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LOL holy fuck..

also the kawaii portraits.. get out.

There's a dungeon crawling doublepack coming to PC / Switch next year in the form of Saviors of Sapphire Wings & Stranger of Sword City Revisited.

Still can't bear to look at Etrian 2 eh?

ahahah reee.

nah I 've just seen enough animu portraits to last me a lifetime, if I was playing western stuff I'd want the western artstyle.
But each to his own.

I'm a little confused now. i thought you were playing Wizardry 7 aka Crusaders of the Dark Savant. Cosmic Forge is Number VI, if I recall correctly.

I remember playing Cosmic Forge back in the day on my Amiga. I enjoyed it, but at one point I had to take a break from it for a couple of weeks due to real life issues, and when I tried to get back into it, I couldn't. I had become completely lost and youldn't find my way around anymore, because everything in the game looked the fucking same.

I am on Dark Savant. Cosmic Forge is the name of a fanmade tool for modifying Wizardries 6, 7, and 8. Not to be confused with Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge!

I read Wizardry Tales of the Forszken Land is a real good dungeon crawler, did nit see it mentionnex on this thread unless mistaken.
Any thoughts on this one by someone who played it ?

Masterpiece.

I liked Tale of the Forsaken Land at first but holy fuck does it get tedious. Every battle you have to wait for the enemies to load in, then sit through all the unskippable animations. Your party's tandem tactics, strong moves you'll want to use frequently, are especially long. In typical Wizardry fashion there are shortcuts you'll open up to lower levels of the dungeon, but even these take an inordinate about of time. Once you're a few levels deep you'll be desperately dodging encounters on the way down just so you don't have to spend 40 seconds wiping out a trash mob. Enemies have instant death attacks, which I'd be fine with, if the necessary response to any of your party members being killed wasn't to hoof it back up to the surface, res them, and go back down. Also, the only way to make stronger spells is by combining ingredients on the surface, which has to be done individually, while you watch the combining animation every single time. Freakin' Ultima IV had batch reagent mixing in the '80s.

Pro: the combat system is quite good. Con: only with groups. The nature of battle mechanics mean that single opponents get bodied, which means bosses are pathetic compared to the regular baddies on their floor.

^

Great story and mood, too.

And any thoughts on Operancia ? Seeking a nice one on the Switch...

And any thoughts on Operancia ? Seeking a nice one on the Switch...

Other than people seem to love it? No
But, Zen (the dev) makes really good video pinball tables...

I've been playing Shining in the Darkness on the Switch's Genesis Collection. It's relatively simple but I think it's aged really well, especially with some of the filter options available. And the portability factor makes kicking back in a chair and drawing your own maps a really relaxing way to spend an evening.

Ick.

You know, I got a copy of this when I was young then never actually played it. I think in part I shied away from the incredibly daunting interface (and also wanted to play the earlier games before jumping in at the 7th).

You know, for how basic it is I really enjoyed Fatal Labrynth.

you know, for how basic it is I really enjoyed Fatal Labrynth.

Man, I loved Fatal Labyrinth. I remember being really intrigued by the concept of "Randomly Generated Dungeons. No two games are alike!" as they boasted on the back of the box (I, and 99% of the rest of the world were unfamiliar with the concept of 'rogue-likes' and the only other game I ever played that did such a thing was Alternate Reality: The City on c64 which captured my imagination precisely because of the random aspects)

But yeah, I pretty much loved that aspect. And thought the game was super-cool.

(speaking of dungeon crawlers, I wouldn't mind revisiting Alternate Reality: The City someday. I loved it as a kid. Even if the whole concept of five separate games that connect into each other remained unfinished)

Same.

You guys ever play "Dragon Crystal"? I actually stumbled on it as a kid before I saw Fatal Labyrinth and always assumed it was a Game Gear sequel to Fatal Labyrinth or something. Fun, but very hard!

It's not? It looks pretty much identical

I remember seeing an ad for Dragon Crystal in a magazine as a kid, so advertising definitely works.

