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Classic CRPGs - Rollin 20's, losin' codewheels (article #2 is up!)
Moriveth
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Hey guys, I don't know if you know this, but I like CRPGs a lot. So I'd like to talk about them with you!
Instead of doing a monster OP where I go over every CRPG I can think of, though, I think I'm going to frequently make long posts about the various CRPG series that have existed. And there are a lot, believe me.
This OP will mainly serve as a table of contents, I suppose. I'll post a link to my newest post every time I make one. Feel free to start your own discussions, and I hope you enjoy this thread!
Also, I should note - for CRPGs I'm not intimately familiar with, a lot of my info is paraphrased from Wikipedia. And the images to go along with the posts are from Mobygames. Please don't think I'm so dedicated as to load up all these games, configure them in DOSBOX, and play through them to completion. I'm not that insane.
1. SSI Gold Box Games (I am not going to link this since it is literally the second post) Part 1 - Forgotten Realms games
2. Gold Box Part 2 - GOLD BOX IN SPACE (also the original Neverwinter Nights)
Instead of doing a monster OP where I go over every CRPG I can think of, though, I think I'm going to frequently make long posts about the various CRPG series that have existed. And there are a lot, believe me.
This OP will mainly serve as a table of contents, I suppose. I'll post a link to my newest post every time I make one. Feel free to start your own discussions, and I hope you enjoy this thread!
Also, I should note - for CRPGs I'm not intimately familiar with, a lot of my info is paraphrased from Wikipedia. And the images to go along with the posts are from Mobygames. Please don't think I'm so dedicated as to load up all these games, configure them in DOSBOX, and play through them to completion. I'm not that insane.
1. SSI Gold Box Games (I am not going to link this since it is literally the second post) Part 1 - Forgotten Realms games
2. Gold Box Part 2 - GOLD BOX IN SPACE (also the original Neverwinter Nights)
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The SSI Gold Box games were a series of AD&D-licensed games (you'll probably be seeing this a lot) that all shared a common engine, that of first person exploration coupled with isometric, turn-based combat. Also, the boxes were gold, which is why they were called such!
One interesting thing about the Gold Box games (and other related games) is that to make up for the lack of, well, descriptive graphics (and likely to make it more like the pen and paper games they emulated), they included a book of paragraphs that the game would tell you to read at certain points in the game. And to combat people reading all the paragraphs and spoiling themselves on the story, they were in random order, and also included a number of red herrings.
Of course, the games had copy protection as well - code wheels! I love code wheels so much, I want to take them behind the middle school and get them pregnant. So much better than 'Go to paragraph 3 of page six and type in the third word', these would prompt you with two symbols, which you would have to line up on the code wheel and type in the word revealed. Of course, if you lost them (as I often did), you were proper fucked.
The first four games were paired with novels which paralelled the story. Since they were best sellers, I assume they were at least slightly better written than those shit-awful Baldur's Gate novels.
The gameplay of all these games was pretty similar throughout (first person exploration/puzzle solving, isometric turn-based combat), but I'll try to note when there are differences.
That guy is not gonna put up with that dragon's shit for very long, I tell you what
The first game was Pool of Radiance. No, not the shitty, awful, terrible, hard-drive-erasing-when-you-uninstall game - that came out years later, this is the good one.
The plot is standard D&D fare - you're a party of six adventurers (made up of fighters, clerics, mages and thieves - that's it!) and you adventure around trying to clean out the slums of the main city of Phlan (seriously), so that a new city can be built over the ruins. Then you fight a fortress full of undead, which you need (seriously) magic and silver weapons to defeat. Eventually you discover that an evil dragon is behind all the city's problems, because apparently evil dragons have nothing better to do - and you defeat him in an epic battle that ends the game.
Who cares about these bonds, look at them knockers!
The sequel to Pool of Radiance, this game allowed you to continue with your party from the previous game, or import a character from SSI's other game, Hillsfar (more on that later). It added two new classes - Paladin and Ranger, as well as some new features, such as the 'fix' feature which allowed your party to be healed quickly so long as you had a living cleric in your party.
The plot is a bit more interesting than Pool of Radiance - the characters wake up in an inn, the innkeeper informs them they've been there for a month, and - surprise surprise! You suddenly have some interesting tattoos, and not tramp stamps - five 'azure bonds' that sometimes glow and take over your body, causing you to do something that you probably wouldn't want to do as a good, kind-hearted adventurer. You later discover that each of the bonds is the symbol of an evil organization that you must somehow get to remove the bonds. Oh, and guess what? One of those bonds is the symbol of that dick dragon that you thought you killed from the first game!
