So far Thief is amazing, loving the old pixelated Quake 1/2 and Jedi Knight look, haha. Can't wait to get through this and Thief 2 now (I hear it's coming to GoG soon as well). Even though I did get that one working on my PC in the past, may as well buy it when it hits.

The music at times reminds me a lot of the original Half-Life. But yeah, Thief's music and sound design in general and incredible. Crazy level design as well like I've always heard. I may not love the Dark Engine, but they sure as hell did some complex stuff with it for this and SS2.

It doesn't take too long. After a while, when you can afford a ship, start exploring the other three continents and the surrounding islands. On those islands you'll find sign posts, and interacting with them will boost a particular attribute. You can't interact with the same sign post more than once without interacting with a different sign post. You'll end up sailing between pairs of sign posts repeatedly to grind up two attributes at a time.

One special sign post gives out a weapon. Every time you interact with it it'll give you a weapon that is one better than the previous one. It starts out by giving you something shit like a dagger, but in the end it'll give you the best weapon in the game.

Are you playing Thief Gold? the levels it adds really help balance out the monster fighting levels.
The mage towers may be my facourite level, not to mention easily 1.5 hours of playtime.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I was very fond of the monster fighting levels, especially Down in the Bonehoard. The atmosphere is just chilling and the exploration is a ton of fun. The Gold levels I didn't like too much. Too gimmicky the levels, not that well thought out. Especially the mage towers I found too dull.

Yeah Gold is the version up on GoG so I'm playing that. I just got to the Boneyard, I think "WTF" sums up my reaction to some of the stuff in this game... in a good way. Those weird monsters, the caves I'm in look like the flesh levels from SS2, and medieval camera's? I had no idea this game was going to be weird as hell with all these weird neo-gothic fantasy elements. But I'm loving that a ton about it. It's probably creepier than Penumbra, Amnesia, etc, haha.

Started playing Trine the other day. Pretty fun so far, the puzzles are entertaining and the leveling up + combat adds a fun action RPG dimension. The presentation is good too, more than I was expecting.

Speaking of Ultima, anyone remember the Underworld games? They were boss when I was younger, though they probably wouldn’t hold up enough today to warrant replaying.

What? It holds up far better today than the previous Call of Duty game does. It was one of the first RPGs with a dialogue tree system, it has fantastic level design, it has plenty of side quests and optional content and it has a decent story. These are all things modern gamers seem to like. It even has an auto-map!

Oh don't get me wrong, I loved those games to death. The first one particularly had great atmosphere. I feel like the combat will probably seem a bit clunky these days, but maybe I'll boot up DOSBox and have a go at it.

Yeah, it is clunky. But then again it's no more horrible than Oblivion's.

To be fair, I haven't really played any games made in the last decade so I probably won't even notice.

Ultima Underworld is awesome, shame they dont make dungeon crawlers like that anymore

Ugh screw those damn zombies or skeletons or whatever they were, been too long.

I stopped playing Thief when I got stuck in a level and couldn't figure out where to go.

HOLY WATER ARROWS!

Ultima Underworld was awesome, aged better than System Shock I'd say... I still don't' know if I can get into that one. The interface in UU wasn't bad at all. I still need to check out UU2 sometime.

Ultima Underworld II was nice for the graphics improvement, but I think they might have overreached a bit in world design. It's a lot bigger, but I recall it didn't feel quite as fleshed out and full as the first. Mind you, it's been 16 or 17 odd years since I played them.

From what I remember Shutdown saying it sounded like a big improvement, looks like it too based off pictures with the bigger screen, and more varied environments. The environments did get a little tiresome and repetitive in the first game after awhile. I never manged to beat it actually though, but I got to the 8th (final?) floor I think. Last thing I remember was fighting some insane brown monster on this big square, then this one area was like a jumping Mario maze with lava pits, holy crap it was awful. lol

On Thief: Really now, learn your swordplay. Zombies are supereasy to deal with after that. Two overhead blows and they go down. Sure they get up too, but only after a while and sometimes they stay down until disturbed. I usually try to play without being detected at all, but if you get frustrated with not finding your way or not getting where you're supposed to, just hack your way through. Of course, can't do that on Expert with humans, but you can't really get stuck in those levels either in the same way. The only really difficult monsters to actually beat were... Well, I won't spoil.

I started playing this terranigma game for SNES. Anyone know anything about it? I was shocked to have never heard of it before.

It's fairly obscure; it was released in Europe, but never in North America. Developed by Quintet, it's a pseudo-sequel to the more well-known Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia.

It's pretty awesome.

Terranigma is a great game. I think it's already been mentioned in here.

