I grabbed Torchlight when it was free on Epic and have been giving it some playtime recently. I never got into Diablo at all, as I always found it too bleak & dreary, so that put me off most "Diablo clones" for a long time too. But I'm having fun with this! So what's different?

Firstly, the environments are tons more interesting than the de-saturated crypts I remember from Diablo - the engine in this wasn't particularly high-end, even for 2009, but I think it looks great and really shows what a good design team can do with low poly counts and simpler effects. Some of the places you go through are gorgeous.

Secondly, I was never really big on the whole hack-and-slash style - I picked the ranged character and by only a few levels in, had her set her up with goddamn dual pistols and a whole bunch of fire & electricity spells, so she could stomp around one-shotting most of the common enemies & even blow them off bridges and into chasms. Naturally this is fun as hell, but the best part is she has a dog who tags along, carries extra crap, and attacks on his own. Yeah! Git 'em! Good boy, 14/10! You actually have a choice of pets, but obviously the correct one is the dog.

The dog even comes to the rescue in terms of the tedious inventory management that plagues these games (constantly having to return to town to stash or sell all the items you pick up) - he has his own inventory and can take off & sell all the loot by himself.

You can even give the dog his own spells to cast - mine summons a horde of skeletons & a giant disembodied flaming sword every time the battle gets heavy enough. Hell yes!

Complaints? A few; it's not perfect. I've found some bugs and have had it crash on me a couple times, but no big deal. The "permanent, continuous save" is nice, but I would have liked a few save slots just so I could go back to previous environments or weapon loadouts.

My biggest complaint is the character takes no initiative on her own, and will even just stand there getting pummled unless you specifically tell her what to shoot. They equated attacks with mouse clicks 1:1 so you constantly have to watch where the mouse cursor is and click on things, often in the middle of a heated battle with everything moving around. Sometimes you'll try to select an enemy right as it dodges or dies, so your character will run across the room instead, and maybe end up somewhere really dangerous (you can see this happen in the gameplay video I linked below a couple times.) I would have loved some RTS-style unit initative where she'd shoot at things in range by herself, or at least if I click on an enemy she'd keep attacking it until it was dead.

THAT SAID... Having the dog helps again because he does attack things, and uses spells on his own too. In my case, that means I have a small posse of dog, skeletons, and flaming sword helping me out in battle. I'll take it. 😜 Starting out with a ranged character is a little rough until you get the dog powered up enough though.

There's no keyboard movement or attack control, it's all mouse-driven - although I have both mouse buttons mapped along with most of the other hotkeys and shortcuts on my Logitech G13 keypad. IMHO it'd be a lot more irritating to play without that thing.

I also wish the environments were a bit more destructable, they're pretty much static. If I blow up a barrel of TNT on a rickety wooden bridge surrounded by lava, I expect the bridge and everything on it to collapse into the molten sea below, thanks. I guess that would have been difficult to do without creating situations where you could blow up the only path forward, given the procedurally-generated maps, but I think they could have figured out something.

Finally, the music is ... okay, but it loops endlessly and gets old really fast with the length of some of the maps. The town music gets especially annoying considering the amount of time you spend there optimizing your character. Fortunately the files are all just oggs in a directory so I fixed that right up (video). Every goth-y RPG should just forget all the pseudo-medieval crap and go with this style of music, IMHO.

So since this tuned into a mini-review, would I recommend this? Sure! Considering it can be had dirt cheap or free just about everywhere, it's worth a look if you think you'd be into it.

Donkey Kong 64 again. On the Crystal Caves Level and only 2 Golden Bananas left for Diddy Kong.

After I finished Dark Forces, I've been able to devote all my game playing time to Eschalon: Book II. This is a REALLY good RPG series, and the first game is permanently free, courtesy of the developer Basilisk Games. It's a single-character, story and quest driven game with turn-based combat. You can pretty much go anywhere in the world from the get-go, but some places are designed for later in the game, so you can get yourself killed that way because the monsters and quests are too challenging for low-level characters. 😉 The quests pretty much set you up for the path to take, with lots of side-quests for gold and XP build-up. Lots of random treasure chests so you could save scum if you wanted to get the best treasure. Lots of save slots and easy quick save option make this a convenient strategy. Lots of character-building options from the start: you can be a fighter, wizard, rogue, ranger, alchemist, etc. How you build your character determines lots of things (good/neutral/evil, where you're from, etc). You can still learn magic if you're a fighter or ranger, but you'll start off with lower base skills, so it'll be much harder to become a high level magic user with access to the best spells. Pretty classic feeling game with lots of skill options to build up through level-up points, trainers, or books. You will need some repair skills as your weapons and armor wear out with use. Repairs take place while you camp, as does foraging. You do have to feed and drink yourself, but it's set up in a way that enhances the game rather than making it annoying. Building up the foraging skill, for example, will make your hunger and thirst bars go down more slowly. Certain foods are a better bang-for-the-buck. I found salted fish, wild potatoes, bread, apples, and rat meat the best values, so you don't waste your gold. Fill your water skins at the various wells in the different towns. You need torches or magical light sources in order to not incur visibility penalties during night combat. I use the Predator Sight and Cat's Eyes spells which take away my low light attack penalty without giving the opponent any light to help them. You'll need some skill points in Cartography for your automap to fill. The more points you have in Cartography, the more detail in your automap. Finally, the game is easy to get in and out of for short periods of time, so I can play a 10 minute session if that's all the time I have. 😎 Lots of cool features like this make this a really entertaining RPG. Some screenshots:

