I too have about 4 friends, that I ALWAYS played games with that I haven't seen in about 10-15 years. A couple of them were REALLY good friends too. Those videogame memories stick in my head the most out of my childhood for sure. Like alot of other people on here!Originally Posted by Dr. Morbis
Day 21: DND (version 1.12)
I now know that DND was one of the early "Rogue-like" adventure games that used textual characters to simulate graphics, but when I first saw it I didn't know what to make of it. I was in seventh or eighth grade, which would have made it 1987 or '88. In any event, I walked into our school's pitiful computer lab and saw an upperclassman named Brian playing some complicated looking game on one of our aging IBM machines. The screen was filled with text. There were lots of numbers and abbreviations everywhere, and a lot of letter I's making up what I assumed to be a map. Brian tried to explain the game to me, but I don't think I followed him. As it happened though, I had a 3.5" diskette on hand, so I made a copy to play with later (hey, it was shareware!).
When later came, I still couldn't figure it out. I had a hard time visualizing the map; it just looked like a bunch of random letters to me. Guess you might say I couldn't see the forest for the trees. Unimpressed, I put the disk away. Some time later I came across it again and decided to give the game another try, and this time it clicked. I was primed for what turned out to be my first true RPG experience.
At the time, I knew there existed a game called "Dungeons & Dragons" where you created characters and went on medieval adventures, but I didn't really know how you played it. Hit Points, Magic Points, character attributes, player levels and all that were unknown to me. DND introduced me to these concepts. I "rolled" my character, figured out why Constitution and Dexterity were important, and was off to the textual dungeons in search of the magical ORB. I fought # after # (# was the symbol for an enemy creature). I discovered Elven Boots +3. I explored ALT's (altars) and FNT's (fountains), fell into PITs, and picked up a king's ransom in $ (the symbol for treasure). I was transported. Amazing that such a visually unspectacular game could do all that, but I suppose it really forced me to use my imagination.
DND also had one of the coolest features of any PC game I've ever played: printable maps. With enough Gold Pieces, you were allowed to purchase a map of any given level. Purchasing a map generated a text file on your disk that could be printed out through any standard line printer. Viola -- instant hardcopy map! Maybe it was my initial inability to navigate the game, but I became obsessed with printing out all the maps and going through every level, marking all landmarks and staircases. This quest continued well beyond my actual completion of the game. I devoted a good many weeks to this cause, and I still have my old marked up maps to prove it. I still plan to finish someday.
DND just goes to show you that you don't need graphics to achieve greatness. How do the rest of you feel about the old text adventures and Rogue-like games? Do you ever still play them?
It sure as hell was in my hometown in '82. And this is a place that STILL has the Camaros run free. Musta been a regional thing.Dude. Berlin is so NOT mullet rock. Essential Eighties, sure, but not mullet rock.
Lick me! LICK ME!!
One of the hopeless idiots that runs SC3; (Southern California Classic Collectors):
www.sc3videogames.com
What I want to know first is if you still have a copy of this. I'd love to try it out.How do the rest of you feel about the old text adventures and Rogue-like games? Do you ever still play them?
Which answers your second question I suppose.I enjoy taking the occasional stab at a text adventure through emulation (Atari 8-bit stuff). Although I have to admit I sometimes find that not knowing the proper words can be a bit frustrating.
Time will be when the broadest river dries
And the great cities wane and last descend
Into the dust, for all things have an end
Ask, and you shall receive...
A download approaches. What will you do?
This copy of DND is descended from the original copy I made of the game in junior high, about 18(!) years ago. Go to a DOS prompt and type "DND" to run it. The docs are actually worth reading. Some of my old characters are still in the player.dat file, if you can figure out their secret names (secret names are like passwords).
This version has what I believe is called the "Trove glitch." If you come across a TRV (like a slot machine, but easy to win), you can get very rich very quickly -- the payoff is way too high. It kind of takes the challenge out of the game since you can then buy super weapons and armor, but it comes in handy if you just want to go exploring. You can always avoid TRV's if you want to play fair.
Day 22: Pick Axe Pete!
The best Odyssey2 game of all? Lots of my friends and family thought so. If I had to select my favorite O2 game, Pick Axe Pete would probably be my choice. It’s kind of like Donkey Kong would be if it was less concerned with climbing to the top and more focused on smashing things with the hammer. I love it now, and I loved it then.
