The Gamer's Quarter

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

It runs really well, although it might crash once in a blue moon. If you are on a laptop, find a two-button mouse. Playing with a trackpad is not fun at all. Make sure you are using the latest version of DOSBOX because it does NOT RUN WELL AT ALL with the older ones. The game has ridiculous physics and you will fall in water a lot on the first floor, and trudging through that is not fun, however I do not want you to be put off by that because it's totally awesome in a variety of other ways that I do not care to explain now because I am a tired little boy. I will write about it tomorrow.

[ryan]

[dongle]

[Cycle]

There is a patch for both Ultima Underworld games
that makes them run perfectly under new operating systems.
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[Cycle]

Thanks to dhex, I've been playing Project Snowblind, which I've been curious about since it started as a Deus Ex spin-off. It's still very clearly a Deus Ex spin-off, and very much how I expect an action orientated Deus Ex to play. There are optional objectives, there are multiple ways to approach a situation (the parking garage was a riot), and you can hack terminals and there are biomods and yada. Obviously it's all stream-lined for an action game, but I actually think it works pretty well. I'm enjoying it. If Deus Ex 2 was actually not a dissapointment, this would have been a great spin-off. But considering the reaction to IW, I can see why they decided to turn this into an original IP. I'd like to think the story and characters would have been a bit better in the original write up, too.

So yeah, been a blast so far. The story and characters are interesting enough, action movie stuff, not deus exy stuff but still entertaining. The levels could have been a bit bigger (or just featured one or two open areas), but hey. Great popcorn game, really.

He also sent me boiling point, but I probably won't play that for awhile since I finally started Pathologic yesterday. I post-poned that for Snowblind since I was really in the mood for something requiring less intelligence.
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[dhex]

[Cycle]

We all know Ultima 7 was all about Scientology and how full of shit it is, right?

I was reminded of this after the guy who made Scientology PWNED was taking in by the police about his game and "urged" to change the name of the game.

Also, that whole incident with that BBC guy screaming at the Schientology guy.
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[dessgeega]

hey, could someone please direct me to a list of controls for ultima underworld? in particular, i would really like to know how to jump.
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[Ethoscapade]

[dessgeega]

mmmaybe. that's what i'm trying to find out. there's a slot on the game doctor to plug carts in - you can run a game through the doctor, so you don't have to remove it from the snes, but some games don't run right (running pilotwings through the game doctor gives me the ability to fly in parachute stages). star fox won't run at all through it.

i've heard that you can use co-processors of plugged-in carts when running games off disks, but it's possible it only works with later versions of the hardware (my game doctor's a 3). it's also possible it's just not true.

[Ethoscapade]

if you've got an actual star fox cart, try running a rom of stunt race FX with star fox piggybacked and i'd think you'll have your answer right there.

for reference (from memory):

C4: megaman x2 & x3
DSP: pilotwings and mario kart
SFX: star fox, stunt race, vortex
SFX2: doom, yoshi's island, (star fox 2?)
SA-1: kirby superstar, mario rpg

[Shapermc]

So, I remember playing an Ultima game in the early ninties and really not liking it. Is it worth exploring again in an attempt to enjoy it? Where should I start if this is the case?
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dhex]

shaper if you don't dig the early pc rpg aesthetics you won't really dig any of them i think it's safe to say.

i would say start with five. maybe. ehhh. that's a hard question actually.
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[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

[dhex]

ok then five it is!

shapes if you don't have it i can hook you up. there's also a modernization pack that runs off of dungeon seige if you have that. (i don't and frankly, i think the original is very charming)
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[Shapermc]

[Crazy Bacon Lips]

[dhex]

stay away from the sea for a while. then uh, go forth and do good works!
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[dessgeega]

i tried stunt race fx with star fox plugged in the slot: it wouldn't run. boo!