I'm having a lot of fun playing Corporate Life Simulator..

Finished Quake few days ago. I did enjoy it more than Duke 3D but it's still not exactly my favorite game in existence. Honestly the best thing about it in my opinion are the short levels, I think the longest maps took like 23min or so and I did run around looking for secrets a bit. Combine that with pretty fast and smooth gameplay and cool soundtrack from Nine Inch Nails it was actually pretty fun for short 10-20min runs. I did try to start the first expansion but noped out, whoever did the soundtrack for it is no Trent Reznor.

Continued to Quake 2, soundtrack is awesome but I noticed the slower gameplay kinda bothers me. Shotgun feels like it's the creaky grandad of the Q1 shotgun. I better give it some time before I get back to it.

In the meantime I whipped out two of my all time favorites, The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2! It's been around a decade since I last played them and still either straight up remembered the puzzles or had this funky distant echo from somewhere deep of my subconscious that directed me forward. Damn I really do love these games, especially MI2. I wish I could somehow forget all of the puzzles and experience them like I've never played them before. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is up next!

clueless1 wrote:

This is a REALLY good RPG series

This is not my kind of RPG but your enthusiasm for it still piques my interest, great to hear.

I got a PSIO for my PS1 recently so have been on a bit of a PS1-game-sampling kick, none stuck. The PSIO allows the use of NTSC images on my PAL machine so I was interested to see my fave tennis game (Sampras Extreme Tennis) @ 60Hz, but it turns out that it wasn't released in the U.S. There's a NTSC-J version but sadly I can't read Japanese. Unable to shake the thought that a better version of this game exists I tried the DOS / Win9x version and it's pretty gosh darn good - significantly better looking than the PS1 (when run in SVGA mode). My only complaint was that the crowd was unreasonably loud, but after some reworking of the relevant files in Cooledit I have them under control 😎

badmojo wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

This is a REALLY good RPG series

This is not my kind of RPG but your enthusiasm for it still piques my interest, great to hear.

Yeah, I get it. I'm extremely unlikely to play Diablo-like or Elder Scrolls-like RPGs, so I know what you mean. Still, it's good to explore genres you wouldn't normally consider.

Crank9000 wrote:

I did try to start the first expansion but noped out, whoever did the soundtrack for it is no Trent Reznor.

You would be correct, the soundtrack for the expansions was composed by Jehung Hwang if I'm not mistaken... The same composer as Mechwarrior 2, Heavy Gear, Battlezone, etc.

Anyways, I've been live streaming myself on Twitch playing through the Urban Assault singleplayer campaign. Not sure if I'm going to do the Metropolis Dawn campaigns or not...

DracoNihil wrote:

Crank9000 wrote:

I did try to start the first expansion but noped out, whoever did the soundtrack for it is no Trent Reznor.

You would be correct, the soundtrack for the expansions was composed by Jehung Hwang if I'm not mistaken... The same composer as Mechwarrior 2, Heavy Gear, Battlezone, etc.

Well damn, Battlezone and and especially Mechwarrior 2 have great soundtracks. I guess the style he went with the Quake expansions wasn't his strongest suit.

Started playing the original Alone in the Dark with my son a few days ago. Despite its age, it's incredibly atmospheric of course (I have fond memories of playing AITD3 on CD). And it still managed to creep my son out who had trouble watching 🤣. Score 1 for old games.

MusicallyInspired wrote:

Started playing the original Alone in the Dark with my son a few days ago. Despite its age, it's incredibly atmospheric of course (I have fond memories of playing AITD3 on CD). And it still managed to creep my son out who had trouble watching 🤣. Score 1 for old games.

I tried this game last year, I just couldn't play it. The control mechanics are impossible to bear today.

Finished AitD 1 earlier this year! I had an okay time with the controls, though I did have issues doing that double-tap to get Carnby/Emily Hartwood to run. However, apart from one or two scenes it's also not really necessary to run afair. I loved the music and atmosphere so much!

