I think Drirr mentioned talking to Frill again but he seems unmoved by us having found Argim as well as the ex-murderer. I’ll ask around.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6891

I think being given the objective of “just wander and explore for two days” did great things for how much I loved this game – there was so much just to learn about. And I’m reminded of something else that stood out to me about Albion – it’s a game that’s actually mature, not in a shocking or provocative way, just that it talks openly about crime, morally difficult practices, sex and relationships in this society. (I can imagine the Sebai ritual being a million times more tangled than abortion can ever be, for example.)

I’ve gone round to the battle trainer and poured a load of points into close range combat – it feels odd that you can boost Tom so dramatically at this point, a significant distance towards the maximum capacity he’ll ever have in the game.

I found the clock! This game doesn’t give you any hints, does it – it’s just lying around in a pile of scrap in the basement that looks the same as any other. I briefly questioned why the Iskai day is so suspiciously similar to ours, but then remembered they had set that up quite nicely by having Rainer mention that the planet’s rotation was exactly the same as Earth’s earlier 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6890

I had the same trouble with the gun – I had no idea when the appropriate time to use it was 🙂 Maybe this time I’ll actually take advantage of it. (I also vaguely remember that I should have a compass and clock by now? I missed those somehow)

I’ve been following yozy’s tips now that I’m in Jirinaar – like most DOS RPGs, it’s unclear what you should be picking up and using. But I’ve done a lot of exploration this time round and really paid attention to the backstory of the magic guilds, the Formers who use magic to build things, and their disdain for those who train to use magic as a weapon. For some reason I’d idealized the Iskai as a utopian society in my memory, but from asking everyone about everything this time, they have some seriously messed up stuff going on.

I’m trying to stay conscious of the inventory limits and pack spare rations into a chest in the South Wind Clan’s house before I start having to throw them out. By today’s standards it’s incredibly awkward to have both money and rations count towards your weight limit!

[DavidN]

in reply to: First Steps #6885

Thank you for your advice 🙂 I like having the hints – especially as I’ve never really played D&D RPGs, and the whole language of what the game expects from me is unfamiliar to me (I had no idea that levelling up didn’t help with any abilities!)

[DavidN]

in reply to: Your questions for Jurie Horneman #6884

I’d love to know if any lore or design documents still exist – there seems to be a ton of background information in the game that’s easy to miss! Today, I’ve only just gone around talking to everyone on the ship extensively for the first time, and learned a lot about the previous species that humanity has encountered, as well as their wiping them out or pushing them into reservations.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6882

Thank you 🙂

I did the gun sidequest at the start, which I remembered from playing the demo – in my mind it gave you a huge advantage but I’ll have to see if that’s true. I messed about with the guards a bit, going repeatedly through the comms room, but they don’t get any more annoyed by it.

I swear I remember you could show the security guards the gun, which made him respond “ARE YOU MAD?!” in double-height letters, and needless to say, confiscate it. But I can’t get it to happen this time – the security guard refuses to talk to you. I thought I’d misremembered, and tried the captain as well, but he says he’s too busy to talk as well. I must have been playing the demo at the time – perhaps it was changed.

Despite talking to the characters excessively, I still don’t really understand what over-c (which comprises both the drive and the COM unit?) is. The name sounds like faster than light (c as in mc^2) – is the same branch of technology used for communications as for actual travel?

[DavidN]

in reply to: The Way To Play #6875

Oh my god there’s a source port! Did they recreate the hellish loud PC speaker blare at random points during combat, or decide to drop that feature? 😉 Thank you – I’m trying this immediately 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Revisiting Albion #6874

From exploring the Toronto at the beginning I’m already discovering a ton of backstory that I didn’t realize was available in the game! Just by talking to Herr Rainer Hofstedt, you can get a ton of information about who you work for, why you’re here and the history of human civilization up to where the game starts.

I was particularly surprised to realize that the Iskai weren’t the first extraterrestrial intelligence that humans had encountered – it had felt to me that finding alien species was a massive event for the characters, rather than just the latest in a series of them! But again from talking to Rainier, it sounds like there might only have been one before and they were all wiped out by a disease (at least, perhaps that’s just what DDT wants people to think). “At least we don’t have to listen to any whining like those flop-ears on Joshi!!” (I’m personally offended) I had no idea that the space humans in this story were in such a callous, megacolonial society – I thought the reason for covering up the true nature of Albion was just corporate desperation, but it sounds like it’s a common attitude not to really care about anything that isn’t human, even though to us these would be incredible discoveries.

