and all of the original Sims games, 2 and 3. Haven't played 4 or 5.
I also like Virtual Villagers. It's a "casual" game, where you play a bunch of people washed up on an island named Isola. Instead of one character, you start out with several. You move characters around to have them build huts, clear rubble or farm/catch fish, and also to work the science table, where you can eventually buy upgrades to your people's ability to farm, build structures and so on.
Your first task is to get clean water, then start a fire, and clear rubble from the beach. There is also a tree with berries your characters can pick. As you assign villagers to tasks, they slowly get better at them. To grow your tribe, you need to build huts
First, they haven't had a Sims 5.
But given the timeline, it'll probably be announced soon and come out in 2019. It was 4.5 years from 1->2 and 5 years from 2->3 and 3->4 and we're just over 4 years since Sims4. I'd guess probably be announced in the next 6 months and come out next Fall. MAYBE they will have improved it and have it be a beautiful blend of the best aspects of 3 and 4. Or more likely, it will be a steaming pile of 'NOPE!' again.
I have a game sort of like that called 'Survivor', by Activision.
The premise is you have a bunch of characters in an environment, and you have to gather food, lumber, and rocks, build clothes and shelters, and bring in the rescue party by either building a signal bonfire or a raft and send someone off.
and all of the original Sims games, 2 and 3. Haven't played 4 or 5.
I also like Virtual Villagers. It's a "casual" game, where you play a bunch of people washed up on an island named Isola. Instead of one character, you start out with several. You move characters around to have them build huts, clear rubble or farm/catch fish, and also to work the science table, where you can eventually buy upgrades to your people's ability to farm, build structures and so on.
Your first task is to get clean water, then start a fire, and clear rubble from the beach. There is also a tree with berries your characters can pick. As you assign villagers to tasks, they slowly get better at them. To grow your tribe, you need to build huts
First, they haven't had a Sims 5.
But given the timeline, it'll probably be announced soon and come out in 2019. It was 4.5 years from 1->2 and 5 years from 2->3 and 3->4 and we're just over 4 years since Sims4. I'd guess probably be announced in the next 6 months and come out next Fall. MAYBE they will have improved it and have it be a beautiful blend of the best aspects of 3 and 4. Or more likely, it will be a steaming pile of 'NOPE!' again.
I have a game sort of like that called 'Survivor', by Activision.
The premise is you have a bunch of characters in an environment, and you have to gather food, lumber, and rocks, build clothes and shelters, and bring in the rescue party by either building a signal bonfire or a raft and send someone off.
Hmm... interesting. Virtual Villagers (there are five games in the series) have a number of puzzles to solve. All the games I mentioned (except the Sims) have a strong element of puzzle solving. I like puzzle games. I like solving puzzles.
Old-school RPGS: Moria, the SSI Gold Box games (remember the code wheels?), Might and Magic, Betrayal at Krondor (loved that game but every party member was male! I used to pretend that my male character was a girl in disguise)
Oh yes! I remember those Code Wheels for the first one. Then they made you look up words in the manual included with the game!
I actually have a book that has *all* the SSI game manuals in one book.
Like I said, my Favorite was Secret of the Silver Blades, because I discovered the way to rest in the ice tranches/canyons without being attacked. Go up to one of those black arch things that separate the sections, but don't go through. Rest there, and the computer doesn't have enough space to ambush you, and enemies don't appear behind you, so you are quite safe to rest right there!
I'm not sure if I ever played Secret of the Silver Blades. I'm pretty sure I played Curse of the Azure Bonds and Pool of Radiance. I remember fighting lots of shambling mounds.
I used to spend a ton of time on character generation. You could come up with some really hideous designs, especially if you use the cyan or magenta! My go-to character was a FMT with white skin, white hair and a black outfit. Funny the things you remember.
