You might enjoy CRPG Addict’s blog posts about his adventure in Wizardry for DOS.
I beat it through emulation and save scumming, but his playthrough was a lot more tactical, and now Im starting to understand I’m not support to just hit the attack button over and over again!
Wizardry inspired a lot of games, but the three games listed have greater influences elsewhere. (FF and DQ in particular are more like Ultima.) Sadly the games that were most inspired by Wizardry, sometimes called “blobbers,” have mostly died out: The classic Bard’s Tale games, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. Etrian Odyssey and the Japanese Wizardry games hold the torch but are pretty niche these days.
The demise of the original Wizardry series is one of the greatest injustices in the history of computer gaming, up there with the closing of the original Atari.
I was obsessed with Wizardry and Ultima growing up… but I can’t stomach the node-based, turn-based conceit any more. I had a hard time finishing Wizardry 8 back in… ok, maybe I don’t want to know how long ago that was.
But I was spoiled by the real-time evolutions of the concept… stuff like Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Ultima Underworld, Descent to Undermountain, and the like (also, shout-out to Arx Fatalis).
I would love more epic dungeon crawlers, with the soul of these classics but all the modern conveniences, graphics, and gameplay advances.
It’s great! I’d put it up there with other weird children’s lit like The Stinky Cheese Man and Strega Nona.
IIRC DreamWorks originally tried adapting the book directly but it didn’t really work so they kept some concepts and redid the entire story. Early designs of movie Shrek looked a lot closer to book Shrek.
If what I’ve read is true, the saddest things about the Shrek movie is that they changed what Fiona was. What I read was that she originally was some other sort of monster, not another ogre - one that Shrek thought was physically unattractive at first. The whole message about a person’s insides being what’s important loses a lot of impact when Fiona is an attractive version of Shrek’s same race/species.
Similar to OG Beauty and the Beast. Originally the Beast was kind from the start and it was all about appearance. Disney changed it so he was a fixer upper. Kinda misses the whole point.
I once saw the Shrek book in a bookstore and paged through it. I often see that movies that are based on books have little to do with the original story, but Shrek absolutely took the crown. But where this usually is a turn to the worse, with Shrek this was exactly the other way.
Space Colony is an older game that was like Sims in space. I got this at Big Lots years ago and played some of it and apparently this is the remastered version on Steam.
The screenshots and video on the Steam page doesn’t go into the detail of what you can do when it comes to controlling your Sim-like characters. But this video shows more of that aspect of the game youtu.be/BEys39TsRdw?si=t3HU3vFlNO9q0O0T
Granted, it’s a lot of games in one like other top down tycoon manager games and has some elements of tower defense.
I played some Tiny Life recently. I liked it, but it is a bit simple, and the bigger issue I had with it is just that there isn't much to it, especially to build. There's like two counters, two fridges, one shower... from my perspective it really needs an artist to just go ham and make tons of options so there's stuff to actually decorate with, even if stats are the same.
Yeah but that game is either (depending on how you view early access) woefully unfinished and shat out in such an incomplete state, or not released yet and possibly years away from release.
That’s a tough decision to make, especially in today’s gaming marketing, but I applaud them for stepping back and recognizing what they had wasn’t good enough to sell. Blizzard made that decisions years ago with Starcraft Ghost, the Blizzard of today wouldn’t make that same call any more.
The art style was “what if we target the uncanny valley specifically?” It was the strangest thing that seemed to target realism but without the technology that actually makes it look reasonable. I didn’t really care about what it looked like though. Just having some game competing with Maxis would have been nice. Cities: Skylines brought the city builder out of the pit it had been festering in with no competition. I was hoping this would do the same. Hopefully the other projects can do that still.
polygon.com
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