Advice for trying out some older RPG's

[luj1]

Wizardry 6 is creme de la creme

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

If you want to go way back and start with something easy/simple, you might want to take a look at Akalabeth. It's perfectly playable in short bursts, the objectives are simple and clear and it might make it easier for you to get into other classic RPGs.

Also, Wizardry 1 has a pretty simple (overall) objective, which should be all the direction you need.

You should replace Gordon Ramsay on "Hell's Kitchen". Send those aspiring cooks to learn to make fire using hand drills first.

Aren't there some akalabeth remakes floating around?

 

[AArmanFV]

If you want to go way back and start with something easy/simple, you might want to take a look at Akalabeth. It's perfectly playable in short bursts, the objectives are simple and clear and it might make it easier for you to get into other classic RPGs.

Also, Wizardry 1 has a pretty simple (overall) objective, which should be all the direction you need.

You should replace Gordon Ramsay on "Hell's Kitchen". Send those aspiring cooks to learn to make fire using hand drills first.

Aren't there some akalabeth remadters floating around?

There is a DOS port called Ultima 0, if you meant that. Never heard of other.

 

[mondblut]

Once you grow accustomed to the basics, playing other crawlers becomes much easier.

Once you grow accustomed to 'quality-of-life' features like automapping, autowalking, awesome buttons and quest markers, playing anything other than casual shite becomes much harder.

Once you grow accustomed to matches or lighters, going back to hand drills becomes hard indeed. "Quality of life" is there for a reason.

Why would anybody play Wizardry 1 and Akallabeth after 1986? What do they bring to the table that other, much more developed and mature games don't? Spinner tiles killed ded by the evil automap? That's a hard sell.

More importantly, who are you and what have you done to mondblut?

mondblut got a hard cutoff for "playable games" set around 1987.

 

[AArmanFV]

I have to agree there, the early Wizardries or Akalabeth aren't games I would recommend to newcomers, especially Akalabeth. Only if they want a better understanding of the evolution of CRPGs, maybe Wizardry if they want to get full oldschooltards for its straight to the point and well balanced design, that's the advice a I would bring.

Now if someone aspire to design an RPG it will be good play as much as possible games from that era and new ones, because a lot of ideas and examples of good design can be found there, some of which is forgotten. We can't pretend that every good thing of the old times was carried into the new generation, the same "Quality of life" makes us lazy and less prepared in cases where we need to "improvise" or do it ourselves, not saying we need to go back to the stone age either.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Once you grow accustomed to matches or lighters, going back to hand drills becomes hard indeed. "Quality of life" is there for a reason.

Why would anybody play Wizardry 1 and Akallabeth after 1986? What do they bring to the table that other, much more developed and mature games don't? Spinner tiles killed ded by the evil automap? That's a hard sell.

Akalabeth is a simple and very accessible starting point, while Wizardry 1 is more complex than Akalabeth, but the elegant design makes it easier to approach.

At worst one can get an idea of how RPGs worked before, and at best it's a jump into binge-playing through Ultima or Wizardry series and having fun.

mondblut got a hard cutoff for "playable games" set around 1987.

Shalom.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Even if akalabeth was party based it would be different than wizardry. In fact, if party based, it'd be more akin to Dungeon Master and EOB.

I'm pretty sure if you just stand still in the dungeon <PASS> will occur naturally. What do they call that; some sort of constant turn timer or something.

Wizardry you can sit forever looking at the monsters encountered and untill you get your party commands typed in and start the round; nothing will happen.

Ah! This is what I was talking about.

THE OFFICIAL AKALABETH REMAKE PAGE

Or you can go here:
Ultima: The Reconstruction


What's interesting on the Reconstruction site are the files with assets I'm not sure are used or not.

 

[Cael]

Even if akalabeth was party based it would be different than wizardry. In fact, if party based, it'd be more akin to Dungeon Master and EOB.

I'm pretty sure if you just stand still in the dungeon <PASS> will occur naturally. What do they call that; some sort of constant turn timer or something.

Wizardry you can sit forever looking at the monsters encountered and untill you get your party commands typed in and start the round; nothing will happen.

Ah! This is what I was talking about.

THE OFFICIAL AKALABETH REMAKE PAGE

Or you can go here:
Ultima: The Reconstruction


What's interesting on the Reconstruction site are the files with assets I'm not sure are used or not.

The time based <PASS> thing was in Ultima until Ultima4. It was finally stopped in Ultima5.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

For nonrpgs I used to play Splatterhouse 3, Castlevania, and cauldron 1&2 every Halloween.

Once I had the internet and discovered emulators It was my goal to finish Ultima 3 with every class on each platform. I also tried with 1 char a lot (not so easy tbh). Can't recall if i did it. Btw, when I finally tried the NES version I had to vomit. That music, those stupid graphics on some parts, and the glitching.... god damn awful.

I remrmber a game store ages ago that gad a try before you buy. They had NES U3. I tried and went fuck no. Then I forgot. At least i finished it. FM-towns was interesting trilogy as was the gameboy one with a part 2. The final battle... lol. That was a bit space-invaderish.

 

[mondblut]

Now we are talking. This actually looks not like a cataract.

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Now we are talking. This actually looks not like a cataract.

