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Post by crystallogic13 on Apr 11, 2020 4:51:45 GMT -5
Not planning very soon dungeonsnake, but next time I want to try a JRPG which I'm not a fan of, I'd go with this over the original despite reading mixed words about the remaster.. Still I remember friends playing it back in the PS1 era and being blown, not even RPG players, while I was *more* than happy at the time enjoying PC Western RPGs which are in my adventure comfort zone I would really like to play at least 3-5 of the top JRPGs sometime in my lifetime , Earthbound which I've heard and read so many great things is the first, Zeldas I think don't count but I'll be more than happy to play again after good old Link to the Past and Link's Awakening -again Zelda maybe fall in Action-RPG category so doesn't count), a certainly a game from the Final Fantasy games, there doesn't seem to be any consensus from the fanbase there.. Anyway, currently had a short blast last week with some Magic the Gathering Arena, god disappointed by some $^#&$%& blue control which is like Boredom Incarnation, and currently looking for some oldschool DOS/Windows 3.11 stuff to forget
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Post by DieuxDesCimetieres on Apr 11, 2020 10:38:31 GMT -5
BTW, is the first Magic: The Gathering game available anywhere in a Win10 compatible version? That was a damn awesome game!
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Post by anfortas on Apr 11, 2020 11:14:12 GMT -5
BTW, is the first Magic: The Gathering game available anywhere in a Win10 compatible version? That was a damn awesome game! Do you mean the Shandalar game from 1997? The version I downloaded from myabandonware at least started on my Windows 7 PC, but I got an error after selecting my character, but maybe it works for you, or you can get it to run somehow.
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Post by crystallogic13 on Apr 11, 2020 12:36:15 GMT -5
BTW, is the first Magic: The Gathering game available anywhere in a Win10 compatible version? That was a damn awesome game! Do you mean the Shandalar game from 1997? The version I downloaded from myabandonware at least started on my Windows 7 PC, but I got an error after selecting my character, but maybe it works for you, or you can get it to run somehow. I mentioned it already here dungeonsynth.proboards.com/thread/128/magic-gathering?page=2 , the game you are referring is Microprose's Magic the Gathering, the best adaptation of the game for like 18 years till Arena came and still, the original is great. The original game and expansions had some of the early classic sets and for years it is serving players. What many people don't know is that it got updated by the community, renamed to Manalink, still same game just with instead of a few hundreds, with THOUSANDS, yes THOUSANDS of cards up to VERY very modern sets 3-4 years back. At that point the usual stuff happened (random troll attacking developer) and development ceased, but you still can find it (downloads were broken at some point) here : www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=25 .. Needs some downloading, setting up, nothing difficult and you're set. You can thank me afterwards for the time sink you are going to get. Tell me to help if by any chance someone has problems getting it and setting as well as finding decks ready deck lists/files, I have like 3500 decks downloaded from there (and a handful of mine) which cover every conceivable deck for 2 and a half DECADES. Really, while I enjoy Arena, nothing beats Microprose's FAST menu and play against A.I. even more with thousands upon thousands of decks and cards
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Post by dungeonsnake on Apr 13, 2020 9:33:00 GMT -5
I got the FF7 Remake, and I must say, it's extremely cool. I wasn't sure I was going to like it but I do. It looks simply gorgeous, the environments are so lovingly detailed. It's maybe one of the most visually detailed games I've ever played. I find myself just coming to a halt in-game so that I can gawk at the marvelous, surreal world of a giant circular city, suspended high above the slums below. It reminds me of walking through a Miyazaki film, although this game is more bleak and realistic than any Miyazaki movie. I'm not crazy about the fact that this release only covers the first 1/3 of the original game, but they've fleshed it out into the size of a full standalone game. In the old game, the city often felt oddly small. It felt like you could walk across the whole thing in 10 minutes. In the new one, it sprawls out to an immense distance. You truly get a sense of the scale, and your place in it. Each section of the slums feels like a real neighborhood, and there are also many NPCs and side quests to interact with. So far the side quests have been pretty basic ("Go to this building, kill some monsters") but it goes a long way towards making the game feel more full. Overall, this feels like the game that Square wanted to make back in the 90's, but simply didn't have the technology. They did an incredible job with the original game of INVOKING this game, through the use of pre-rendered backgrounds and paintings. But this is the real deal. To put it another way, this is the game you imagined you were playing as a child, late at night by the flickering light of a boxy TV. Here's a screenshot that I took early in the game, one of many moments I had to stop and soak in the view.