I finally beat Terranigma myself last year, then played Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. To be honest I know I'm in the minority on this, but I don't really care for Gaia at all. The story and characters were flat out awful, and the game/level design was super tedious throughout a lot of the game. You had to do very specific and obscure things like find this hidden switch in the ground you can't see at all, talk to X dude at this house for who knows why, etc. Soul Blazer I liked a lot more even though it was even simpler, but it was just straight up more fun to me.

Terranigma has some of that weird game design at times, but it's so much better and so worth it. Probably one of the most cinematic SNES experiences out there, it was crazy. Damn good OST as well.


Yeah the overhead swing seems pretty good. Zombies aren't bad at all. I am having a problem with the game mechanics off and on, enemies will just slowly gravitate towards you if you're backed in a corner or trying to hide, and I just can't get their vision or the light down so far. I'm watching some LP off and on over at youtube to compare things in some of the levels I've done and half the stuff he does, I'd get caught if I did that. So he's either getting lucky or just knows the mechanics.

Hard to explain I guess. It just seems kind of clunky off and on compared to sneaking around in Deus Ex or something.

I agree that Illusion of Gaia is not that good. Neither is SoulBlazer, really, but it still had some charm in its simplistic straightforward hack-and-slashing.

I didn't get into Terranigma much. I got stuck somewhere years ago and never bothered to play again, I just wasn't motivated.

Anyone picked up Jagged Alliance: Back In Action yet? It's out on steam from today.

If it's well received I might pick it up after my rerun through the Greatest RPG series of All Time, Quest For Glory. I'm almost done with the 2nd one so that might be a while with three to go.

That would mean two to go then, right? ...What do you mean, "Dragon Fire"? That never happened!

Dragon Fire wasn't too bad. Last time I only made it halfway through as a magic user when I got bored with it, so I might try another class this time.

Has anyone here played Gorky 17?

Gonna give that Kingdoms of Amalur game a go. I've been told it's solid at what it does (action RPG with lots of loot), even though it's generic and stuff.

I played the demo and it reminded me of Fable quite a lot with the way the game played. I couldn't bring myself to give a shit at all about the story for some reason and just blazed through all of the dialogue really quickly and didn't feel like talking to NPCs at all. I'll concede that I was probably being unfair, but it just didn't seem like something I was interested in at all.

I also heard it was like Fable (yuck), but another friend compared the fun level to Diablo 1/2/Guild Wars, so I'm gonna benefit-the-doubt it.

The Fable comparison definitely makes me a little hesitant about it myself.

I'm waiting for my copy of this game, gonna play it as soon as i have some time. Demo was really good, KoA totally suprised me, i had no idea what kind of game it was supposed to be. Mixture of Elder Scrolls style exploring and God of War combat sounds interesting enough for me. Story and the whole lore seems to be a really generic fantasy yeah, but KoA doesn't seem very story centered game, so i couldn't care less. Cant say anything about Fable comparison, never played that one, though i've heard people say graphics remind of that game.

So after about my fourth failed attempt to get Tactics Ogre: LUCT based on all the praise in this thread, I just threw up my hands and got FFT instead. Y'all seem to jizz about that one roughly an equal amount. Strategy games aren't really my forte, so hopefully I can stick with it. It's not that I don't like them, I do, I just suck really really badly at them.

Which version of LUCT did you get?

The PSP remake is supposed to be a lot easier. I mean, the whole "you can rewind to any point within the past 50 moves" is basically a game-breaker, but if you suck it could be helpful used sparingly.

Not sure which is harder...I might say FFT but I'm so used to SRPGs that I can't tell anymore.

Yeah I played it, it's like Resident Evil plus XCOM or something. It's quite fun, though it gets a little too easy toward the end once you figure out how to exploit the enemies' weaknesses. Definitely worth playing if you enjoy strategy games, plus it's got survival horror elements.

I've been trying to get the PS1 version but the only version I got of it that worked was in Japanese. No other files have worked and I can't really spare the money to buy it for real right now. I know almost nothing about it and am only interested because of how much love it gets here.

From what Xeo and people have said, the PSP remake made it a lot easier, so you were probably playing an ultra difficult SRPG.

Well since I suck so legendarily hard at SRPGs, maybe I should just hold off on it for a while until I get better with the genre. My brother has a PSP but I can't think of the last time I saw it, I'm fairly sure he hasn't bought a game for it in at least two years.

Jeanne d'Arc is a great and relatively simple and easy SRPG for the PSP, if you need an introduction to the genre. Probably the best game on the PSP imo.

I second Jeanne d'Arc, that was quite a cool game.