The Shambling Mounds are Curse of the Azure Bonds. That's Moander's Temple. I remember that one. I also remember the Tower of Dracandros and how you had to fight him at the foot of the Tower. Man, I hate that Fire Shield he wore, that damaged you as you tried to melee him!
The Gold Box Games were not the first games I was hacking with a hex editor (that honor belongs to Bard's Tale) but I did work on them more extensively. These days, when I fool around with them I use Gold Box Companion with DosBox--I will have to find the link for you.
Hmm... I was not aware there was an editor for the Gold Box games. I do remember Pool of Radiance being straight-up hard, though. But for those who knew the game, there were some things you could do to make it a little easier.
1) Hire a 6th level fighter mercenary from the Hiring Hall. Let him get killed in battle. Take his armor and weapons (they are +1) for your fighters. Rinse and Repeat to make the early game a little easier.
2) Clean out the entire slums. Further down in the slums, there is a fight with trolls that nets you some good experience. To keep them from rising again, stand on the place where they went down. Instead, if your characters get killed, *they* will rise again.
3) Don't do the Valhingen Graveyard until later in the game, when the town offers you scrolls and magic to do so. This place is *very* hard, and you will die otherwise.
4) Bring every Bless spell and buff you can to the fight against the Bronze Dragon. That thing has 88 hp and a breath weapon. Also, spread out when attacking him so that his breath weapon doesn't take out most of your characters in one go. Save before the battle!
Gold Box Companion is a great way to play the game today with auto mapping and HUD for your characters. I setup my games so that it runs 3 times normal size in a DOSBox window; the map and HUD then fit nicely on a 1920x1200 screen.
Never tried the hiring of fighter (didn't like the idea of giving my hard earned away) but I like it! Next time I play will have to give it a go. Already finished this years play through.
Also, the stuff in the Town Vault in Secret of the Silver Blades, carries over between games. I played like 6 games in succession, and the Town Vault actually got so full, It couldn't hold any more stuff.
Hmm... I was not aware there was an editor for the Gold Box games. I do remember Pool of Radiance being straight-up hard, though. But for those who knew the game, there were some things you could do to make it a little easier.
1) Hire a 6th level fighter mercenary from the Hiring Hall. Let him get killed in battle. Take his armor and weapons (they are +1) for your fighters. Rinse and Repeat to make the early game a little easier.
2) Clean out the entire slums. Further down in the slums, there is a fight with trolls that nets you some good experience. To keep them from rising again, stand on the place where they went down. Instead, if your characters get killed, *they* will rise again.
3) Don't do the Valhingen Graveyard until later in the game, when the town offers you scrolls and magic to do so. This place is *very* hard, and you will die otherwise.
4) Bring every Bless spell and buff you can to the fight against the Bronze Dragon. That thing has 88 hp and a breath weapon. Also, spread out when attacking him so that his breath weapon doesn't take out most of your characters in one go. Save before the battle!
Good old Pool of Radiance. One of the flaw of the gold-box games is that once you got Fireball spells many of the difficult encounters came down to who gets initiative. With the clear geometry and turn-based combat it was just too easy to place the Fireballs very precisely. PoR also had some pretty crazy loot at the end, I think the guards of the final boss were all equipped with +5 Rings of Protection. Fortunately, you had to start from scratch in the next game.
I had some difficulty adapting that mentality to BG 1 when it came out at first.
But they were some good games, especially the low-level ones. Champions of Krynn was also pretty good, with the Draconians death effects making for some interesting enemies.
The big RPG series from my youth were probably Ultima and Gold Box. But there were some other pretty good ones, including Wizardry, The Magic Candle, Might and Magic, ... Many of those still play pretty nicely to this day.
Edit: Oh, and Star Saga 1+2. I am still upset they never finished that Trilogy. Purely text-based, but fantastic sense of exploration with excellent story. Probably the rarest games in my collection. They have a multi-player mode, so maybe I should set it up for the forum?
