ratfink wrote on 2026-10-10, 09:39:

At the moment I am on Diablo (single player), tried to start it a year or two ago having never actually played the original before but found time this last few weeks. Never realised how much was in the first game.

With the 30th anniversary of it's release just around the corner, I may revisit the first Diablo as well! I may finally try Hellfire, as I've never actually played it. It's non-canon, so I didn't bother I guess...

ratfink wrote on 2026-10-10, 09:39:

If only someone could make the graphics look better on a non-CRT screen!

Maybe try Shaderglass? It's got dozens of CRT overlays, some even simulating PC monitors.

EDIT: Oh, forgot to add: I've been playing FIFA 2000 as of late. It was the last new FIFA game I played! I didn't like it when it first dropped and, to be honest, I still think it's a step back compared to FIFA 99, both graphically and in terms of game controls. I'm hell-bent on finishing an entire season now though!

Could never get into Diablo 1... dunno why... Think because it s mainly one dungeon and most of the game looks the same... However , Diablo 2 is one of my favourite games.

I also recommend the original Morrowind , that is a very good game as well.

Blackthorne
Cool game so far. It's basically Prince of Persia with a shotgun, in an edgy 90s comic book setting. It looks and sounds great (fantastic SC-55 soundtrack), but what I like most about this game is how many moves your character has. In addition to the standard PoP/Flashback movements of running, jumping, drawing your weapon, and grabbing ledges, you can also crouch and roll, shoot behind you without looking (the coolest move by far), and press against the background to avoid gunfire.

Like PoP, it's more of a puzzle game than an action game, though the action is fine. I was able to get through the first few levels and reach the second area of the game without too much trouble so far.

Treasures of the Savage Frontier
Damn, the Gold Box games are so addictive. After completing GtoSF I transferred my party and thought I'd play something else... but then why not just play through the intro and save my game? Then, why not explore the first area? Two hours later, I found it difficult to put the game down. The graphics are much nicer (VGA vs EGA) and it's fun to revisit the same areas from the previous game and see how they look now. The biggest improvement, so far, is the quality of the encounters. GtoSF suffered from copy-pasted encounters all over each map, but this game has a lot more unique encounters. Good stuff so far.

newtmonkey wrote on 2026-10-16, 15:06:

Blackthorne
Cool game so far. It's basically Prince of Persia with a shotgun, in an edgy 90s comic book setting. It looks and sounds great (fantastic SC-55 soundtrack), but what's I like most about this game is how many moves your character has. In addition to the standard PoP/Flashback movements of running, jumping, drawing your weapon, and grabbing ledges, you can also crouch and roll, shoot behind you without looking (the coolest move by far), and press against the background to avoid gunfire.

Like PoP, it's more of a puzzle game than an action game, though the action is fine. I was able to get through the first few levels and reach the second area of the game without too much trouble so far.

Awesome. Let us know how you progress through this. I'm always curious to see how people who play classics for the first time respond to them. Blackthorne was certainly a positive experience for me. I played through it 2-3 times, maybe 4-5 if you count the different console ports.

Treasures of the Savage Frontier
I think I'm pretty far into this game now. It's still an improvement over the mediocre Gateway to the Savage Frontier, but it's also getting pretty tedious. You basically go from town to town confronting a massive conspiracy between three evil groups by killing the same group of enemies over and over and over. The developers knew that you would have access to pretty powerful spells at this point, and they tried to design the encounters around that, but it's more annoying than challenging. If you roll poorly on your initiative check, all the enemy spellcasters get to go first and wipe out half of your party. If you win the initiative, you have basically won the encounter.

The game takes place in the same world as the previous one (in fact, it even reuses the maps), so maybe playing this immediately after finishing Gateway was a bad idea 🤣.

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
I will preface this by saying that I actually like some adventure games. I played through Loom, The Secret of Monkey Island, Leisure Suit Larry, and Space Quest a few years back, and I actually had a blast playing through them all, and even got through them without any hints (except for one part of LSL).

Excited to find a "new" genre of games to get into, I quickly became frustrated in my attempts to play Sam & Max Hit the Road , Day of the Tentacle, and The Legend of Kyrandia: Book Two - Hand of Fate (what a title 🤣) because I simply could not understand what I supposed to be doing. I felt like I was just collecting random items in every single room, just because I was playing an adventure game and that was what I was supposed to do. I'd often find myself in a situation where I obviously had to do something with all the random trash I'd collected, but it wasn't clear what I was actually meant to do, or what anything had to do with what my goal was supposed to be.

