Brilliant Gameologists Forum
General Gab => Off Topic Fun => : X-Codes July 05, 2011, 08:33:41 AM
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TL; DR I'm looking for a decent game, preferably adventure(/RPG), preferably Mac compatible, that is preferably either free to download, has a free demo, or some similar deal (if it's not free, then I can probably spring a few bucks, but only on a really awesome recommendation...). I've already played Minecraft, Terraria, and Dungeons and Dragons Online to the extent that I'm going to.
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A little over a month from now, I'm going to be moving 4/5 timezones away. I do still need to get a job and such lined up there, but there's not a whole lot I can do about that when it's ~2pm here and everyone there is already home for the day. As such, for the remaining 8-12 hours I'm awake beyond that point, I need to find something to waste my time on.
I recently played Minecraft, but don't have the inspiration/motivation to build much beyond the little hut I usually go with. I expected the recent update to contain more "adventure" content such that I could really see some value in continuing a game past exploring the first big cave I find, but that got pushed back a patch (so it might not even come out before D3).
Frustrated with the lack of adventure, I switched over to Terraria. In Terraria, I found the exact opposite extreme: Lots of great adventure content, but not a whole lot to do back at home. There's also something of a grind factor involved, too, since it takes so much time just to make basic stuff. You basically go through all this for the sake of upgrading your gear to the top levels and then play interior decorator until you get bored. What's more, with the current patch of Terraria, the mid-game content is kinda screwy. The difficulty makes significant jumps from surface to caves to corruption, making it difficult to get into the game for the first time.
When I started getting bored with Terraria, I read a thread on here, remembered an old DDO account I had, and started playing that again. That said, soloing in DDO gets really boring really fast, and the party-oriented content in DDO is, I dare say, vastly inferior in quality to WoW. I know, DDO is free and all, but it came out a couple years after WoW. They should, at least, be able to come close in terms of quality content to WoW, but they really don't. The game is "free" only in the sense that you can get everything for free if you play the game CONSTANTLY, and most of the higher-level content is only unlockable through this horrible grind process, and judging from what I see on the forums, the end-game content might even be worse than what I'm doing now.
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Dwarf Fortress?
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Dwarf Fortress?
*looks it up*
Oh hell, I remember this game... I hear good things about it, but I can't seem to figure it out myself. Kinda goes with the territory of not even being able to recognize the world. I guess I can give it another go, though.
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If you didn't play Cave Story or Iji yet - do it. They're extremely good freeware titles. They probably won't last long, since you can finish each in a few hours... but they're too good not to pass.
If you are a (moderate) masochist, try La Mulana as well. Or just go with Spelunky - it's La Mulana AND a roguelike in one huge timewaster of a game.
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Dwarf Fortress?
*looks it up*
Oh hell, I remember this game... I hear good things about it, but I can't seem to figure it out myself. Kinda goes with the territory of not even being able to recognize the world. I guess I can give it another go, though.
The fun part is playing through it mostly blind. it can be fairly trivial to go on forever otherwise.
The real fun is with pumps, mechanisms and unlimited power supplies though.
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Dwarf Fortress?
*looks it up*
Oh hell, I remember this game... I hear good things about it, but I can't seem to figure it out myself. Kinda goes with the territory of not even being able to recognize the world. I guess I can give it another go, though.
The fun part is playing through it mostly blind. it can be fairly trivial to go on forever otherwise.
The real fun is with pumps, mechanisms and unlimited power supplies though.
I really don't find it fun. I mean, you're not just playing the game blind, but you're doing so while simultaneously having to tell these dwarves to do every little thing short of wiping their own asses. Who knows, maybe you have them wipe their asses later on in the game. After spending half an hour looking for a base site that may or may not be useful, spending another half an hour assigning skills that you really have no idea the function of, and then sitting for half an hour with the game on pause trying to figure out what you're even looking at in your base camp, I really just don't have the patience for it anymore.
EDIT: Just learned that Dungeon Keeper is a DOS game, and I have it already...
