Saturday!
A million years ago, if you were stuck in a place where you couldn’t even imagine getting enough kids together for a D&D group and really, seriously, desired to get into the whole “man, I wanna play a game of D&D!” thing, you pretty much had but so many options.
Foremost, of course, were the gamebooks of Steve Jackson.
Specifically, the Sorcery! (exclamation point included!) gamebooks.
The basic idea was that you’d buy the book (only $3.95!) and have a couple of regular, old six sided die in the house lying around anyway, and be able to sit down with a pencil and paper and have a good, old-fashioned, gaming sesh. Even if you were all by your lonesome.
And, you know what? Even if you didn’t have any die in your household (hey, some don’t!), you could close your eyes, face your head towards the ceiling, then thumb through the book and stop on any given page… and there would be the image of the top of a six-sider for you. Maybe you rolled high. Maybe you rolled low. But you, technically, didn’t even need dice for this sort of thing.
But, seriously, you’d probably want dice. You probably have some in your house *RIGHT NOW*.
Anyway, it was like a Choose Your Own Adventure kinda game mixed in with some serious “Okay, you want to roll dice, do you?” mechanics. Stuff like “you encounter this particular event… how do you repond?” and you choose some variant of belligerent, intellectual, or sneaky and the book would then tell you whether you chose wisely.
For the record, you didn’t.
Anyway, you then started rolling die and figuring out whether you choose to turn to the next appropriate page. At which point you were read a lovely description of the environment, told to make a decision, then given another 3 or so pages to turn to.
And, seriously, if all you had were a bunch of Dragonraid characters pre-made up with no one to play with? That book was the sweetest book ever written.
In any case, the books have been made into IOS/Computer games in the last few years. Specifically, Sorcery 4 has recently come out (and, seriously, if you could only play Sorcery 1-2! and Sorcery 3!, why bother?) and I am now downloading the set and preparing myself for such things as the magic spell that involves putting a gold coin on the back of your hand and then having the benefit of a shield for the next fight. And the best part? I remember that they put weird and silly spells in there.
If you didn’t read the spell book and memorize it, you might find yourself summoning a skeleton! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Anyway, it’s a computerized experience of 1985 (or, if you want to go old-school, an experience experience), and it’ll take you through an epic long-level single-player game and leave you wishing that Steve Jackson was born in 1990 something rather than 1950 something.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
Trade paperbooks selling used for more than a penny on Amazon? They must have been good!Report
They were magnificent.Report
Just got into a cooperative card game called Sentinels of the Multiverse. We are having a blast playing it. It seems to be very good at creating the sort of surprises and tension that an RPG would, but without a GM. It’s no good solo, though.Report
That game is fantastic.Report
@doctor-jay
Sentinels of the Multiverse is a favourite with the group I play with.Report
I’ve played the first two of those Sorcery games, but hadn’t gotten around to playing the third yet. Now the fourth one is out, I’ll have to make some time to play them between finishing my run of Dragon Age Inquition and Civ 6 coming out.Report
Last weekend a strong group of players (and me!) unboxed Pandemic Legacy.
Holy crap was it awesome! We ended up playing five straight games, completely ignoring all other available games, and stopping only when one of us was threatened with divorce if he didn’t come home.
MILES AND MILES better than Risk Legacy.Report
Too bad I didn’t know about those books as a kid. I loved Choose Your Own Adventure and Time Machine books as a kid. I preferred the ones with RPG elements, like the Dungeon and Dragons branded ones, but they seemed few and far between.
I bought Arkham Knight on sale a couple weekends ago. Every Arkham game I’ve started thinking I’m going to get 100% completion. Then, after trying several challenges, I think “oh yeah, this is why I never get 100% on Arkham games”. The story’s entertaining, though. It runs well for me, even on max settings, and I’ve had few issues.Report
Strangely, the Arkham series relationship to 100% competition is weird.
Arkham City had a lot of really hard and annoying challenges to get 100%. But I did it, and I’m hardly an action guy.
Arkham Origins had the stupid situation that there were certain challenges you could only do *at certain points in the game*. Areas would get closed off and you couldn’t go back. So if you missed them without knowing it, the only solution was to *play the entire game again*.
It additionally had challenges based on fight situations that you could not find in free play after the game…aka, you had to play the game over again to get those, but what was even worse there that was literally a finite (but unknown) number of chances to do those things in those situations. At least with the ‘collect a thing before leaving the area’, you could use a guide to know do that….no one ever made a guide that said ‘Oh, here is one of the six places in entire game where you can do this combo move and complete this challenge’…and if you screw that up, you better hope the game didn’t autosave before you reloaded a previous save to try again.
Arkham Origins 100% was…incredibly stupidly designed. When I figured out what was going on, I didn’t even try. I’ll *go back* to get 100%, but I refuse to do it their way.
