catacasa
CAGiversary!
Just curious what others think the best RPG ever is...or even what spawned their interest for that genre of gaming. My choice is...
Game: Alternate Reality: The City (PC) (if you count Atari 120XE as a PC)
Released: 1984 (?)
Premise: You are abducted from Earth by aliens and placed in an alien city on another planet. The aliens want to watch how humans interact. (Sound familiar? Ever watched the movie Dark City?)
Pros: AR is a rewarding game that implemented many realistic features unseen in other games for its time. AR has both good and evil (faction based) encounters, a 24-hour day with Inns, Taverns, Smiths, Banks, etc having opened and closed hours, weather, need to wear appropriate clothing or suffer from weather effects, need to sleep, eat, and drink water (you could also get drunk,) and contractable diseases! Your characters were transferable from The City to The Dungeon (the second game in the series.) The music in the Taverns was actually quite impressive with catchy, memorable lyrics (on screen.)
Cons: Extremely difficult. You could die within 5 seconds of starting a character. To make things worse, when you died, your character was erased from the 5.25 floppy he or she was saved on. Getting cash in the game was a chore to start. Damn those prices at the Smithy! The series ended after the second game unfortunately, leaving the additional five games of the series to never see daylight.
The re-make (kind of) for the Atari ST was not as good, but had better graphics and small additions like the ability to work at Taverns for cash. A new version of this game (AR Online or something like that) was in the works back in 1999 I believe, but it never saw daylight either.
Game: Alternate Reality: The City (PC) (if you count Atari 120XE as a PC)
Released: 1984 (?)
Premise: You are abducted from Earth by aliens and placed in an alien city on another planet. The aliens want to watch how humans interact. (Sound familiar? Ever watched the movie Dark City?)
Pros: AR is a rewarding game that implemented many realistic features unseen in other games for its time. AR has both good and evil (faction based) encounters, a 24-hour day with Inns, Taverns, Smiths, Banks, etc having opened and closed hours, weather, need to wear appropriate clothing or suffer from weather effects, need to sleep, eat, and drink water (you could also get drunk,) and contractable diseases! Your characters were transferable from The City to The Dungeon (the second game in the series.) The music in the Taverns was actually quite impressive with catchy, memorable lyrics (on screen.)
Cons: Extremely difficult. You could die within 5 seconds of starting a character. To make things worse, when you died, your character was erased from the 5.25 floppy he or she was saved on. Getting cash in the game was a chore to start. Damn those prices at the Smithy! The series ended after the second game unfortunately, leaving the additional five games of the series to never see daylight.
The re-make (kind of) for the Atari ST was not as good, but had better graphics and small additions like the ability to work at Taverns for cash. A new version of this game (AR Online or something like that) was in the works back in 1999 I believe, but it never saw daylight either.