i reached all the outrun goals with my intermediate b car, though. (and fuck that one sharp left turn in skyscrapers, which may as well be a brick wall. as long as i can get through the twist at the end of jungle without crashing, though, i can recover from messing up that left.) instead of moving on to a "professional" class car, i'm going to use this opportunity to take a break from outrun 2006. nights should be arriving soon, and i think that game will benefit from receiving the time i've been giving to outrun. (my total time at outrun so far is twelve hours and forty-four minutes, at that was spent entirely in outrun mode.)

i think, of all the pre-guardian ultima games, five is probably the easiest to get into. start by just traveling up and down the coast, visiting towns, meeting people and recruiting allies (and learning when to avoid towns). when you're feeling daring, seek out empath abbey. when you've got some money, buy a small boat. when you're feeling capable, take on the dungeons. you're really free to set your own pace.
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[D-A-I-S]

[dessgeega]

thanks dais!

i flashed doom gba while waiting for doom snes to show up. there's something really pleasing about being able to play doom on a gba micro. the controls work really well; the fact that you can only move and fire on a horizontal axis makes it easy to manuever with just a d-pad and shoulder buttons. the green blood is bizarre, though. you'll find blood-stains on the floor that look like patches of moss; piles of bones look like bizarre martian plants.
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[Koyetay]

My god, Elebits is ludicrously fun. I don't marathon game very often, so for me to spend three solid hours on a game is something.

I've been kind of surprised at the number of levels. I just made it to 21. The anti-grav levels were wonderfully absurd. The boss battles feel like they've had some thought put into them. Ever time I think all the possibilities have been exhausted, I find something new.

I started thinking of Elebits as the second coming of Katamari. Now I'm starting to see it as something altogether more.

[dessgeega]

my third attempt at clearing the second route through star fox has ended in failure. seriously, the boss of venom's airspace is hard. the stage before i got my ass saved by a space whale though.

this game has really perfect presentation. it's as though they realized the engine itself was kind of jerky and knew they had to compensate by filling the game with character and charm and by making the game as cohesive an experience as possible.
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[ryan]

I'm now level 10 in Titan Quest. My character is currently a mage/fighter, with his primary being Fire and secondary being Combat - coming soon: dual wielding. My grandmother passed this morning, ending a nearly six-week struggle, so I sunk myself into the game as a means to distract myself; some people listen to music, some chain smoke, I beat the shit out of satyrs and zombies.

I'm also putting together a collection of older titles onto a disc, along with the apps to get them to run. Fun project time!

Also! System Shock Portable has been released! This is the original system shock that has been tweaked to run on newer systems (re: XP). It's called 'portable' because it can be played off the local hard drive or a jump drive. Link.
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Come to me, Mordel. We shall depart.

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

cleared episode 1 of doom gba and havn't started episode 2 yet. i picked "not so rough" at the beginning, i think because i was expecting the controls to be awkward and hard to pick up, especially after playing the live arcade version. not so: the controls are pretty much perfect and consequently i've experienced little danger of dying so far. considering restarting on a higher difficulty but more likely going to plod ahead or wait for the snes game to arrive.

speaking of which, i found the unpatched star fox 2 rom and will probably try it when doom arrives, despite the stunt race experiment failing.

and speaking of star fox, i finally got around to playing star fox command. earlier i spoke of the original's excellent presentation: this is what command and the less recent star fox assault are lacking. (well, there's no shortage of other flaws either.) what has always made star fox (the original, the unreleased sequel, and star fox 64) so compelling, at least for me, is its seamless, almost cinematic approach to storytelling: a story that goes on around you, with you in the heart of it, while you're playing, influencing and influenced by your actions. star fox command is cutscenes, cutscenes, cutscenes. often full of melodrama and the most awkward animal crossing-speak i've heard from a game yet.

i'm not real big on how the game plays but i havn't really formulated an opinion on it yet. it's like star fox 2, i guess, in the way it tries to alternate between strategy and combat, but star fox 2's moments of strategy are quick decisions of priority, and its combat episodes make up much more of the playing time. i havn't gotten very far yet - i've cleared the star wolf fight that comes absolutely out of nowhere - so it could become something that works. finding enemy bases by rubbing the stylus over clouds is a dumb gimmick, though.

i am probably going to try that system shock later even though a bat has me hemmed into a corner in ultima underworld.
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[Ethoscapade]

i think the implicit backstory of katt (implicit in all of four lines, if you actually go back and play the game) in star fox 64 is a pretty beautiful example of what you're getting at right there.

