Amazing? I very much disagree. But then, I’m one of the crazies who bitched and whined about how incredibly fugly 3D was, right up to the current generation of consoles.
Man… I still remember watching the NWN trailer on my BG2 disk and just sitting there in shocked disbelief, thinking something hideous must have crawled into my eyeballs and died at the exact moment I hit “view trailer”. Because going from BG2 quality graphics to NWN … what’s the antonym of quality? Graphics, was just too horrendously stupid for me to believe. Honestly, right up to the day I bought NWN, I was pretty much convinced the stuff of that trailer had to be some kind of placeholder graphics.
Yeah, it was hard to top BG2, that game had some amazingly beautiful graphics. On top of that 3D didn’t really add anything in terms of game play to NWN.
I think he’s talking more about the perspective the use of polygons/2d, although if that’s not what he meant then I’ll contribute that statement. Isometric/2d games seem almost ageless - playing X-Com, Fallout, etc. But early 3D/first person perspective games seem really crude.
As much as I liked the Ultima Underworld games, or System Shock – they’re pretty hard to play these days, while Ultima 7 still looks great, IMO, despite being 20 years old, which is just incredible.
I remember when I heard about it, this seemed like such a cool & bizarre idea. But does it hold up as a game?
While I’ll agree that U7 is a lot more pleasing to look at, after 4 hours of playing UU1 the last couple days I would say it holds up surprisingly well. I also find it a lot easier to play than (unmodded) System Shock, though that is mostly a function of having a less complex interface. I think anyone who has any nostalgia for the UU games (or early 90’s first person games in general) would do well to try them out.
Haha, I remember working so hard back then to get that Voodoo Memory Manager to run in U7, that once it did I felt it qualified me for a computer science degree lol.
I tried it yesterday and it was actually pretty easy to get U7 going on DOSBox; I just had to set “ems=false” in the config. It was definitely a lot harder on real systems though, since memory was a lot tighter (DOSBox virtualizes away a lot of driver stuff that chews up memory on real systems), you needed an alternate config.sys/autoexec.bat since you had to set up high memory differently, etc.
(And then I spent 15 minutes trying to get to the cheat room in Trinsic, but couldn’t find enough crates, bah.)
Desslock, that’s exactly what I was talking about.
Yeah, but early 3d was really primitive, whereas late 2d games were reaching their zenith, so to speak. I definitely agree that NWN was hideous. In fact, I wish there were still games using the Infinity engine, just updated with better rez.
Still, not all 2d games hold up well. I think Arcanum is ugly in a lot of places, though I’ve been criticized before for that opinion.
Overall, though, the 2d games hold up much better now. 3d games from the mid to late 90s are really hard to look at and play. In fact, I tend not to go any further back than 98-99 (or whenever SS2 came out). Even for those games, I look for updated textures, with System shock 2 has.
JM1
4771
It’s one of the weirder roguelikes, and I’ve not played it for long stretches but it’s worth trying. It’s very impressive how much of the original they’ve managed to translate.
U7 and U7 Part 2 work perfectly, in DOSBOX. I imagine this is the route that GOG will go, should they add these games. There are no voodoo troubles, whatsoever! I highly recommend playing it this way, U7/SI in DOSBOX really was the ultimate Ultima 7 experience for me.
I agree with your preference for the original, over Exult. Exult is still a fairly different experience from playing the DOS version. The damage model from U7 was not ported over to Exult, making combat feel very strange to anyone who has played the originals.
DK is a great game in a lot of ways, but it’s one of those games that follows the Chick Parabola – after you figure it out, it’s less interesting.
What they do is throw different scenarios at you where they artificially limit you in some way so you have to work around it and use different units.
It’s a creative game, however, and well worth experiencing even if after 10-15 hours you feel like you understand it and the scenarios get less interesting.
Somebody mentioned Sundog? According to that Wiki, there’s an open source resurrection project, which seems to be dead after 3 years.
…
Breaking news! The original IP owners (FTL!) are thinking of making a commercial rewrite.
I should add that I didn’t play it that much, but remembered replacing capacitors on the ship.
W00t, I signed up on his page.
When Privateer Online was rumored to be in development, that was the map I was hoping they were going to use. Out of all the rumored games that never came to fruition, that’s probably the one that bothers me the most.
Privateer Online wasn’t a rumor. It was in development. It got killed because EA decided to go with Earth and Beyond instead.
Yeah, there was also a separate Wing Commander Online project prior to that. The Privateer Online one involved the team that went on to work on SWG and Jump to Lightspeed (Raph Koster, etc.) headed by Andy Hollis, who did the Janes flight sims
All of this Privateer reminds me to ask… is Freelancer available for download yet? Because that’s a better game. Yup.
Thanks guys, now I just want a new Wing Commander. :(
I miss this old, perhaps unknown game called “Chaos Overlords.” I thought that maybe GOG would have picked it up, but all I can find is an independent guy working on CO2. Well, it might be worth it.
