I started playing Black Mesa. I've really been enjoying it so far. I rarely replay games, but Half Life 1 is an exception. It's nice to have a bit of a different HL1 experience this time.

Been playing a lot of Postal 2 lately, it just seems the stupidity of our modern society is really really getting to me. I figure it's the only acceptable and non-destructive way I can go on a temper-fueled rampage against stupid people.

creepingnet wrote on 2023-09-01, 18:33:

Been playing a lot of Postal 2 lately, it just seems the stupidity of our modern society is really really getting to me. I figure it's the only acceptable and non-destructive way I can go on a temper-fueled rampage against stupid people.

You know... I think you're onto something. I may join you in that.

I still have such fond memories of fucking around in Postal 2 at LAN parties, amazed at the sheer attention to detail in the vulgarity. Like every hardcore gamer, the first thing I did was check the settings menu and keybindings, and noticed an "unzip" input. So naturally the first thing I do is try that, and discover I piss on things in this game. When I pissed in someone's mouth they began vomiting. While they were vomiting I covered them in gasoline and lit them on fire. Then I discovered Postal 2 has probably the longest, most torturous burning death sequence of any game I've ever seen. They run around screaming, then give up and curl into a fetal position, then start crying begging to die. A buddy of mine figured out if you pissed on them again to put them out at just the right moment, they turned into horribly scarred zombies.

We loved discovering the bonkers things you could do in that game. I don't think any of us even tried to beat it. We just played it like a sandbox. Then we laughed even harder when we saw Computer Gaming World gave it 0/5 stars for how vulgar and tasteless it was.

Postal 2... It was indeed vulgar... It was right up my alley when I was 17. Too bad you never finished the game as you ended up pissing gasoline in new game + (if a remember correctly).

Is this game on Steam..? 😀

Joakim wrote on 2023-09-01, 20:22:

Postal 2... It was indeed vulgar... It was right up my alley when I was 17. Too bad you never finished the game as you ended up pissing gasoline in new game + (if a remember correctly).

Is this game on Steam..? 😀

Yep, it's on steam, that's where my current copy is from. It's changed quite a bit since the original release. I remember about 2005 or so when I got this game the fan community was really modding it, to link up the Apocalypse Weekend levels to the regular P2 levels - AWP7, (A week in Paradise (Arizona) 7-day mission) - and that added a lot of the new stuff that's in the Steam Release, which seems they have expanded even further upon including Auto Save. Some faves of mine are the Machete and the Chainsaw. It also seems they have made some of the NPCs tougher as well compared to the original version(s) I've played. Plus they added various achievements with cheeky pictures for them - including one I'm surprised Loverboy has not sent them a C&D over, 🤣 (beat all 5 days of the original - get the "Get Lucky" album cover for the "Workin' for the Weekend" Achivement).

There's also another mod, a horror mod, that I am trying to remember that was out around the time of AWP7 as a fan-created mod. It included an underground hell level, something akin to "a night at the museum", an industrial factory level, and an apartment complex, it did not have Postal Dude in it, but rather you played as a 20 somethign college student or somesuch. It had it's own name, it was pretty hard, but rather cool. I recall it had something like Zombies but it also had a lot of religious-related enemies like demons and soul stealers and whatnot - and some of the new weapons were ported over to AWP7 from that.

I'm going to make a serious attempt on Quest for Glory 1 (VGA version). Tried the thief but I just keep dying, maybe I'll try a different class as I don't know what I'm doing. 😀

The Postal series doesn't do anything to me at all. Postal 1 was semi-serious and more interesting, as is was more focused on the inner mental state of the protagonist.

The rest of the series is very "meh". It's not my kind of humor, plus open sandboxes bore me to tears to begin with...

The only game i've sat down to play recently was Kingdom Eighties. Really enjoyed it and finished it very quickly, I think in a couple of sittings.

Been replaying Wolfenstein 3D using ECWolf. So far I'm halfway through Spear of Destiny, and I'm not sure what I'll do after that. Maybe I'll play through Return to Castle Wolfenstein again.

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in my ass for 20+ years Baldur's Gate is finally done and beaten! And what an ending it had, straight to credits immediately after the main antagonist bit the dust. No end cinematic, not even a lousy text screen congratulating the player, nothing. Unrewarding endings, one of my favorite pet peeves. Especially after very long game that nearly bored me to death.

At least it's finally over. Phew.

