August 2, 2017
The Spodcast #9: The Games of Yesteryear, Today!
2:50 – Lucasarts (Adventure Games)
13:08 – Trilobyte (7th Guest/11th Hour)
23:53 – Westwood (Command & Conquer)
43:40 – 3D Realms (Duke Nukem)
56:55 – Maxis (Sim Games)
1:06:15 – Origin (Ultima)
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Were you trying to describe Trump when you were talking about Duke?
Format worked really well. Don’t get me wrong: I like the more-usual format (or formats*), too, but if you decide to do a whole ‘Cast on a single theme again then I say go-go-go for it.
~
*I guess there’s three main ones, with very often a mixture of the first two:
-Commentary on the news
-What folks is playin’ and/or watchin’. Mainly watchin’, recently, if we’re honest
-Professor R.P.G. Rutskarn GMs yer little snafflin’ gubbins crew there. Haven’t snaffled much actual gubbins yet, if we’re honest. (Or, well, nobly dishonest, let’s say, given context)
Horror adventure games of note: Last Half of Darkness, Waxworks, the Elvira games, Dark Seed, Hugo’s House of Horrors (horrible in a different sense). I’d also include Alone in the Dark, the game that spawned the Survival horror genre.
As for adventure gaming studios legacy, Sierra’s has been very well served with the likes of the Blackwell games and AGS games.
RE: Westwood, people also forget that they made adventure games and RPGs (Kyrandia series, Land of Lore, Eye of the Beholder etc.). When EA bought them they seemed to only want to be the C&C company.
The multiplayer focus for RTS games kinda spoiled them for me, as someone who only plays them single-player. I think Josh’s suggestion of having bigger maps would be a good plan, the maps in the old days were actually quite small. You could have a large map with a series of increasingly difficult objectives, like a string of missions from an older game, but linked far more well.
The decline and fall of Origin was really sad for me, between them and Sierra they were pillars of my gaming past. The Ultima games from U4 to U7 and the Underworld games were amazing, but they are almost forgotten these days.
My favourite Ultima tale was playing Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, and having to find money to release a ship captain from jail. I spent hours scouring the map for valuables and getting the money, and every time they would increase the amount required. Turns out you had to wander over to the east, do a little quest and get a gold bar to trade for his release. I can’t remember the final amount of cash I was carrying, but it was many thousands more than the amount of gold bars I’d recovered.
There’s also a good comedic playthrough of the bulk of the series over on the LP Archive: https://lparchive.org/author/Nakar
So did Josh change his mike or am I going mad?
Jeff Vogel has been making RPGs for a living since 1994, not 2000. He started with the three Exile games, made the first three Avernum games as a technical/gameplay update, began the Geneforge series(my favorite), made a further three Avernum games as sequels to the first three, finished the five Geneforge games, began updating the first three Avernum games(again) and has by now almost finished, and started and finished the three-game Avadon series. Next he’ll be updating the first few Geneforge games and starting a new series, purportedly a sci-fi one. Don’t underestimate his work!
When you guys were talking about RTSs / Westwood, I couldn’t help think of:
1. Knights and Merchants, which had a tonne of resources to manage to feed your knights-era armies. Stone, wood, grain, wine, pigs, sausage, gold. Some resources were scattered on the map, and others were intermediates which you could protect inside of your base.
2. Offworld Trading Company, which has a lot of economics going on, for an otherwise normal-looking sci-fi RTS.
3. OpenRA, which is an open-source RTS engine which aims to be completely compatible with the old game disks / installers from Command & Conquer, Red Alert, and Dune 2000, but still be very mod-able, and to patch / fix balance in the old game. For example, there was a lot of imbalance in the original Red Alert, such that tank-rushing was a dominant strategy, and spies were almost useless – this engine has tweaks to a lot of units, so that’s no longer the case.