82-T/A

Game has been pretty good so far. Graphics are amazing, and the fights are actually quite good. There seems to be stories within stories, and I've found that I've had to temper what I do for fear that I'll upset one of the party members over the other. What one party member might approve of, is not always something everyone approves of. As a Paladin (Good), I am also more or less obligated to make certain decisions that may upset other party members. There seems to be a lot of discussion of slavery in the game, so as a Paladin I generally need to disadvantage these people and / or attack them outright. There are dozens of potential "party members" as I cheated and looked up more or less a list of them. They can all be convinced to join your party at one point or another. You can include them or leave them in your "camp" which I find interesting. As of this point, I don't have any stragglers... meaning that I've flat-out rejected anyone except the people immediately in my party. There can only be 4 total people, and I've taken the vampire thief, the cleric lady, the wizard, and myself (who is a Paladin). Another thing I noticed... not to offend anyone, but apparently every single male character is gay (if you're playing a male character I guess). Like... apparently you can romance them (from the IGN page that shows the character list). Alternately, there are only 2 female characters that you could potentially do this with, but like 9 male characters. I mean... I guess this is just what it is with WOTC today, but I found it odd. I'm not going down that path, but I'm having to constantly say things that are "less than nice" because some of the phrases are interpreted as encouraging a "relationship" with these male characters. I'm not aware of any positives to having a relationship with someone in the game other than the story building, but I have noticed that it affects your character's performance when someone with a very high "emotion" toward you is gravely injured. It causes a disability roll if you will against you for future attacks (probably not the best way to word it). Either way, the game has been pretty cool, and I hate myself for getting into it. I'm shooting through it quickly, but there's a lot of smaller quests and such that an individual could follow along. A lot of hidden things too which I find myself skipping over (but hope to go back to). It really feels like a "find your fate" kind of book, because there's so many possible solutions to a variety of different things. Really... it's probably the closest thing I've seen to one of the original games, Pool of Radiance (SSI Gold Box), where you just have a wildly open world, and you can basically do whatever the heck you want. Most of the other games in between all seem to focus on getting from point A to point B while not having a lot of diversion. So this has been really cool.

I'm happy to hear this. I appreciate what Wade Rosen is doing. I do hope he has deep pockets, because he's rebuilding an empire, but I hope he's not doing it too quickly. But, it's not expensive to buy-back licensing and rights. Either way, glad to see it!

In a lot of the games I used to play in DOS, there were usually two drivers that needed to be loaded... one for the Adlib/MIDI/OPL music, and another for SFX. So I'd imagine that it's just a programming issue, more than it has anything to do with the cards. My guess... Atari (then) probably tried to rush it out at the time, and didn't put a whole lot of effort into little things like that.

Oh dude... I really do like this. It definitely doesn't have the RLL sound, but it does emulate well the later 486-era IDE drives.

We used to take our graphics cards for granted back then. But like Sauron is implying, I think you should consider upgrading your graphics card. The link I posted above for the $50 dollar one uses one of the higher-end Cirrus Logic processors. It's literally one step down from the $150 one I also posted next to it. It really does make all the difference in the world. Like I mentioned, if you notice graphics "skipping," then it's the graphics card. If you notice graphics going incredibly slow, then it's the processor. But really, you should be busting out a came of Scorched Earth on that and call it a day! Haha...

Ugh, the game is good. I'm so pissed at myself for getting into this damn game. Like, I wouldn't have even bought it myself... but now I'm addicted to it.

If you're missing the .exe file that enables the cache for whatever reason, I have the latest version of it. I have a 386 SX-25 that was upgraded to a 486 DLC-25 Cyrix processor also. Just let me know and I can e-mail it to you.

Hahaha... yeah, I can tell the sexual undertones are hard-core. The troll lady was pissed that I freed the elf lady, and the elf lady keeps going on about how I saved her and all that. Man, these games are hilarious. So far it's been pretty good... but I can tell that as you say, there's a path that takes you down one way, and another that takes you down a different way.

So... I looked up some videos to see what I could expect, man... I guess I'm from a different time. There's a male-on-male relationship... ok, whatever, but one of them is a mind-flayer, and there's some "odd" activity that occurs during that with the tentacles. Man, I grew up with games like Civilization, Kings Quest, Starflight, Star Control, the AD&D gold box series games. About the naughtiest stuff I saw was when I'd go into the cave on Legend of the Red Dragon BBS door game. Hahah... I think I'll probably play with the mind-flayer sex option turned off.

This is super lame... but I installed one in my 8088 KayPro PC-10. It has an NEC V20 8088 processor, and originally came with a Seagate ST-225 RLL hard drive. The "sound" was every bit what made the computer what I remember it. I saved my original one, but put in a non-working one (hardrive spins, but tons and tons of bad sectors). Removed the old RLL controller, and installed the PC-XT card with a 128mb DOM, and then I still plugged in the Seagate RLL drive... just with power, so it turns on with the power. You hear it running, it doesn't give the beep/boop sounds of loading files, but you still get that disk spinning sound, even though I'm using the DOM. hahah...

This one is really cool! I wonder if someone scanned / transcribed these? I'd love to read these...

That is really nice.

The DOM should help a lot too. I'm nostalgic for the old hard drive sounds, but you just can't beat a 512mb storage capacity on a 386. You can basically load every game you'd possibly want to play on it... and have it load at the fastest speed possible by the processor.

A friend of mine bought me the Deluxe set, and I started playing it. I think I'm bombing so far... I crushed the brain in that dude's head who was telepathically talking to me, and I'm trying to help my second player / character out of a mindflayer tank and can't figure it out. I seem to think the two of these things are related. Also, what's with the option to pick the hair color for my balls? Like... that's an odd thing. Am I going to be doing a lot of running around naked? I'm wondering what I'm going to expect out of this game, hahah...

Doom played fine on a 386. That's the system that most people played it on originally. It came out in 1993, and most people still had 386s at the time. It didn't play all that great on a 386 SX, but played totally fine on a 386 DX. Remember that you could minimize the screen size as well to reduce the processing demands. Minimum system requirements was a 386 w/ 1mb of RAM, but recommended a 386 DX w/ 4mb of RAM.