Games and Game-Related old and new

General Discussion
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No, not so far. You must bear in mind that I’m playing on PC - and reports suggest that’s the best implementation.

So far. I’m really enjoying it. For me, the fun in this kind of game is to take my time, and explore. This game allows that in spades.

To date, I haven’t come across any genuinely game-breaking bugs. There have been times when the game has glitched out, and I’ve been unable to complete an important quest - but loading an old save has always fixed that. In many ways the bugs are startlingly similar to the ones you find in all Bethesda games. And, as with Bethesda, the solution is “Save Frequently”. Seriously, I think some of these bugs may be inherent in the open world format. Yes, Cyberpunk has an autosave feature - but these are constantly overwritten. If you want to go back to a section you were playing an hour ago, you need a hard save. So Save Frequently (did I mention that?).

The game assumes a future where robotic / computer body modifications (known as “chrome”) are commonplace. In a competitive society, people need the edge that chrome provides. But chrome is expensive - so people are regularly kidnapped, and butchered for their body modifications. Kidnap victims also undergo forced modification - for instance, brain implants to turn them into willing prostitutes.

The main enemies are street gangs, organised crime, and corrupt corporations. The Police may or may not be enemies - i’m not sure it’s intentional, or a bug, but if you stand near them too long they will start shooting at you.

The street gangs involve themselves in muggings, kidnappings, drugs dealing, theft, forced sex-trafficing and murder. You can find groups of them on any back street or empty lot. You can ignore them, or choose to fight them, which will bring you loot and experience.

Taking on organised crime and corporations is more complicated. and these form the basis of the major scripted quests.

There’s a lot of “adult” content, i.e, sex, drugs, gory violence, and mutilation (as a side note, I’m 66, and probably as adult as I’ll ever be. There was a time when I would have found sexual content a selling point, but that was 50 years ago. When did “adult” come to mean “appeals to 16 year old boys”?

The game space is huge. Looked at on the map, it doesn’t look so big, but it exists on many levels. You can easily get lost in it. Fortunately, the maps and pathing work really well.

Level Of Detail (LOD) is astonishing. Moving cars, pedestrians, and advertising signs, continue to be rendered WAY into the distance. You can stand in a high place, and watch the city moving around you.

It’s a truly open world. You can go pretty much anywhere. If it looks climbable, you can probably climb it. If it looks swimable, you can probably dive into it. Vehicles don’t have to stay on the roads - if a surface is not actually vertical, there’s some kind of vehicle you can drive on it.

If you don’t want to drive, you can walk (or run), and there are fast transit points which will instantly send you from one area to another.

Oh dear. This is turning into a fan essay. I’ll stop now. On PC, it’s a nice game. It has some bugs, but nothing serious. Buy it.

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303

I think in US english, “adult” means “has naked boobs and swearing in it”…

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304

I’m looking forward to that bit the most.

Last I saw, my PS4 was loading up a massive patch on my shoe-string internet & since then I’ve been to occupied to even look at any games time.
If exploration is less affected by old-gen consoles then I’ll still enjoy myself once I can settle into it & snoop around. (Given I’m nearly as ancient as @Polyphemus, I still recall a time when graphics meant ‘some sort of image’ & pixels were the size of a refrigerator) :grin:

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305

I recall a time when the box art looked nothing like the actual game because…well, who would have bought it if they had known the game consisted of a couple of rectangles and squares fireing square dots… :laughing:

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Elite Dangerous is taking this comment personally… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

1920×1080 463 KB

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Some times the box art did indeed appear pretty random, not unlike novel covers, but most of the time they were really just for helping your imagination. As were the overly long and often beautiful manuals.

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Nothing much has changed really, we just deal with it differently :slight_smile:

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Back in the 1970s I was a firefighter with Merseyside Fire Brigade. The Brigade was run by the Municipal Authority, Merseyside Council, and they (the Council, not the Fire Brigade) had a mainframe computer (I never actually saw the thing - minions like me weren’t allowed anywhere near it).

But the Brigade did have a couple of Wyse terminals that connected to it. We officially used them for things like training records and breathing apparatus maintenance schedules.

