I'm impressed that you can put so much time towards Wizardry, @clueless1! That's some real dedication. Do you read the CRGPaddict? I didn't read all of his stuff on Wizardry but it's usually quite edifying.

I forgot to mention that I finished a game recently too: Legend Entertainment's Beneath A Steel Sky

Tbh, I know this is one of those beloved titles but I wasn't blown away by the experience. I was entertained and all, but in the end I think the fact that the tone keeps oscillating between Sierra and LucasArts kinda turned me off the whole thing. Great art of course, pretty good music (except for that annoyingly happy tune on the residential level) and decent story with a fine twist, but overall it just wasn't my cup of tea.

henryVK wrote:

I'm impressed that you can put so much time towards Wizardry, @clueless1! That's some real dedication. Do you read the CRGPaddict? I didn't read all of his stuff on Wizardry but it's usually quite edifying.

I forgot to mention that I finished a game recently too: Legend Entertainment's Beneath A Steel Sky

Tbh, I know this is one of those beloved titles but I wasn't blown away by the experience. I was entertained and all, but in the end I think the fact that the tone keeps oscillating between Sierra and LucasArts kinda turned me off the whole thing. Great art of course, pretty good music (except for that annoyingly happy tune on the residential level) and decent story with a fine twist, but overall it just wasn't my cup of tea.

I bought and played BASS back when it was new and I still own the copy. I don't recall it ever feeling like a LucasArts game at all, it felt very much like a late Sierra game to me, even down to its dark humor. I would say it was the best Sierra game made, even. I guess how unique the experience was would depend on how engrossed you were by the story. Back in the day, that kind of and level of storytelling in a game was rare. Games as a storytelling medium really evolved in the 2000s and now the original charm may have worn off, I guess.

Eh, I guess later Sierra games also had their fair share of zany supporting cast as well. It's mostly that the story (or rather the setting) didn't really capture my imagination in the same way as, for instance, Journey, the game I'm playing right now, is. Admittedly, they belong to different genres of adventure.

Do you think BASS's narrative is a lot more developed compared to it's contemporaries, though? I mean, 1994 had a lot of fluff come out, but it also had Quest for Glory 4, Simon the Sorcerer, Sam & Max...

I think it's a huge disservice to compare BASS something like Simon - a kitchen sink world of slap-stick fairy tale humor. The other comparisons are more apt. Obviously Sam & Max has been a lot more successful; it was written by Steve Purcell who went on to write Sam & Max for comics and even a TV cartoon. It obviously gained mass appeal to some extent, and being humor focused and accessible had a lot to do with it, I feel. BASS in contrast was written in part by Dave Gibbons who drew Watchmen, so there's no surprise that the setting and story resembles a lot of terribly depressing comic books of the era and Judge Dredd in particular. It was an instant sell to people like me who at the time played video games and read comics (but it was still a fairly niche market back then, believe it or not..) but a tough sell to people who really didn't take videogames all that seriously at the time.. At the end of the day, BASS was an entirely different experience for me; it was one of the first videogames where I felt like I had become engrossed in a more mature story.

https://streamable.com/wcfwt

Ah, I see why it seems to mean a lot to you. Having no interest at all in comic books, this connection is entirely lost on me.

oeuvre wrote:

https://streamable.com/wcfwt

If there is a joke here it is lost on me...

henryVK wrote:

I'm impressed that you can put so much time towards Wizardry, @clueless1! That's some real dedication. Do you read the CRGPaddict? I didn't read all of his stuff on Wizardry but it's usually quite edifying.

Yeah, it's been awhile since I visited that site, but now that I've gone back and looked at his Wiz6 stuff, I'm shocked he finished the game in 38 hrs with characters with roughly 1.5 million XP. I've been grinding my characters to level 12 (currently at 1.14 million XP) just to have an easier time moving forward at an area prior to the endgame. And he describes a battle near the end requiring more than 20 reloads, which in my experience would've taken at least a few hours by itself. I'm not sure how he tracks time spent playing, but I have a spreadsheet that I do it on, and I include all time I spend in front of the game screen, even if I'm looking through the clue book with the game paused. But still, his characters only take 38 hrs to gain 1.5 million XP while it's taken me 80 hrs to get 1.14 million? Something seems weird.

