Re: What Have You Been Playing... IN APRIL 2025?

On Thu, 1 May 2025 19:57:10 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 01/05/2025 19:30, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Thu, 1 May 2025 14:54:12 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

The Spectrum - Retro

I kinda disagree as it was amazing how quickly many 8-bit games started
coming out that arcade mentality and moved towards this is a home
computer. I loved the likes of Arcadia, Manic Miner and Jetpac but I was
really blown away with Lords of Midnight and only slightly The Forth
Protocol and Enigma force to name but a few. This is the future of
computer games is how I saw it.

Well, I can't speak specifically to the Speccy. It wasn't my device of
choice and I've very little familiarity with its software. But a lot
of the ports to PC and Apple (where I did have familiarity) did suffer
from the problem. There were, of course, exceptions but even in games
like "Zork" you could sense this underlying philosophy; make things as
hard as possible for the player to extend the duration of the game.

>

As one of the players
said it was probably best that they 'retired' as their characters would
never get over being in a town full of killers that are children.

 
Are... are you Richard Garriot in disguise?
 

That went right over my head!

Garriot, developer of the Ultima games, frequently hid rooms in his
dungeons where the only occupants were 'children'. In the above-world
part of the game, these were usually marked as noncombatants, but in
the dungeons they attacked the players. It became something of a
running easter egg for the Ultima games (AFAIK, Ultima 4,5,6,7 and 8
had murder-kid rooms). The apocryphal reason was that it was intended
as a moral challenge to the players (it wasn't plot critical to kill
the kids, and you could just flee or use non-lethal methods to subdue)
but most players just slaughtered the children.