vga256
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vga256ParticipantYIKES hahaha I can’t imagine how painfully slow it was moving around at 12 mhz. I tend to tune it up into the high 486 DX2-66 level, just to make traversing the regions a little faster.
One nice thing is that they have the “step size” option. If you set it to small (and your dosbox cycles to high), you get very smooth, very fast, interpolated movement.
vga256ParticipantThis is a lovely little game, and I really like the first (shareware) episode. It’s short, and would be very straightforward for an ‘easy’ podcast episode.
vga256ParticipantYeah, that almost definitely sounds like a LLM fabrication. Has no basis in fact.
Iβve never actually received the Rusalki quest, so I never tried. For this monthβs playthrough I will attempt it now that I know how to trigger it.
vga256ParticipantOkay, I just went through several hundred 30+ year old conversations on Usenet to try figuring this one out. From what I can gather, there are at least two possibilities:
a) Some players say there is a single rusalki in Dimwood. They believe you need to kill this one too.
b) One player said “Some are hidden so if your stealth is good, you might not get to fight them.” I have no idea what this person meant, and if this is true.
As I said in our earlier e-mails, I’ve never successfully completed this quest in the 30+ years I’ve played the game. I’m eager to hear from anyone who does.
Once that is figured out, I can update the walkthrough at Dimwood.net accordingly.
Edit: some more thoughts on possible quest triggers:
– There’s an old woman in a house in Darkmoor that can only be visited at night. She speaks of the Rusalki. Who knows – maybe she needs to be visited.
– Re-visit Haphra the mystic’s house after you reject her fortune and then kill her rusalki. There is a whole new dialogue with her after that.
vga256ParticipantOne of the most rewarding things about Krondor is finding out just how much you’ve missed in a chapter, years later. I’ve been playing the game yearly since the mid-90s, and I’m *still* finding new quests and conversations that I somehow missed.
For the most part, and there are many exceptions, you can run around the world map in an early chapter and characters will have different things to say in later chapters if you go back to that same place. It rewards thoroughness.
The clunky interface is very likely a product of Dynamix literally gluing damon slye’s Red Baron flight simulator engine code to the Heart of China point and click interface π
vga256ParticipantThat’s a wild story. Neil really is passionate about Krondor, even today.
IIRC gametz.com used to be UGTZ.com – “Used Game Trading Zone”. I used to be a regular there a long, long time ago π
vga256ParticipantFWIW, the GOG version has pops and skips in the CD music, due to them using the ISO from a well-known pirated release of the game which was imaged from a scratched CD ;D
vga256ParticipantGreat! That first chapter of the game is surprisingly long.
vga256ParticipantFor anyone wondering what Feist’s novel Krondor: The Betrayal is like, imagine someone did a single run-through of the game and novelized the experience. He did some of the sidequests and mostly stuck to the main plot. He improvised dialogue where necessary but stayed very close to the story at all times.
It’s amazing to see a novel where its origins are:
role-playing group -> author -> game -> author
vga256ParticipantThis is a surprisingly unique game that, despite the awful EGA artwork, has some good role-playing and adventure depth. It plays like a midpoint between an Infocom adventure and Wasteland.
vga256ParticipantJust to save some time for other players, so you don’t have to scroll through the whole text file:
Chapter 8 Bug:
I hit a showstopper mid-way through the game that quite literally kicked me to DOS. I don’t remember this happening in real MS-DOS, and I am 99% sure this is a DOSBOX bug. Basically: in Chapter 8, if you get to a point where the game is crashing to the DOS prompt, google for “betrayal at krondor freeze in chapter 8”, and you’ll find a workaround so you can complete the quest. Basically, the solution is to stay in overhead view (not first person view) for a minute or two, get what you need from two chests, then leave the area. Once this is done, you’ll never encounter the bug again.Bugs in the CD version:
One of the most powerful spells in the game, Mind Melt, can’t be gotten due to a bug in the game in the CD-ROM version of the game. This one requires some hex editing to fix. Thanks to RPG Codex user LightandTime. To fix this, google for “bak mind melt spell quest bugfix gog” and you’ll find the thread with the hex address to change. Takes 10 seconds, and you can finally fulfill the sidequest that lets you get the spell.– There’s a hilarious but game-breaking bug if you manage to power-level Gorath by getting tons of gold and using tons of books to train his skills and strength up: a weapon like that Guarda Revanche can do negative damage (e.g. give health) to enemies by having such high damage (>255) that it rolls over the damage integer variable into negative numbers! I haven’t done this myself, but I’ve seen other people complain about it. If you’re into powerlevelling, you’ve been warned. That being said, I’ve played the game a dozen times, and there really isn’t a good reason to power level your characters. The game was balanced to be completable just by finishing the main quests, without having to do a ton of grinding to get there.
