Ancient DOS Games Pro 2 - Weapon Effectiveness - System Shock is online!

Gonna keep this brief because I really need to get to bed but yeah, wanted to take a crack and figuring out the damage rates in System Shock. I know all the raw data is online to be found quickly and easily, but where's the fun in looking up raw values when you can beat up a Cortex Reaver with a lead pipe? ;D

Love this one, Kris. Easily my favorite of your videos! Thanks for making the weapon chart available for download. 😀

Ancient DOS Games Filler #75 - Local Area Dungeon is online!

I'm... kinda at a loss as to what to say about this which I don't say in the video. This is a REALLY obscure dungeon crawl, yet has all the features you'd expect of a decent one. So why is it so obscure then?

...maybe being harder than every single dungeon crawl before it didn't help... :P

"I died in the freaking town!" - all the best dungeon crawls start this way!

For some reason I love these little Win 3.1 iconic graphics games. A lot of adventure/RPG types on the platform have this sort of look, maybe it traces back to SkiFree or Rodents. Those little 16x16(?) pixel sprites had a real economy to them. JUST enough to show you what's going on while still letting a 1-person dev "team" make a playable game in a decent amount of time.

Has there ever been a dungeon crawl that didn't actively hate the player? I guess trying to murder you at every opportunity is the core of the gameplay, but it seems like giving the player a sporting chance was harder than it looked. 😀

Ancient DOS Games Episode 253 - Brain Dead 13 is online!

So this marks the first time I've ever actually played a QTE FMV game... I've watched LPs of many others, but never played one before now. :o

Because of that, I kinda had an idea already of what makes these kinds of games interesting and engaging. Brain Dead 13 tuned out to be VERY interesting, but very unengaging. This could've easily surpassed Dragon's Lair in terms of quality had more attention been put towards the technical and design aspects. :P

Ancient DOS Games Pro 2 - Minimum Winning Score - King's Quest is online!

This was a fun one to put together, as going for a maximum score seems like a no-brainer, but how do we get the fewest points possible and still beat the game? I actually learned quite a bit about the game I didn't know and was able to condense everything down to quite the degree, turning the entire game into a list of event/action scores and inventory item scores, along with producing a nice little PDF for people to download and have at the ready for their own purposes! :)

Hey everyone, made the decision to postpone the next ADG Mod video for a couple months, even though it's nearly ready. There's a lot of circumstances tying into why and it took several paragraphs to give a proper explanation, so I'm just going to link to the Patreon post I made about it below, but I'll check for comments about it here on VOGONS too.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/delaying-adg-mod-25399071

I just kind of rediscovered this series and I have to say, I'm really enjoying your treatment of these games, particularly some of the older, more obscure titles!

One thing that struck me as pretty funny, is that (mostly in your earlier videos) you tend to say things like "yeah, not sure what more I would say about this game" and then deliver some of the most well-rounded and on-point criticism I've seen in these types of videos 😀

Anyway, I know you already did Visual Star Trek as part of the series, but I'm wondering if EgaTrek wouldn't be a good candidate as well, since it's both shareware, somewhat obscure and at the same time, at least imho, a very competent and fun game.

Cheers,
Henry

EGA Trek might be obscure NOW, but back then it was the one most people talked about when it came to Trek games! :o

...it also wasn't free, thus why I played OTHER Trek games as a kid, either ones which were free or weren't crippled in their shareware state. :P

And yeah, when I say I'm not sure what else to talk about, I'm more-so referring to the game's content, factoids, etc., thus most of what follows me saying something like that are opinions instead of information about the game. ;)

Glad to hear you played it back in the day! I clean forgot there even was a registered version.

Ancient DOS Games Episode 254 - Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is online!

Amazingly, I'd never actually played this game until this week... or any game in the franchise for that matter. I was aware of them, sure, but none of the schools I went to had any of the games in the series and by the time I was aware of its existence I was already playing proper games on my consoles and computers, so the thought of asking my parents to get me edutainment never crossed my mind. :P

Also, when I first tried playing it this week, I got really confused as to how THIS of all things became so freaking popular, but when I looked into the history of the franchise and just how old it was, it made too much sense! :B

The recent Netflix show is very good, I must say. 😀
I liked it a lot.

Ancient DOS Games Pro 4 - Maximum Scores - Animal Quest is online!