I figured that MI2 would be more approachable, having completed the first game, but I got stuck toward the end of the first area. The game actually does a great job of setting up your goal: get off the first island, which requires getting rid of the town bully, which requires making a voodoo doll, which requires four ingredients from him. Three of the ingredients make total sense if you're paying attention and explore each area. The last one, his clothing, is moon logic. You need to collect swamp water in a bucket (why??? because it's there), and you have to be up with your college pranks and know to put that swamp water bucket on his door, so that he'll open the door, get drenched and change, so you can get his clothes (it's a bit more complicated than that).

The problem is twofold. First, it requires you to just randomly collect swamp water in your bucket, even though this makes no sense, simply because swamp water is interactable in one area, and you have a bucket. Second, it requires you to think that the only way to get a thread of clothing from someone, is to play a prank on them with that bucket... even though you have total access to his room at all times. I mean, what about just having his sock in a drawer or something? What about having a single alternative solution, for the people who unfamiliar with the good old bucket on the door prank?

This is my problem with adventure games. It's not the deaths from the Sierra games (just save often), and it's not even the walking dead situations (although those are awful)... it's the rigid structure that requires you to be on the exact same wavelength as the writers/designers, or the game comes to a complete halt. Maybe for a lot of people, putting that bucket on the door makes perfect sense. But if it doesn't, your only recourse (outside of looking the solution up) is just to start using every item in your inventory on every spot, just to see if you missed something.

newtmonkey wrote on 2026-10-18, 16:02:

This is my problem with adventure games. It's not the deaths from the Sierra games (just save often), and it's not even the walking dead situations (although those are awful)... it's the rigid structure that requires you to be on the exact same wavelength as the writers/designers, or the game comes to a complete halt. Maybe for a lot of people, putting that bucket on the door makes perfect sense. But if it doesn't, your only recourse (outside of looking the solution up) is just to start using every item in your inventory on every spot, just to see if you missed something.

That's my general feeling as well. Some games are better than others in this regard, but I think that in every adventure game I've played, there has been at least one location where I found myself thus stuck.

Yeah, I only got so far with a few games for this reason. I sometimes wonder whether there's a sort of language to this kind of thing that you learn kind of like muscle memory. Like in a more visual/action game once you've played a while you can start to "see" what to do in new situations you find yourself in. But I think you just have to learn to enjoy a lot trial and error and that sense of relief/eureka you get when you finally realise you need to scare the cockerel with the corkscrew and then the blue mouse will cough up the magic key you have to balance on your head etc. I find text games similarly challenging - how am I supposed to know the limited vocabulary programmed in (and why should I care)? But each to their own!

Adventure games were a product of computer limitations. They were never very good, they were just the best solution for the resources and abilities. I've always felt this way even back in the day.

The same way JRPGs were just inferior western rpgs due to the limitation of the target platform.

Counter strike: source, Italy map..
"Into the flood again / Same old trip it was back then / So I made a big mistake / Try to see it once my way"

Treasures of the Savage Frontier
I'm getting very close to the end, I suspect. The structure of the game is actually very cool. You have to uncover a massive conspiracy, which you do by tracking down coded messages (one for each town, won from random battles) and three crystals used to decode the messages. Once you've decoded the message for a town, you can then go in and eliminate the threat. There are also some fun random events that can occur throughout the game that send you to optional areas.

The structure gives the game the open-world feel that has been lacking the series since Secret of the Silver Blades. It's too bad that the encounter design really takes a nosedive once you've reached the halfway point. Your party becomes ridiculously powerful by that point, so every single fixed encounter is against multiple pockets of enemies with spellcasters all over the place, preventing you from easily disrupting their spells. This could be an interesting challenge in a game with better encounter design, but here you either win initiative and win, or lose initiative and sit there helplessly as every single enemy spellcaster casts lightning bolt and fireball on your party, wiping out half of your characters before you can do anything. Of course, if you know the encounter is coming (or reload after losing), you can haste your party beforehand, which is basically an instant win button.

Maniac Mansion
This is the enhanced EGA version (sometimes referred to as "v2"). I've played this game a lot over the years (including the NES port), but was never able to complete it. I love the concept. It's cool how you get to choose your party like in an RPG, and how each character has his or her own unique skill. It's also cool how puzzles have multiple solutions... though this is usually as simple as "use Razor's skill on this item, or Jeff's skill on that item. As a far of cheesy horror and sci-fi movies, I also love the setting and atmosphere. The graphics are also very charming and attractive.

The structure of the game is pretty cool. You are basically free to explore this kooky mansion and are given very little guidance outside of the fun "billboard" poster that came with the game. So far, I really like it. I'm sure there's gonna be some crazy moon logic stuff later on, but the game sort of makes sense so far.