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Post by thekeeper on Apr 15, 2020 1:14:34 GMT -5
Been playing Outcast 1.1 lately. It's pretty damn cool. It came out a few years before the first Gothic and it seems like it was a huge influence because there are many similarities. It's pretty cumbersome and clunky, not very intuitive, but considering it was one of the first 3d open-world action rpgs like this it still holds up pretty well and was way ahead of its time. It looks very crude and dated, but I like that primitive 3d look which is why I went with this one rather than Outcast - Second Contact (which seems like basically just a graphics overhaul). The voxel-based environment is particularly unique and interesting. I don't know if I'm going to play it all the way through, but I've enjoyed the time I've spent with it so far, a nice atmospheric journey through some alien worlds, with exploration being the main focus. Just beat this. Got super addicted since that last post. Amazing game, you got to meet it halfway because of its age, but like with Gothic once you really get a feel for the mechanics and environment and start juggling a number of quests at once, it just feels really good and keeps drawing you back. Very ambitious for the time, but also very buggy, unstable, and unpolished, but Piranha Bytes fans will know all about that and probably like me find that charming to an extent, and with this game that's definitely the case, it oozes character. This game looks interesting. I'm not super into spacey games but this looks like it has a pretty original setting so I may check it out eventually. dungeonsnake, I played the demo and thought it was fun, but to me it felt like a different game. Not even just because of the new more live combat style (I didn't try the classic battle mode), but something about it felt too different. I suppose it's truly remade in that way, and it's fun as it is, so making the comparisons is kind of tricky. I thought the recreated the characters pretty lovingly and accurately. That screenshot you posted looks insane. It's like Advent Children graphics but throughout everything. I've gotten to Gold Saucer on my original version that I was meaning to finish before the new one came out, but I've really gotten behind on it. My attention just got carried to other things I've been playing Myst for the past few days. I got my old Thinkpad 570 drivers sorted out so I have a decent-ish Pentium II W98 laptop to play around with. It's still kind of underpowered since it's a laptop of course, but it's running some games alright without getting too hot. Myst is running fine on it. I haven't played it in ages and I never beat it when I first played as a kid, but I'm progressing pretty quickly. Just cleared the Stoneship era. My wife is playing at the same time. We'll see who finishes first. I also just bought a bunch of old computer components to make a decent W98SE setup. I bought a Gateway LP-Mini online that has a Pentium III @450 mHz. It's the slowest P3 you can get, but really I don't need anything that fast since the newest games I'm interested in playing on it are from 2001, most else is between 96-99 so all the high-end recs call for much less. I'm adding a ATI Rage 128 Pro 32mb card to it to replace the real old Rage 128 8mb card it came with. I can't remember if I ever had a Rage card, but I've read that it's supposed to rival the TNT2 and other cards of it's time. I've seen some test videos and it looks like it runs pretty great. I think these ATI cards are pretty underrated compared to the other nvidia and 3dfx cards everyone shoots for when building old gaming rigs, which is great for me because the card was $15 when a similar spec'd voodoo 3 2000 is like $100+. Swapping the phone card for an ethernet card so I can go on the internet and act like web 2.0 never happened. Got a NEC LCD monitor since a CRT while take up way too much space on my desk. Got a Gateway keyboard and some Altec speakers, too. I'm pretty excited for everything. All should be built by Tuesday. I'll take a pic of the setup once it's all built. I'll try installing Cool Edit Pro and see how recording some DS fares on a W98 setup, haha.