GOG CD version:
If you’ve bought the GOG version, you’re going to hear skips and blips in some of the redbook audio tracks. Yes, GOG used a CD image from a scratched CD. GOG has a habit of grabbing any bin/cue/iso they can find on the web (they never do their own rips) without checking the quality first.– Redbook audio doesn’t loop during combat. So if your combat lasts longer than five or so minutes, be prepared for a very silent finish π So if you want your combat music to loop, switch to MIDI music.
Tips for all versions:
– Don’t leave stuff in a bag on the ground. It *will* disappear after you exit the area and return. If you really need to store something, store it in a chest. And that being said, if you store it in a chest, you still might lose it if that chest is an important “quest” chest. So my advice is: if you really need something, like something you suspect is a quest item, keep it in your backpack! This isn’t a LucasArts adventure – you really can break the game if you lose a main quest item. Thankfully, they’re usually pretty obvious things to hang on to.
– It’s a sierra/dynamix title. Save often. Like, really, really, often. Expect to have your characters incapacitated constantly, always searching for some healing herbs or vials of healing juice.
vga256ParticipantGreat. I’ve dumped the podcast notes into a text file (attached). Everything is separated into sections, point-form.
Hope that helps someone.
Attachments:
vga256ParticipantSeconding TFTD as well. I grew up playing a pirated copy I downloaded from a BBS as a kid, and I always found it more terrifying than UFO Defence – perhaps because of the underwater setting.
vga256ParticipantThe adventure elements in this game make it worth a play. I have some very happy memories of playing this as a kid, and I recently finished it after a 30 year break. Some of the later missions are fairly difficult, but it’s never unfair (unlike its sequel – No Regret – which is outright abusive).
vga256ParticipantIf anyone wants FLACs of the redbook audio soundtrack, I uploaded them here. Enjoy!
vga256ParticipantCheers Tijn. I’ll for sure try to join in for the upcoming podcast recording – BaK is in my top 3 games of all time! π
vga256ParticipantJust echoing my appreciation for Fuji Golf. I got to play it when I was 12 years old, in a university student computer lab while my mom went to class. My mom told me the door lock password to the lab, and I’d sneak in there when it was quiet and pretend I was a student, so I could play Microsoft Entertainment Pack games.
Fuji Golf (and Jezzball, and Rodent’s Revenge) were on there, and I had a TON of fun with them. It didn’t take long to figure out how to copy files from the university lab’s Novell Netware server drive to a floppy disk, and take pirated copies of the MEP games to play at home.
Not-DOS, yes.. but Win 3.1 is just a fancy DOS shell anyway! π
The other game I played a ton of – and I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet – is PGA Tour Golf (1990) by Sterling Silver Software/EA. While most people automatically think of Links 386 as the ubiquitous golf game, I think PGA Tour had a better mix of arcade and realistic gameplay. As a kid, I found Links a bit too stodgy and complex – more like a flight simulator than a golf game. The television style fly-by animation at the start of each hole absolutely blew me away as a kid, and to this day looks just wonderful.
It’s just a shame that while the intro has a gorgeous MT-32 track, the rest of the game has horrendous non-digitized PC speaker sound effects.