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Less adventure and more RPG, but more time wasters I have always loved the old school feel of spiderweb games (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/).
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Less adventure and more RPG, but more time wasters I have always loved the old school feel of spiderweb games (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/).
Ooo, nearly forgot about those. Exile 3 was awesome.
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Less adventure and more RPG, but more time wasters I have always loved the old school feel of spiderweb games (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/).
Ooo, nearly forgot about those. Exile 3 was awesome.
Yea, 3 was always my favorite.
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Spiderweb Software makes awesome games. It's too bad I don't have the money to actually register any of them, the demos only last me about 5-10 hours of gameplay time.
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How about ADOM?
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It hurts the eyes. That's what.
I guess I can give it a go. It's better than Dwarf Fortress at the very least. Why can't people spend a little extra time to get these graphics up to the level of... I don't know... Ultima I?
[spoiler](http://www.adamantyr.com/crpg/images/ult2.png)[/spoiler]
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Well, short of full blown graphics, ADOM and similar roguelikes have a lot more information in a given ASCII object than their tile versions, once you learn to 'see the Matrix'.
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Here (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) is a more graphic dwarf fortress, and here (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/DFGtutorial.php) is where it says what you need to do for mac.
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Spiderweb Software makes awesome games. It's too bad I don't have the money to actually register any of them, the demos only last me about 5-10 hours of gameplay time.
Yea, that's why 3 was my favorite... It had by far the most expansive demo, especially if you got the flying orb and explored around long enough for the mage tower down in exile to explode.
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Well, short of full blown graphics, ADOM and similar roguelikes have a lot more information in a given ASCII object than their tile versions, once you learn to 'see the Matrix'.
Um... if you simply made a different tile for every ASCII object, you'd give out just as much information and not force people to "see the Matrix." The whole idea here is that these designers are just substituting ASCII objects for map tiles, and the result is an interface that I'm not going to bother learning because it's so overtly absurd.
Here (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php) is a more graphic dwarf fortress, and here (http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/DFGtutorial.php) is where it says what you need to do for mac.
While it helps to not be literally blind when playing Dwarf Fortress, I still have no idea whatsoever what the various skills are for. Spending a month slogging through a game just to learn how it works isn't fun.
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Different strokes I guess. Remember, lots of these are one-man or limited resource teams. There really IS insufficient art resources to make them more informative than ASCII.
For example, looking at a red '&', I know its a demon, and of what general power.
A yellow H is a hill giant, a grey H is a stone giant. Green i are to be killed on sight because they are claw bugs that breed, bleed and shred armor, etc. An l that changes color every turn is a karmic lizard, which is a lot more dangerous than a regular lizard. A D that changes color every turn is a karmic dragon, which is "oh shit run". etc.
Would take far more effort to put in a tileset with the same depth of content.
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how about going into the STALKER Series with STALKER CLEAR SKY, its one of the hardest game's out there but one of the most immersing and indepth, and intriguing games
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nethack (http://www.nethack.org/), Fun times I've had with that one! :D
Of course Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 are superb! :thumb I hear they can legimately be downloaded for free nowadays.
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Whether or not it's done legitimately, I tried playing Fallout 1 on DOSBox and it was tough to navigate the interface, but it actually seemed to work. Unfortunately, I was rather quickly dispatched after getting ambushed by a half-dozen Radscorpions.
I've been screwing around with Linux recently, found out that Wine can go on OSX (and got it there after much aggrivation), figured out the easy way to do it about 5 minutes after I got Wine installed (PlayOnMac), and am now looking to download/install The Witcher from a disk that I've got. Between that and Minecraft (somewhat more interesting to play now, although I was hoping there would be better content in this latest patch), I've got myself pretty occupied.
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How about Touhou? We've got 7 titles ported over with minimal trouble* (http://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&ix=c1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=touhou+mac+port), and we could always use more
mindless drones casual players.
*There's an issue with the dialogues of ESoD, MoF, SA, and UFO. It's nigh unreadable for some reason, but that content is available online. And TD is still untranslated.