People also seem to be a bit casual about Snoopy being distributed forcefully around the computer room! Is there no ship’s counsellor on board? Everyone seems to be momentarily shocked, then shrugs and says they might as well proceed anyway. Once again, it points towards the, uh, casual attitude to the value of life that this future society seems to have.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Tekst voor Martijn #2354

Thanks from me, too – we talked yesterday about how little it seemed the game had altered things from the real-life procedure. It’s interesting to see the parallels especially during the surgery section!

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #2217

Hah, that’s incredible with the surgical gloves and mask – I can only imagine someone walking behind you while you’re playing it in full gear, saying “It’s only a computer virus, you idiot”…

I was going to follow along with a walkthrough to help me through the details of the operation, having failed to tell what I was meant to be doing from the manual, but it sounds like that would spoil the experimentation that’s meant to be part of the game. But what a bizarre way to require you to experiment! In Richard Cobbett’s article on the games, he mentions that they were thought up by a surgeon, and it’s odd that they would have paid so much attention to the realism of the operation procedure but then throw you right in with “real” patients before training you. It’s almost like that Surgeon Simulator game with the floppy physics, just blundering into doing a heart transplant somewhat correctly. https://www.pcgamer.com/saturday-crapshoot-life-and-death/

There’s a TADS text adventure I had ages ago called Rematch, which was famous for manipulating the parser to make the solution to the game a hugely complicated sentence – but on every action you take that doesn’t solve the puzzle, you die and have to restart. (Walkthrough to working it out is here: http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive-fiction/solutions/rematch.txt ) I remember people saying that it was an amazing thing technically, but that they didn’t like the exploration being so punitive, feeling that you had to die many, many times to continue. Life or Death feels a lot like that – you’re encouraged to experiment, but doing so feels like you’re failing at the game miserably. It’s so strange that they didn’t build up to practicing on dummies and so on before then expecting you to perform operations on your patients. (You send them away with a referral for kidney stones, you don’t attempt to vibrate them out of their kidneys manually!)

[DavidN]

in reply to: Things to try #1848

Keep going back to the cannibal village after you escape the first time!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Then vs Now #1695

You know what – I’ve just rememebered discovering the secret lines that units and the setup program say. I was with a school friend and I think it was the first time I really felt I’d discovered something secret in a game 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Then vs Now #1694

YAW SOUND CAHD WORKS PERFECTLY!

[DavidN]

in reply to: The making of Warcraft #1693

When I open this thread the preview for the first link pops open and obscures the rest of the text! And on the phone it creates a lot of dead space on the right – I’ve no idea.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Magazine Scans #1682

I found something I really loved in Pix’s first issue of PC Zone – the concept of Dune 2 was so new that they had no idea what genre the game even was, leading them to call it something like Sim City with shooting.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Magazine Scans #1675

What an amazing collection – I’m going to enjoy reading through these again! I’m pretty sure I have some more early issues of PC Zone, though my parents’ house is 3000 miles away from my current location 🙂 I’ll have to remember the next time they take a journey over to us.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Magazine Scans #1665

“Wargames used to be about as much fun as putting your underwear between two flowery baps, slapping on some mustard and scoffing the lot”. My god, I miss these magazines 😀 Are these from your own collection, or are you looking at some online archive for them? There must still be a large box of them at my parents’ house, I wonder if they have any that haven’t been made available yet…

It’s interesting how Chris Anderson in PC Zone spends two pages absolutely lambasting it and then awards it an 82 – spending most of the review talking about the presentation rather than any of the gameplay! Although that’s something that I’d meant to mention as a reason I remember this game so well – the narrator with his veins audibly popping out of his forehead at the sheer determination with which he’s doing his “English” accent.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Then vs Now #1664

Fantastic memories nonetheless 🙂 I wasn’t able to identify what felt awkward about groups of units, but you said it – you can’t tell which health bar belongs to whom! A lot of my success in this game has just been in building an overwhelming force and sending them all out at once (or at least nine at a time).

There’s a weird feature in the manual where you can sort of recall unit groups – if you click on a unit while holding Alt it will select everyone who was in the last group in which this unit was selected. This is pretty awkward and doesn’t make things as easy as using the number keys to set unit groups, which I think was only added in the later battle.net version.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1654

I went through the human campaign a few years ago (but I remember very little about it) so I’m doing the orcs this time!