I have lots of memories of Pick Axe Pete that jumble together in my mind and form a pleasant potpourri. There was the time that my father, my older cousin Brian, and I stayed awake all night playing it. I remember that we each had our own spot on the screen where we’d camp out while waiting for keys to appear. I think we eventually decided that the upper left corner was the best (now I usually “camp” in the middle of the second-to-bottom girder).
Then there was the time I was playing the game and my dear, departed cat Henry jumped on top of the TV and stuck his face in front of the screen, batting at the moving game sprites. That memory always brings a smile to my face. And then, there was the time in second grade when I talked to a classmate, Sarah, on the phone for a good hour or so about video games, most notably Pick Axe Pete. I was a shy kid in school (still am really), so at that young age, it was really cool to have a friend like that. She even nicknamed me “Pick Axe Pete” for a while.
Most of all, Pick Axe Pete makes me remember simply having fun. It was a fantastic game back then, and what may be more impressive -- it’s still one now. Take away the nostalgia angle and many old games will lose some of their luster. Not Pick Axe Pete. I’d love it with or without the memories. They just make it even better.
Oh my word, yes. In fact, my board identity is a reference to <u>one of the better ones</u>. I play ADOM religiously, and NetHack sporadically. I played Angband and descendants for over a year until I realized they're the evil opposite of fun. Hadn't heard of DND until a few days ago when a reference to it popped up in a Google search for <u>a Windows remake of Avalon Hill's classic Telengard</u>. I'll give DND a try.
That was a great story. It really brought back some childhood memories. Conquering the unconquerable seemed to be the mantra of games back in the day (pre-1995).
You, my friend, need to play the current incarnation of Rogue: Nethack. It has evolved from Hack, and Hack evolved from Rogue. It is the oldest computer game still in development.
http://www.nethack.org/
Believe me, I've been tempted to on many occasions, but I have a feelilng it would sap the little free time I have remaining.
Day 23: Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
Ahh, Star Trek. I’m a Trekker (Trekkie if you must), and I’ve been one since the time before Voyager and Enterprise and when the only generation was the one that gave rise to Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy. Ryan, Bryan and I watched the same four episodes over and over again on RCA videodiscs (didn’t have cable TV back then), and we must have seen The Wrath of Khan at least a few hundred times. Seems like our time and interest was pretty evenly divided between Star Trek and the Atari 2600 back then, so when a game came along that melded our two favorite things, not even a fleet of Klingon warships could have kept us away.
But we faced a more sinister enemy: living in the boondocks of Scioto County, OH. Even up through the NES era, it was hard to find many merchants that carried video games where we lived, and we had no way of buying Star Trek. In fact, we wouldn’t have even known about the game had not one of my neighbors (also named Ryan) happened to get it. Seeing as how we had no other Star Trek supply, a plot was hatched: neighbor Ryan’s cart would be ours. We’d make a trade!
But what could we offer? Neighbor Ryan had a lot of games, including practically all of ours. I seem to recall him turning down at least one proposed trade -- we may have offered him E.T., in which case he make the right decision! However, my friend Ryan owned one cart that my neighbor Ryan wanted: Pac-Man. Yeah, today 2600 Pac-Man is the whipping boy of the classic era, but back then, it was Pac-Man! The phenomenon, the game everybody had to have -- and the only home version available, since K.C. Munchkin had been rendered illegal. Trek vs. Pac -- it was a tough decision.
Somehow, Ryan (the friend) decided to give up Pac-Man in favor of Star Trek, and we never regretted the decision. Sega’s Atari 2600 port of Star Trek is really good, with multiple screens, good graphics, and lots of action. We played it nonstop, and our infatuation with it never really waned like it usually did with other new games. Best of all, it wasn’t long before we got Ms. Pac-Man, which was about a billion times better than Pac-Man had been.
Good trades are great, especially when both parties get what they want. What were some of your best trades?
I'm gonna go back to DND quickly here, as I just finished playing it (finally) for the first quick go.
Fantastic.
I lasted about two minutes. Before I died that is. Hit a transporter which put me ... well somewhere. Fought an ogre (which I won). With 3 hit points left I thought I'd Pray. Apparantly my God didn't like me, as after 3 attempts (the text happens so fast I redid it to read it properly) he just zapped me.
