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Castle of the Winds

StromaelStromael Member Posts: 195
Has anybody else played this fantastic little game?

It's a loosely Norse-inspired rogue-like dungeon crawler, with a surprisingly fun and addictive gameplay involving mana-based spellcasting and a turn-based "you move I move" combat/movement system. I'm taking a short break from my Sword Coast adventures to rediscover something else I massively enjoyed in my youth. :smile:

On more modern operating systems you need to download and install DOSBox, and run it in a Windows 3.11 environment. [There's a great guide to setting it up here, alongside which you can download the game itself here.]

Comments

  • MERLANCEMERLANCE Member Posts: 421
    I used to play that all the time back in the day. I found a boxed version of it in the late 90s (for maybe $5), I probably still have the disk *somewhere*.

    I would always use the exploit where you would start with minimum constitution (to distribute the points elsewhere) and keep casting magic arrow until the con loss from overcasting would roll over and you would have max con.
  • Rik_KirtaniyaRik_Kirtaniya Member Posts: 1,742
    Oh yes! This is one of the first games I ever played. I finished till the end of the first part. I still have the game files on my PC but cannot run them on Windows 10 (those still ran fine on Windows 7). I'll try the DOSBox thing for this, but is there any chance this method will work for games like Exile 2: Crystal Souls (my other favourite old school game) as well?
  • StromaelStromael Member Posts: 195
    @MERLANCE I didn't know that trick! Very similar to the Uglification Rod in BG2:SoA. :grin: And all thanks to finite-range (or modular) arithmetic...

    I've succumbed to restarting just to try it out, and it took two tries: first one got my Constitution to 0, leaving me on 2 Health, then I had to rest completely and repeat, which looped it around. Now I've got a superhero running around Bjarnarhaven. Sold lots of my armour to buy a strongly enchanted broadsword in the shop there (which I've dubbed "Choppa"), and now my toon is just slicing and dicing everything into pieces before they can even get a hit in.

    @Rik_Kirtaniya DOSBox should satisfy all of your needs. The guide I posted in the OP should help you set up Windows 3.11 in DOSBox (it makes a little partition of the computer that can run a completely different version of Windows, just needing a little over 30 MB of space). Then if you access the .exe for Exile 2 within that partition it should run without any problems.

    Once I'd finished working through the guide on Reddit, I added the following two lines to the end of the config file opened by DOSBox 0.74-3 Options.bat:
    After the bit you already added during the guide, namely
    mount c "C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74-3\c"
    imgmount d "C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74-3\c\Windows 3.11.iso" -t iso
    c:
    
    add
    cd windows
    win
    
    to make DOSBox automatically boot up the Windows 3.11 partition when you run it.

    Like you I've only ever completed Part I of CotW, but I did previously get a few levels into Part II. So far so good on this run, up to level 6 of Hrungnir's fortress in Part I. Looking forward to slaying me some Jotuns. :grin:
  • saraluck9090saraluck9090 Member Posts: 1
    Yeah I am playing this game on my Xbox, actually, I recently started this game because the last month I bought an Xbox from back to school coupon 2019, and really I enjoyed a lot to play this game on it, and the game is also fantastic in fact graphic is just awesome.
  • StromaelStromael Member Posts: 195
    @saraluck9090 I'm not sure we're talking about the same game... Castle of the Winds was made in 1989 for Windows 3.11, and I'm pretty sure it's never been ported to any other system.
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