And regarding the amount of hours I put toward the game, keep in mind I've been playing this game for about two months now. 😀 I consider this game really good because I've been able to sustain almost 1.5hr/day on average without getting tired of it. Even Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, which I spent about 80 hrs each on, started getting old near the end and I was pushing to beat them so I could move on to another game.

MicroProse Grand Prix 2... just checking if I can update the graphics with better resolution textures

clueless1 wrote:

henryVK wrote:

I'm impressed that you can put so much time towards Wizardry, @clueless1! That's some real dedication. Do you read the CRGPaddict? I didn't read all of his stuff on Wizardry but it's usually quite edifying.

Yeah, it's been awhile since I visited that site, but now that I've gone back and looked at his Wiz6 stuff, I'm shocked he finished the game in 38 hrs with characters with roughly 1.5 million XP. I've been grinding my characters to level 12 (currently at 1.14 million XP) just to have an easier time moving forward at an area prior to the endgame. And he describes a battle near the end requiring more than 20 reloads, which in my experience would've taken at least a few hours by itself. I'm not sure how he tracks time spent playing, but I have a spreadsheet that I do it on, and I include all time I spend in front of the game screen, even if I'm looking through the clue book with the game paused. But still, his characters only take 38 hrs to gain 1.5 million XP while it's taken me 80 hrs to get 1.14 million? Something seems weird.

And regarding the amount of hours I put toward the game, keep in mind I've been playing this game for about two months now. 😀 I consider this game really good because I've been able to sustain almost 1.5hr/day on average without getting tired of it. Even Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity, which I spent about 80 hrs each on, started getting old near the end and I was pushing to beat them so I could move on to another game.

Hmm, not sure how he tracks or calculates tbh, but he usually plays games the honest way, so idk how the playtime could be so much shorter!

I think, for what it's worth, that the "small portions" approach of playing some 1,5 hours or so is the way to go to keep games from feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. With adventure games, my desire to go look at the walkthrough rises somewhat proportionally with the lenght of the session 😀

Speaking of which.. I knew that Journey: The Quest Begins had some kind of conceptual issue, and now I found what it is. In spite of the game manual encouraging you to explore freely and not save-scum, it's ridiculously easy to render your session unwinable and the game basically won't tell you until you've exhausted every possible action of whatever branch you're in. I'm about 3/4 through the game but I can't go on because I ran out of essences to cast a particular spell due to a decision I made in the very beginning of the game. That is just horrible design even by 1988's standards.

I'm stuck at the base of Sunrise Mountain. The way to the top (and the wizard Astrix's fortress) is a maze of six forks where you can go either left or right. You can skip this puzzle by casting a spell on a map you can buy, but if I do this I run out of spells later on for a puzzle that, afaik, there is no alternative solution for. So, if I'm thinking correctly, for the six forks there's 2^6=64 combinations of left/right that I have to go through in order to solve this? I looked at a walkthrough, but the combination given there doesn't work.. maybe because it's for the Amiga and I'm playing the PC version.

I think I need to do a spreadsheet for this one.

EDIT: nevermind, I found a website with a macro that does it

henryVK wrote:

I think, for what it's worth, that the "small portions" approach of playing some 1,5 hours or so is the way to go to keep games from feeling like they're overstaying their welcome.

Working 50 hr/week and being an active and involved husband and dad, I pretty much have to play in small time segments. 😀 My biggest chunks of playing time come on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I'm an early riser, so I can usually get 2-3 hrs each morning before the rest of the family wakes up. And I can usually get another 30 minutes in before work each weekday morning. And when my wife is working (she does a lot of work from home) I can sometimes sneak some time in then. So it does add up.

Weird, I was a big Infocom text adventure fan in the mid 80s and I don't remember Journey: The Quest Begins. I had an Apple II at the time and it looks like it was released on that platform. I think it was during my 2nd year of college, and I wasn't gaming so much that year. Sounds good, but potentially really frustrating. 😵

It's a good schedule you have going! Wish I could sneak out of bed on weekends, but my wife is a super light sleeper, so there's no chance of me disappearing unnoticed.

Playing a lot of classic Everquest on the Al Kabor Project lately.