Things I liked:
- The first, I don't know, half of the game? From the beginning to cloakwood is good ol' low level party critter spanking, ogre kiting and gradually getting beefier and beefier. Very simple yet somehow charming
- Durlag's tower from the expansion. At this point I was already getting dangerously close of crossing the line between being really bored and starting to actively hate the game but Durlag's tower turned out to be an oasis in the middle of desert. Like someone in the dev team had suddenly realized they could try to make the area actually interesting and to everyones surprise it worked, I honestly had fun figuring out the place. Also actual fights that required buffing! The place reminded me of BG2 more than BG1 and that's a compliment
- The soundtrack is pretty good, some of the tracks I like quite a lot

Things I didn't like:
- Just about everything after Cloakwood (except Durlag's tower), the game really started to drag at that point. Especially the city of Baldur's Gate has to be the most boring city I've seen in a RPG, huge place filled with little of value, mostly just a pile of garbage tier filler quests
- Designing many of the indoor corridors too tight for a party of characters was certainly a decision, especially with the pathfinding issues Infinity engine has
- Things like interesting quests, characters and competent writing in general clearly weren't yet too high in the order of importance
- The companions. I guess it's an achievement of sorts to create companions that have no dialog at all or very very little after their introduction who still manage to annoy the hell out of you

Thank goodness I can cross this one over now. If I ever come back to it in the distant future it will be in full power gamer mode with a list of quests that are worth doing and location of items worth getting, stealing everything that isn't nailed down and killing everyone that even looks at me funny. I've paid my dues, now I'm allowed to have fun with it.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:56:

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in my ass for 20+ years Baldur's Gate is finally done and beaten! And what an ending it had, straight to credits immediately after the main antagonist bit the dust. No end cinematic, not even a lousy text screen congratulating the player, nothing. Unrewarding endings, one of my favorite pet peeves. Especially after very long game that nearly bored me to death.

There should have been a cinematic which shows Sarevok disintegrating, and his essence returning to the abyss. The statues on the walls around that hell pit are supposed to hint at the existence of other Bhaalspawn, thereby setting things up for the sequel.

At least that was what I saw after replaying the original version of Baldur's Gate a while back. Not sure if that enhanced edition changed something there.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-05, 20:09:

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:56:

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in my ass for 20+ years Baldur's Gate is finally done and beaten! And what an ending it had, straight to credits immediately after the main antagonist bit the dust. No end cinematic, not even a lousy text screen congratulating the player, nothing. Unrewarding endings, one of my favorite pet peeves. Especially after very long game that nearly bored me to death.

There should have been a cinematic which shows Sarevok disintegrating, and his essence returning to the abyss. The statues on the walls around that hell pit are supposed to hint at the existence of other Bhaalspawn, thereby setting things up for the sequel.

At least that was what I saw after replaying the original version of Baldur's Gate a while back. Not sure if that enhanced edition changed something there.

Oh goody. Yeah the Enhanced Edition did away with the original 3d cinematics and replaced them with new 2d hand drawn stuff, so either they didn't add a new end cinematic or it bugged and didn't play. Considering it's Beamdog we are talking about here both are definitely possibilities, took them years to fix the buggy messes they released ten years ago.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:56:

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in my ass for 20+ years Baldur's Gate is finally done and beaten! And what an ending it had, straight to credits immediately after the main antagonist bit the dust. No end cinematic, not even a lousy text screen congratulating the player, nothing. Unrewarding endings, one of my favorite pet peeves. Especially after very long game that nearly bored me to death.

At least it's finally over. Phew.

Thank goodness I can cross this one over now. If I ever come back to it in the distant future it will be in full power gamer mode with a list of quests that are worth doing and location of items worth getting, stealing everything that isn't nailed down and killing everyone that even looks at me funny. I've paid my dues, now I'm allowed to have fun with it.

Man, I'm kind of sad it never grew on you. Maybe it really is one of those "You had to be there" games.

I know for myself, it was damned near revelatory for a lot of external reasons. The last D&D CRPG I saw a friend of mine playing before Baldur's Gate came out were old Gold Box games. Diablo had come out not long before, with it's tile sets and grid movement, but Baldur's Gate had massive hand painted backgrounds and totally free form movement, bursting at the seams across 5 CDs you could absolutely not reasonably do a full install off of back in the day. It was the first AD&D multiplayer game I ever got, finally letting me play D&D with the new online friends I was swiftly making as a young teen in the late 90's. And the manual really played up that this wasn't just some random location. This was Candlekeep/The Friendly Arm Inn/Wherever! A storied location across decades of roleplaying lore! There was a sense that Bioware was really trying to depict these locations with a gravitas and significance they'd never seen before.

Ah well. I congratulate you on pushing through. I know how those games can be.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:56:

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in […]
Show full quote

Finished Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, after who knows how many attempts of playing all the way through it and being a pain in my ass for 20+ years Baldur's Gate is finally done and beaten! And what an ending it had, straight to credits immediately after the main antagonist bit the dust. No end cinematic, not even a lousy text screen congratulating the player, nothing. Unrewarding endings, one of my favorite pet peeves. Especially after very long game that nearly bored me to death.

At least it's finally over. Phew.