I definitely agree that it takes ages to get up and running – I wondered if it was just me, but chopping lumber in particular seems to take an enormous amount of time until you have a small army of workers. And in the orc campaign, it seems like you often start off using more food than you’re actually growing, so you have to spend your first resources on about four farms before you can really get started.

Comparisons to Command and Conquer are definitely inevitable – something I was surprised by in C&C was that it had a lot of varied missions beyond “destroy the enemy base”, like the one where due to budget constraints you have to clear the area using a bunch of mouldy old tanks and a repair bay. Warcraft’s missions, despite having slight variations like “destroy the castle and get to this rune stone”, seem to be fairly repetitive like Pix says. Once you’ve got your armada sorted out there’s little the enemy does to stop you beyond throw its starting units at you.

It’s interesting that “fog of war” is an option in the preferences, rather than a cheat code! I prefer to play with it off, C&C-style, but I imagine the game would be very different with it on – usually, I spend a while at the start of the mission flying a scout around to reveal most of the map, but that wouldn’t be as useful with the fog turned on.

[DavidN]

in reply to: "Multiplayer" vs CPU #1638

I’ve noticed that I tend to take a very long time to really get a base going compared to other RTS games – that hasn’t mattered so far in the campaign as the enemy tends to leave you alone before you start exploring on the early levels. What’s your build order like? 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: The making of Warcraft #1634

I’ve messed up the forum and I’m very sorry

[DavidN]

in reply to: Attempting a speedrun! #1624

Thanks! I had a bit of illness just after posting that video, but here at last is the commentary as to what I’m doing and how I’m skipping pieces of the levels… I had to talk faster than I had anticipated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfOocUkxJ08

[DavidN]

in reply to: Memories of the game #1620

I think Jordan Mechner threw that in as a follow up to a feature in his previous game Karateka – https://tcrf.net/Karateka_(Apple_II) – where he went to the trouble of providing an entire second copy of the game modified to display upside down for the sake of a joke! That’s dedication 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Prince Of Persia 2 #1617

Agh, those biting heads. I never found a reliable way to swipe at them with the half-butterknife that you’re given throughout most of the ruins either – timing gets you so far, but then they’ll hover just out of your range and then swoop in to kill you. They’d be far more enjoyable if they didn’t stay out of range, didn’t have a chance of biting off about four health bottles at a time, and ideally didn’t exist at all.

Prince of Persia 2 really had an avalanche of new ideas – it’s interesting that none of the obstacles from the first game are repeated, not even the basic shrubs of spikes on the floor – but not all of them really worked. And the controls are definitely more sluggish, I feel it in both the jumping and the swordfighting… it’s odd that they didn’t seem to base the game on the perfect groundwork of the original.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Attempting a speedrun! #1613

So I said the next phase was levels 7-9, but I went ahead and finished the whole thing – after you’ve got through those, levels 10-12 are nothing! I finished the game in 12:20.58, counting from the moment the “Level 1” text appears on the screen to the cut to black after completing level 12c. For comparison’s sake, my best human time for the game is 14:24.32, over two minutes slower – an eternity in speedrunning terms! And I’m sure that there’s more that I can go back and enhance (not to mention the emulator was a bit choppy at some points as well, not helping the final time).

Here’s the final rendered TAS from the DOS emulator, and I’ll do a version with commentary soon.

(WARNING, the video begins with quite a loud and alarming emulated PC speaker beep)

https://youtu.be/vIjM2Sy7pOo

[DavidN]

in reply to: Memories of the game #1612

I always found it strange that Jordan put the potion there where you didn’t even need it, when it could have been at the top of an impossible drop instead!

The green potion on level 9 is a great surprise moment as well, but I’d completely forgotten that it existed because you never need to go there!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Attempting a speedrun! #1595

From my initial exploration into the TAS community, they seem very friendly and willing to support newcomers 🙂 I got some great advice from slamo in this thread that helped speed up my workflow: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20296

And with that, I’ve been able to complete levels 4 to 6 in two minutes flat. (You can use Shift+L at the title screen to enter a practice mode that can bump you up to level 4, but sets your timer to just fifteen minutes – this is supposed to make the game impossible to complete, but I think otherwise! I’m counting this as a legitimate way provided by the game to “complete” levels 1-3 instantly 😉 )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmEM5-43_Ek

It’s odd instructing a computer how to play a game rather than directly doing it yourself – you lose a lot of the feel of the controls and timing, so I was surprised that some parts actually felt more difficult than they would have been if I were doing a human speedrun through levels that I’d memorized years ago. But having the ability to save a state and restart definitely let me try some guard-skipping tricks that I wouldn’t have risked if I were doing it manually.