I'm sure there's gonna be some crazy moon logic stuff later on

actually, there is not a lot of "moon logic" here but some puzzles will be challanging for future generations (TAPE recordings ???)
Once you have beaten it - try Timbleweed Park - its equally awesome

Treasures of the Savage Frontier

Finished!

I ended up pleasantly surprised with this one. It's an improvement over Gateway to the Savage Frontier in every way, and still remains a challenge even though it takes place in that "lower-mid-level" range of the Gold Box games where your melee characters feel nearly invulnerable and your spellcasters all have multiple copies of very powerful spells memorized.

The biggest improvement is in how the game is structured, as it's a return to the nonlinear open-world questing of Pool of Radiance and (to a lesser extent) Curse of the Azure Bonds. Although the beginning and ending sections are linear, the majority of the game involves dismantling a massive conspiracy by taking out its agents in each of the main cities, and this can mostly be done in any order. There is also plenty of optional content worth seeking out, and even some random events that slightly change the structure of the quest.

It's also paced extremely well. Unlike Gateway (and many of the Gold Box games), I didn't begin to hit the level maximum for my characters until nearly the end of the game. You're always finding nice upgrades to your equipment, too.

However, the game does become somewhat tedious and even frustrating during the last few hours of the game. Unable to deal with how powerful your party becomes, the game starts to throw the same encounter at you, consisting of two to three pockets of enemy spellcasters that seem to always win initiative over you, immediately fireballing or holding half your party before you can do anything... even though I had spent the time during character creation to ensure that everyone had 17 or 18 Dexterity.

The final area of the game is a ridiculous challenge that takes this encounter design and turns the difficulty up to the point of frustration. You get pockets of three to four powerful spellcasters, who almost always win initiative. If that's not enough, reinforcements get called in every two to three rounds if you aren't able to win the encounter quick enough. The final two battles are this and more, since winning simply throws you into a boss encounter with no chance to heal, rest, or memorize spells.

However, to the game's credit (or perhaps to mine), I was able to beat the game with fairly rolled characters on the default difficulty without too much trouble. It took two tries to beat the first boss encounter, and I was able to beat the second boss encounter on my first attempt (though only barely, with just my two magic users left standing).

In spite of the frustrating endgame, I had a great time with this. My ranking of Gold Box games so far:

1. Pool of Radiance
2. Champions of Krynn
3. Treasures of the Savage Frontier
4. Curse of the Azure Bonds
5. Gateway to the Savage Frontier
6. Secret of the Silver Blades

newtmonkey wrote on 2026-10-22, 02:06:

Treasures of the Savage Frontier […]
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Treasures of the Savage Frontier

The attachment TotSF.png is no longer available

Finished!

..

1. Pool of Radiance
2. Champions of Krynn
3. Treasures of the Savage Frontier
4. Curse of the Azure Bonds
5. Gateway to the Savage Frontier
6. Secret of the Silver Blades

that whole series always intrigued, i like the onscreen artwork as in above too, very much of that era, nostalgic

C&C Renegade... I had the itch. I really like the RTS C&C games, and I had this game when I was younger. I'm a sucker for it.

The game is a bit crap, everybody knows, but it's still really cool. The good maps - not the city map 😀 - feel very big. I like taking time to get places in games, so when there's time to run around and there are things along the way, I have a really good time. The game sounds good, and I don't just mean the music. Havoc is a bonehead, my kind of dude.

But, when I was young, I never played on the higher difficulties and never tried to make a lot of sense of the weapons. On hard, the game is interesting but a little boring up until they nab all your weapons, and from that point, ammo is a lot more scarce. It's not the most sophisticated challenge, but really being mindful of what weapons can stun, and who is immune to tiberium, it's pretty fun. But, the whole thing is starting to remind me of Nitro Family, and that's probably not a good thing. A lot of running, a lot of popping into rooms and getting merced. At least Renegade doesn't spawn stuff in your face.

I have an annoying bug... Issue, something, where the FMV audio is mostly gone, but cuts in briefly every now and again. I've never seen this one before. Oh well.

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday
After completing Treasures of the Savage Frontier, I really wanted to play another Gold Box game... but wanted to take a break from Dungeons & Dragons. It seemed like the perfect time to play this game.

It's an interesting spin on the Gold Box formula. It adds a skill system, and the classes are more defined by their skills than their roles in combat, since everyone can use guns. The only major thing differentiating a "warrior" from an "engineer" is that the former can specialize in certain weapons for bonuses in combat. Of course, there is no concept of magic in the game, though certain weapons and equipment provide similar effects. There's also a cool spaceship combat system, where you can target individual ship systems and even board enemy ships and take them over.

