Game News Underworld - Return of the Blob

[Jason]

Tags: OlderBytes; Swords and Sorcery: Underworld

Scratch that old school blob-with-arms-and-legs itch with <b><a href="http://www.classicgamesremade.com/underworld-details" target="blank">Underworld</a></b> from Classic Games Remade.
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<blockquote>Underworld is a full-fledged 80s style 3D perspective adventure game… with pretty pictures!
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Underworld is comparable in look and feel to the first two Might and Magic, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Wizardry or The Bard’s Tale. Lead a party of 6 adventurers into the underworld to take on a rising demon that threatens to cover the world in yet another darkness. Before you meet the final foe, there will be 5 other major enemies, and legions of monsters with a wide range of special abilities standing in your way.
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But there will also be allies. Elves, dwarves and a misanthropic gnome will help you make the difference. Items of power you will find or be awarded along the way, your priest, paladin and sorcerer’s 40 spells, your rogue’s ability to assassinate, your archer’s infallible accuracy with missile weapons, and your knight’s resistance and strength will ultimately enable you to match the demon’s power.
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All of this, combined with a large underworld, three towns, fast game mechanics, traps, treasure vaults, crypts, lairs and other surprises along the way will keep you on edge for dozens of hours before the final showdown. There is also a twist in the end…</blockquote>
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"Thank you, but your foozle is in another dungeon."
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Classic Games Remade offers a <a href="http://www.classicgamesremade.com/" target="blank">demo</a> or the <a href="http://www.classicgamesremade.com/buy-underworld" target="blank">full game</a> for $25 (good luck with that).
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<i>Thanks to getter77 for the tip</i>

 

[JarlFrank]

Awesome armor. A step up from chainmail bikinis

But meh:

Shitty poser art detected. Looks like an okay game overall, though, although I'd rather spend my time trying to get into Wizardry 6 and 7 properly.

 

[mondblut]

How come they invested a fair amount of effort to render all those characters, but the dungeon walls you're going to stare at for 99% of the game look so shitty?

 

[Tolknaz]

Also,

Underworld requires 800MB of RAM (yes, it is big and has lots of data to handle!).

Le fuck?

 

[JarlFrank]

How come they invested a fair amount of effort to render all those characters, but the dungeon walls you're going to stare at for 99% of the game look so shitty?

Their graphic budget was used up after making all these character images.

 

[GarfunkeL]

I created a party, the game dumps me to a city map (at least on map it says City of XYZ), I have no equipment at all yet, I take one step and meet HILLMAN whose every hit instakills anyone in my party. Not to be content with that, he is also accompanied by 5 gnomes who speed up the kill process.

Great experience, I'm sure they'll have lots of happy customers if my experience is typical :D

 

[Mortmal]

Would you still rejoice if EA/bioware collapsed and be replaced by indie developpers like this ?.. For one knight of the chalice theres like 100 like that.

 

[getter77]

I'd reckon patches and polishing are the best shots from here via feedback on his contact page. Besides, this is the closest something like this has gotten yet, mysterious as this is, since Elementium vanished into the haze under mysterious circumstances.

Clearly, the developer is crazy so there's that much to work with.

 

[aleph]

I created a party, the game dumps me to a city map (at least on map it says City of XYZ), I have no equipment at all yet, I take one step and meet HILLMAN whose every hit instakills anyone in my party. Not to be content with that, he is also accompanied by 5 gnomes who speed up the kill process.

Great experience, I'm sure they'll have lots of happy customers if my experience is typical :D

Just like playing Bards Tale, nostalgia... :wink:

Not really, Bards Tale kinda sucked. They'd be keep closer to the early Wizardries and Might and Magics. Those unforgiving but didnot dumb that crap like having impossible tough encounters during the first few steps of the game just because you were unlucky.

Btw, the Underworld's character graphic look like crap, should have used hand drawn ones.

 

[denizsi]

 

[Black Cat]

The visuals are totally awful. With so many good looking dungeon crawlers out there i can't really find any reason to subject myself to this kind of horrible looking thingie.

 

[Melcar]

Doesn't even work on WINE, therefore it is shit. Looks like shit from the pics. too, so good thing I'm not wasting my time on it.
You would think the guy would have bothered to pretty up the interface a bit. The contrast between the shitty interface and the decent models makes for a really awful visual experience.

 

[mondblut]

Devil Whiskey and PDA games like Legacy or Undercroft look infinitely better, and judging by first comments, play infinitely better too.

 

[Murk]

jesus, i may be judging a book by its cover here but that is not worth 25 dollars.

 

[DraQ]

*click*
*click*
Utter faggotry.

 

[Mattresses]

this game is fucking hideous. jesus, I'd rather entirely text-based interface to this shit.

I bet most codexers will buy this, though, because:

 

[Charles-cgr]

OUCH!

People on rampant were nicer :shock:

Where to start?

Utter fagottry - gee thanks.

This is not worth $25 - What does that mean? Either you enjoy the gaming experience and it is worth something or you do not and it isn't. Some people have bought the game after trying the demo. They weren't tricked into it. To them it was worth it.

Doesn't even work on WINE, therefore it is shit - OK.

Devil Whiskey and PDA games like Legacy or Undercroft look infinitely better, and judging by first comments, play infinitely better too - Yes, they look better. As for playability I'll answer below.

