Another week, another truckload of gaming press releases. Bioware announces their new downloadable content for their Dragon Age RPG, “The Darkspawn Chronicles”. Meant as an alternate story – one where your character from Dragon Age: Origins and Awakening dies during the Grey Warden initiation – here you command the forces of the Darkspawn against the remnants of the forces of Light, led by the man who wouldn’t be king, Alistair. ...
I loved the IDEA of a modern, casual update to the classic Infocom adventure game, Zork. The devious puzzles, the humor, the sense that something wondrous (or at least hilarious) was right around the corner, but mostly the puzzles. We’d get together in UNH’s McConnell computer cluster and try to figure them out – for HOURS. Then try out our guesses on that creeky old VAX up in the engineering lab. ...
I’ve been thinking of swapping my sidekick in Legends of Zork from the Gent (who made me essentially immune to traps) to the Accountant (who earns interest on your stash) for awhile. It kinda disappointed me that they nerfed her – it used to be that having her in your base would soon make you rich as Croesus. Not so much anymore, but as each upgrade now costs well over a million zorkmids, I need all the help I can get. And I can switch back to the Gent later on, once I’ve reached my goals and seeded the clan bank with some good upgrades for others. ...
Actually, the folks at Jolt claimed to have fixed group quests for this hands-off browser RPG weeks ago, and maybe they did, but my first couple experiences with it were just our group wiping to every single monster and coming out of the whole thing missing a lot of action points and with no xp or loot. I was invited to start another one yesterday, and the experience (pun unintended) is so much better – here’s the log from our first session: ...
Yeah, I know Legends of Zork is a “ProgressQuest”-like achiever game where you grind meaningless combat again and again to earn gold for gear that you will wear so you can return to the grind to replace it. But aren’t most RPGs like that? Just because you know there’s a man behind the curtain, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the show. It’s like five minutes a day to kill my thirty monsters… um, plus the half hour to make spreadsheets analyzing the various combinations of weapons, spells and armor to be most effective. ...
On February 17th, 1980, around 10PM, I was so frustrated with some puzzles in Dungeon (which would later become Infocom’s flagship game, Zork), that I found out where on the University of New Hampshire’s engineering school’s VAX-11/780 the game was installed, and printed out all the text in the game, hoping that would give me some CLUE to the devilish puzzles. I still have that printout, covered with my scrawled notations and maps. Why I’ve kept that printout over twenty-nine years – longer than many of my friends have been alive – I don’t really know, but there it is. I look at those words and remember nights spent in the lab learning about programming sound, graphics, user interfaces and compilers, but late at night after all the homework was done, trying to solve yet another puzzle in Dungeon. ...
Ready to return to the last days of the Great Underground Empire and carve bloody Zorkmids from the flesh of every goblin you find? Are you prepared to match wits with a troll? And if not, why not? They aren’t very bright and let’s face it, if YOU think the stench is bad, think of how THEY feel. They have to live with it ALL THE TIME. Killing them would be doing them a FAVOR. Especially those holding shiny treasures; those are the ones who need your help the MOST, because the shiny treasure only continually reminds them of how wretched they are compared to you, the best the Frobozz Magic Company has to offer. You just might be one of the Legends of Zork! ...