A really great abandonware game.
Jan. 13th, 2005 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasOne of the other reasons I haven't been updating my LJ much recently is that I've been spending my free time with a new computer game. Well, an old one, actually.
"Abandonware" is one of those grey areas of copyright. But it's a fairly light shade of grey. It refers to software which is technically under copyright, but the copyright holder no longer exists, and nobody actually CARES about the software, except the people who want the software. There's a website, Home of the Underdogs, which archives abandonware and allows for it to be downloaded. They only put up software if they've got good reason to believe that nobody owns it, and, if they find out differently, they take it off their site, and replace their download link with a link to the actual copyright holder. So I consider them good folks.
Anyway, there was this DOS CRPG from 1992 called Darklands. It's a great game that did terribly in the marketplace (that's the main purpose of "Home of the Underdogs" -- to showcase the underdogs), mainly because the first release was so buggy to be unplayable. The version they've got on the site is Version 7, which is when they finally got everything ironed out, but, by that time, it was too late, and Microprose killed the entire division which had produced the game, and which was the copyright holder. Microprose then sold the distribution rights to a fansite, and the fansite went under, which is how The Underdogs got it.
Let this be a lesson to all you software developers out there: it doesn't matter how good a product is -- if it's too buggy to use, it's no good! Because this is a damn fine CRPG.
This was one of the first CRPGs to try to do a sword-and-sorcery fantasy game in a historical setting. It's the fifteenth century, and you're in the Holy Roman Empire. The map you're wandering around is Central Europe -- Germany and environs -- east into parts of Poland and Czechoslovokia, west into Belgium, Luxemborg, and some of France, as far south as Switzerland, Austria and the Alps, and just barely getting into Denmark in the North. Pretty much, if you've got a one-page map of Germany in your atlas, that's the game map.
The genre is Dark ages fantasy. Basically, assume that what the people of the time thought was true was true. This does mean that I've had to exercise that part of my brain which allows me to enjoy "The Merchant of Venice" or "The Jew of Malta". . . the witches in the game are straight out of Malus Maelefactorum. The game manual says this specifically: they KNOW that real witches weren't like that, but they decided to use the beliefs of the Church at the time as their universe background. So, if you're a Pagan who'd have trouble letting that slide, you may want to give this a miss. If you're okay accepting "Okay, they're using my people as The Bad Guys, and they KNOW that's not true, but that's their game background," you may want to try this out.
The plot of the game: you control a party of four people, who you can create yourself, or you can use a pregen party of four, who have decided to wander around the Holy Roman Empire righting wrongs, wronging wights, and gaining undying fame.
That's your goal: fame. Every time you do something really impressive, you get a bonus to your party "fame" statistic. High fame has some benefits -- people have heard of you, might like you better -- but, basically, what it is is a goal. Make "fame" as high as possible.
Actually, you've got two kinds of fame. You've got your general fame, which is how well you're known through the length and breadth of Central Europe, and then you've got local reputation, which is how well you're known in particular cities. Which you get for doing things which are locally useful, but wouldn't get you talked about elsewhere. The best way to improve local reputation is to walk around dark alleys after curfew and wait to get mugged. Once you slaughter a few dozen muggers, the locals really like you. Hey, it's the Dark Ages.
My characters have gone through "unknown", to "slightly recognized", and are now "slight heroes." They're "respected" in several cities, and are "local heroes" in Berlin.
Mostly, you just wander around looking for good deeds to do. Solve problems in mines. Kill robber-knights who are waylaying travelers. I'm still trying to hunt down that damn dragon. But there's also an ongoing plotline in which you, eventually, try to take on the entire order of Knights Templar, and their demon master Baphomet.
Yes, the manual does point out that the entire Baphomet thing was a frame job and the Knights Templar were actually innocent and were just victims of papal persecution. But, again, it makes a damn fine game plotline, so they used it anyway.
There are two "magic systems" in the game. One is that you can pray to saints, who will, if your call upon them is successful, (which depends on two numbers: your Virtue -- the higher it is, the more powerful the saints you can appeal to, and your Divine Favor, which is something like manna points -- you spend it to increase your percentage chance to successfully appeal to a saint) temporarily increase skills and stats, or perhaps perform a real, honest to God miracle to save your bacon. Of course, you can only pray to a saint that you've studied in a monastic library somewhere. . .
The other in alchemy. Which is real nifty. You can get alchemical formulas. And then you get weird ingredients together, and spend a day or two, and brew up explosives, or flash bombs, or healing potions, or all sorts of stuff. . . or you blow yourself and the rest of the party up. One or the other.
Another cool thing about the game is its character creation method. First, you choose a sex and background -- noble, wealthy city dweller, rural peasant, whatever. This gives you a starting set of statistics, which you improve from a points pool. Skills and statistics are on a 1 to 100 scale, with starting maximum being 40 -- stats don't go much above 40 without divine or alchemical aid, and, in those cases, it's only temporary.
Then you chose a career. Each career gives you 1) automatic increases to some skills 2) a pool of points from which you can buy further increases to those skills (how much you can raise each skill depends on the particular career: for instance, a Soldier might get 5 points automatically in Edged Weapons, with an option to buy up to an addition 6 points), and 3) possibly a point or two up or down in various statistics. Then you can either send that character to go adventuring, or choose another career. Each career takes five years. And after you get much past 30, your physical stats start declining . . .
You can create a 75-year old Master Alchemist with a 99 Alchemy skill, and very high intelligence. Of course, he or she will have Strenghth and Endurance of 1. Which means "one hit point." So you won't have a 75-year old Master Alchemist for long. . .
Anyway, I'm really enjoying this game. That is all.