Level 4

– At the start, there’s a guard on the other side of the portcullis to the right who usually just turns around to face you if you venture on to that screen. But by moving into the screen in a specific way, you momentarily convince him you’re close enough to be worth pursuing, and he obligingly steps forward on to the tile to let you in. This lets you avoid going along the real route to the left, down and up again.

– Having done that, you then rudely teleport past him! By jumping forwards when you’re a very specific distance from the guard, you can avoid his swing and dodge past him. Then, once you’ve bopped him once, you have a window to turn and run.

– Jumping forwards is significantly faster than walking. I’m almost sure I could have fit in one more jump on my way to the right, but the presence of the pit and the spikes mess the rhythm up a bit.

– As I go back to the left after opening the exit, you see a “Sound off” message (which is really turning off the music, not the sound). Disabling the sound saves a few seconds at the end of each level, because otherwise the game’s theme plays and the timer is still running!

Level 5

– No jumping when going to the right at the start, because it would make the Prince too quick and he’d hit his head on the portcullis.

– Tempting the guard down from his platform lets you take advantage of a bug. By coaxing him over to the left and entering combat, you can back on to the screen to the left and the game will think you’re beyond the portcullis. Otherwise you’d have to get here by going up and over, fighting another guard.

– Then a run to the left, alternating between fighting and jumping. The guard skipping trick doesn’t work when you’re facing left – you have to stop, draw your sword and then swap positions before making your escape.

Level 6

– The spikes are arranged really awkwardly here, very hostile to continuous running and jumping!

– The midboss of the game, affectionately known as Fatty, is anticlimactically skipped in the same way as any other guard!

– You’re meant to attempt to jump over to the Shadow and try to climb up only for him to close the door on you, but the level ends as soon as you leave the bottom of the screen so you can just do it yourself 🙂

—

The next phase will be levels 7-9, which are much longer and involve more fights with guards, so those will be more difficult – oddly, the game’s levels get much easier again on 10 and 11. Wish me luck 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Podcast – who wants to join? #1483

Would love to join again 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Balance and bonuses #1427

Finished it last night! With 104 races, which seems a bit inefficient of me. One of the things I didn’t appreciate above in how the game is balanced is that the longer you spend messing about in the easy levels, the greater a lead the difficult opponents can build up so you create more work for yourself catching up.

This time around, I chose to spend a long time in the easy races to build up these bonuses and having a strong chance of winning $3000 or so per race with an extra bonus every three races (for destroying other cars and having a winning streak) rather than going for the Medium races, but that set my score back quite a lot and I had to really grind at the end once I had the best car to reach the top of the league.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1420

Yes, the Windows update is definitely a lot easier to get going – Death Rally runs under DOSBox with some configurations because the 3D Realms Anthology version ran fine, but even then sometimes the music went strange.

Repetitive though it is, I’m very into this game again 🙂 Just having some races occasionally and increasing your stash is enjoyable. The only thing I can’t get over is how laughable the “edginess” is – for example, the inclusion of heroin delivery by a pitch-shifted dealer that sounds like what I used to do for my games when I was twelve and didn’t have a deep enough voice 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Race Strategy? #1413

I started it up again and played much longer than I’d intended… which is probably a good sign 🙂 I forgot another tactic that I discovered in my earlier exploration of the game – I find that it’s worth moving up to Medium difficulty earlier than the game recommends (it asks you for the level 3 car, but it won’t actually stop you if you try again after getting the warning). The prize money is much more worthwhile, even if you only finish in third.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Race Strategy? #1412

Yes, once you get over the hump of moving away from your original Volkswagen from about 1947 the game gets easier, if I remember right 🙂

My own strategy was what Wan mentioned – to hang back at the start and let the other cars beat each other up for a bit, then go for the easy kill at the back so that you guarantee yourself at least a bit of income from finishing in 3rd place. The racing mechanics never really seemed like they had a whole lot of depth to me, beyond “hold forward and try not to crash on the corners”, so it’s hard to talk about tactics for driving apart from learning the courses as you go.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1411

I grew up with most of the Apogee catalogue but didn’t encounter this one at the time – I played it for the first time for a video that I did a couple of years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8chy-kRRg#t=19m10s . I ended up really enjoying it and playing all the way through to the end! The 3D Realms Anthology came with the original DOS version at the time, but the Windows-ized version that comes with Steam is functionally identical and works a bit better.