It still plays like a Gold Box game, but the changes are good. It doesn't feel like an awkward attempt to make a sci-fi game out of Dungeons & Dragons. I think if I had bought this back in the day without realizing it was a Gold Box game heavily based on D&D, I would have just thought it was a cool, unique sci-fi RPG.

Having said all that, the combat is kind of lame. The Gold Box games excel in combat precisely because you have access to magic and magic items. Strip that away, and you are just rushing up and smacking enemies with your weapons. Buck Rogers tries to spice things up with various grenades, but it's not enough; you spend nearly every round of nearly every battle simply firing at enemies with every character.

Still, I like it so far. The scenarios are all very interesting so far. A bland dungeon crawl would make no sense in the setting, and I think that the developers really embraced the setting in coming up with unique situations.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
I've tried to play through this game many, many times over the years. I always enjoy it, but always lose interest by level 4 or 5. I find managing inventory to be a major pain in this game, and it starts to get really annoying by that point. Anyway, I restarted, rolled a Druid character with high STR (so I can hold more stuff), and am having a blast! I also have a better understanding of the leveling system this time around, which makes things a lot easier. It's so much fun exploring each level, and I like how you often have at least two main objectives on each level.

I really like the music in this game, playing on an MT-32. It doesn't use any custom instruments, but it's a massive improvement over the FM version.

Ninja Gaiden Black
I was playing the Xbox version before (on Xemu), but now I'm playing the recomp, and it's awesome. This is a really tough game, but it feels so satisfying to make progress... sort of like the original on the Famicom/NES. Amazing game, so far.

I've been playing a lot of PC games lately!

Ultima Underworld
So far, I'm partway through Level 4. I like how each level is like its own little RPG, with one or two major quests and a few optional things to do. The major quest here is to join a group of knights, which involves killing a rogue knight and then tracking down some artifacts. This is around the point where I last stopped playing, because my severely unoptimized character was having lots of difficulty with the enemies on this level (especially the rogue knight). This time around, I had no trouble at all defeating the knight, so I guess I've learned a thing or two about developing a useful character since then!

I made sure to get a high STR roll when creating my character... even so, the encumbrance system in this game is very strict. I've been leaving everything at the stairs at the start of each level, organized into several bags. On my person, I carry only my equipment, my bag of keys, and empty bag to store stuff as I find it exploring the level, and a backpack full of general adventuring equipment. I spent some gold (and time) getting my best equipment repaired to 100% at the blacksmith on Level 2, and it's all stayed in that state since then. Really helpful. Of course, I have been slowly replacing that stuff with upgrades as I find them.

One thing that is pretty annoying about this game is that you need a pretty high Lore skill to even recognize that a piece of equipment is magical. There isn't even any NPC (so far) who can identify magic equipment for you. I looked it up and, sure enough, I've missed several pieces of magical equipment so far. Oh well, combat is easy enough, so far, that I don't think it really matters.

Ninja Gaiden Black
I finally got past the part where I got stuck back in the day playing this on the original Xbox. That means that Old Man Newtmonkey is better at games now than he was 20 years ago. This game is really exceptional so far. It's got a hell of a learning curve and feels nearly impossible at first (the first boss was a very cruel move on the part of the developers!), but a little bit of practice and lots of observation go a long way. The game also helpfully introduces new enemies near save points, so you can practice and learn how to defeat them pretty easily.

I love how this game looks. It's overall very clean, and characters have a "plastic" look to them that I find charming. Even though combat is ridiculously fast paced and takes place in geometrically complex areas, you never have trouble seeing what's going on. Enemies are always colored in a way that makes them stand out against the background, but not in a way that makes them look unnatural. It's really become a lost art over the years.

Biohazard
This is the PC port of the original version, which has been fixed up very nicely on GOG. It runs fine as is, but you can do better. Installing the Classic REbirth patch enables modding and, more importantly to me, allows you to select 320x240 resolution. The 640x480 of the PC port is fine; it simply renders the 3D stuff at 640x480 and scales the backgrounds up from 320x240. However, I find it to look inconsistent, as you have (relatively) high-res models over very pixelated backgrounds. Running the game at 320x240 eliminates that inconsistency, and just looks great. One really fun thing about REbirth is its controller support. Connect a PS4 controller, and it will actually use the colored lighting of the controller to track your health, from green, to orange, to red!

