/vr/ - Retro Games

>>6071202

>>5995210
The game is this weird hybrid of RPG and adventure game. You run around with the Fellowship of the Ring, starting in Bag End with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin, and you try to make your way to the end of Fellowship intact.

The problems are manifold: Most obstacles are of the nature where you use the skill or appropriate object to bypass it. If there's a chasm, use Jump to get across. If there's a sealed stone slab, use a prybar to work it open. If there's a pack of orcs, kill them. But nothing ever scales to party size or composition or anything. If you have one guy with the Jump skill, you are suddenly able to get over any chasm without any difficulty. As you get more people and acquire more items and skills, you get fewer and fewer things that can meaningfully hurt you, and by the time you get to Rivendell, you should be essentially invincible.

All that being said, there's stuff I absolutely love about it. It discourages grinding, since rewards are scripted; you'll get a stat boost for turning in a quest or finding a magic pool or something, not for chopping up your 542nd orc. It encourages you to avoid fights wherever possible and stick to the objective, which I think should be encouraged more in RPGs. They also, more than anyone I've ever seen before or since, grokked Tolkien's world. They didn't just slavishly reproduce the books, they did add stuff, but the stuff they added fits thematically. You'll find athelas on the west end of old Dunedain ruins. Elves will bitch about the various 'ethnic' distinctions between them. They even put some of Tolkien's constructed languages into the game (There's an area where you can read some old Arthedain tomb inscriptions. If someone in the party has Numenorean Lore, you get the names and a brief mention of their lives in English. If not, you get it in Quenya) In some ways I wish they had put the effort into making a game that worked, but I really admire the effort they obviously put into this.

>>5914883
Pic related has actual Quenya and Sindarin in the game; often times you'll have a branching trigger if say you read an inscription, the game will check if you have a character with the appropriate lore. If you do, it will display the text you read in normal English, if you don't, it will display it in the appropriate Tolkien conlang.

>>5889405
Not a great game, to be honest, but for something slapped together in about 4 months back in the early 90s, it's amazing how well they stuck to the Tolkien lore; they even put stuff in with the constructed languages, which gets "translated" into regular English if you have someone in your party with the appropriate lore skill.

>>5189506
It's not even that good. But it's very comfy.

>>5066279
It's a hybrid adventure/RPG that is loosely based on the Tolkien books. Unlike most adaptation stuff, they really do their homework, down to posting stuff in Tolkien's constructed languages (but only if you need to read something when nobody in the party has the appropriate lore skill), having elves talk about their 'ethnic' conflicts, and the Bree people talking about local gossip.

It's not very hard, especially if you've played it more than once; there's often no reason not to duck a fight, but it's worth a look.

>>4807493

>>4328345
Nobody ever seems to have heard of it, but there was this really old school RPG called Falling Stars. One of the neat things it had was a hidden reputation stat, and the higher your reputation is, the more people are willing to help you, give you quests, join up with you, etc. If you reputation gets too low, too early, it will be impossible to win the game.

While you are told that breaking into houses can lower your reputation, if you say, didn't pay attention early, you can break into enough homes that your reputation can never recover to the point where you even find the minimum you need to win the game. Oops.

Also, don't throw the bag end key away in your game of pic related. You need to give it to Lobelia or she'll have you arrested, and then the Nazgul pay you a visit in the lockholes.

>>4306312
I quite liked pic related. The gameplay aspect is terrible, it's this weird half adventure game half RPG, which fails at both aspects. The combat is dull and lackluster, as the encounters are generally not well balanced to your likely party; and there's very rarely a point to it. Once you've gotten to Rivendell, there's very little htat can actually threaten you. Similarly, the non-combat hazards are very poorly implemented. There's a chasm? You need to jump over it? Well as long as any one dude in the fellowship has the jump skill, you can hop over and back and again and again at zero risk whatsoever. Which means that as you accrue more items and party members with an array of skills, fewer and fewer things can hurt you.

But it is the single best adaptation of Tolkien I have ever seen in my life. As someone who is a nutty Tolkienfag, this level of worldbuilding, not just including things JRRT wrote but actually adding them in so that it works takes my breath away.

>>4181097
I mentioned it in another thread, but I really love this game, despite it being terrible.

It is THE best adaptation of Tolkien I have ever seen. These guys were crazy enough to sit down and write alternate versions of a bunch of the events; so like, for instance, in the Two Towers game, you can come across an old Gondorian tomb. If you look at the gravestones, you can see here lies so and so, and a bit of a blurb about them, as long as someone in the party has the Numenorean Lore skill. If nobody does, you get a text of the same stuff, but in Quenya.

They do things like have Athelas grow on the west side of Arthedanian ruins. They have Silvan elves talk about how the Noldor constantly stir up shit that their lesser kin have to deal with after they get killed. They have dwarves get upset if you use Khuzdul words around them. It's unbelievably crafted, and seriously, I didn't even notice most of this stuff until I became autistic enough to read the History of Middle Earth and delve into all this background.

>>4176714
It's not a classic adventure game, and kind of straddled the line between adventure game and RPG, but I quite liked them. (Admittedly more as amazing tolkien adaptations than great games as games)

>>3711526


Pic related.

But in all seriousness, I would have recommended some of the mid-late Ultimas (7 probably being my favorite), P:ST if you count it as "older", Geneforge, and Falling Stars.

>>3414095

To be honest, as a pure game, it's pretty awful.

But I have never, before or since, seen a better adaptation of Tolkien into some outside format. Athelas is pretty consistently found in the west side of old Dunedain ruins. They actually put in some of Tolkien's conlangs as part of the in-game text if your characters read something that they don't have the appropriate lore skill to decipher. You have elves complaining over differences in their various "ethnicities". It's brilliant, and they REALLY did their homework on this one.

>>1724138


It's not that great, tbh, but I have a soft spot for it. Although, to be fair, I haven't played in a long time. I think I've found literally everything in the game.