It feels a bit short because all the tracks are theoretically open to you from the start and there isn’t much in the way of feeling like you’re progressing, just the same loop of signing up for a race. But once you’re over the initial hump of difficulty and have the hang of the game, it’s satisfying to work your way up the ranks. It definitely wouldn’t have flown as a “full” game even at the time, I think (it was considered a budget title if I remember right), but it’s a fun enough diversion.

One tip that I remember seeing somewhere is to always pick the Duke Nukem portrait for yourself, because this takes him out of the game and he’s the hardest opponent by a mile!

[DavidN]

in reply to: UK Magazine Reviews #1410

Thanks for scanning those! I grew up with PC games magazines and really miss the tone of humour they had in them, particularly the irreverence of PC Zone. I don’t think it’s a style that survived in the Internet age of game journalism 🙂

Interesting to see such a spread of scores, as well – I agree with the observation that the game isn’t really as edgy as it would like to be, it’s more like just an Apogee game that’s been allowed to stay up past its bedtime and is trying to be a bit darker without really knowing how.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Abuse #1161

I’d definitely love to do this one 🙂 I had the shareware version ages ago, made a couple of levels for it through the provided editor, but never got very far in the main game.

[DavidN]

in reply to: How To Play #1135

From my first impressions, the general feel seems quite like a different Silmarils game I had called Le Fetiche Maya, where you were basically dumped into the environment (a set of locations connected by driving sections) and left to work out any and all objectives for yourself! Though admittedly I got the game from my uncle and I didn’t have the manual, so that could have hindered me a lot.

[DavidN]

in reply to: How To Play #1124

Blimey, this definitely throws you in at the deep end – thanks for the quick guide, because without it the game just presents you with this unfathomable screen to click around on! Definitely another case where a read of the manual is going to be needed 🙂 Silmarils (and more generally, French) games seem to be very like this.

Something I’ve thought might be good as a starting point for each month is a few links showing people where to get the game – one possible place is https://archive.org/details/msdos_Transarctica_1993 . It looks like you can also get it in the Silmarils Collection as a download from Amazon – I found a download of the American version Arctic Baron elsewhere, but it suffers from a weird problem with the mouse where sometimes it’ll jump into the corner of the screen.

Will update once I’ve worked out what I’m doing at all 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Campaign – Lord Ironfist #1123

Well, I downloaded a save game editor to get past the fourth mission! It’s interesting that the computer players change their behaviour and try to avoid fighting you if you suddenly have, say, a stack of 999 phoenixes.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Podcast – who wants to join? #1106

I’d love to if I haven’t been on too much recently 🙂 This was a great pick, I started off thinking I’d hate it but got really into it by the end.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Multiplayer #1100

Haha, that’s great, dr_st 🙂

As much as I’d like to participate, I can only play in couple-of-hour bursts occasionally and would drag the whole thing along. I’m interested to hear what the experience is like!

[DavidN]

in reply to: Campaign – Lord Ironfist #1091

I think I may have hit my wall on level 4! I’m pretty much stuck in a siege where I own the three rightmost castles on the map – I have just about enough forces on hand to fend off the armies of ten Cyclopses that keep coming my way, but not enough to make any headway in forming a counterattack.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Favourite class? #1083

It’s interesting you say that because I’m on level 4 of the campaign now, playing as Knights, and I’ve run into a difficulty wall where I had to admit defeat and start the level again – I spread myself too thinly with units that get torn through like paper, and I’ve been pining for access to the more powerful units of the Warlock class! Does the increased cost of the Warlock’s army make it impractical to build it up in the early game?

[DavidN]

in reply to: Best armies #1082

Aha, yes – I learned about the Trolls’ unique advantage, I had the feeling they were stronger than they should be based on the numbers 🙂 Like I said in the other topic, it’s amazing how many nuances there are to the game – it starts off looking overwhelming, then seems quite simple (buy units, send them off to fight), then becomes more subtly in-depth again.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1081

That Acidcave site is incredibly informative! (I was hoping for more detailed campaign strategies, but the conversations are cute too 🙂 ) I love reading about the in-depth quirks of games like this – the battle system has more nuances than “move and stab” the more I look at it, with some units being less mobile because they’re large and cumbersome, and ranged units being unable to fire if there’s an enemy next to them – it makes positioning and the order of your units on the map all the more important.

And it’s great when makers of a game go above and beyond what’s necessary – there’s no reason at all to have drawn a separate banner for every single combination like that, but it gives a lot of flavour 🙂 (I’d also have liked more distinct looks for the heroes rather than just one per class, but often the amount of memory you take up with extra sprites is a concern for DOS games of this era).