[dessgeega]

falco's reaction to her tells you everything you need to know in a single spoken line. there's a failed relationship between fox and krystal in the backstory of star fox command and it would just work so much better if it was just hinted at instead of baldly stated in a text dump at the beginning of the game. these screens of text leave so little room for subtlety.
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[ApM]

Last night I played through Manhunter: San Francisco. I didn't intend to play through it, at first. I had recently been to San Francisco on a short business trip, and walked by a pier that I recognized from the game, and I wanted to figure out where it was so that I could potentially find a photograph of it.

The Manhunter games are simultaneously very progressive and very regressive. For example, they're the only Sierra games that don't punish you for dying (it took until Space Quest 6 for someone else to realize that a "Let's back up to just before you got yourself killed" button was a good idea). In some cases, it's even required that you do something that kills you once before the game will let you continue. And yet, there are also numerous ways to set yourself up so that you can't win, and the game will not tell you.

They're the first examples of point-and-click adventures with a smart cursor, but they have no mouse support.

The artwork is detailed, gritty, and often incredibly gory; except for the bits that are totally cartoonish -- splatting into a pancake onto the pavement and springing up, or hiking up your robe to reveal polka-dotted bloomers.

There's this awesome, absorbing mechanic of tracking a suspect's movements throughout the city on your computer, and then physically going to where they went to discern their identity, and what they were doing. And then there are some of the most obtuse, illogical puzzles ever devised -- one in particular has you connecting an unrelated comment made by the designers in one of their in-game snark screens ("Don't get your goose cooked!") with an unfinished message left in blood on a rock by a murder victim ("COO|...") to come up with a suspect's last name ("Cook"). You also have delightful things like the maze layout of an arcade game in a bar corresponding to the layout of an underground sewer maze that you have to navigate in first-person without a compass (and all those twisty passages look alike). Oh, and the most efficient way through the arcade game makes a pattern of knocked-down Kewpie dolls on the top of the screen that you have to match when you go to Coney Island and play Kewpie doll baseball. (These are all in Manhunter: New York, but Manhunter: San Francisco really isn't much better.)

I don't know how the developers went from that to Space Dude. Their website is pretty tragic. (I don't have any idea what's up with the link to "Crack Dog Video" at the bottom, but it is, in fact, a short film about a dog who smokes crack.) And it's seriously weird to consider that the artist who drew all those gruesome corpses and death animations now pretty much just paints pictures of ponies and kittens.

[JasonMoses]

I picked up Etrian Odyssey yesterday. I don't think I've played enough of it to make a genuine judgement about its quality yet, but I will say that I really, really like what I've seen so far. It's a tribute to first-person dungeon crawlers, which means you make your party at the adventurer's guild from a range of classes, map out the dungeon on the bottom screen as if it was a piece of graph paper, and fight monsters who are very distinctly harder-than-average. It just feels right though, in terms of flow. You prepare in town, see how far you can get into the dungeon (the thrill of discovery heightened palpably by the requirement to map everything yourself), develop your characters as they gain experience, risk-analyze situations as you start to run low on supplies, and warp out to repeat the process. The music is intentionally-FM Yuzo Kushiro, and it's excellent.

I would definitely recommend checking the game out if you get the chance - it seems right up the respective alleys of many people who post here.