Gold Box Companion is a great way to play the game today with auto mapping and HUD for your characters. I setup my games so that it runs 3 times normal size in a DOSBox window; the map and HUD then fit nicely on a 1920x1200 screen.
That is the link I was going to post. If any of you play the Gold Box games at all then you owe it to yourself to get GBC.
@Ammar Like I said, my personal Favorite was "Secret of the Silver Blades". I also really liked Vala and fighting the Black Circle Sorcerers as well. The fights against the Iron Golems were a pain, but also interesting. And I liked the mirrored shields that helped protect you against gaze attacks.
@Ammar Like I said, my personal Favorite was "Secret of the Silver Blades". I also really liked Vala and fighting the Black Circle Sorcerers as well. The fights against the Iron Golems were a pain, but also interesting. And I liked the mirrored shields that helped protect you against gaze attacks.
I think this is a bit rare, many people consider Secret of the Silver Blades to be one of the weaker Gold Box games, since much of it is one long slog through the mines. But the silver blades & mirror shields were pretty interesting.
Good old iron golems... fire heals them and lightning slows them. Thankfully in Gold Box they tend to line up very nicely and the bolt path is much more predictable than in BG.
@Ammar Like I said, my personal Favorite was "Secret of the Silver Blades". I also really liked Vala and fighting the Black Circle Sorcerers as well. The fights against the Iron Golems were a pain, but also interesting. And I liked the mirrored shields that helped protect you against gaze attacks.
I think this is a bit rare, many people consider Secret of the Silver Blades to be one of the weaker Gold Box games, since much of it is one long slog through the mines. But the silver blades & mirror shields were pretty interesting.
Good old iron golems... fire heals them and lightning slows them. Thankfully in Gold Box they tend to line up very nicely and the bolt path is much more predictable than in BG.
Yes, that was definitely good. I think I liked it so much because you were finally high enough level that you didn't have to worry about being one hit killed (more or less). I liked the mines, actually, and the enemies you fought there (the Lizardmen holding Vala, the tomb deep in the mines). I also liked that you had met the Mayor earlier in Hillsfar (He was the Red Plume Captain). And the old guy who told you stories (In New Verdigris) He was great, too.
I concur with @Ammar that the mines and ice crevasses caused many people not to like SotSB all that much. I didn't like the crevasses because I was mapping them by hand on graph paper but once I realized that you could rest next to the black transition doors it got a lot easier. I used a *lot* of graph paper mapping everything in that game--the ruins, the mines, the crevasses, etc. *yeesh*
I viewed the iron golems as "free experience" because they were relatively easy. The purple worms and remhoraz, both of which could one-shot your character by swallowing them whole....I hated those damned things.
You realize, of course, that now I am probably going to have to resurrect an old save game or start a new one, right? I think I still have my maps transcribed onto a spreadsheet, as well. hrm.... Hey, look at that--I do still have them. I am missing some labels but I can fill those in later.
Oh, yes--*those* things. They were often lethal when going after Mogion n CotAB, especially since there were no "protection from acid" spells or items.
Is not insanely old, but recently i started to re play M&M VIII. My first RPG was M&M VII For blood and Honor, i only played the 6 and 8 as a adult, got the CD roms from my uncle. In that time, my English was awful(my grammar/vocabulary still not good but i can understand pretty well) so took one week(irl time not game time) to discover what i need to do to escape emerald island.
I only managed to complete the game as an adult and purchased the 3 some years ago on gog, finished then many times and now i an re playing M&M VIII. I an in a point where i need to "forge" an allianace and need to choose between dragon hunters or dragons, clerics vs necromancers, etc.
Gold Box Companion is a great way to play the game today with auto mapping and HUD for your characters. I setup my games so that it runs 3 times normal size in a DOSBox window; the map and HUD then fit nicely on a 1920x1200 screen.
Never tried the hiring of fighter (didn't like the idea of giving my hard earned away) but I like it! Next time I play will have to give it a go. Already finished this years play through.