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

There was a archive to download all the fm-towns games but its corrupt. Fails so bad. I'm not sure you can get all the emulated games.

 

[AArmanFV]

Now we are talking. This actually looks not like a cataract.

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

There was a archive to download all the fm-towns games but its corrupt. Fails so bad. I'm not sure you can get all the emulated games.

Have you tried the neo kobe archives for FM towns?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That's the one I had failed. I think maybe theyeye archives has some but damn that file is huge and broken.

maybe its fixed...

https://archive.org/details/redump.fmt

https://archive.org/details/fmtownscdcollection


This one is the one I had issues with. 4gigs for each file and you have to combine them all into 1 and well.. it failed for me. I couldn't get the games individually either.
https://archive.org/details/Neo_Kobe_Fujitsu_FM_Towns_2016-02-25

https://archive.org/download/Neo_Kobe_Fujitsu_FM_Towns_2016-02-25

Maybe this one is ok...

https://archive.org/download/fmtownscdcollection/FM-Towns CD/

 

[AArmanFV]

Then I don't know, but there is a forum of japanese retro-PC where you could search or even ask, it's not so active but I think it's still alive.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

That is legitimately 80% of games on FM Towns. I remember looking up some flight sim and everything but FM Towns had the typical '80s computer look, FM Towns? Beautiful. If its before like 1993, its going to look better on FM Towns. Most of which you won't understand until someone perfects Japanese-to-English machine translations.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I could always try to torrent instead of zip for the FM-towns. I did find the pc-98 one they listed as working.

https://archive.org/details/NeoKobe-NecPc-98012017-11-17

Seems its huge and done by publishers. It'll take a little while to dl these. Then its back to trying fm-towns.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

You sure your net didn't just screw it up at one point? Checking two parts of it doesn't seem to have any obvious points of failure. I'm not checking anymore at the moment, because that's a shitton of data.

 

[MRY]

I think the Ultima series is overrated (not from the standpoint of historical significance, just in terms of whether it's worth playing for non-historical reasons) and a bad series to encourage someone to play. In particular, I think U7 is wildly overrated. The simulationist/seamless world stuff strikes me as essentially irrelevant to core RPG gameplay, the presentation is bad (font, Olde English, weird camera angle, terrible UIs), the combat is terrible. It's a landmark game, sure, and some of the things it does remain very technically impressive today, but I just don't really see what anyone would get out of playing it other than checking a box on the "important RPGs to play" list.

Other older RPGs, however are very different from contemporary or even Renaissance RPGs in fundamental ways. One that I think is quite important is that they tend to just play so much faster. The lack of elaborate combat animations, cutscenes, and lengthy dialogues, coupled with movement speeds that are extraordinarily fast compared to games today, mean that much more of the game is active rather than passive. I also think they're quite a bit different in that there's much more experimentation and weirdness in them. Things are much less scripted, there are tons of skills and options that are just kind of irrelevant. There's a reason why things got streamlined, of course, but a major mood for me when I play these older games is agoraphobia. There are so many places to go, so many different things you can do with your characters, etc., etc. M&M is a good example of this. It can be a hard hurdle to get over, but once you do, the games just play radically differently from the curated experience of PS:T or even FO (which I think still has some aspects of the older model in things like pick-pocketing or using dynamite to close the radscorpion nest or whatever).

I think playing at least some of these games is worthwhile just to get a sense of that contrast. It's not even an open-world vs. linear thing; modern "open-world" games still feel to me much more curated than fairly linear RPGs from the 80s and 90s.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

C64 Ultima 3 will always be that game with a huge impact on me. Before this it was Temple of Apshai, Questron, and Scott Adams Adventures and I think Sword of Fargoal. Not sure on the last.

 

[flyingjohn]

Now we are talking. This actually looks not like a cataract.

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

Only the ultima remakes are worth it.
Everything else is just different palettes or portraits(might and magic series,wizardry) and better audio for most games.

 

[Cael]

Why not just play the originals?

 

[mondblut]

Now we are talking. This actually looks not like a cataract.

Someone should compile the list of all RPGs ported to (and improved) for FM Towns, PC98 and the likes. Maybe a couple is even available on the human tongue

Only the ultima remakes are worth it.
Everything else is just different palettes or portraits(might and magic series,wizardry) and better audio for most games.

The first two Might & Magics are very different on those obscure jap computers, although not necessarily more appealing:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/pc98/might-and-magic-ii-gates-to-another-world/screenshots
https://www.mobygames.com/game/pc98/might-and-magic-book-one-secret-of-the-inner-sanctum/screenshots

Phantasie 3 on PC98 and Sharp 68000 looks worlds apart from Amiga and Atari ST versions, let alone the cancer-tier PC version. Not to mention Phantasie 4 is japPC-exclusive.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/phantasie-iii-the-wrath-of-nikademus/screenshots

Death Knights of Krynn on PC-98 looks pretty fucking hot (Pool of Radiance and Curse of AB look like ass though):
https://www.mobygames.com/game/pc98/death-knights-of-krynn/screenshots

 

[mondblut]

Why not just play the originals?

Cause they look like cataract and play like bone cancer?

 

[Cael]

Why not just play the originals?

Cause they look like cataract and play like bone cancer?

Ultima? Blasphemy!!!