[DavidN]

in reply to: Campaign – Lord Ironfist #1050

Finished level 2 now (had to leave it for that night, but I was only a couple of turns away from discovering the last enemy castle) and have gone through 3 as well where the objective is to find the buried treasure! I spent a while conquering the east side of the map where I started, then recognized the location of the treasure before I’d really uncovered the X by finding enough obelisks, and just diverted all my attention to excavating the whole place for it as the enemies went on a shopping spree through my undefended castles (I found it on the sixth turn).

It’s nice that so far, the missions alternate between having a specific objective and just a fight to the death – it keeps them interesting.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Best armies #1047

After diversifying a bit in the second scenario map, I’ve discovered that phoenixes are like a flying pink steamroller – if you’ve got about seven of those then you can absolutely waste everything in a pack encounter very easily, and they’re very powerful against enemy heroes as well! They’ll definitely be on my list of things to prioritize in the future.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Campaign – Lord Ironfist #1046

This game is absolutely wrecking my week. I’m supposed to get up in about six hours and drive to daycare and I’m absolutely hooked on finishing this second scenario (good to know that the others are just the same maps played on different starting points, by the way – that’ll save a bit of time.) I think I’m quite close! I think I’d mistakenly thought this game was an RPG before, where it’s really more like Civilization (especially in the temptation to take “just one more turn” about fifty times in a row). My weakness is definitely in defence – it’s only recently that I’ve thought to actually leave troops behind to defend a castle and keep a hero around specifically to keep my flags planted on the mines, rather than just leaving things alone and hope nobody barges in.

After struggling back and forth a bit, there seems to be a point where you reach critical mass with your castles and income (currently 10,500 gold pieces a day) and can just buy up everything, after which the game gets a lot easier… having a hero act as a taxi had occurred to me as well, to ferry troops out to the combat zones instead of returning to heal up, interesting to know it’s a viable strategy 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: Best armies #1042

I’m still in my first steps with the game, but the tutorial mission starts you off with a barbarian army and I quickly got to appreciate the Trolls a lot 🙂 They’re strong, they hurl big boulders at the enemy… they’re very expensive, though.

The Hydra was a massive headache for me during that mission, I never got hold of one myself but whenever I encountered one it seemed like a massively overpowered scaly wall of doom that would trundle round and absolutely slaughter everything. I’m looking forward to seeing if the impression is the same the other way around… it’s interesting that you’re finding uses for units that you hadn’t originally realized!

The way that each class has one more unit type than you can fit into an army reminds me of Etrian Odyssey, in an odd way – I read that the director of the game chose a party limit of five specifically so that it would always feel you were missing something and want to experiment with new combinations. It’s also interesting that you get a morale penalty for having too many units of different classes – I think this is something I didn’t realize way back when I briefly played HOMM3! What that does is discourage you from stuffing your army with multiple fliers, or ranged units, or whatever, by reaching across classes.

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1038

Additional note regarding the sound – I honestly wandered around my house trying to work out why the heating was making a distressing noise until I realized it was the bizarre “wind” sound effect in the background of the game! It’s so repetitive and mechanical…

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #1037

The project manager, with the underlings doing the actual work 🙂

I knew roughly what this game was going to be like because I’d played Heroes of Might and Magic 3 many years ago, from a CD borrowed from someone. My overall impression was that I hated it – my primary memory is of fumbling around, entering combat, the computer declaring I had no morale and skipping all my turns, and then having its units slaughter me instantly!

So I started HOMAM1 up this evening and to be frank my first impression was “Oh my god what on earth is going on”. The art style is very, very busy, with a veritable avalanche of things going on on-screen even when you start a scenario (the grainy look of the terrain contributes to that, along with the bold lines of the sprites) – the view and lack of labelling on the buttons contribute to make something that looks incomprehensible.

Fortunately the manual is generous enough to provide a tutorial, although it cuts off just when you’re about to find your feet – http://replacementdocs.com/download.php?view.538 . With its help, I was able to just about understand what I was meant to be doing – there definitely seems to be a lot to discover, and even the combat doesn’t seem as insurmountable as it once was. I think that one of the major things that it explained was to get into the habit of holding down the right mouse button on things to get more information – in a modern UI, this would just be done by hovering, and that action hadn’t occurred to me.

