… Ultima VII! Using Exult, an open source Ultima VII engine for modern operating systems (because the original game used a weird memory manager that only works in MS-DOS, and in very specific MS-DOS configurations, at that.)
Archive for the '90s games' Category
In the 80s, adventure games - where you take the role of a fictional character, solve puzzles and live a story - were quite popular - never a “mainstream” genre, but one of the most successful “niche” ones. Most games then were text adventures, where descriptions were text-based (possible with a static picture at the top of the screen), and the game had a parser which was able (up to a point) to understand what you want. I’ve talked about one of them, The Hobbit, before.
In the early 90s, as more powerful computers became available, the genre shifted a bit, to graphical adventures. Many of them were from Sierra (Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc.) and from LucasArts (then LucasFilm Games) (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Monkey Island, etc.). These were much more successful, as players no longer had to do that scary thing called “reading”, or that even scarier thing called “imagining”. One of the best ones, which I’ve mentioned here before, is Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.
But in the late 90s, adventure games mostly vanished off the face of the earth. People, it seemed, wanted only first person shooters, and endless revisions of sports games. Thinking, solving puzzles and interacting with other characters were, apparently, out of fashion.
Then, in 1999, there came two amazing adventure games which, while not making adventure games highly successful, at least were a blast to play, and sold very well for adventure games. One of them is Gabriel Knight 3, which I’ll talk about in the future (hint: “The Da Vinci Code” is but a watered-down version of it). The other is Funcom’s The Longest Journey.
And what a magical game it was.
Along with Final Fantasy VII, Squaresoft’s Chrono Trigger is probably my favorite console RPG ever.
Fantastic graphics, music and presentation. An original combat system, which made battles interesting until the end of the game, instead of the usual FF-like repetition (attack, attack, attack, cast spell… yawn). Great characters, and a fantastic plot, which included what is probably the best use of time travel in a computer game. Mutiple endings. No random encounters. And all that in a 16-bit cartridge game.
Hmm, I must play this game again, soon. 
Ah, the hours and hours I spent with this one. Why aren’t there more games like Microprose’s Darklands?
Too intellectual, I’d guess. Or too original. People, unfortunately, do seem to want more and more of the same. 
Darklands was a computer role-playing game. “Ah, another Tolkien rip-off with elves and orcs and dwarves, where you do quests and, mostly, kill monsters for experience points (XP), which make you level up, then be able to kill bigger monsters, which give even more XP, and so on”, you may think.
And you’d be right for, well, almost any other CRPG (the exceptions are those which aren’t medieval, but futuristic, for instance - and the rest of the description still applies).
But not Darklands.
Chalk this one as another “don’t play anything else until I get to the end” game. The year was 1993, and the game was Sierra’s Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.
Written by Jane Jensen, whose games I’ve never missed after this one, GK is a mature adventure game, set in New Orleans. The main character, Gabriel, is a horror novelist who begins to investigate a recent succession of apparently Voodoo-related murders, in order to get inspiration for the plot of his new book. Little does he know that he will get much more personally involved with them than he ever thought possible… or desired.
Continue reading ‘Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (PC, 1993)’
Few old games are as beloved these days as this as Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III’s 1992 classic, Star Control 2. If you somehow missed it and need proof on “how beloved” it is, check the end of this post.
SC2 , while technically a sequel, doesn’t follow in the genre of the first Star Control, which was a simple strategy game with 1-on-1 arcade battles (very playable, though - so much that most people ignored the strategy game and just played the “Melee” mode, choosing a fleet of ships and fighting another player, one ship on each side at a time, until one fleet was eliminated).
But this sequel was different - and, when I got it in 1992 and started playing it, I was quickly able to see that this game was unique.
If you know this game - really *know* it (and the asterisks are a reference to it :)) - it’s one you’re sure never to forget. Like many of the best games, this one doesn’t have many fans, but the ones it has consider it one of the best games of all time - if not the best. To me, it’s certainly the best of its kind. Ladies and gentlemen… Planescape: Torment.
Torment is a computer role playing game (CRPG), and possibly the one which most deserves the “R”. The story is mature (and I’m not talking about sex or violence, although it has those, too - but described, not shown), thought-provoking, and deals with concepts never seen or even mentioned in a computer game. You play an amnesiac immortal who wakes up in a slab, inside a mortuary, with no memory of how he got there. His first companion is a wisecracking floating skull. He is in Sigil, the City of Doors, a city with portals to every plane of existence in the multi-verse, a place where belief shapes reality.
It should actually be “Brian Reynolds’ Alpha Centauri”, but Sid Meier was (and is) the best known name, and it draws heavily on Meier’s original Civilization, so… Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri it was. By Firaxis Games, distributed by Electronic Arts.
SMAC, as the game is affectionately called, is still a very popular game these days among strategy fans, and for good reason. In my opinion, it’s still the best Civ-style game, and I doubt even Civilization 4 (which I can’t wait to have) is as good, in some respects. Unfortunately, it didn’t sell as well as it should have, because people these days lack imagination, and it’s much easier to understand what you get by inventing “The Wheel” or “The Alphabet” than what “Bioadaptive Resonance” or “Controlled Singularity” even are. In short, it scared many Civ fans, which was a shame.
But it has some things no other game of its kind has:
- style - the spartan interface, the voices, the graphics, the sounds, the descriptions, the movies. Unforgettable.
- characters with personality - Civ 3’s leaders, even though they’re supposed to be real life ones, have no personality. SMAC’s had. Who can forget Chairman Yang, Lady Deirdre, Sister Miriam, or CEO Morgan? They actually have different goals in mind, and act towards them. They all speak in their own way. And they all have great quotes.
- a story - yes, a strategy game with one. Really. And it doesn’t always end the same way (and I don’t mean just because you lose the game in the middle).
As I said… still my favorite game of its kind, after 6 years. You can probably buy the Planetary Pack (the game plus the expansion pack on a single CD) very cheaply, these days. And you really should.
Links: Wikipedia entry, Official site.
P.S. - did you know that this game has inspired 3 novels, a comic book and a GURPS book? Not bad for a turn-based strategy game…
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