🚀 go-pugleaf

On 7/2/2017 6:15 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

(Need For Speed SE, for instance, kept me
> wonderfully enthralled for hours and hours).
> 
> I don't know how often I'll be returning to my DOSBox installation,
> but I love that I have such a huge selection available at my
> fingertips, all the more so since the whole thing weighs in at a
> surprisingly light 10GB (less than the 1/3 the space required by one
> modern game!). There are so many classic and often forgotten titles
> from yesteryear and it's always a blast to revisit these archaic
> experiences, both to enjoy the games themselves and to see how far our
> hobby has advanced since those early years.
> 

I know the speed increase settings in Dos Box made Pool of Radiance far 
more playable than it was originally.  That's still pretty poor compared 
to modern games though. I haven't gone back to any other games in recent 
history, except Telengard, which still played surprisingly well for what 
it was, though it still only kept me interested a few hours.

I'm kind of interested in trying Need for Speed SE now as I missed all 
those driving games back in the day.  Although I didn't get very far 
with Carmageddon when I tried it a few months ago.

If you want the *REAL* DOS experience there's always FreeDOS.

I'd be tempted to try win 3.11 again, as it had the fastest/easiest/best 
macro creator & runner I've ever seen.  Of course I probably couldn't 
load anything I need to work on into anything that runs on 3.11.

> What have you been playing... IN JUNE 2017?
> 

Fallout 2
Fallout Shelter
GTA V
Death Skid Marks
Westerado
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Buriedbornes

Fallout 2 (1998 Post Apoc RPG) - I guess it's finally too old for me. 
:(  I was trying to get through a dumb run and a melee run.  Melee was 
just too annoying with people running away.  Dumb was fun at first but 
after not being able to do much I finally got bored with it about 1/3 
through the game.

Fallout shelter (PC Freemium sim) - playing it on the PC works much 
better.  I just eventually found the time delays to play too annoying, 
and no cheats seemed to work to get around them, without changing your 
PC clock, which I didn't want to do.  I'm tempted to try it on an old 
laptop to do that, but not sure if it would run as poorly as it does on 
my phone.

GTA V (xbox 360 - sim?) - Finally got into it on my third attempt to 
play it.  I like it better than IV, but the cops are way too deadly and 
reactive.  It seems way too hard to get money in the game.  I'd like to 
buys some of the business, but you need hundreds of millions of dollars 
for some, which from what I've read just isn't available until the end 
of the game unless you wanted to spend hundreds or thousands of hours 
grinding 5k at about 7 min a piece, or trying to game the stock market 
which seems questionable.  By the time the game's over there's no reason 
to have the business. I miss being able to just cause mayhem to get 
money.  I still miss the cop & fireman missions.  I'm a bit irritated 
that the missions for collecting cars aren't in the game either, as it's 
is GTA after all, what's the point if you can't get paid for doing the 
thing that's the name of the game.  It feels a bit too tight and 
realistic, having lost a lot of the 'fun'.  With all those complaints 
it's still a good game, there's been a lot of laughs, but it's no GTA 
VC.  There's apparently quite an online game which is quite different, 
so I'm thinking of buying it again on PC for the online play.

Death Skid Marks (indy 8bit squad-battle-driving) - Reminds me a little 
bit of the old Spy-Hunter arcade game, which was my 2nd favorite arcade 
game (after Street Fighter 2).  It's got some random 'roguelike' 
elements as you get stores where you can get repairs only randomly.  The 
first game I played I didn't get any for something like 5 fights after 
the first and died of attrition.  The second game I got quite far and 
was killed by the 2nd boss.  It's a fun little indy game, it 
almost-but-not-quite grabbed me.  Thus I only played those 2 games, 
maybe a couple hours.  Still not bad for the less than $2 I payed for it.

Westerado (indy 8bit western/rpg)- I may have not given this game enough 
time, it's got lots of reading quests like a lot of old RPGs, and I got 
tired of slogging through those.  I had one shoot-out I just barely won, 
but that's it before I got bored.  I could see this appealing to me if I 
weren't so spoiled by more modern designed games.

Star Wars: Republic Commando (2005 Squad FPS) - This was the best rated 
of the Star Wars games I got in the huge pack in the previous sale that 
I hadn't played yet, so I thought I'd try it.  It's a decent squad 
shooter.  The mouse control needs some smoothing, it feels a bit 
squirrely, and your starting weapon - some sort of blaster auto-rifle is 
highly inaccurate and does little damage which contributes to the 
feeling.  I might go back and try again with controller to see if it 
feels better.  The squad aspect seems pretty tacked on, you just need 
them to do certain things like hack doors or snipe someone, and they 
don't really help much in a battle.  In general it both looks and feels 
a bit dated. I got a few hours out of this, and got to a bit into the 
Genosian area before I left it. The Genosians are gross and nasty.  I'm 
not into the prequel SW setting so that doesn't do anything for me.

Buriedbornes (Android jp 'rougelike' freemium) - This game has me 
totally hooked, even to the point of often playing it instead of PC 
games at home.  It's a sort of roguelike where you play a single 
character and see how far you can get in a dungeon, you can start as a 
mage, ranger, warrior or priest but can unlock many others through 
actions in the game or with in game money.  You choose a path in a 
dungeons as if you were choosing from 2 cards (rooms) the left or right 
path and you can see some of what's in each room, and if you have 
scouting you can see what's beyond that another room giving you a total 
of 4 paths to take.  You start with a few abilities, and collect more on 
the way, that work with cool-downs on turns that remind me a bit of how 
some of the MMOs.  You also collect 3 items that affect your strength 
and abilities. It's not unusual to change out everything constantly 
until higher level as you keep getting upgrades.  It's originally in 
Japanese and some of the translations are a bit lacking, and it can be 
difficult to figure out just which items are actually best for you, 
although that seems to be a feature of the game choosing between items 
with up to 6 modifiers.  In some cases the Japanese is still there 
without translation, especially on yes-no prompts, but I figured out yes 
is on the right.  This has just the right level of interaction to allow 
me to play while taking a walk on a break.  I can also use one of the 
characters I unlocked - the Moon Queen who has Frenzy naturally, which 
makes your attacks happen randomly and automatically, while you gain 2x 
hp & damage, so it is easier to play her as I just have to chose what 
abilities and items I pick up and can let the fights go on their own. 
The freemium aspect is pretty negligible, there's a banner on the bottom 
(you can pay $2 I think to get rid of that) and you can buy extra in 
game money to help get certain things that you can get just by grinding 
the money.  If you've got any interest in this sort of thing I strongly 
suggest trying it out.

- Justisaur