Can't wait to play it again (like, say, now
Time will be when the broadest river dries
And the great cities wane and last descend
Into the dust, for all things have an end
Day 24: ShadowGate
I think it's only natural when you're as obsessed with video games (as I am) and you know a thing or two about computer programming (as I do), that you might be tempted to try making your own game. For me, this happened sometime in the late 1980s. I knew just enough BASIC to code a simple game, so I gave it a whirl. I didn't know much about graphics programming, so I used extended ASCII characters to simulate graphics (not an uncommon technique back then). At the time, I was a huge fan of Sierra On-Line's adventure games. I knew that Sierra’s first game had been a simple adventure set in a haunted house -- I think it was called "Haunted Mansion." So, I decided to create a similar game called "Magic Mansion."
I didn't get far with Magic Mansion before I realized two things: 1) the ASCII graphics just weren't going to cut it, and B) I wasn't familiar enough with the adventure genre to come with an entire game of my own. While I began learning about some BASIC graphics routines, I also began looking for some inspiration. I found it in ShadowGate.
I first saw ShadowGate in the pages of Nintendo Power, and right away thought it looked like exactly the kind of game I could create -- a graphic adventure built around logic and puzzles rather than action. It didn’t require much animation, which was important to me since I couldn’t have programmed it. And it was set in a magical castle, which was the same kind of setting I wanted for my game. I rented ShadowGate, played through it, and came away with about a million ideas for my game, along with a fair number of things I wanted to avoid (like your character dying every five seconds).
My vision for Magic Mansion had grown beyond my ability to implement, so I sought help from the best programmer I knew -- my mother. She handled the programming, while I did most of the game design, writing and music. The title was soon changed to “SerpentHead,” which is a pretty obvious homage to “ShadowGate” (it’s also a very oblique Star Trek reference -- betcha can’t figure out why).
SerpentHead turned into a years-long project. The code base moved from BASIC to QuickBasic to C++ to Visual C++. It went through several iterations, surviving one disastrous hard-disk crash, but eventually hit the shareware market and earned a few positive reviews. Producing it was a big part of my teenage years. It had an even bigger impact on my mother, because it prompted her to start up her own software company, which is still in business. SerpentHead and its prequel are still for sale at Pharos Games.
By rights, SerpentHead should be the #1 game in this little list I’m making, but I thought I’d better stick with games people had actually heard of.
Shadowgate oh how i love thee
I mean it's such a great game and luckily there are many nes games like it
My rotating want list http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=101550
Your television doesn't care how angry you are with it. Turn it off and find something better to do with your time.-Beserker
Day 25: Pinball Construction Set
Wow, we’re really in the home stretch of this list. Good thing too, since I’m sure everybody’s getting pretty tired of my ramblings by now.
Being able to make your own pinball table -- what could be better than that? Pinball Construction Set was the only one of the “Construction Set” games I had, but I got plenty of use out of it. I built table after table based on any subject I could think of: food, cars, games, whatever. I had an entire series of tables based on asteroids (inspired by the “Astro Blast” table which came with the game, pictured above). I can’t begin to guess how many hours I spent making tables, but it had to be about 10 times as many as I spent actually playing them. It was the creativity involved in table design that hooked me. Playing them was purely secondary.
The aspect of PCS that I liked best was the pixel-by-pixel graphics editor. At the time I didn’t own a paint program that allowed that kind of detailed editing, so the only outlet I had for my inner digital artist was the virtual pinball table. Of course, my love of video games eventually spilled onto the canvas. I spent a lot of time painstakingly recreating NES game graphics using Pinball Construction Set, a copy of The Official Nintendo Player’s Guide on hand to show me the exact pixel configuration I was copying. PCS had a very restrictive palette, so there was limit to which sprites I could tackle, but I did the best I could. It amazes me now that I had the patience for that at age 13, but that shows you how committed I was to the NES, I guess.
When I got Deluxe Paint, its superior editing capability allowed it to quickly surpass Pinball Construction Set as my favorite graphics program. I copied NES sprites in minute detail, sometimes recreating entire screens (take this one for example -- it’s a picture I drew using Deluxe Paint, not a screenshot). But it was Pinball Construction Set that got me started, eventaully allowing me to develop a little computer graphics skill. I’m no serious artist, but my skills have helped me personally and professionally at times. I owe a lot to Pinball Construction Set and those long hours slaving over hot pixels.
