Because the kids are less than thrilled with the graphics in Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord -- even I'm a little taken aback because the graphics are different from those on the Apple IIe -- they're not interested, and I'm free to do whatever I want with those characters, though I do plan on showing them the battle against Werdna.
It's also even more brutal than I remember, possibly because we used the identify cheats back in the day. The "evil" group died on the stairwell between the 4th and 5th levels, and then the "good" group, while getting strong enough to go after the evil group, died on the third level**, so a third group needed to level up to the point where they could recover the good group. Finally, Gandalf (our original "good" mage) has learned Malor and we can start retrieving the evil group (because Gandalf will always try to save Saruman).
So let me back up a moment. In some ways, Proving Grounds makes modern CRPGs look like they were designed for sissies, because nowadays you can always revert to a previous save. OTOH, in modern CRPGs, you also only get one party/storyline, and if you make bad choices in character development early on, you can hose yourself down the road (Wizardry 8 and Dragon Age: Origins are especially guilty here), and starting over means a couple dozen hours of mind-numbing repetition of the quests you just completed with the first character. By contrast, in Proving Grounds, you build up a stable of characters and can easily mix and match your party as you determine the "optimal" group, and leveling up a new batch of characters to where they're useful is only a few hours of mind-numbing dungeon crawling.
** the Samurai with 18 Luck keeps getting decapitated; after one battle in which he was beheaded, we ran for the stairs to the second level and were surprised by Rotting Corpses and Grave Mists. Two characters paralyzed in round 1; the other three in round two; TPK. Good times.
That's one of only issue I take with the giant Bethesda 'RPG-esque' games (fallout3,falloutNV,Oblivion,Skyrim) I love all these games, but essentially there is ONE path to character development; not because there is only one choice, but because once chosen you're locked in for the duration. Sometimes this doesnt matter, but often it means that any misstep gets to haunt you forever.
ReplyDelete