What are the largest and most ambitious Extended BASIC games or projects in TI-99 history?

[WhataKowinkydink]

On 5/26/2021 at 3:05 AM, pixelpedant said:

For anyone who hasn't played Legends 1 and 2 incidentally, I've recorded a complete narrated playthrough of both games.  So if you'd like to see what they manage to do in terms of world and story and system and can't be bothered with the slog (and they are a bit of a slog at times), here they both are from start to finish, compressed into about 20 and 30 minutes respectively.  The first one deals with all the background first.  The second is really just a playthrough of Legends 2.

Thanks for doing this.  Been enjoying the series so far.  But, considering the grind, i was rather disappointed to learn there was a version 1.1 with all the "quality of life" features i was missing out on.  I tried using option "3) Load  Old  Party" from the utilities menu but i keep getting a disk error.  Have you tried using the utility at all? 

Now, by the sounds of things, you have been able to get your Legends 1.x party into Legends 2.0, so I'm guessing that Legends2conversion utility works as advertised.  It'd be nice to convert my 1.0 party to a 1.1 party :D

[oddemann]

On 5/12/2021 at 12:26 AM, Ksarul said:

I made a complete 1ST Edition AD&D character generation program

Would love to see that program!

[WhataKowinkydink]

1 hour ago, WhataKowinkydink said:

But, considering the grind, i was rather disappointed to learn there was a version 1.1 with all the "quality of life" features i was missing out on.  I tried using option "3) Load  Old  Party" from the utilities menu but i keep getting a disk error.  Have you tried using the utility at all? 

Now, by the sounds of things, you have been able to get your Legends 1.x party into Legends 2.0, so I'm guessing that Legends2conversion utility works as advertised.  It'd be nice to convert my 1.0 party to a 1.1 party

Okay, I figured this out.  On the Legends2conv.dsk there is a BASIC program called "V1->V1/1".  Run that with your Legends 1.0 disk in the drive and done.  The output file's name is "PDATA". Enjoy

[pixelpedant]

Nice, yes, I was just typing that out, but you beat me to it! 

 

Starting off with 1.0 would have been rough, indeed!  Ouch! 

 

I played it myself, but I'm a masochist sometimes, with these things.  Legends 1.1 is definitely the way to go, for most players.  It's a major all-around improvement. 

 

And in my view, Legends 2 is even more playable.  With the party import nixing the brutal early level grind (i.e., you can actually start doing things pretty much immediately).  And with more general visual and storytelling improvements. 

 

 

[WhataKowinkydink]

1 hour ago, pixelpedant said:

Starting off with 1.0 would have been rough, indeed!  Ouch! 

Yeah until i saw your series i'd sort of stopped playing since it seemed to be taking so long. I'm glad to see it's not just me, so I'm gonna carry on.  I'm almost level 4 across the board, so things should start opening up a bit more then, from what you were saying in the video.
 

1 hour ago, pixelpedant said:

I played it myself, but I'm a masochist sometimes, with these things.  Legends 1.1 is definitely the way to go, for most players.  It's a major all-around improvement. 

Lmao... it's a bit much for me XD
I think the improvements will make things go at least a little more quickly

 

1 hour ago, pixelpedant said:

And in my view, Legends 2 is even more playable.  With the party import nixing the brutal early level grind (i.e., you can actually start doing things pretty much immediately).  And with more general visual and storytelling improvements. 

Nice - looking forward to getting to that one and seeing how the story unfolds.  (Of course I still have to watch your Legends 2 video)

[Ed in SoDak]

I played Legends a lot, bought all the programs. I did eventually grow weary of the grind, my answer was to hack the player data to create a super party. Most any one of the team will hit hard enough to kill most the monsters in a single turn. No spells needed, and would be gross overkill to do in a single attacker. I was able to explore instead of spending most my energy and time staying alive and running to home base to recharge.

[pixelpedant]

I do think the game could use some tweaking even in 1.1, though 1.1 makes huge improvements. 

 

Mainly, in that

1) You can save anywhere in the overworld (just a big quality of life thing) 

2) You can explore without constant monster harassment by using stealth potions. 

3) You get a more visceral and effective scaling of weapon damage as you level, since you get more attacks over time.  This also makes encounters less time-consuming, and reduces random chance of death by spreading monster damage over more individual attacks (larger dice pool has more consistent damage, in tabletop terms). 

 

Some of the tweaks it still could benefit from in 1.1, in my opinion, are: 

- Either the XP curve is redesigned, or level simply starts at 3ish (Legends 2 figured that solution out), nixing the crazy level 1 and 2 grind.  Since both XP and gold are used to level, a full XP curve redesign would be fairly complex.  Starting at 3 is probably the easy solution. 

- Overworld monster encounter rate is halved.  A lower overworld monster encounter rate might also provide more motivation for exploring monster dungeons. 

- Stealth has a minimum guaranteed duration (this would be a bit of a pain to implement, since currently it just makes a failure roll on every tick - there's no timer).