[dessgeega]

that is good news! i remember being interested by the description of the game but grew confident it would just end up being jrpg pap. clearly i will have to check this out.

i have played a little system shock. is my speed affected by how much stuff i'm carrying? also, wow, this is great. cyberspace especially.
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[SuperWes]

[Scratchmonkey]

Hell if the only thing that I've been playing recently is Puzzle Quest DS, which I play before I go to sleep. It's a pickle of a game in that it really highlights the problems with non-sandbox RPGs. I mean, does jamming Bejewled into an RPG as the new combat system leverage the logistics of the RPG with an 'actual game' or is it a spotlight on the strange juxtaposition of RPG vs. 'actual game'?

It's pretty confusing.

[Intentionally Wrong]

I had a brief affair with Puzzle Quest myself. I don't know why, but the really generic music and character designs kind of appealed to me. Kind of funny that it took Pokemon Pearl to get me to finally remove the card from my DS, since I used to self-identify as an RPG fan who didn't want anything to do with pokemon.

[Koyetay]

It only took a few more levels for the honeymoon to end. By level 23, Elebits is starting to drag. It goes back to the store today and I'm not terribly upset about that.

Still, a great game, one I wouldn't mind playing again, but I'm a little bored of it at the moment.

[Cycle]

[dhex]

portable is neat, i have to tweak it a bit.

but i must say that cyberspace was my least favorite part of the game. (sneaking around with the lightsaber and waiting for death like a coward was the best)

i think i just installed daggerfall correctly. gonna go find out now.
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[Winged Assassins (1984)]

[Swimmy]

I can't wait to delve into System Shock. First I need to get the program that remaps the controls. And speaking of, I have to wonder, what's up with the thread which links the program? It goes from a bunch of elitist g'fawing about how stupid noobs are for having to change the controls (and on this note, really? really? as if every single game on earth shouldn't offer some option to change the controls? as if getting used to a game's poor or outdated controls is an accomplishment?) to a debate about whether System Shock should have even been formatted to work with XP--I mean, like, why don't you just install another hard drive to run Windows 95 so you can play old games? Duhhhhhhh.

. . .


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"Ayn Rand fans are the old school version of Xenogears fanboys."
-seryogin

[dhex]

ss1 does have a weird interface, to say the least, so *in theory* i could see how many "ZOMG TEH KEYZ SUX" posts over the years might whittle down what goodwill towards humanity one might have.

still, though. it's not quite vaguely disguised child molestation fantasies masquerading as games, but the whole western games memeplex (complexity, intelligence, blah blah blah) is pretty obnoxious.
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[dessgeega]

so i played some etrian oddysey. it's much better than i expected, though i wish the dungeon was laid out in a more logical and interesting way. i've only seen one floor so far, but the first floor feels like just a bunch of random hallways.

as for the mapping, i'm unconvinced. i love that a game would have me draw my own map, and i think the ds is a natural platform for it, giving the player as much virtual notepaper as she needs. in etrian, though, you're not drawing a map, you're just playing connect-the-dots. you're just toggling lines and dragging icons to where you're expected to put them. there is an ideal map and instead of being given it you're being asked to fill it in yourself. it's more like a quiz than mapping. there's no room for personality or cleverness - any deviation from the next person's map will be just a mistake.
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[Shapermc]

[SuperWes]

I got Etrian Odyssey last night too and I'm really digging it so far. I like how constrained the design feels at this point. There's one town and one dungeon and you're given the freedom to be as meticulous as you'd like within what you're given. Enjoyable!

-Wes
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[Shapermc]

Also, dess, if you go to the Etrian website and read the Columns->Director's Diary->2 he gives some more insight on the reason that the mapping is the way it is.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

my guild is the daggers.

my party is the same as yours, except with a survivalist instead of an alchemist.
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[Shapermc]

Alchemists are awesome. I was debating on having two of them!
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[dessgeega]

my survivalist can make enemy attacks miss. it is a pretty useful ability!
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