PCS wasn’t really designed to be a graphics editor, but that didn’t stop me. Did you ever have a game that you used as a creative outlet? I can’t be the only one.
That was a genre that came and went, didn't it? Man I used to love all those construction-set games. Adventure Construction Set, Shoot-Em-Up Constructon Set ... plus there were a bunch of games that had level editors and stuff I used to play with all the time. Kickstart had one, Gyroscope had one, Lode Runner had one ... I'm pretty sure I remember an Arkanoid one too. Racing Destruction Set was one of the most fun games I owned, but the loading times killed it. In later years, I picked up the Bard's Tale Construction Set, but unfortunately it used a proprietary graphic editor that I never could find. Without putting yor own pictures in, it wasn't much fun.
Probably the worst one of the genre was Fireworks Construction Set. Yes, choosing from a set of about 20 different fireworks (and coordinating colors), you could set up your own Independence Day show. Somehow the transition from the outdoors to the computer monitor didn't quite make it.
NEVERWINTER NIGHTS w00t!
Day 26: King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
Screenshot lifted from Adventure Collective
There was a time when I was captivated by Sierra graphic adventures, and King’s Quest IV was the best of them all as far as I was concerned. In many respects, it’s a “pinnacle” game -- meaning that it’s tops for its genre. It featured fantastic graphics and animation for its era. Also, it was an amazingly deep adventure, even if half the puzzles were hackneyed rips of fairy tales. And the music -- well, I played it using a Tandy 1000, which had only an internal speaker (capable of dual-channel audio), but I still thought it was great. I recorded the soundtrack on cassette tape and listened to it over and over. Pretty good for tinny PC speaker audio!
What I remember most about KQIV, however, was the darn Sierra Hint Line. You know, the phone number you could dial to get answers to the game’s confusing (and not always logical) puzzles. Of course, there was a fee for this service. The answers were my crack-cocaine, and the Hint Line was my pusher. I don’t know if I was just stupid or if Sierra intentionally made the solutions obscure or what, but I’m sure the company made more money from my Hint Line calls than from my actual purchase of the game. Of course, my parents were playing the game too; since Hint Line calls were made only after all three of us were stumped, I guess those puzzles really were tough!
Nevertheless, I have fond memories of KQIV -- and the other King’s Quest games, along with Space Quest, Police Quest and Hero’s Quest (aka Quest for Glory). They were excellent games, and writing about them has got me jonesing to play a graphic adventure again. Sadly, they don’t make ‘em like they used to.
Sierra. Of course they’re still around these days, but they’ll always be the “Quest” people to me. What are your thoughts on the old adventure games?
King's Quest (the original) was one of the first games I ever played on our PC Jr. The graphics and sounds were so much better on the Jr than our XT at the time.
Sierra was the first king of the point-and-click adventures, mostly due to the game series you pointed out. Later the crown would be challenged by LucasArts (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, The Dig, Zak McKracken, Day of the Tentacle, etc).
Some of my favorites in the genre include: The Black Cauldron, Conquests of Camelot, Conquests of the Longbow, Darkseed, Day of the Tentacle, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Freddy Pharkas, Heart of China, Laura Bow 1/2, Legend of Kyrandia 1/2/3/4, and of course Willy Beamish.
All of the above games, along with most of the King's Quest, Space Quest, Hero's Quest, Police Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games can be found here:
http://www.abandonia.com/genre.php?g...venture&page=0
Hey finally another game I know!
I remember playing Kings Quest IV on my old Tandy 1000 SL back in the day. I played the first Kings quest before that but didn't get all that far cause that was a hard game! Well mostly it was just pretty cheap. I remember having to push the witch into the oven at the exact milisecond or she'd get ya!
I was a HUGE Sierra fan back in the day though. I've finished all of the Quest for Glory's too many times, as well as the first couple of Police Quest's and the Space Quests. Actually I think King's Quest was the one that I played the least. Seems like in all of those games if you miss something at the start then you were screwed the rest of the game. Then again thats the same as Space Quest 2 cause if you forgot the Rubix cube at the start then the tazmanian devil thing would get ya!
I could talk about these games all day so I'd better stop now...
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