Pool of Radiance: Continuing
Comments(4) According to my self-imposed schedule, I should be moving on to 1989 this weekend. This may not happen. I think I’m pretty close to the end of Pool of Radiance, and want to polish it off before moving on. More importantly, looking ahead, I see that there are three games on the Stack for 1990: Might and Magic II, Wizardry VI, and Secret of the Silver Blades, the third of the SSI Gold Box games. I prefer to play series in order when possible, and the only one of these where I could plausibly do that in two weeks is Silver Blades, and that only if I manage to finish Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds in that time. But I think this is doable; as I mentioned before, I spent much of the beginning of the current two-week block lallygagging. Also, importing some level-6 (or higher) characters into Azure Bonds can be expected to make it go faster. But we’ll see.
Don’t let your fun or principles be thwarted by the commitment you made. Play the games in order, but beware: COTAB and SOTSB continually get more hack’n’slashy and linear. COTAB I like because of the 5 different parts, SOTSB is weaker than the first two. If you have Pools of Darkness, that game is clearly the very best of the quadrilogy.
But it is best to play the games in order.
I’ve just looked up your list on Google Docs.
I wanted to write a mail, but this will have to do since I couldn’t find your address.
I don’t know if it’s important to you, but, for example, Chrono Trigger was released in 1995, not 1991.
Also, you’ve got Eye of the Beholder II, which is also a candidate for playing after part one, if you haven’t yet.
I was interested if you’ve played the older Bard’s Tale games, since Dragon Wars is on there.
*nosyness off*
COTAB is nonlinear, very fun and quite difficult because of it. Suspension of disbelief hits hard. For instance, you know that in real life, if six guys attack an enemy base, the alarm is raised, the personnel rallies and kicks their asses. Not so in most old games: wandering from room to room killing inhabitants has been a staple of D&D since forever, and people seriously didn’t mind. On the other hand, it’s expected that random encounter mobs spawn endlessly, while in real life a base hold a finite amount of people (until reinforcements arrive). Thus, the player is metagaming, not living in the gameworld but solving a logical puzzle.
And then, there’s a town where you can actually pick guards one by one and reduce their numbers until the “plot” encounter is like three guys and not the rapefest it used to be if you rush straight in to save resources. So in order to win, you have to outright *guess* when the game will use abstractions and when it will try hard to model reality. Metagaming^2. Still, a neat game.
Looks like I had the wrong date for FF6 as well. No idea what happened there.
Eye of the Beholder I isn’t in the list because I’ve already finished it; I played it when it was relatively new. This was long enough ago that it may be worthwhile to play it again to refresh my memory before going on the the second part.
And yes, I also played the original Bard’s Tale trilogy way back when.