Right now, I'm playing Gravity Well! r/retrobattlestations had that Lunar Lander basic challenge which reminded me of this DOS clone I used to play. It's a really fun little variant which has you control the thruster with mouse movement and adds "combat mode". In the latter, your lander is equipped with bombs and the landing sites have turrets that lob bombs at you that are also subject to gravity. You can just evade them or try to bomb either the turrets or disable the radio antennas that control them. Good hectic fun with neat vector graphics!

I swear I just play the same games over and over, oh well. FO:NV for me at the moment - it's been cold and wet here IRL so the virtual Mojave setting is a nice break. As I wander around this game for the 100th time I'm trying to work out why I like it so damn much and I suppose it's the combination of lots of things, but in summary I think it just has personality, or humanity, or something.

What mods do you have installed, if any?

appiah4 wrote:

What mods do you have installed, if any?

I run quite a few but all just 'look and feel' and bug fix related stuff, nothing that changes the game mechanics really.

1
2-- install via Steam
3-- enable all DLC:
4	- dead money
5	- honesthears
6	- lonesome road
7	- old world blues
8
9** replace any files as you go
10
11-- nvse_5_1_beta4.7z
12
13-- use FalloutNVLauncher.exe to set Ulta graphics settings
14
15-- use nvse_loader.exe going forward
16
17-- contents of ../Stutter remover to C:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas\Data\NVSE\Plugins
18
19-- NVAC - New Vegas Anti Crash-53635-7-4-0-0.zip
20
21-- unpack and run FNV 4GB Patch-62552-1-3.7z in the .exe directory
22
23-- Enhanced Blood Textures-34917-2-22c.rar
24
25-- Goodsprings Shack-35325.7z
26
27-- Hi-Res Eyes 1-2-37537-1.rar
28
29-- Improved LOD noise Texture-46451-V1-00.rar
30
31-- Increased run speed 6-34750.rar
32
33-- pipboy_3000_remastered.zip-64175-1-0.zip
34
35-- Wasteland Clothing HD V1-3 FULL PACK-54478-1-3.7z
36
37-- weapon_retexture_project_1dot95-38285-1-95.7z
38
39-- YUP - Base Game and All DLC-51664-11-1.7z
40
41-- Fellout 1_4_1-34888-1-4-1.zip
42
43-- MTUI-34902.zip
44
45-- NMCs Textures NV LARGE Pack Part 1 of 3 FOR NMM -43135-1-0.7z
46-- NMCs Textures NV LARGE Pack Part 2 of 3 FOR NMM -43135-1-0.7z
47-- NMCs Textures NV LARGE Pack Part 3 of 3 FOR NMM-43135-1-0.7z
48
49-- Ojo Bueno Texture Pack for FNV - HIGH-39755-Quiznak.zip
50
51-- MGs NCR Pack Ojo friendly 7-42551.7z
52
53-- Enhanced Camera 1.4c-55334-1-4c-1544995335
54
55-- use LOOT to sort the load order
56
57-- ArchiveInvalidation File Generator v3_7-52402-3-7.zip
58	-- copy this into the game directory and run it - you might have to manually find the game but you can do it!
59
60-- ensure that relevant ESPs are enabled in the launcher

Ion Fury
https://www.gog.com/game/ion_fury

Plays and looks like a Build engine game released in the 90s. Only played a few hours so far but I like it.

Back to playing a little Ark: Survival Evolved. And some Age of Empires (with the Rise of Rome expansion) because it's a dang fine classic.

In another thread, I mused about going through Wizardry 6-8 with the same set of characters. Since then, I've been watching dfortae's Wizardry 6 playthrough, doing lots of research on party builds, and researching possible mods. I did some experimenting with the Cosmic Forge Editor and discovered that you could apply mad god's Attribute Bonus Generation Algorithm patch from Windows, then transfer the install to a real DOS PC and the patch will work in real DOS. This patch makes rolling high bonuses much easier, meaning it won't take me days to roll a party of elite class characters, such as ninjas, samurai, lords, and bishops. This is a game changer! I'm still not set on playing this game, but I'm at least going to roll a good group of characters and try out the first level of the game to see how playable it will be. No automapping means I'll have to keep the cluebook PDF open on another screen. One save slot means I'll have to manually back up my save game when I exit to DOS. But it still might be fun enough to be worth it. Wizardry 8 holds a special place in my heart as probably the best RPG I've ever played on a PC (I played and beat it between Feb and April of 2002, in a race to finish the game before I got married), so taking the same group of characters through 6, 7 and 8 seems like it would be a treat. Wish me luck.

clueless1, I was also thinking of doing the same, I will certainly give that playthrough a look!

appiah4 wrote:

clueless1, I was also thinking of doing the same, I will certainly give that playthrough a look!

I'm still researching potential party mixes, spreadsheet style. This is almost required for me, if I get this invested in my party, it will make the game that much more immersive. Here's a good site I found:
https://sorcerers.net/Games/Wizardry/Wizardry … rough/index.php