Gus
You have just become one of my favorite people in the whole world! I never knew that existed until now.
There really is no reason at all not to use the Gold Box Companion to play them. For one thing, it almost makes the "modern" in some respect. The early ones with only keyboard controls are still cumbersome, but the game already has a sort of automap that is horrible and the one the GBC provides is light-years better. People just simply don't have time to sit down at a desk and break out graph paper anymore. Moreover, even when I HAVE mapped old RPGs before (and the ones I did were actually very small Unlimited Adventures modules for practice) it still never helped me figure out just WHERE I WAS on that map.
In addition, it allows two key things with the character editor. It allows Paladins and Rangers to be used in Pool of Radiance, and (optionally) allows you to remove the demi-human level limits of 1st Edition by temporarily changing them to humans before leveling them up, then changing them back. Personally, I am in favor being able to use Paladins and Rangers in the first game, but would prefer to stick to the rules on races, but my understanding is that by the time your party his Pools of Darkness, you're absolutely screwed if you aren't rolling with a party full of nothing by multi and dual-classed humans.
I remember playing through the Savage Frontier duology, ignorant of the level restrictions after not having read the manual carefully enough...and ended up being completely screwed by the end. It was practically impossible to finish the final battle, and I only made it through after several attempts and a single character still alive.
The end Battles were always difficult. Pool of Radiance has your sixth-level characters facing off against a bronze dragon with 88 hit points... and that breath weapon ::Shudders::
I think the oldest RPG I played was TES Arena. There was a chilling winter February evening in 2005, we didn't have internet back then, and I got tired of what games I had at home. So I perused the DVDs from gaming magazine issues I had a pile of, and found the full version of the game on a 2004 issue disk. It was English only, and while I had a decent grasp of it by then, it was still very foreign to me. So I put the dictionary on my desk and played with it, looking up 2-3 words per each sentence... my first real step towards becoming bilingual years later
@Ardanis That's wonderful. I can only speak a few words of some languages, thanks to Anime/Chinese food Fortune cookie papers (Nie-hao Means "How are you?" in terms of "Do you feel well? and xie xie means "Thank you". That's Chinese. Domo Arigato or "Domo" means Thank you/Thanks in Japanese.)
I also picked up a lot of my English from crpgs, specifically Ultima. As games did not have speech back then, my written English was a lot better than my spoken English when we started to have it as a subject in school...
The end Battles were always difficult. Pool of Radiance has your sixth-level characters facing off against a bronze dragon with 88 hit points... and that breath weapon ::Shudders::
At least in the lower-levellish Gold Box games I felt it often came down to who got initiative... hasted fighters & 2-3 fireballs could cut even an 88 HP dragon down pretty easily.
In Champions of Krynn you had two back-to-back final fights: first you fought several Draconians, then you got healed (but did not recover spells) and had a final fight against three adult red dragons with your characters at levels 7-8. However, again, if you had the Dragonlance a hasted fighter characters who got to move first could easily take down 2 of the 3 dragons in the first round, before they could react.
Comments
But given the timeline, it'll probably be announced soon and come out in 2019. It was 4.5 years from 1->2 and 5 years from 2->3 and 3->4 and we're just over 4 years since Sims4. I'd guess probably be announced in the next 6 months and come out next Fall. MAYBE they will have improved it and have it be a beautiful blend of the best aspects of 3 and 4. Or more likely, it will be a steaming pile of 'NOPE!' again.
I have a game sort of like that called 'Survivor', by Activision.
The premise is you have a bunch of characters in an environment, and you have to gather food, lumber, and rocks, build clothes and shelters, and bring in the rescue party by either building a signal bonfire or a raft and send someone off.
I actually have a book that has *all* the SSI game manuals in one book.