ET is so close to a roguelike I'd even make effort posts with trolling arguments in its favor.

I thought it was just me! It never seems to garner anything approaching praise, eclipsed on these collections by the likes of Sword of Vermillion (which I find to be kind of awful). I'm generally not much for roguelikes, but this one seems to just suck me in, it's kinda chill.

You're trolling me right now with this bullshit!

Yup. Enjoyed my time with Fatal Labyrinth. And one of these days I'll write labyrinth without spell check stepping in.

Probably the closest thing to real roguelike i've played.

hoo hoo hoo, nothing hurts more than Almost The Truth:

* Randomized locations of Jedi Powers and lewt make for a different experience every game.

* Arcane, byzantine game mechanics that require research to have any chance of success.

* Limited resources, in this case midi-chlorians that can be replenished by eating rat turds.

* A score system.

Just add a leveling up system of some sort, and randomized world layouts and you're 100% the way there.


I do have affection for games that aren't strict clones of something else, like ToeJam & Earl.

I thought it was just me! It never seems to garner anything approaching praise, eclipsed on these collections by the likes of Sword of Vermillion (which I find to be kind of awful)

Kind of? Sword of Vermillion is awful. If you erase Yu Suzuki's name, nobody would give that game a second thought.
Although, I did think it would be an awesome middle finger to the world if at some point during the Shenmue trilogy if Ryo had to sit down and play some Sword of Vermillion

And yet it shows up on all kinds of "Top X Genesis RPGs" lists. Presumably by a lot of people who haven't actually played it. It's ambitious, it just doesn't quite achieve those ambitions.

And yet it shows up on all kinds of "Top X Genesis RPGs" lists. Presumably by a lot of people who haven't actually played it. It's ambitious, it just doesn't quite achieve those ambitions.

I'm a lifelong Sega fan but not a Sega zealot. The Sega fan can say, "wow, I can kind of see what this game is getting at, but it seems to be made-up of spare parts from other games, doesn't work at all, and is absolutely no fun to play" A Sega zealot says "But... Yu Suzuki... It's visionary. You say that it's no 'fun', but have you ever considered that it's challenging your entire concept of 'fun?'"

Let's judge E.T. against the Berlin Interpretation along with a few other games to use as references and see what we get:

ET challenged my idea of fun, and won! (eventually...) Definitely in the top 10 2600 games, and probably the best dungeon crawler on the platform. The competition is pretty lousy - Superman and Adventure aren't exactly masterpieces.



This is exactly what I mean by cloning being a big issue with genres. If you clone a game, you haven't made a new game, it's just a reskin of another one. A lot of these arbitrary (often outright undefinable) metrics boil down to "is a literal one-for-one clone of Rogue". This attitude kind of annoys me about the scene when even tiny changes could create the illusion that you're actually playing a new game.

I've been successfully reverse-trolled with its claim of the labyrinths of Toejam+Earl not being "dungeons".

Seriously though, putting the "single controllable avatar at a time" metric as "low value" is something I'll never agree with. It's literally the most important aspect of the genre, only "space matters" is as important: it's an in-between space between realtime and turn based games. Round robin inputs slow the game to an absolute unplayable crawl (the second character halves the impact of your inputs, the third thirds, etc). Action Point systems try to simulate the visceral immediacy of choosing between moving through space and action, but they still compress several seconds of time into a single round.

.... .... I kind of want someone to make a roguelike where you walk through a mall and are given missions to buy certain things. ... not enough for me to be that guy......

There are dozens of high quality and tremendously original games that are at least as Berlin-compliant as Fatal Labyrinth. Sil is wildly different from ADOM and neither is a mere clone of Rogue. Nethack is among the most inventive works ever created by human hands. To say Angband is the same game as Incursion betrays a level of ignorance equal to if you had claimed Guwange was the same game as Battle Garegga.

The genre classification is useful. It's not an arbitrary limitation. If you want to make a game that borrows from roguelikes, but isn't one, then go for it. It's fine. Just don't call it a roguelike. I love Spelunky so it's not like I'm against that sort of thing.