"Abandonware" is one of those grey areas of copyright. But it's a fairly light shade of grey. It refers to software which is technically under copyright, but the copyright holder no longer exists, and nobody actually CARES about the software, except the people who want the software. There's a website, Home of the Underdogs, which archives abandonware and allows for it to be downloaded. They only put up software if they've got good reason to believe that nobody owns it, and, if they find out differently, they take it off their site, and replace their download link with a link to the actual copyright holder. So I consider them good folks.
Anyway, there was this DOS CRPG from 1992 called Darklands. It's a great game that did terribly in the marketplace (that's the main purpose of "Home of the Underdogs" -- to showcase the underdogs), mainly because the first release was so buggy to be unplayable. The version they've got on the site is Version 7, which is when they finally got everything ironed out, but, by that time, it was too late, and Microprose killed the entire division which had produced the game, and which was the copyright holder. Microprose then sold the distribution rights to a fansite, and the fansite went under, which is how The Underdogs got it.
Let this be a lesson to all you software developers out there: it doesn't matter how good a product is -- if it's too buggy to use, it's no good! Because this is a damn fine CRPG.
This was one of the first CRPGs to try to do a sword-and-sorcery fantasy game in a historical setting. It's the fifteenth century, and you're in the Holy Roman Empire. The map you're wandering around is Central Europe -- Germany and environs -- east into parts of Poland and Czechoslovokia, west into Belgium, Luxemborg, and some of France, as far south as Switzerland, Austria and the Alps, and just barely getting into Denmark in the North. Pretty much, if you've got a one-page map of Germany in your atlas, that's the game map.
The genre is Dark ages fantasy. Basically, assume that what the people of the time thought was true was true. This does mean that I've had to exercise that part of my brain which allows me to enjoy "The Merchant of Venice" or "The Jew of Malta". . . the witches in the game are straight out of Malus Maelefactorum. The game manual says this specifically: they KNOW that real witches weren't like that, but they decided to use the beliefs of the Church at the time as their universe background. So, if you're a Pagan who'd have trouble letting that slide, you may want to give this a miss. If you're okay accepting "Okay, they're using my people as The Bad Guys, and they KNOW that's not true, but that's their game background," you may want to try this out.
The plot of the game: you control a party of four people, who you can create yourself, or you can use a pregen party of four, who have decided to wander around the Holy Roman Empire righting wrongs, wronging wights, and gaining undying fame.
That's your goal: fame. Every time you do something really impressive, you get a bonus to your party "fame" statistic. High fame has some benefits -- people have heard of you, might like you better -- but, basically, what it is is a goal. Make "fame" as high as possible.
Actually, you've got two kinds of fame. You've got your general fame, which is how well you're known through the length and breadth of Central Europe, and then you've got local reputation, which is how well you're known in particular cities. Which you get for doing things which are locally useful, but wouldn't get you talked about elsewhere. The best way to improve local reputation is to walk around dark alleys after curfew and wait to get mugged. Once you slaughter a few dozen muggers, the locals really like you. Hey, it's the Dark Ages.
My characters have gone through "unknown", to "slightly recognized", and are now "slight heroes." They're "respected" in several cities, and are "local heroes" in Berlin.
Mostly, you just wander around looking for good deeds to do. Solve problems in mines. Kill robber-knights who are waylaying travelers. I'm still trying to hunt down that damn dragon. But there's also an ongoing plotline in which you, eventually, try to take on the entire order of Knights Templar, and their demon master Baphomet.
Yes, the manual does point out that the entire Baphomet thing was a frame job and the Knights Templar were actually innocent and were just victims of papal persecution. But, again, it makes a damn fine game plotline, so they used it anyway.
There are two "magic systems" in the game. One is that you can pray to saints, who will, if your call upon them is successful, (which depends on two numbers: your Virtue -- the higher it is, the more powerful the saints you can appeal to, and your Divine Favor, which is something like manna points -- you spend it to increase your percentage chance to successfully appeal to a saint) temporarily increase skills and stats, or perhaps perform a real, honest to God miracle to save your bacon. Of course, you can only pray to a saint that you've studied in a monastic library somewhere. . .
The other in alchemy. Which is real nifty. You can get alchemical formulas. And then you get weird ingredients together, and spend a day or two, and brew up explosives, or flash bombs, or healing potions, or all sorts of stuff. . . or you blow yourself and the rest of the party up. One or the other.
Another cool thing about the game is its character creation method. First, you choose a sex and background -- noble, wealthy city dweller, rural peasant, whatever. This gives you a starting set of statistics, which you improve from a points pool. Skills and statistics are on a 1 to 100 scale, with starting maximum being 40 -- stats don't go much above 40 without divine or alchemical aid, and, in those cases, it's only temporary.
Then you chose a career. Each career gives you 1) automatic increases to some skills 2) a pool of points from which you can buy further increases to those skills (how much you can raise each skill depends on the particular career: for instance, a Soldier might get 5 points automatically in Edged Weapons, with an option to buy up to an addition 6 points), and 3) possibly a point or two up or down in various statistics. Then you can either send that character to go adventuring, or choose another career. Each career takes five years. And after you get much past 30, your physical stats start declining . . .
You can create a 75-year old Master Alchemist with a 99 Alchemy skill, and very high intelligence. Of course, he or she will have Strenghth and Endurance of 1. Which means "one hit point." So you won't have a 75-year old Master Alchemist for long. . .
Anyway, I'm really enjoying this game. That is all.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 06:04 pm (UTC)Based on your description, I may give it a whirl. It sounds like it's based on the Rogue/Nethack idea, only much expanded.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 07:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 07:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 07:28 pm (UTC)I've been using VPC since it was Connectix, though...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-13 09:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-14 02:38 am (UTC)