Also, hilariously, they bugged one of their puzzles, and it was possible to get trapped in a room *forever*. (Single-slot autosave…the thing that makes me want to track down console players and slap them around for being okay with that, and then it *infecting* PC games.)
Arkham Knight was back to a sane approach, and for some reason they toned down a lot of the challenges. A lot of the timing elements were gone, the crazy ‘throw six batrangs at six different things in 4 seconds’ nonsense.
The hardest ones left were the batmobile ones, but the batmobile, outside of combat, is one of those things that it’s very easy to play entirely wrong and make things much harder for yourself. I.e., race in *first person*, and suddenly driving up walls and whatnot is much easier to understand. (The batmobile *in* of combat is just one of those things you have to keep playing until you get good at it. The only hint I have is don’t think of it like combat, think of it like dodgeball. Your job is to constantly not get shot…shooting them is what you do in between not getting shot.)
I eventually got 100% in that, also.
EDIT: And I left Asylum off for some reason, probably because I barely remember it. It was basically Arkham City, but way, way toned down…I seem to remember that with most of the Riddler’s clues, the only ‘puzzle’ was finding them.Report
Huh, that never occurred to me. Thanks! Trying to dodge obstacles while driving on the wall has been one of the points of frustration for me.
I seem to have the most trouble with the hand-to-hand challenges where you have to rack up enough points in a limited number of rounds. I know you have to use as many different moves and gadgets as possible, I just have difficulty working them in during combat.Report
Huh, that never occurred to me. Thanks! Trying to dodge obstacles while driving on the wall has been one of the points of frustration for me.
I’m one of those players that, when I get frustrated with something, I tend to assume I’m being dumb, and playing it wrong, and I just randomly change what I’m doing.
This usually accomplishes nothing, except causing me to understand things better, so that when I go back to trying to solve it the correct way, it’s magically become easier.
But sometimes I actually *am* playing it wrong.
Switching into first person that was…holy crap. I no longer have to try to figure out the directional controls for a car that’s almost upside down…or even entirely upside down! The very first time i switched, I had died like 20 times on a Riddle challenge and 90% of the time dying at a certain point, and the rest of the time dying after…and I switched POVs and just drove right through that point and the second point, and finished it entirely like three time later.
I seem to have the most trouble with the hand-to-hand challenges where you have to rack up enough points in a limited number of rounds.
Are you talking about Arkham City? The Riddle Challenge thing? Yeah, I’m no good at those either. (At least, not earning enough *points* in them.) But the good news is, those do *not* count towards 100%.
OTOH, there a few of those in Arkham Orgins, and, as I said, not only are those towards 100% completion, but are annoying *as hell*, because a few of the situations you literally cannot *find* in free play, or in any of the (very lackluster) ‘challenges’ to actually do. I seem to recall something like ‘grab two people over a railing’ and stuff like that.
Of course, now that we’re talking about it, I start to get back pissed off about their incredibly obvious oversight of ‘Hey, how about letting me play the boss battles again? Let me select what tools I’ve upgraded to, throw me into the starting cutscreen, let me play, throw up the ending cutscreen, and then end.’
With their lack of support of doing that, *combined* with the total lack of support of multiple-saves, means that is literally impossible. Hell, they even *inexplicable* encrypt the saves so I can’t download ‘Saved game right before boss battle’ and plop it in.(1)(2) So even if I wanted to swap around saved games files, I’d have to carefully keep track of *my* saved game files and save backups while playing.
What. The. Hell. I’ve beaten the game, *let me do whatever I want*, you assholes. If I want to beat Clayface 10 times in a row, *let me beat Clayface 10 times in a row*. What’s it to you?
I honestly cannot understand the game’s total lack of replayablity, and how later games actually got *worse* at it. At least Arkham City had the challenges you could keep changing and doing.
All the other games seem to be assuming you will literally keep starting the game over and over and play the entire thing, which has, as a very dubious premise, that you find *all* parts of the game equally enjoyable.
1) I discovered this by accident, when installing on a new computer, I restored all my documents, including a 100% completed Arkham City games, and then one day installed that and fired it up, expecting to have free play…nope, they didn’t like those saves, apparently I didn’t get the Games for Windows or Xbox Live or whatever the hell they call it decryption key, Windows made me a new one when installing. I could probably find my old key in the backups, but that would mean anything I did in any *other* game that used that framework (Like the other Arkham games) then wouldn’t decrypt!
2) Can I just point out that, as a single player game, it’s not actually any of their *business* if I cheat or not? If I legitimately couldn’t get past something, they don’t really get any say if I download a save past that point, and in fact it’s being a bit of an asshole demanding that someone who can’t do something *never ever ever* gets to see any of the game (that they *paid* for) past that point.
Multiplayer is something else entirely, I get that, but encrypting the saves of a single-player game is nonsense.Report
Adom did the whole “play it like you mean it, motherfucker”. But adom was free, and you could and did play as many times as you wanted.Report