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Post by crystallogic13 on Apr 19, 2020 0:24:27 GMT -5
Ah Myst is still looking great, quality art and graphics never age.. Myst has huge huge ambient atmospheres, one of the greatest OSTs ever and a must play in my eyes.. Back in the day everyone was in awe of the CD revolution which Myst was at the frontline of.. I finished it a little bit later, somewhere in the 00s but still got its vibes.. Unfortunately I started the sequel(Riven) but dropped it to return later more concentrated and never found the time.. And I own good old Collector's box of it along with official guide, as well as most of the rest of the Myst series (yes Collector's edition..).. As always, so many great things to do, so little time..
As for the PC you're building nice, I'm on the opposite now looking to build a new one to play some Red Dead Redemption 2 and some other stuff coming up (Cyberpunk,Baldur's Gate 3,Diablo 4).. But due to the Covid case I'm on the waiting phase now..
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Post by Flagris on Apr 25, 2020 11:01:02 GMT -5
Playing Hellgate: London now (original game with Revival singleplayer mod). This game should be a hit. Steam release is not so bad as well though quite buggy.
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Post by crystallogic13 on May 11, 2020 14:40:24 GMT -5
Well I got a new PC since my old one seemed to no longer be worthwhile of an upgrade (not that I remember doing any ) .. And while I got it mostly to play Red Dead Redemption 2 (when I'm able to purchase, soon hopefully) and when available, Baldur's Gate 3, Diablo 4 and Cyberpunk, I ended up installing lots of stuff and taking more than looks in many.. Currently I'm about to go through Dear Esther, a walking simulator and a genre which I probably like but never had the chance to play one through, going well, I also installed the ancient (of my time) Amerzone of Benoit Sokal (Syberias' fame) and it's better than I expected, pure Myst vibes there at least in the beggining.. And finally I have installed some rally games (a fav genre) and trying to decide if Dirt Rally is worth the increased difficulty (for current times).. Looking forward to checking lots and lots of backlog and to play stuff
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Post by dungeonsnake on May 12, 2020 15:00:57 GMT -5
I've been playing a lot of Red Dead 2 while stuck in quarantine, it's a pretty amazing game.
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Post by DieuxDesCimetieres on May 13, 2020 2:51:39 GMT -5
I've been playing a lot of Red Dead 2 while stuck in quarantine, it's a pretty amazing game. I should replay it. One of the most immersive games I've ever played, this time around I could just forget about the plot entirely!
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Post by thekeeper on May 14, 2020 0:33:15 GMT -5
So I've got my win98 PC all up and going. My first attempt at getting all the drivers right resulted in a number of memory issues when running DOS games but I've got everything going with all the original OEM drivers from burned ISOs so everything should be exactly as it should.
Specs: Gateway LP-MINI, TBR3 Motherboard w/ Pentium III @450mhz 256mb RAM 100 GB HDD ATI Rage 128 Pro 32mb Soundblaster Vibra 16c 8x CD Drive 3.5" Floppy Drive Intel network card (idr the name) NEC Multisync LCD Monitor (17") Logitech Mousman 3 button mouse Gateway mechanical keyboard
Can actually browse the internet quite well with Retrozilla, with a couple 256sha booleans added to the config. Pretty happy with everything. Originally came with an 8mb ATI Rage card and a CT5803 Ensoniq PCI128 soundcard. Apparently this soundcard is incompatible in real-mode DOS since it like emulates sounds or something (you can specify which waveset to use). The 16c I bought was super cheap and sounds pretty great, it's the best out of the Vibra line IMO. Doesn't have the hanging note issue like some others.
