Ever since I’ve played Etrian Odyssey I’ve been hooked onto this genre that I’d previously ignored completely and it just kept growing and growing, to now become my favorite genre of all.
Though every time I try to interest a gamer I know in real life about it, I get something like “Oh, not one of these games with dungeons that you can’t even see and where you can only move in four directions!”
Of course there are many of them, but perhaps you could try talking about your favorites, and why you like them so much.
I’ve only scratched the surface, but so far I’m partial to Might and Magic, mostly because I love how leisurely the games are. No pressure, no epic serious quests, no dialogue that takes itself any seriously, just explore at will and kill some stuff, trying to discover what lies in the surroundings. I play Might and Magic 2 on the go with my Desire Z these days and I’m having a blast.
I was without playing games for a long while because I had a very bad bout of blepharitis. But now I’m slowly getting back in.
For the course of this thread it’s more the discussion of older DOS games that I’m interested in, although of course discussion of stuff like Strange Journey is perfectly fine.
Soft spot for the old SSI “gold box” Dungeons & Dragons games. Forgotten Realms titles were included in a “silver archives” collection at some point (which I own) and include Dungeon Hack, a freeform Rogue-like dungeon crawler that uses Eye of the Beholder-like real-time mechanics. Not sure about how to find/purchase Dragonlance titles, though.
I loved all the ones mentioned so far. Dungeon Hack was a blast. I tried to install Wizardry 8 this past weekend since I never finished it before. Unfortunately I can’t get it to load past the Sirtech logo. Anyone have any idea how to get it going?
Wizardry 6 and 7 were also two of my all time favorite Step based RPG’s.
I’m a huge fan of this genre. The Bard’s Tale was actually my intro to them, I didn’t get into Wizardry and Might and Magic until later. I preferred the combat style of those games to the later “real-time” combat of games like Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder, though those games are great too.
There were some great 3D crawlers I used to play on the Amiga (which are probably quite playable on an emulator) such as Bloodwych and Captive. Dungeon Master remains a favourite because of the evil and clever environmental puzzles that it would throw at you every so often. But the pinnacle of this genre for me was Wizardry 8 (which had it flaws, but I loved it). In fact, the one remaining major omission from GOG for me is a Wizardry collection, 1-8 including Wizards and Warriors. If they can do it for Might and Magic…
My favorites are Might and Magic III, World of Xeen, and (to a lessor extent) Lands of Lore. I enjoyed the sense of exploration, and the progression as you uncovered the map and became more powerful. While the games had their challenges, especially when starting out, I feel that they were much easier than the modern variants of Etrian Odyssey, Dark Spire, etc, and as a result, I prefer them.
