Now and then I go back to this game. It is one of my more fond games from my childhood and I remember spending hours watching my dad play it on the family computer.

It is not the best game in the Might and Magic series, but it was my personal favourite.

There's a huge Might And Magic old game bundle on GOG, really wish they'd format it for Mac Granted I've still got a bunch of the Wizardry and Ultima games to go through, but I'm curious about this series.

I would recommend watching an LP or something of the MM and games. They are hard, unintuitive and expect a hell of a lot from the player. They have very odd and large difficulty spikes for one thing. The later ones tend to get around that but the early ones...whooo boy.

DarthHelmet86 wrote:I would recommend watching an LP or something of the MM and games. They are hard, unintuitive and expect a hell of a lot from the player. They have very odd and large difficulty spikes for one thing. The later ones tend to get around that but the early ones...whooo boy.

So, kinda the like Wizardry and Ultima games

DarthHelmet86 wrote:I would recommend watching an LP or something of the MM and games. They are hard, unintuitive and expect a hell of a lot from the player. They have very odd and large difficulty spikes for one thing. The later ones tend to get around that but the early ones...whooo boy.

This is all very true. Fun games regardless

The Rocket League servers have been rubbish since yesterday evening either down completely or as good as as you get stuck on the matchmaking screen. I can only play with stupid bots for so long. Correction; the bots on your team are stupid. The ones on the opposition have no trouble setting up plays and scoring goals while your left to carry your team. Your team seem to have no problem nudging the ball in for the opposition for the OG.
I need human players I can praise and taunt.

Nice of Psyonix to keep us up to date on Twitter. Not many devs are so open. They seem to have seriously underestimated how popular this game would be by a factor of 6. They're adding servers and I've been playing a good few games. Ton of fun.

SafeAsMilk wrote:

DarthHelmet86 wrote:I would recommend watching an LP or something of the MM and games. They are hard, unintuitive and expect a hell of a lot from the player. They have very odd and large difficulty spikes for one thing. The later ones tend to get around that but the early ones...whooo boy.

So, kinda the like Wizardry and Ultima games

The Ultima games tend to be a bit more understandable difficulty wise. MM 3 and 4/5 both have odd placement of enemies, dungeons filled with easy fodder then switching to end game creatures with it being unclear if you were meant to come back or work out a trick to beat them. They are all products of their time but the MM games are some of the oddest.

Yeah, 1-5 are rather tedious at times and random which can make them frustrating.

6 and 8 are my personal favourites of the series. 6 because it is a well made fantasy rpg and 8 because I had fun creating and playing some of the more evil races. I mean being able to play a Lich is pretty cool.

Picked up AC4 for free on my xbone thanks to the games for gold thing. Playing it again and I just keep thinking how did they make such an unlikable prick the main character...and on top of that not even have much of a character ark or term him into an assassin by the end. Watching him talk about how he isn't going to do a side quest, doesn't care about freeing slaves and just wants his money or other item just makes me want to slap him. Watching him say he has to help someone because he fucked up and in the next sentence bitching about how he isn't going to help makes me wonder if anyone actually read the script or if someone lost a few of the recorded lines and no one else noticed.

But hey it was free about all it is worth.

My gaming experience recently:

• Satisfactory and interesting victory in Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup as Deep Elf Conjurer of Vehumet. Did I save-scum? You bet I did. I save-scummed up and down with special bash scripts to make things really easy and safe (asks me whether I really want to backup or restore) and am not apologetic about it. I hate permadeath. I do not get people who devoutly adhere to the permadeath condition like this. I'd have a fucking aneurysm.
• Tried ADOM, as Gnome Elementalist. Continued to save-scum with other scripts. Had some fun but just got kind of tired of the immense difficulty of roguelikes, with or without permadeath.
• Decided to quit roguelikes for a while. Tried Ultima IV, having heard good things about it. Have little idea of what I'm doing despite extensive walkthrough material on GameFAQS and all the documentation that came with the GOG.com release. Distinctly turned off by the idea I have to go all the way to the central castle to level up, as well as the apparent fact that I can lose track of levels I've earned and forgo benefits I could have gotten otherwise by accident. Left me wondering what other unintuitive features are going to screw up my gameplay.

Now I'm simply looking for a more palatable RPG experience. More specifically, I'm working with a spreadsheet produced from a scraper I wrote for myabandonware.com that took all the RPG titles, then gave me a record for each one consisting of the title, average rating and number of ratings. (Sorting in descending order by the latter attribute tends to send games that have high ratings only due to a few enthusiastic raters towards the bottom and greatly improved the quality of the top results IMO.)

So anyway, I'm going through this list of RPGs and—one by one—assessing them for what I want by looking at gameplay videos, screenshots and documentation—and then attempting to make a definitive list of abandonware RPGs that will serve my needs for some time to come.

The criteria in question:

• I can take my sweet time deciding what to do in combat; not only do I like turn-based games in general, I am going to be looking at a lot of documentation in any case.
• The mechanics seem engaging and well-articulated, but hopefully not too complex.
• The dark fantasy ambiance is there visually. It should be like a black metal album for the eyes. (I let Wizard's Crown slide even though that has ugly CGA graphics because it looks promising otherwise.)
• No roguelikes.
• No Ultima games. I know a lot of people love them but I found the controls of Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss clumsy (though the game was beautiful) and had a very hard time hitting foes. I've already documented my issues with IV and V and VI seem like much of the same.
• No weeaboo crap. Sorry, I just don't like that style.

I'm going to post that list when I finish with it in case this is something any of you would be interested in.

Also if anyone needs help getting them to run I may be available to help through PMs. (Though I am running Linux here.)