Even edutainment can pose interesting questions as to how to maximize one's gaming potential! Figuring out how the predators and prey were being generated in this game was the key to determining what the maximum scores were for each of the game's 48 animals, then it was just a matter of doing a bunch of math... so I wrote a QBASIC program to do it for me! ;)

Ancient DOS Games Filler #76 - Gemini's Emulator Picks is online!

Yeah, taking a bit of a departure from DOS gaming this week to talk about which emulators I use for my own personal enjoyment and/or streaming. This isn't a super-detailed video; I only touch on each emulator briefly since there's several to go through and I didn't want this to turn into an hour long video detailing how every single feature worked, rather I just wanted to show some good emulation options for the systems I'm most familiar with for those struggling to find decent emulators. :B

Ancient DOS Games Episode 255 - Ultima Underworld is online!

I'm continuing to be surprised by the Ultima games. Having missed out on them as a kid due to a dumb preconception I got from briefly playing Ultima IV, it's actually surprising to me just how well made these games are. I mean, I say that in full knowledge of the quirks they have, but quirks are things you can adapt to; minor issues which just require a small adjustment in how you play to succeed.

Though that said, it's amazing the kind of influence Ultima Underworld had; inspiring the entire start of The Elder Scrolls franchise and even having its engine adapted and updated to end up being used in System Shock! :O

🤣, i ran recently into the mouse problem as well and assumed a DOSBox bug at first glance.

You are off by your guess though.
According to ripsaw:
It divides the mickeys by 2 hence 1 gets turned into 0. (and 3 into 1, etc). Seems to be intentional by the game as well..

Not sure if mickeys are always reported as even numbers to the game. anyway, that is why 200 works, as it undoes the division by 2...

Anyway we are leaning towards an oversight of the game itself.

Nice review, Gemini. Just to expand a little on your comments about the upset rat: this game does a great job of informing the player of creature moods, and it also tells you if taking items would be considered STEALING. If the items in question are described as "belonging to..." than that person or creature that the item belongs to will become hostile if you take those items. So it's pretty easy to decide what's takeable in the game without initiating unwanted combat. If it's not described as belonging to someone or something, than it's free for the taking without the risk of being attacked for it.

When I played through this game a few years ago, I tried it on a fast Pentium first. It seemed to play fine, other than the keyboard movement seemed "slippery" as if the character is running around on ice. Using the mouse made it easier to slow movement down to compensate, but I REALLY preferred keyboard controls to mouse. So first I tried slowing the computer down with SETMUL to disable test registers in my MMX. But there still weren't enough speed points (this game seems to run best in the 60Mhz range, while my slowed down PC was running in the 25Mhz range) to make it ideal, so I played through this game and its sequel on a real DX2-66, which turned out REALLY well.

Qbix wrote:

You are off by your guess though.
According to ripsaw:
It divides the mickeys by 2 hence 1 gets turned into 0. (and 3 into 1, etc). Seems to be intentional by the game as well..

That would do it too. Integer division would chop off the remainder and thus 0.5 would become 0. Given that System Shock has mouse issues as well when running at 640x400 and was even a problem on some real DOS machines, this is why I get the impression Blue Sky / Looking Glass was doing some weird stuff with the mouse support in their games. :P

clueless1 wrote:

Just to expand a little on your comments about the upset rat: this game does a great job of informing the player of creature moods, and it also tells you if taking items would be considered STEALING. If the items in question are described as "belonging to..." than that person or creature that the item belongs to will become hostile if you take those items. So it's pretty easy to decide what's takeable in the game without initiating unwanted combat. If it's not described as belonging to someone or something, than it's free for the taking without the risk of being attacked for it.

When I bring this up in the video you can see this exact messaging on-screen so I figured it was obvious. ;)

Ancient DOS Games Pro 5 - HP & MP - Excelsior I: Lysandia is online!

This one was entirely too much work for as little payoff as it gave, but it was still nice to finally have the question answered as to how this game was calculating HP and MP values, plus it gave me an excuse to figure out all the minimum stats required for the various classes you can choose from. ;)

Ancient DOS Games Mod 2 - Ship Editing - Tyrian 2000 is online!

Tyrian 2000 is absolutely PACKED with extra features and secrets, one of the more obscure features being its ability to load in custom-made ships anytime you want using an included ship editing tool! :O

There are some quirks in regards to using it but it's actually really simple and a neat way to add your own personal touch to the experience, so I felt it'd be neat to take a look at it and put something together for it! Since I've made my own 2D shooters in the past, the choice of what kind of custom ships to add was obvious! ;)