I say “officially” because if you knew the right people, you could get a special password. And that would give you access to data storage areas the technicians knew about, but the office administrators didn’t.

One of the things you could access was the very first computer game I ever played. And it had no pictures at all - just text. It was called “Adventure”, and it involved typing simple commands to explore a system of caves.

Well it may have been simple, but at the time, I thought it was wonderful. I was hooked, and have been ever since. When the first home computers started to become available in the 1980s, I was a very early adopter.

I suppose my point is that graphics can be over-rated. As the veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke once said “I prefer radio to TV. On the radio, the pictures are better.”

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310

Is that the one that starts with a mailbox?

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It’s a long time ago. I remember something about a well house for a large spring. And there was something about Y2 and Ynot - and there was a snake and a bird… and it was 40 years ago.

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Seems to me that I played something similar on a Dec Vax in the early 1980’s. It was exciting.

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Zork is perhaps the most known. I have the DOS series.

I never tried the play by email games but I know people who have.

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Aha. Thank you for this. This is the one I remember:

The version I played was just called “Adventure” - there was no mention of colossal caves in the title - which is probably why I haven’t been able to find it since.

Back in the day, mainframe engineers would copy these things amongst themselves, and install them on computers without the customer’s knowledge. In those days computers were very expensive, and were staffed by technicians 24/7, in case something went wrong. And bored technicians will find ways to amuse themselves…

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315

You were eaten by a grue… :rofl:

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“Hello Sailor”

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Ooh, I heard of these text adventures, even though I never played the originals. I started out with the next game generation which was called MUD on unix/linux servers.

It was even multiplayer! You could be one of different fantasy races and have different classes and skills, and walk around and stab rats and dragons.

I was a lemurian thief specialised as bard, in other words a kleptomaniac fish-person that could recharge fellow players‘ points by singing motivational songs – it was a horribly ineffective class/race combination, but I always had enough gold to pay for skill progression! :stuck_out_tongue:

Every place was on a regular (graphing paper like) grid, but there could be code typos that teleported you miles away, instead of to the next grid square - quite disorienting if you don’t actually “see” anything and have to read text descriptions.

Being a fish person, I could walk across the bottom of the ocean and cartograph it. … I typed “go west” 100 times, and the game said “You are at the bottom of the ocean. You see: a fish. You can go north, east, south, west.”, 100 times. :laughing: I also cartographed more exciting things on land, don’t worry. :wink:

Thinking back, text adventures prepared me perfectly for No Man’s Sky!! :laughing:

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Y’all giving me the nostalgic feels! I was a huge adventure game fan as a kid. Played many Scott Adams text adventures on my TI computer, and the Zork series on the school’s Apple 2e. Played a bunch of the other Infocom games on my Amiga in high school… still have the boxes sitting on a shelf with all their original goodies inside. In college I discovered MUDding, ultimately joining with a great group of folks to run our own MUD. Taught myself C working on that project, and co-authored a builder’s guide that became reasonably popular among Merc mappers. Ahh, the memories!

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Thanks! I suspect that I started out on Zork/Dungeon.

Supnik released his version in January 1978,[16] which was ported to many platforms. The source for these versions were taken in the era when the original game was still known as Dungeon .[10][14] The Fortran version of Dungeon was widely available on DEC VAXes, being one of the most popular items distributed by DECUS,[12] and incorporated features and changes from the original muddle version.

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The one appeal for me was using my imagination to interpret the text setting, it was a very different engagement than the hyper realistic graphics that followed when the hardware developed enough.

At the age of 14 back in 1988, I programmed on a ZX Spectrum 128k, a small text based adventure called Minstrel’s Minion.
Small map, and you had to collect and reunite various items with their rightful owner, to open up a hidden block in the grid map to complete the game.

Its converted now and available to play in a browser:
http://minstrel.flcl.co/

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Tweeted out New Year’s Eve. Clever clue for ES6 setting or a red herring?

IMG_20210103_190500
IMG_20210103_1905004032×3024 1.5 MB

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