50 games that are candidates for my evaluation now:

Castle of the Winds (Windows 3.x - 1993)
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands (DOS - 1993)
Eye of the Beholder (DOS - 1991)
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (DOS - 1993)
Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (DOS - 1991)
Dungeon Hack (DOS - 1993)
Betrayal at Krondor (DOS - 1993)
Knights of Legend (DOS - 1989)
Might and Magic: World of Xeen (DOS - 1994)
Curse of the Azure Bonds (DOS - 1989)
Pool of Radiance (DOS - 1988)
Wizardry: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (DOS - 1990)
The Summoning (DOS - 1992)
Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager (DOS - 1994)
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (DOS - 1984)
Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (DOS - 1992)
HeroQuest (DOS - 1991)
Might and Magic II: Gates to Another World (DOS - 1988)
Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (DOS - 1994)
Champions of Krynn (DOS - 1990)
Secret of the Silver Blades (DOS - 1990)
Wizard's Crown (DOS - 1987)
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I (DOS - 1990)
The Magic Candle III (DOS - 1992)
Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (DOS - 1993)
The Dark Queen of Krynn (DOS - 1992)
The Dark Heart of Uukrul (DOS - 1990)
Amberstar (DOS - 1992)
Dragon Wars (DOS - 1990)
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. II: The Two Towers (DOS - 1992)
Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity (DOS - 1994)
The Bard's Tale III: Thief of Fate (DOS - 1990)
The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight (DOS - 1988)
Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen (DOS - 1993)
Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan (DOS - 1990)
The Magic Candle II: The Four and Forty (DOS - 1991)
Pools of Darkness (DOS - 1991)
Tales of the Unknown: Volume I - The Bard's Tale (DOS - 1987)
Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom (DOS - 1993)
Spirit of Adventure (DOS - 1991)
Legend of Faerghail (DOS - 1990)
Might and Magic: Book One - Secret of the Inner Sanctum (DOS - 1987)
Treasures of the Savage Frontier (DOS - 1992)
Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen (DOS - 1992)
Gateway to the Savage Frontier (DOS - 1991)
Shadow of Yserbius (DOS - 1993)
Might and Magic: Swords of Xeen (DOS - 1995)
Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (DOS - 1988)
The Magic Candle: Volume 1 (DOS - 1989)
Disciples of Steel (DOS - 1994)

Awesome list! Thanks for sharing. I'd never heard of roguelikes before, you learn something new every day. Explains the title of Rogue Legacy. I also didn't know they made a computer game of Tunnels And Trolls.

Please let us know how it goes with you trying these games out, I haven't played 90% of them. I vouch for the awesomeness of the Wizardry games, all the way back to the first one. Ultima, well...I appreciate the series, but it's tough going. Really nothing else quite like them, though.

If you're down for venturing into the world of console games, I highly recommend Dragon Quest (3 and 8 are my favorite) and the Megami Tensei/Shin Megami Tensei series. I don't know if those count as weeaboo (I don't think they do), but DQ is fun and casual and SMT is deep n' dark. Dark Spire on the Nintendo DS is an excellent Wizardry clone, and the Etrian Odyssey series has an interesting system that caters to old dungeon crawler fans. It's also hatefully hard. And might be weeaboo.

Dragon Quest 3 = one of the best games I have ever, ever played....ever.

SafeAsMilk wrote:Awesome list! Thanks for sharing. I'd never heard of roguelikes before, you learn something new every day. Explains the title of Rogue Legacy. I also didn't know they made a computer game of Tunnels And Trolls.

Please let us know how it goes with you trying these games out, I haven't played 90% of them. I vouch for the awesomeness of the Wizardry games, all the way back to the first one. Ultima, well...I appreciate the series, but it's tough going. Really nothing else quite like them, though.

So I'm trying a number of them and encountering more difficulties. One of the largest is that I don't like this nearly ubiquitous first person view with abrupt changes between cardinal directions that makes the space very difficult to conceptualize.

Now I'm kind of jaded about this. I think I'm actually going to go back to playing Dwarf Fortress.

We went through your application, Mr Sadegh and we will get back to you.

willhud9 wrote:Dragon Quest 3 = one of the best games I have ever, ever played....ever.

One of the best, for sure. Have you played 8? It's visually majestic, and hearing the music done by an actual orchestra tends to make me tear up a little.

Sadegh wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:Awesome list! Thanks for sharing. I'd never heard of roguelikes before, you learn something new every day. Explains the title of Rogue Legacy. I also didn't know they made a computer game of Tunnels And Trolls.

Please let us know how it goes with you trying these games out, I haven't played 90% of them. I vouch for the awesomeness of the Wizardry games, all the way back to the first one. Ultima, well...I appreciate the series, but it's tough going. Really nothing else quite like them, though.

So I'm trying a number of them and encountering more difficulties. One of the largest is that I don't like this nearly ubiquitous first person view with abrupt changes between cardinal directions that makes the space very difficult to conceptualize.

Now I'm kind of jaded about this. I think I'm actually going to go back to playing Dwarf Fortress.

I honestly think it's worthwhile to put in the effort to get used to this. It can be a bit disorienting at first, yes, but I got accustomed to it pretty quick. At this point I can easily go through the first few floors of Wizardry 1 and Dark Spire without any sort of map.

DarthHelmet86 wrote:I would recommend watching an LP or something of the MM and games. They are hard, unintuitive and expect a hell of a lot from the player. They have very odd and large difficulty spikes for one thing. The later ones tend to get around that but the early ones...whooo boy.

This post has inspired me to do a LP of MM8. I think I can manage it!