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

https://streamable.com/wcfwt

If there is a joke here it is lost on me...

Please, give me back my hammer.

I finished Journey: The Quest Begins last night for a total playtime of something like 20-25 hours.

Overall, I have to say, I can't decide if it was more frustrating than fun. The beginning is quite atmospheric and really liked the writing from the get-go. I found the often matter-of-fact tone refreshing (rather than the flowry prose seen in so many Fantasy scenarios) and, for the most part, the swift progression from scene to scene felt charmingly pictoresque rather than hasty. As a person who is not big into puzzles they were largely manageable and I only needed some light hints from the walkthrough, which was not terribly helpful when it comes to actually solving the game.

Anyway, around the halfway point you realise, however, that this game is not the sprawling whimsical jaunt it masquerades as, but a very linear, railroad-y experience. As others have described, the game is extremely unforgiving when it comes to messing around with the magic spells, which are the primary means of solving puzzles. Even though I was unusually meticulous, I ended up having to "retroactively" brute force two of the puzzles (Sunrise mountain maze and the mine teleporter) in order to manoeuvre myself out of walking dead states due to lack of fire and air essence, respectively, later on in the game. Exessive save scumming, which the game's manual discourages, ends up being the only way to play the game, because you have to revisit parts of the game so many times in order to "fix" whatever you did wrong or missed. This could have mostly been avoided by providing just a few more opportunities to find magical essences.

In conclusion, Journey is about equal parts enjoyable and annoying. The solid game engine, nice graphics and puzzles as well as the quality writing never quite make up for the frustration of having to backtrack to the very beginning from about the mid-way point, just because the game doesn't have the decency to tell you that you've been walking dead a few hours.

Playing The Outer Worlds and F.E.A.R. atm.

I've never played through F.E.A.R. even thought I've had it and both expansions for like a decade, bout time I guess. I think it's overrated, but it's still fun.

Outer Worlds is overrated too, it's OK, but I don't see it being the next New Vegas like some people claim it is.

Getting ready to start Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I just finished Wizardry 6 and am working on transferring my characters over. There's a bit of randomness over which items and spells transfer over, so I'm transfer spamming, trying to get all the spells I want to carry over. I've given it about 5 tries so far, but haven't gotten a good mix of spells so far. Will keep trying until I'm satisfied with the results. Then I'll start playing. 😀

I've never played through F.E.A.R. even thought I've had it and both expansions for like a decade, bout time I guess. I think it's overrated, but it's still fun.

I played through this awhile back and I agree. A bit overrrated, but still fun. It's good to play the classics, and sometimes they're better than expected, sometimes not.

I forget to update this thread until it winds up in my queue again. I've been bad and started quite a few things simultaneously, I'm at varying levels of completion which I will try to estimate here:

PC:

Assassin's Creed: Origins - 70% complete? I'm guessing. Really like this game it looks brilliant on the new 10bit monitor at 98hz HDR. Gotta say I'm so disappointed in my HDR TV, compared to my monitor at 1100 nits the HD tv looks like garbage for HDR. Now I know you need at least 1000 nits for HDR to truly look great. Oh yeah, enjoying this game a lot.

Red Dead 2 : 1% Complete. Just played part of the intro mission to check it out. Looks like a lot of fun and I will probably play this next. HDR looks great on this one too.

Quake 2 RTX: 90% Complete. Think I'm almost through with this one, enjoying the raytracing visuals, plays like Quake 2.

Console:

Yoshi's Crafted World: 60%? Complete. Mindless fun.

God of War (PS4 Latest) 15% Complete? Not very far, seem good so far, I started too much at the same time!

Games I dabble with:

Also I replay and dabble with stuff like , Diablo 1, Giants - Citizen Kabuto, Blood 2, etc...

I have some time off coming up after thanksgiving hopefully I can complete some of these and get my starting up habit under control.

I got bored of F.E.A.R. and will probably go back to it later, it's just meh.

Still playing The Outer Worlds, hoping I'm done with that soon, it's really boring tbh and feels like yet another incomplete game from Obsidian.

I installed Doom 3 and got the headlight mod working finally, been playing it and having a blast, it's quite fun actually. The shotgun really sucks though.

Flashlight mod really makes Doom 3 a much duller affair I think but to each their own..