Interestingly enough, the bonds actually did affect gameplay somewhat. If you still had the bond of an organization that a town dislikes, the citizens of said town would be a bit peeved and charge you exorbitant prices for everything.
Is that horse giving me the eye? I think that horse is giving me the eye.
Same gameplay as the first two games - with, of course, a higher level cap, and for some reason the lack of an overworld.
The plot of the game is as such: Once upon a time, there were two brothers. One was a paladin, the other was a mage. They built a castle together, and helped establish a town around said castle. Unfortunately, as they grew older, the mage got increasingly aware of his own mortality. So, he decided to become a lich, and his brother was like "Hey don't do that" but then the mage went "Try and stop me". But it was too late, and he became a lich called the Dreadlord, which is the most buttfuckingly cliche name ever.
Not wanting to kill his now evil and undead brother, the paladin decided to recruit a group of adventurers and find a way to stop him. Their solution was to freeze the entire valley, including the paladin brother, who died and haunted his castle. But since the valley was frozen, nobody noticed. And this was magic ice, so it didn't melt!
Of course, the evil followers of the Dreadlord who weren't frozen in the ice at the time began to plot to free him. So, about 300 years later they finally succeeded and the ice began to melt. People began to notice that the old mines from the old town were available, and not only available but chock full of delicious gems! But when they realized the mines were also chock full of evil monsters, they took all the gems to the Well of Knowledge, dropped them in, and asked for some adventurers to help. And then you (the guys from Pool of Radiance and Curse of The Azure Bonds) fell from the sky, completely nude because the idiot villagers forgot to ask for any of your stuff too.
Drow ladies. Gotta love 'em
That's some VGA shit going on there!
Unlike the previous three games (which took place entirely in the Forgotten Realms), Pools of Darkness actually took place across multiple dimensions! Why?
Well, apparently Bane is up to his old tricks, which this time means claiming the entire world as his own, and teleporting/destroying many cities across the world. To defeat Bane, you must defeat his four minions, all of which are contained in other dimensions. And to make things rougher, in order to get to those dimensions you must travel through the titular Pools of Darkness, which have the nasty side effect of destroying many of your items. You can keep your stuff in a vault to prevent it from being destroyed, but of course then you don't have them.
After the first four Gold Box games, SSI took a break, decided to start developing a new game engine (the one that the two Dark Sun games would run on), and told Stormfront Studios to make some games about the Savage Frontier.
One thing I miss about game covers? Actual drawn art.
The plot of this game involves the Zhentarim, an evil organization of dudes. They want to take over the entire Savage Frontier, and of course, you don't stand for that kinda bullshit. Once you do stop them (their evil plot is using some magical statues to open the way through an impassible desert so their armies can march through - seriously I can't make this shit up), your party is hailed as the Heroes of Ascore, and given many blowjobs. Also, this title carries over to the sequel.
This lady is way too high to notice the army of demons and spirits coalescing behind her.
The Heroes of Ascore return (or are newly-created, if you didn't import your party from the last game) - and man are they peeved. They thought they'd just mop up the last of the Zhentarim and then take a cushy job guarding some ambassadors. But whaddaya know, the Zhentarim are still sore about the beating they took last game, so they kidnap the ambassadors and blame it on the heroes. Now the heroes have to go through all the trouble of clearing their names, mostly by doing back-breaking adventuring work for the cities the ambassadors represented, and finally defeat the Zhentarim. Shit!
.
This wizard's like "OH SHIT I JUST CREATED A BIG-ASS CASTLE IN MY CRYSTAL BALL, WHAT THE HELL AM I GONNA DO WITH IT"
Unlimited Adventures was an interesting beast. While not technically a Gold Box game, it did include all the tools you needed to make your own. Yes, you could make your own AD&D adventurers, taking place wherever and doing whatever you please - provided you didn't mind not being able to change stuff like wall textures, combat backdrops, and title screens. Actually, that didn't even matter, because people made hacks for it that made it hell of easy to do that kinda shit - and you could already import pictures and monster sprites! Hell, they even had comprehensive hacks that changed the entire setting, so you could set it in modern-day if you wanted.
Also, if you wanna create a classic-style adventure, don't seek this out. There's a free, fanmade program called Dungeon Craft that basically does everything FRUA did, and with even more customizability. Get to making adventures where we play a group of dicks fighting evil dicks, folks.