Got a handful of big box PC games, too: Myst (beaten) Riven Age of Empires Gold Edition Sims Sims Livin' Large expansion Ultima Collection Ultima Underworld I&II Cd-classics (two in one re-release) Goosebumps Escape from Horrorland (this game rules, judge all you want) Forgotten Realms Archives Silver Edition
Was going to go through the Ultima games one by one but I'm playing a burned copy of Daggerfall right now. Got to find out first hand what a sloppy mess Ultima Collection is. It's essentially games 1-8 (including all the extra stuff for 7 and 8) on one CD, all files ripped straight from the original floppy disks. This is kool in some ways, but it means that they're not optimized to run on newer systems (for the time). Origin shipped the games with MoSlo preconfigured to drop your PC performance to emulate the power of a PC playing the original games so they don't run hyper fast. Problem is, they're all super off. Ultima 2 ship with MoSlo set at 1% speed, but this is style like 100 times too fast. Most games run at light speed still. Fixed this problem by downloading a bunch of different upgrade patches that include frame skippers or patches for 7 and 8 that allow you to run from windows instead of just DOS. Ultima 2 was a huge issue. Apparently the company overwrote a bunch of map files when putting them on the CD so the game is virtually unbeatable withou unofficial patches. Also, 7 and 8 can only be run in real-mode DOS but require really specific config.sys and autoexec.bat settings, so you pretty much need to make a boot disk. Ultima Collection includes a bootdisk maker program, but the the problem is the company put the boot disk maker for the wrong game entirely. It's not even for any Ultima games so info is just wrong. Thankfully, I can get 7 going without it with u7win9x on windows, but 8 really needs the boot disk. Found out that if you run the original 8 install file you can get to the original boot disk maker it came with, so I have one set up for 8 that's working fine now. Was a lot of work for everything. Lost my U1 save when I did a system restore to install the proper OEM drivers, so I'm kind of abandoning Ultima for now. Will get back to it soon enough.
Right now I'm playing Daggerfall. I've started the game maybe 5 other times in the past but never got real far into it. I'm going all in now. I've got a hang of the quirks and nuances and I'm having a blast. The dungeons are really tense. There's a huge risk:reward payoff in this game. Kind of just screwing around with various little quests right now for the Temple of Kynareth. Made a Khajit Ranger. Haven't worked on magic at all and am doing just fine, idk why people say it's super essential to do, but maybe I'm about to find out why. Would've bought this boxed if it wasn't $100. I do have an actual copy of the Daggerfall Chronicles guide though. Great reference material. So much to do in this game. Blown away that you can actually take out loans from a bank with a set APR rate. Only thing I'm kind of bummed about is how boring it is to manually travel places on foot. Coming across things was one of the highlights of the later games, but in Daggerfall you just fast travel everywhere so discovery is kind of nonexistent. Of course there are a literal million places to go, so that's still fun.
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Post by dungeonsnake on May 14, 2020 1:51:00 GMT -5
Wow, that's really awesome man! Congrats. I often wish I could go back to the good ol' days of Windows 98. I have very fond memories of playing Age of Empires 2, Lords of the Realm, Warcraft 2, Baldur's Gate, Starcraft, Diablo 2 and so forth.
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Post by crystallogic13 on May 14, 2020 10:21:04 GMT -5
thekeeper Man endless respect for going full hardcore and setting up a retro system and going for the original experience.. Personally I;m afraid besides some required DOS hunting for old greek DOS games and programs I avoid any other hustle as much as possible by using the convenience of full ready/set-up retro systems (like Exodos ones, you , everyone, really should check them out... REALLY THOUGH...) to avoid all troubleshooting I didn't really enjoy back in the day.. Still remember the days of trying to fix MEMMAKER for every different game, UU1 being on of them, totally worth it though Also, you got me, RDR2 is on sale now for 53 Euros Ultimate Edition till May the 25th and I will probably dive into it.. Very soon..
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olofdigre
Knight
digre.bandcamp.com
Posts: 376
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Post by olofdigre on May 18, 2020 14:05:05 GMT -5
OpenTTD. It's an open source variant of Transport Tycoon. Great game. Many hours.
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