Great experience, I'm sure they'll have lots of happy customers if my experience is typical - Not they. He

Clearly, the developer is crazy so there's that much to work with - Can't say I disagree :D

Their graphic budget was used up after making all these character images - Budget?? No one told me I had a budget!

The shitty interface - I was content with something that looked like Wizardry / Might & Magic I. That's my experience of these RPGs as a kid. The characters are obviously more detailed than the MMI characters were.

The impossible encounters - Well, actually they aren't impossible. The rogue's assassination circumvents the oponent's armor, so keeping him healed and using stealth / assassination gets you through against the hillman, the drake, and, if you're patient, the vigilante. There's also running to avoid the fight until you're suited up.

That being said, I'll have to reconsider that. Clearly it is too frustrating and has turned many people off.

Thanks for the feedback though. It helps! Also there's a Brian that took the time to send an awesome email with detailed questions / feedback just as I was writing this so I'm off to answer those.

I hope we can exchange some more!

Note: The price tag I put up may make it seem like I'm some greedy capitalist pig, but I'm just broke and clueless about marketing :D I'm just saying that because... Well you should see some of the emails I've been getting...

 

[Melcar]

It's cool man. Just do something about the interface's appearance man. That contrast in appearance between the models and everything else gives it a look of a copy and paste hack job. Just smooth it out a bit and you should have a much better presentation. The game itself is alright; not as entertaining as other similar games I played, but tolerable. The price is steep, but don't listen to these commie Godless pricks. Oh, and this is The Codex, the gauntlet of fire and multiheaded dickings of gaming.

 

[aleph]

OUCH!

People on rampant were nicer :shock:

the codex doesn't scale to your level

The characters are obviously more detailed than the MMI characters were.

Why put so much work into something that isn't really needed on a game like this, nobody cares that the characters look better than in MMI. And the higher quality of the character graphics makes the rest worse than it actually is.

 

[Azrael the cat]

For the folk laying into this game, I suspect that it will do better than you might think. Most of you folk either grew up on the late 90s Fallout/BG/SS2 era, or otherwise discovered that stuff in retrospect. A few more grew up on Wiz 5-7, M and so on. What you forget is that there's an older audience who doesn't frequent sites like this, whose idea of a great crpg is Wiz1-3. I.e. if there's no graph paper and hand-mapping involved, and if its immediately explained what class/ability/skill does what, then it isn't a real crpg. I'm on the tailend of that myself, having played the crap out of Wiz1-2, Ultima 1-2 as a kid, but admittedly I then didn't play crpgs again until the infinity engine and fallout games came out, so I associate crpgs much more with the games I played at uni than those old blob and graph-paper ones.


Thing is, if you are from the graph paper era, what the fuck else are you going to play? You've played every single Wizardry and M game so many times over that you can probably clock Wiz4 by wrote, and you probably have a filing cabinet full of the maps you've made for each game. Commercial developers, or even respectably sized indie developers, aren't going to make any more of those games....well...ever. So that leaves the no-budget one-man shows. And heck, yeah the graphics and interface are awful. But if the computer you did most of your gaming on was the Apple IIe, then the graphics and interface range from decent to pure heaven. Well, at least they have other colours than green available.

And the average age of that crowd is around 40 these days. $25 is nothing for them. Heck, I'm only just into my early 30s and it's nothing for me. That wouldn't even get you a quarter of a way to the cost of a dinner for 2 with a bottle of wine at a decent restaurant - if it entertains you for more than a couple of hours then it's money well spent by that measure.

As I said, I'm not buying it; my days of blob-dungeons are long gone. But there's plenty of folk around who crave that stuff. Heck, I advertised my old Apple IIe on a whim a couple of years back, and got a decent number of calls just in my home city alone (this is without even putting it on ebay). And when I asked them why they wanted it, every single one said that it was to play their old Wizardry 1-3, Ultima 1-3 games.

 

[Mattresses]

get rid of all the shitty renders, and the game is halfway to being worth it's price.

 

[Stabwound]

Okay, I didn't actually try the game, and clearly $25 is way too much, but I think changing the font and adding boxes around the UI components would go a long way toward making it look better. Just a friendly thought.

 

[DraQ]

OUCH!

People on rampant were nicer :shock:

This is the RPG Codex, not rampant. We have heard of such concept as "being nice". It piqued our curiosity and we would like to learn more about it. So far we merely find it difficult to comprehend and very confusing.

Their graphic budget was used up after making all these character images - Budget?? No one told me I had a budget!

There are many kinds of budgets. Even someone not having to manage financial resource has to manage resources like time and effort spent.
It's pretty evident that balancing those budgets was either not even attempted here or a catastrophic failure.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Managing ressources in this case felt a lot like stretching them to the limit. That engine was hard to build.

As for the $25 price, it was merely what I saw myself paying for it had I been in a player's shoes. But since I'm not, obviously that vision is thwarted. Seeing that here and other places, I fixed the problem by reducing the price to $15.

Live and learn.

 

[Luzur]

atleast get the graphics and UI up to...lets say Might and Magic 2-3 level and the we'll have a deal.

i am old enough to have played through the Might and Magics, Dungeon Masters and Bards Tales, but i am also too old to return to the black sky/ground and grey walls again.

other then that, its good to see someone still remember the party based FPV RPG's, last one i knew of (and was part of aswell, i might add) was Wysardrys Might and Magic 1 remake, sometime back in 2002-2003.