Next time: Something else. Perhaps more Gold Box games, perhaps not! The mind boggles!
Sure! I don't want any real MMO talk in here, though. Although I meant to include the first Neverwinter Nights, but completely missed it. I'll add that later.
I loved the gold-box games of long ago. I only played the first 2, on a Commodore 64!
XBox LIVE: Bogestrom | Destiny
PSN: Bogestrom
i had a couple of d&d cd sets, one with pools of radiance era stuff and one with unlimited adventures, stronghold, shattered lands, fantasy empires and hack. hack
every game in that set was phenomenal
(I totally won the TTB run a couple of years ago!)
XBox LIVE: Bogestrom | Destiny
PSN: Bogestrom
That is my contribution to CRPG history.
By Hack do you mean or the roguelike
or Dungeon Hack
because they are both awesome
oh, dungeon hack! that's the one i mean
edit: but it really is a 3D roguelike in a d&d universe. with lots of keys. oh god did the levels have keys
Or would that be totally lame.
i was a creator on the discworld mud for a long time and have an embarrasing number of hours (days) racked up as a player
but then [SENSITIVE INFORMATION REMOVED] and i can't really go back
edit: christ, that was six years ago
so brutal, I think I made it off the first level twice
but then again I was 10
I actually have an original copy of Dungeon Hack here!
Me and my brother even had a Hillsfar refrain that was based out of a 2 Live Crew song.
it's the stripped down spin-off version
I think you played the one they had at CoT a while back
I'm pretty sure I killed you in it at least once 8-)
me too!
also:
well just as well i didn't have it on floppies because i'd never have hung onto those
i owned a copy years ago
anyone have experience running it on windows 7?
Also one game I forgot to mention last time, whoops
The original, not your gay-ass game with polyglots and textures and such.
The first graphical MMORPG! Interesting, no? Pay up to $8 an hour and you too could join your nerdy friends in playing Dungeons and Dragons without all that messy social contact. It even had a DM mode - something that, of course, made it into the second game with the same name.
Buck! Ah-aah! Wait, wrong space hero.
Finally, instead of shooting orcs with arrows we could shoot space orcs with lasers.
Interestingly enough, this game included not only land-based combat, but ship-based combat as well. Other than the sci-fi theme, this was pretty similar to the AD&D gold box games - except instead of fighters, mages, and thieves, you instead had warriors, rogues, engineers, medics, and, of course, rocketjocks. Oh, and the races were: Human, Desert Runner, Tinker, Venusian, Martian, and Mercurian.
Also, you don't play Buck Rogers, although you do at least meet him at some point.
I'd actually like to play this at some point, if I can get my hands on a copy I'll probably post some impressions or something.
If you cubed the Matrix movies, I'm pretty sure you could destroy the universe with how bad the latter two are. This is truly a diabolical plot.
Honestly, I can't say I know much about this game. Even Wikipedia and Mobygames fail me, although I do know you can at least import your party from the first Buck Rogers game, and the evil organization from the first game is back for more... evil. What dicks.
Ahh Spelljammer, the only D&D setting where you can pit space-spiders against space-hippos and not be completely un-canon.
This game has an interesting history - since I'm not trying to entirely plagarize, I'll just link to the wikipedia entry for the entire saga of development.
Some interesting things to note are that the 'asteroids' in the game are actually digitized rocks from the programmer's backyard, and many of the sprites for enemies were digitized versions of people from the Society of Creative Anachronism.
This is another game I'm interested to try sometime, although by most accounts it isn't exactly a quality game. Still, I played through the entirety of 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, so what do I care about quality?
Next time I'll finish up the Gold Box games with stuff on the Dragonlance games.
I doubt it is officially abandonware
SSI was bought by Mindscape, then Mattel (really, Mattel?), and finally by Ubisoft, who retired the name but presumably kept all the IP
I don't know the forum's stance on abandonware, but I'm pretty sure it's "Don't talk about that shit", so best not to talk about it, I suppose (unless a mod says otherwise)
Played through the whole series multiple times.
Wonder if I still have my copy lying around.
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The best part about it was since for making your own rpgs, it was basically that or nothing, people would spend so much time on making modules that some of them would be practically commercial-release quality.
I remember there was this one guy who remade a ton of the old classic d&d adventures into FRUA modules, and linked them together with a map. Then you could use this little hack tool to play through all of them with the same party. SO awesome.
Found it! The Realm. SO MANY GAMES
just found this http://dungeonhack.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
open source dungeon hack
bout to try it out
edit: nevermind, its still pretty much alpha