I definitely agree with a few comments above – the combat grid is very vague and it’s unclear where units are standing, partly due to their different sizes… on that subject, the unit graphics are just all over the place and look like they’ve been drawn by at least two separate artists without fully agreeing on a style. That, along with the odd collection of sound effects, reminds me of early independent games which just used whatever sprites and WAV files they found lying around 🙂

I think tonight I’ll do something very nostalgic, and read the manual in bed – I used to do that with all my DOS games in the early 90s, because reading them was so vital to discovering things that weren’t made obvious by the game itself!

[DavidN]

in reply to: My impressions so far #848

A well-earned victory 🙂 Sounds like it was a struggle! I noticed when I went through that the kill frenzies really don’t give you a lot of points, even with the multiplier.

I definitely agree on the aiming problem, too – later in the game you’re asked to go up against whole gangs on foot, and the only way to fight effectively is by doing this strange dance where you run perpendicular to them, wait for them to fire and then turn around spraying your machine gun during the pause. In addition to that there’s a definite limit to the number of directions a gun can fire in, leaving large blind spots!

I found myself wanting strafe controls so that I could move with WSAD and aim with the mouse, although I admit that swapping between the two would be awkward when you’re getting in or out of a vehicle.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Doing the unexpected #840

I’ve been too much of a perfectionist so far, trying to get that score multiplier as high as it’ll go – but I did discover one more example because of a game bug 🙂

There’s a mission in Liberty City 2 where you’re meant to follow and then kill two rival gang heads (whose names I can’t recall) – I assume that someone was meant to get out of the car I was following, but instead it pulled over to the side of the road and just sat there glumly even when I shunted it a bit to try to get it going. With no other options, I chose to just blow it up – and my contact was annoyed that I didn’t take the chance to get them both, but I got a Mission Complete anyway.

[DavidN]

in reply to: San Andreas #839

It just occurred to me that I had no idea what the game’s title meant! Over time it’s just become a game name to me 🙂 But yes, like kdrnic says, seems like “Grand theft auto” is the American term for motor vehicle theft. I’m not sure what the distinction between theft and grand theft is, or why the words are in that order instead of the more natural “grand auto theft”, or why they call them autos and not vehicles, even though I’ve spent eleven years in America now.

And yes, the car names are also plays on real life ones 🙂 Once again I knew nothing about cars when I played this the first time, but looking at them now… Mundano was a nickname for the Ford Mondeo in the UK because it was a safe, common, boring choice of car. Jugular must be Jaguar… Porka is Porsche, Stallion is Mustang, Impaler would be the Chevy Impala.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Tips for running GTA? #817

Aha, and I have sound working! The setup application, for some reason, is called K.EXE – I had overlooked it completely.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Tips for running GTA? #812

(Add Another File doesn’t work on Chrome, gives “Uncaught ReferenceError: gdbbPressAttachmentsInit is not defined”!)

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[DavidN]

in reply to: Tips for running GTA? #810

Yep, I think that GTA24.EXE or the Windows one (if I can find the right compatibility settings to get the performance up) is looking like the best option.

Incidentally I love that the 8-bit and high-colour versions look so different – the GTA8 ones aren’t just low-colour variants of the tiles, they’re a completely separate tile set and it almost looks like a different game. I’ve heard that this is because as the graphics evolved during development, they just sort of forgot to translate their new graphics back to the GTA8 version 🙂

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[DavidN]

in reply to: GTA's Unexpected Evolution #806

I know what you mean and I felt the same way about the PS2-era games – they felt pretty awkward to me. I enjoyed GTA4 and 5, but in different ways from the original top-down games – I suppose in a world where open sandboxes are commonplace, they stand out less than they used to. In the late 90s, being dumped in a city and left to cause havoc was a real novelty 🙂

This will sound a bit “my uncle works at Nintendo”-ish, but an old school friend works with Rockstar now and has a credit in Grand Theft Auto 5, he’s one of the people who wrote the tools for graphics/texture artists and modellers to import their stuff into the game world. We’re very proud of him 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: David P. Gray #731

Those are great 🙂 Something wonderful about the modern era is just how many of these mysterious creators behind the games we loved are just… there and contactable, now. The first PC game I ever played was an ASCII platformer called Jason Jupiter, and I was delighted when its author Neil Drage responded to a post I’d made about remaking it!

I hadn’t realized at the time that the Hugo games were the only shareware graphical adventure series around – that surely boosted their visibility. It’s hard to remember that people could stand out on the shareware libraries then, in contrast to the age when 500 more games are released on Steam every week.