Things I liked:
- The first, I don't know, half of the game? From the beginning to cloakwood is good ol' low level party critter spanking, ogre kiting and gradually getting beefier and beefier. Very simple yet somehow charming
- Durlag's tower from the expansion. At this point I was already getting dangerously close of crossing the line between being really bored and starting to actively hate the game but Durlag's tower turned out to be an oasis in the middle of desert. Like someone in the dev team had suddenly realized they could try to make the area actually interesting and to everyones surprise it worked, I honestly had fun figuring out the place. Also actual fights that required buffing! The place reminded me of BG2 more than BG1 and that's a compliment
- The soundtrack is pretty good, some of the tracks I like quite a lot

Things I didn't like:
- Just about everything after Cloakwood (except Durlag's tower), the game really started to drag at that point. Especially the city of Baldur's Gate has to be the most boring city I've seen in a RPG, huge place filled with little of value, mostly just a pile of garbage tier filler quests
- Designing many of the indoor corridors too tight for a party of characters was certainly a decision, especially with the pathfinding issues Infinity engine has
- Things like interesting quests, characters and competent writing in general clearly weren't yet too high in the order of importance
- The companions. I guess it's an achievement of sorts to create companions that have no dialog at all or very very little after their introduction who still manage to annoy the hell out of you

Thank goodness I can cross this one over now. If I ever come back to it in the distant future it will be in full power gamer mode with a list of quests that are worth doing and location of items worth getting, stealing everything that isn't nailed down and killing everyone that even looks at me funny. I've paid my dues, now I'm allowed to have fun with it.

If you want to play an engaging RPG, try dragon age origins. From memory, not a bore fest like BG. I also found it hard to get into BG

Namrok wrote on 2023-09-05, 20:43:

but Baldur's Gate had massive hand painted backgrounds and totally free form movement, bursting at the seams across 5 CDs you could absolutely not reasonably do a full install off of back in the day

Yeah, how come the original release was 5 CDs, but the later "Original Saga" package crammed everything into 3? Were redbook audio tracks removed or something?

Compression tweaks. There's no redbook (it's all Interplay ACM)

Also available hard drives at the time (4gb-13gb~) absolutely could install the whole thing and is recommended to do so for multiplayer.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:56:

At least it's finally over. Phew.

I liked this a lot more than you did, but I agree with pretty much everything you wrote above. The game is definitely at its best up until you arrive at Baldur's Gate, and then takes a nosedive in quality. I mostly skipped everything there.

I, too, had tried completing this game many times ever since it was released, but could never get into it (I would also lose interest at or after the Nashkel Mines). The game finally clicked with me when I generated my own party from the start, and I made the decision to mostly ignore anything I wasn't told explicitly to do in-game. I left most of the wilderness areas unexplored, though I did completely explore the wilderness maps I entered following the main quest. This extended the "low-level AD&D" experience quite a bit, which kept the game interesting. That was only a year ago or so, and I did complete the game finally (and actually enjoyed it a lot).

Have you completed BG2?

Namrok wrote on 2023-09-05, 20:43:

Ah well. I congratulate you on pushing through. I know how those games can be.

Thanks! And yeah, there's no question would I have enjoyed it more had I played it at launch (and preferably had been into D&D, which I am not). As someone who in general doesn't like black and white high fantasy and played BG1 AFTER games like Fallout 1&2 and Planescape: Torment which I really do love but still enjoyed BG1 enough to keep coming back to it all these years, it must had done something right to make that happen.

gmaverick2k wrote on 2023-09-05, 20:48:

If you want to play an engaging RPG, try dragon age origins. From memory, not a bore fest like BG. I also found it hard to get into BG

I have played DA:O but it's been a while. From what I remember I really enjoyed the combat system and how it had plenty of dialog, but it still had issues I wasn't too fond of. Can't remember what though, other than the weak main story and how on some armors the shoulders were so hilariously large they actually covered the screen occasionally during dialog. It's on my list of games I'd like to revisit.

newtmonkey wrote on 2023-09-06, 02:01:

Have you completed BG2?

I have, twice. The expansion for it once. Much better than BG1 in my opinion, they really improved on the things I personally enjoy in RPG's. Though the lenght of the game might still be an issue, we'll find out once I'm ready to tackle it before playing BG3.

You tried Icewind Dales? Sounds to me you might really enjoy them. I've personally never even tried them because there's no companion characters with their own personality and have to generate your own party, which makes me feel more like a puppetmaster which isn't really what I look for in RPG's, but after playing BG1 with the canon party I can see your way might have been the the right way.

Sombrero wrote on 2023-09-06, 05:48:

You tried Icewind Dales? Sounds to me you might really enjoy them. I've personally never even tried them because there's no companion characters with their own personality and have to generate your own party, which makes me feel more like a puppetmaster which isn't really what I look for in RPG's, but after playing BG1 with the canon party I can see your way might have been the the right way.

From what I recall, I actually enjoyed the writing in Icewind more than the crappy adolescent attempts at humor of Baldur's Gate (fart jokes and all). That game doesn't have much in terms of plot (it's basically a D&D combat simulator) but the little writing that was there seemed decent enough.

I also remember that the graphics in Icewind were a fair bit nicer than those of Baldur's Gate. It's still the same engine, but the quality of the pre-rendered backgrounds was much higher. The music was really good as well, composed by Jeremy Soule of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim fame. Here's one of the more memorable tracks.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-09-06, 06:15:

The music was really good as well, composed by Jeremy Soule of Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim fame. Here's one of the more memorable tracks.

Heh, I guessed what that track was before clicking it and I haven't even played the game. I may have checked the soundtrack out before.

Soule can do great stuff, but got a little too comfortable with his style early 2000's, there are tracks in Morrowind/NWN/KotOR you could swap around between games without anyone noticing as they sound that alike.