71–80 of 99 posts
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS! :-D
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JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck. There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can…
I guess back in the day, PC RPGs like Ultima were more targeted toward high-IQ nerds, while JRPGs were targeted toward kids or more average adults. Nowadays RPGs are pretty much always as accessible as the JRPGs of old. Or more accessible, as even random encounters and turn-based combat are increasingly perceived as not streamlined enough. The question is whether the hand-holding approach makes certain types of games…
Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing.
I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically.
Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log.
Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.
Rise your hand if you remember how long you had to tinker around to get enough EMS to load the game plus sound card drivers loaded into memory when being in DOS! :-D
I'll take this opportunity to mention another engine-upgrade to a classic Origin game that got me excited: https://github.com/Howard-Day/WCUnity
I forget whether it was Ultima III or IV but that turned me off of adventure games. The busy work being asked of me was offputting. May have just been a shift of interest once reaching maturity and turning interests to Women and Music. I still liked some other games but more for study breaks and occasional arcade sessions than constant activities. Gen X here checking in.
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The only reason to play that version is the SotN unlock for the PSP and even then, easier to just download the PSX iso.
The PSP SotN was different enough than the NA PSX release, including a new Maria mode (different than the Saturn one), and a new translation (technically better, but retranslates some iconic lines).
The recent Wizardry remaster encouraged me to go back and play other nostalgic games - finished Ultima I and II, but the nostalgia wasn't strong enough to keep going through the busywork and UI impedance of others. I'll keep this one on my list for when nostalgia strikes again...
Neat, let me just find those old DOS U7 files…