The PC port also suffers from awful sound quality. It's far worse than the PSX original, and the music is all in mono! Luckily, there are patches out there that replace this awful noise with recordings from the PSX version... it's a huge improvement.

Anyway, I've had this game on the PSX ever since it was released, but I've never been able to complete it. I made a valiant effort a few years ago on PSX, and was able to get roughly 1/4th of the way through, but lost interest at some point. I bought the GOG release of the game thinking that it would be easier to launch the game and play for 10-15 minutes a time, without the need to go and connect my Playstation, get the disc out of the case, etc. Sure enough, that's exactly the case. I spent a couple hours over the past two days, mostly in short increments of time, catching up to my progress in the PSX version... and was able to make it past that point earlier today!

What a cool game! It stills looks great today, and the setting is classic horror-- an abandoned mansion in the woods full of monsters. Although the game is definitely linear, you do have some freedom to explore the mansion and figure out the puzzles. It feels very satisfying to slowly fill out the automap as you figure the game out. I must also mention the excellent soundtrack, which is much more atmospheric and less bombastic than you would think about a game where you are a special forces agent taking down zombies with a shotgun.

Halo
I was playing the Halo: The Master Chief Collection version of this a while back. It's a decent way to play these games now, since you can switch between the remastered and original graphics, though the game does require you to be online just to play it, which sucks. Although you can switch to the original graphics, they aren't 100% true to the Xbox original (some effects don't look right). At one point I was playing the game emulated on Xemu, which is fine... but then I found out about the Halo OpenCE decompilation port and decided to give it a try. Install it and then point it at your Xbox disc, and it copies what it needs to your PC and you're good to go. So far, it runs great. You have several options to improve the graphics and frame rate, or you can just run it on the default settings and it will look just like the Xbox original (640x480 scaled up to your screen res). I always to prefer to play games in the state they were released, so I have it on default settings running at 30 fps and am using a controller to play. So far, I have no complaints whatsoever.

It's a good console shooter. It plays great with a controller, and the set pieces are interesting without them feeling like you're just locked in an arena following orders (like many of the PS3/360-era console shooters). The two-weapon limit and shield recharging make sense in this game and give the game some character instead of feeling like means of dumbing the game down.

My biggest complaint so far is that the game kind of sucks as a corridor shooter. It's awesome when you're in an open environment and the game just drops a bunch of enemies on you and expects you to take them all out. It's not so awesome when you're just running down corridor after corridor killing the same two enemies over and over and over. Unfortunately, it seems like for every open area battle you encounter, you get two boring corridor levels.

I am also playing Ultima Underworld, the Unity version, on "modern" (2017) hardware. I am on level 6. I am a big fan of dungeon crawlers of that era so I'm really enjoying it, despite the fact that at time it feels a bit boring.

The gameplay feels a bit simple though, compared to a game like Dungeon Master where there were enigmas to solve etc. But technically it is quite impressive for its age.

I agree, but I think that the gameplay feeling simple is partly due to controlling a single character rather than a party. The game is mostly designed around one-on-one battles because of this, and it feels less strategic or tactical, and more like an action game.

As for the puzzles, I think that the games approach this differently. DM has a more classical approach of solving logic puzzles that are satisfying and enjoyable, but it doesn't really make sense for these puzzles to be there, other than being a challenge for the party (or player) to solve. In contrast, UU attempts, for better or worse, to bring RPG questing into a simulation of a dungeon. Sometimes, it's just going to one end of the map to get something for someone, but there are also some really interesting puzzles in the game. I think that the lizardman language puzzle, for example, is simple but brilliant.

Aui wrote on 2026-10-20, 23:34:

actually, there is not a lot of "moon logic" here but some puzzles will be challanging for future generations (TAPE recordings ???)
Once you have beaten it - try Timbleweed Park - its equally awesome

That's good to hear! I'm old enough to have recorded stuff on tape myself, so hopefully it shouldn't be a problem 😀
I did play Tumbleweed Park a bit back when it was released and enjoyed it. I'll definitely give it another shot once I've completed MM. Thanks for the recommendation!

dr_st wrote on 2026-10-16, 17:09:

Awesome. Let us know how you progress through this. I'm always curious to see how people who play classics for the first time respond to them. Blackthorne was certainly a positive experience for me. I played through it 2-3 times, maybe 4-5 if you count the different console ports.

Sorry, I missed your post! It's a really cool game so far, but I find that I have to be in the mood to play it. I've taken a short break after reaching the forest area, but I'll definitely be going back to it once I'm in the mood for some action.

I've (briefly) played the SNES version, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on the console ports, and how they compare with the PC version.