The Hilarious Misadventures of ArbitraryWater in DOSland part 2
By ArbitraryWater 15 Comments
Or: I continue to play old games of slightly less questionable merit.
Yeah. So remember how I made a blog thing two weeks ago where I showed you all the questionable games I had encountered recently? Remember how it had part 1 in the title? Well I finally am getting around to part 2, because when I tried to launch Stalker it gave me an error message in German and Arx Fatalis isn't giving a very good first impression. So, in other words, I have nothing better to do than record videos using DOSBox's internal codec. Once again, these are initial impressions, so take these with a grain of salt. Or maybe a teaspoon of salt.
Wizardry 7
Wizardry 8 is probably one of the best games I have played within recent memory. Even with its problems of overly slow pacing and Systematic Level Scaling Syndrome (also known as: Oblivion's Disease), I still found a game that hearkened back to the old school without being an overly difficult and deliberately primitive fauxback. Well, I have also managed to get my hands on Wizardry 7 which came out in 1992 (as opposed to Wizardry Gold, the somewhat embarrassing Windows 95 port of W7 that came out 4 years later). My initial impression is very much one of recognition, but there's also the hint of an era where it was ok to be overly hard and overly obscure (i.e. every western RPG before 1997), which doesn't sound like my cup of tea. In any case, it's at least markedly better than anything I encountered in my previous blog. Especially Realms of Arkania... Ugh.
Heroes of Might and Magic II
Really, this is cheating, since Heroes II is not a game I have come upon recently, nor is it bad in any real sense. But here's a video anyways:
I really don't know why things like movement are so laggy. In any case, it's not indicitive of actual gameplay. Oh, and 10/10. Would play again.
Eye of the Beholder
Continuing the weird first person dungeon crawling bender I have had recently, we come upon one of the two pre-Baldur's Gate D&D game series that actually matter. (The other being the Gold Box games such as Pool of Radiance.) From what I can tell, Eye of the Beholder is significantly more action oriented than any of these other games because it's in real time, and most of the enemies can be cheesed through liberal use of sidestepping. Other than that though, EotB seems to, once again, be heavily puzzle focused and if I plan on playing it seriously I will no doubt have to consult a walkthrough. Nonetheless, it at least seems promising. Also, on a totally weird note, this game and its sequels was developed by Westwood, who went on to make Dune 2 and then the Command and Conquer series. Who knew?
Ultima Underworld series
While I don't tell you where I find most of these games for a reason (i.e. the legality is questionable), nothing quite confuses me as my obtainment of these two games. Literally, when I typed in Ultima Underworld on Google, the second result (after the wikipedia article of course) was an abandonware site. While I have no idea whatsoever of the actual legality of Abandonware, it saved me the trouble of going through... other means. Like buying the floppy disks off Amazon for around $50. But I should really shut up right now, in case what I am saying could get me in trouble. Anyways, the Ultima Underworld games are considered direct predecessors to the Elder Scrolls series, and that's pretty much true, being that they are the first real free-roaming RPGs that aren't strictly linear (also, UU came out two years before The Elder Scrolls Arena). While both games use the same engine, UU2 seems to have a more defined structure with more defined goals. That's a good thing in my case, as aimless wandering does bad things to me (See: why I can't get anywhere close to finishing Morrowind). In any case, take a look at the video of the first game, which epitomizes how I have played it so far:
Regardless, I really dig the style of these games, and while the first one is a 5/10, the second one is more of a 7/10. Proto-Oblivion indeed. Oh, and you know how I mentioned Arx Fatalis at the start? That game is a deliberate throwback to these games, right down to the clunky user interface. It will take some more playing before I can really tell you anything meaningful about that game, so I won't delve into it.
I initially wanted to do Jagged Alliance again, as it's not quite as bad as it was when I played it on DS last year, but it won't record for some reason. In any case, it's still not super great. I also wanted to do Tie Fighter, but that game is far too revered and my knowledge of the genre is far too minuscule for me to mess with that particular Hydra.
Coming up next: Maybe one of those games. Maybe I will try Baldur's Gate again, since playing it with the BG2 version of the Infinity Engine at 1920x1080 makes it exponentially better. Maybe I will actually play modern games for once.
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