drauch wrote:BIL, it's not Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry, is it?
Halloween Harry was the epitome of class. The flamethrower animation was gorgeous as all hell from what I remember. It was a bit of a puzzle challenge in not wasting all your jetpack fuel though since you needed it to get around, similar to the actual Jetpack game for DOS, another good platformer with custom level editing.
BIL wrote:Robomaze II: The Lobby.
Hah, nice! It reminds me of some of the weird stuff you found on Shareware CDs back in the day, you could go through weird or unusual games all day long and find some real gems (and stinkers). I actually thought you coulda been talking about
Electro Body but the graphics you described were too rudimentary for it to be that.
I remember a game called Fairy Godmother where you inexplicably had to avoid crabs and had the ability to temporary turn one type of object into another to phase around ladders and things. It was weird but amusing.
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After finally crushing my
Astrosmash/Smashteroid score (MS-DOS remake of Astrosmash that has a deluxe mode with bosses) and failing again at nabbing a SideLine 1cc, I finally wrapped up my run of
The Genie's Curse.
Solid 7/10 or 8/10 game. When I was first playing it I thought it was the best game ever as a kid due to its ridiculous production values. The story and exploration are still fun but with nostalgia goggles off, as much as I've gushed about the game it does have a few legitimate issues that keep it from being perfect:
• Eventually you get a ship you can freely sail from one island to another in. Random encounters appear, but of the three possible encounter types, one of them appears to be buggy in Very Hard difficulty, specifically the Water Elemental fight. It looks like there might be some weirdness in how they're being generated and scaled to Very Hard (which generally makes things hit a bit harder and take more hits) and suddenly enemies that die in 5 or 6 hits literally take well over 150 - 200 hits to die, and they're boring as all hell to fight.
Thankfully a workaround exists in the form of saving and reloading anytime you're about to sail. The Water Elemental random encounter also irritatingly awards no treasure, whereas the undead ships and pirate ships you can encounter have treasure and enemies that die in like 10 hits tops even on Very Hard.
• The game did have a few bugs on initial release but they mailed out patched diskettes to fix an early bug where your character got hung up on a building while following someone in a cutscene. It was tied to the game not behaving properly when played on a machine that's running too fast. There's two other traps I encountered that move way too quickly if you're playing in DOSBox, so I found Cycles = 25000 was the best speed to play the game at with the realistically expected speed.
• The controls kinda suck. Ctrl/Enter are primary attack, Space is secondary, Alt locks your movement allowing you to move backwards. Esc annoying is the menu though that handles everything from healing items, spell selection, saving, etc, so any time you have to use a potion in combat you have to move your hand up to Esc. Why Esc is the only button on the keyboard that performs such an important function where you have to move your hand away from the bottom left of the keyboard I don't know. You can also play with the mouse to move and attack but I don't like the mouse controls honestly, it plays better like a console game would feel with keyboard, more precise.
I died once to something fairly dangerous (the game's equivalent of a superboss that deals 3/4 of your health damage in one hit and moves at a speed equivalent to a fighter jet) where you pretty much have to heal instantly when hit or get murdered, and I'd used Autohotkey to remap Ctrl and Esc to Z and X. Hit them both at once accidentally and... start menu pops up. Can't move, dead. Oops.
When I remembered the Enter key also attacked and Enter + Esc didn't register as a windows shortcut I remapped those and solved that problem.
• The game's setpieces, dungeons, and exploration are amazing, but the combat's somewhat weaker. It doesn't have the kind of "get in kick and knock the enemy back when there's an opening" sort of Zelda/Brain Lord feel where you get punished for being hit. There's a lot of enemies where just swinging wildly while moving backwards works effectively. And, you can easily just run around spin attacking most things later on where being able to attack at a diagonal is a huge advantage.
Most enemies also only have exactly one attack, with Earth Elementals being one of the few to have one melee and one ranged. It's not super deep combat like Beyond Oasis has with its combo attacks and varied weapons and 100 floor bonus dungeon and there's no gigantic bosses to be had here like in Beyond Oasis or Brain Lord. But The Genie's Curse has the best writing and story in terms of richness out of any of them. It's an RPG at its heart built on a top-down action game.
Your attack hitboxes are also very wonky, with your sword feeling very short ranged when attacking downwards, but very long when attacking upwards. There are several spots where you can hit enemies when a table is between you and them if they're above you, but not if they're below you. There's also a lot of exploitable bits where you can smack an enemy around through a wall.
• Midway through the game there's three stealth sections that frankly don't work well at all due to the relatively limited screen size that's too zoomed in to do stealth properly without a bit of trial and error or sheer luck (failure is an instant game-over, thankfully you can save at any time and make multiple saves). The first is an optional quest and isn't so bad
just as long as you don't try talking to anyone while running out of town
, but the second one has a sequence where you have to run from one area to another avoiding detection and it's pretty much impossible to see a reasonable distance ahead of you. It's short-lived thankfully, but still fairly annoying. The third stealth area comes almost immediately after but is a lot easier and enjoyable since the layout of the area means there's only one guard that requires a bit of luck do dodge due to the screen's limited view.
The stealthy sneaking bits are functionally the weakest part of the game since you can't see very far ahead when moving around, as opposed to Zelda where everything is on-screen, or Beyond Oasis and Brain Lord, where the screen is far more zoomed out or centered on your character. It's true the stealthy segments vary the gameplay a bit more, but they're the weakest part of the game and could have been tweaked a bit differently so as not to feel let down by the smaller view on the screen.
Even with these concerns it's still arguably one of the action adventure RPGs with the highest production values that was made for MS-DOS and is seriously enjoyable, even if the action is not super hardcore.
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Monuments of Mars - MS-DOS
One of three puzzle platformers (heavy emphasis on puzzle) that was made using the same game engine. It's a puzzle game at its core, whereby you often have to locate secret switches that trigger just by walking or jumping into a certain area, and you always have fairly limited ammo that you can't go around wasting if you want to complete the game. You have infinite lives and a restart level button since you can potentially get stuck on some levels, with each screen being a single level.
The game looks actually pretty good stylistically as you explore a derelict martian base in glorious CGA. The game's ugly side shows about halfway through though where moving platforms and slopes start to appear. The game doesn't have smooth walking when going up or down a diagonal slope and fails to register jump inputs when on either a moving up/down platform or moving downwards on a slope, so levels with those elements can feel messy. You also have your vertical jumping momentum reduced to 0 when picking up items, so anytime you grab something in a jump you plummet back down. It feels a bit unusual.
There's a rudimentary score system in place for things like collecting items, grabbing M A R S letters in the right order, and so on, but hilariously a completely trivial counterstop exploit exists on the final level, at least of the first out of four campaigns I've played. There's a super computer you have to disable to win the game, and then exit the level via an elevator. You get a huge amount of points for disabling it, but instead of being able to only do it once you can repeatedly interact with it and get points every single time, easily getting well over 10 times your current score in the space of a minute, and probably crashing the game if you counterstop? I dunno I didn't actually see what happened if you counterstop it, I was too lazy. Someone else gets to do this if they're interested!