Like I said, my Favorite was Secret of the Silver Blades, because I discovered the way to rest in the ice tranches/canyons without being attacked. Go up to one of those black arch things that separate the sections, but don't go through. Rest there, and the computer doesn't have enough space to ambush you, and enemies don't appear behind you, so you are quite safe to rest right there!
I used to spend a ton of time on character generation. You could come up with some really hideous designs, especially if you use the cyan or magenta! My go-to character was a FMT with white skin, white hair and a black outfit. Funny the things you remember.
1) Hire a 6th level fighter mercenary from the Hiring Hall. Let him get killed in battle. Take his armor and weapons (they are +1) for your fighters. Rinse and Repeat to make the early game a little easier.
2) Clean out the entire slums. Further down in the slums, there is a fight with trolls that nets you some good experience. To keep them from rising again, stand on the place where they went down. Instead, if your characters get killed, *they* will rise again.
3) Don't do the Valhingen Graveyard until later in the game, when the town offers you scrolls and magic to do so. This place is *very* hard, and you will die otherwise.
4) Bring every Bless spell and buff you can to the fight against the Bronze Dragon. That thing has 88 hp and a breath weapon. Also, spread out when attacking him so that his breath weapon doesn't take out most of your characters in one go. Save before the battle!
Never tried the hiring of fighter (didn't like the idea of giving my hard earned away) but I like it! Next time I play will have to give it a go. Already finished this years play through.
Gus
I had some difficulty adapting that mentality to BG 1 when it came out at first.
But they were some good games, especially the low-level ones. Champions of Krynn was also pretty good, with the Draconians death effects making for some interesting enemies.
The big RPG series from my youth were probably Ultima and Gold Box. But there were some other pretty good ones, including Wizardry, The Magic Candle, Might and Magic, ... Many of those still play pretty nicely to this day.
Edit: Oh, and Star Saga 1+2. I am still upset they never finished that Trilogy. Purely text-based, but fantastic sense of exploration with excellent story. Probably the rarest games in my collection. They have a multi-player mode, so maybe I should set it up for the forum?
@Ammar Like I said, my personal Favorite was "Secret of the Silver Blades". I also really liked Vala and fighting the Black Circle Sorcerers as well. The fights against the Iron Golems were a pain, but also interesting. And I liked the mirrored shields that helped protect you against gaze attacks.
Good old iron golems... fire heals them and lightning slows them. Thankfully in Gold Box they tend to line up very nicely and the bolt path is much more predictable than in BG.
I viewed the iron golems as "free experience" because they were relatively easy. The purple worms and remhoraz, both of which could one-shot your character by swallowing them whole....I hated those damned things.
You realize, of course, that now I am probably going to have to resurrect an old save game or start a new one, right? I think I still have my maps transcribed onto a spreadsheet, as well. hrm.... Hey, look at that--I do still have them. I am missing some labels but I can fill those in later.
I only managed to complete the game as an adult and purchased the 3 some years ago on gog, finished then many times and now i an re playing M&M VIII. I an in a point where i need to "forge" an allianace and need to choose between dragon hunters or dragons, clerics vs necromancers, etc.
This dragons can 2HK my main character(Lich)
In addition, it allows two key things with the character editor. It allows Paladins and Rangers to be used in Pool of Radiance, and (optionally) allows you to remove the demi-human level limits of 1st Edition by temporarily changing them to humans before leveling them up, then changing them back. Personally, I am in favor being able to use Paladins and Rangers in the first game, but would prefer to stick to the rules on races, but my understanding is that by the time your party his Pools of Darkness, you're absolutely screwed if you aren't rolling with a party full of nothing by multi and dual-classed humans.
In Champions of Krynn you had two back-to-back final fights: first you fought several Draconians, then you got healed (but did not recover spells) and had a final fight against three adult red dragons with your characters at levels 7-8. However, again, if you had the Dragonlance a hasted fighter characters who got to move first could easily take down 2 of the 3 dragons in the first round, before they could react.