What I found most interesting about David P Gray is the way that despite being from the UK, he uses a lot of American language (the infamous “bung” from the first Hugo game, for example). It turns out that like me, he emigrated from the UK to the US fairly early in life, though I have actively resisted picking up any of the local terms here 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #708

I had a go at Episode 2, and like I remembered, the presentation improves a bit 🙂 There are now backgrounds other than plain grey – they’re a bit monotonous but they’re there, and there are places with simulated lighting cutting through darkness. In general it feels more interesting than episode 1. It also has the feature of some levers that the overly curious can pull in order to lose the game instantly – a trap I fell into in the early 90s 🙂

But the die-and-retry style of gameplay really ramps up as well, mostly due to the new enemies – there seem to be far more with projectile weapons, and your speed of movement (particularly that short delay before you jump) makes it very difficult to get out of the way. Some of the enemies are also ridiculously fast and difficult to see coming – the puppies (I don’t know what they are but that’s what I always called them – they’re small, fast and blue) are very erratic and unpredictable, and they don’t hurt you but they stun you for long enough to be zapped by a nearby enemy. The lack of look up/down controls hurts as well, as you can often drop down straight on to enemies that you couldn’t even see.

Shareware games used to advertise each other all the time, as corny as it looks today – it was the way to get the word out before the Internet as we know it 🙂 You might notice that the game “The Fight For Justice” advertised in the episode 1 help file – which they just made up on the spot, nothing about it had ever been coded – eventually became Quake!

The shareware titans even put friendly jabs at each other in their games 🙂 http://legacy.3drealms.com/fanstuff/keenstory/page6.html

[DavidN]

in reply to: Standard Galactic Alphabet #700

I never got very far in Fez, but on a quick Google, it looks like it does 🙂 And from what I saw, Fez’s “fox room” – the giveaway room that tells you the whole alphabet – is more creative, just hinting that you have what’s needed to work it out instead of telling you outright.

[DavidN]

in reply to: Level and enemy design #699

Yes, it’s weird how you can see the approach to game design carrying through Keen to Wolf3D to Doom despite the very different atmosphere 🙂 There’s a lot of exploration and side areas that aren’t necessary to complete the game… and just like Doom, Keens 1 and 4 at least have whole hidden levels that are accessible by finding alternative exits from normal levels (although I think this had been done by Super Mario by then, so they may have got it from that in turn).

Metroidvania games definitely involve going back and forward and not in a linear progression, but I think there needs to be a continuous world (no individual levels) and skill-gathering to really qualify. (The pogo stick might count 🙂 )

[DavidN]

in reply to: Installer #695

The installer was such a highlight – I’m disappointed as well that they didn’t catch on! The Windows 95 versions had bland InstallShield setups instead and I really missed the atmosphere of the DOS installer.

Great podcast, by the way – it kept me company on a three-hour drive yesterday and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on more games 🙂

[DavidN]

in reply to: First impressions #693

Ah, I grew up with Apogee and id’s games, so there’s so much I can say about this one 🙂

I’m trying to think back to the first time I saw episode 1 – it was after I’d already seen episode 4, so I remember thinking it looked a bit primitive as well. This is particularly true if you compare it with something like Sierra’s King’s Quest V, which came out the same year and looks absolutely spectacular. Shareware games lagged behind the curve for a long time until the landmark release of Doom, and Apogee would stick to EGA for a shockingly long time – well into 1992 at least. It’s important to remember, though, that this was the first side-scrolling platform game that the PC had ever seen – nothing approaching a Mario-style platformer had been possible before id worked out how to massage the graphics support of the time to do it efficiently, so this was a major milestone. (But yes, fair point that this was already a whole five years after Mario.)

From what I remember, episode 2 was the best out of the trilogy, with new elements like turning the lights on and off affecting the behaviour of enemies, and puzzle-like parts with clearing bonuses to route the little robots you can stand on to where you want them to go. The level designs really are punishing throughout, though – just one slip (or running into a really fast enemy you couldn’t see coming like the ninjas or jumping Vorticons) can set you back an awfully long way, and for less frustration, the game could really do with mid-level saving (something that was added in Goodbye Galaxy).

The quality noticeably drops in episode 3 and the levels tend towards very large copy and paste mazes – see the cave levels in particular here, and the way that the large apartment-style map’s upper left portion is mistakenly completely walled off! It seems like they were in a rush to finish it.

https://www.commander-keen.com/level-maps-3.php

But still, it’s always going to be one of those games I admire from childhood, even though it might have rough edges today 🙂