Castlevania: Sonata in Red (2007)
by Hardle . (Download)
plays fine on both Wine and Vbox on Linux
Castlevania SiR is a magnificent rendition of a Castlvania game (of the SotN-kind) as an old-school jRPG. It sports the same addictive gameplay as it’s 2d-cousins, the-one-more-room-and-then-I-stop-playing syndrome that makes you play until night has fallen and sleep deprivation set in. But what fun. There’s the ingenious level design (the game has around 21 levels) that isn’t fulled by a linear succession of different areas, but by a complex maze of interwoven areas. This is combined with a level-up-system that forces you to explore, since you can only level-up once in each area, after you’ve beaten a certain number of enemies.
While fighting (in short: grinding) is very much essential to the game, without it you won’t get the strength to beat the many bosses, there are no random battles that are part of so many jRPGs and can be quite annoying. You see enemies wander around and can confront them (or not) at will.
Another lovely aspect of the game are the countless secrets, for example there’s a boss rush mode whose final boss is much harder to beat than the final boss of the game. There are certain passages under water, for which you need an item to dive indefinitely. The sub-weapons you can collect and other stuff. Backtracking areas you’ve already traversed is essential to find everything, but that’s made easier by a teleport system. Another well done aspect, the story, is told in small pieces here and there and fits neatly with the whole Castlevania-canon of the official games.
All in all, an excellent game that perfectly captures the atmosphere of Castlevania games. Heartily recommended.
Rating: 5/5
Dragon Quest 2 (1987)
by Chunsoft
2nd Dragon Quest game / enhanced American NES release as Dragon Warrior 2
The grinding from the first part remains, but some details have been improved in comparison to the first part. Instead of just one hero you have a party (but you can’t customize them), the dungeons are much easier to traverse and you automatically use stairways. The story of DW2 is still simple, but since the game is much bigger than the first part, there’s much more to do.
The hero and the princess from the first part have colonized other continents and now the kingdoms of their descendants are threatened by one evil dude named Hargon. Why? It’s never said, probably just because he’s evil, doh. The gameplay is similar to the first one, but as I said, there’s more to do. First you have to find your companions, then you have to find some crests and other items to advance in the game. At one point in the game you get your hands on a ship, which makes the gameplay progression much less linear than in the first game.
Apart from the endless grind (fighting to collect exp and gold to get more levels and better equipment), the game is actually fun. In some ways it reminds me how harder those games in the past were, you have to note down every little piece of information, since the game doesn’t hold you by the hand and shows you what to do next. But the fighting really wears you down.
Rating: 3/5
Dragon Quest (1986)
by Chunsoft
1st Dragon Quest game / enhanced American NES release as Dragon Warrior
DW is an interesting experience if you want to see how the evolution of console RPGs started. One word to describe the game: grinding. The game features a very simple story (evil bad guy terrorizes land, you have to defeat him and free a princess along the way). The gameplay is also extremely simple. It mostly consists of leveling up, catching some hints in the cities you travel to, unearth some items and find your way to the lair of the Dragonlord.
But mostly it’s leveling up, fighting monsters endlessly to get more experience. Since every defeated monster gives you only a small amount of experience and money, this can become a very tedious and boring process. Other annoying things about the game: the menu driven interface is just a way to artificially expand the play time without adding more depth to the game, the lighting and the need to use torches in dungeons makes traversing them rather painfully and the random battle encounter rate (which is extremely high).
Overall, interesting as a historical artifact to see where console RPGing started, but as a game in its own right rather tedious without the benefit of an interesting story or other aspects that could have made it more fun to play.
Rating: 2/5
Final Vision (2007)
by SilverNova / Alspal . (Download)
My first reaction to FV was: It’s over already? I just started playing. Which should give you an idea of how short it is. Final Vision is platformer/RPG mix, meaning you kill enemies for XP, level up (you only get more HP and MP) and collect money to buy better weapons and armor to kill more bad guys, and all that in a 2d-platform environment. The story is superficial and only barely there, I remember something about rebels or so, but that’s as far as it goes plotwise. What makes this fun to play is the core gameplay, jumping around, killing enemies, buying stuff. For those who appreciate it, there are some obvious Final Fantasy elements and that’s it. If it were a hundred times bigger and had an actual plot, it could be really great, as it is, it’s a nice diversion.
Rating: 4/5
Alcahest (1993)
by Square
fan-translated by F.H. . (Download Patch)
Alcahest is a simple action game with some (very) rudimentary RPG elements (you gain levels and your life and magic points can rise throughout the game). You are the chosen one who is destined to destroy the evil Alcahest, but before you reach him you have to defeat a big cast of other bosses. Overall the story is very cliched, you even have to free a princess, but while it won’t win a price for originality it’s mostly well done and makes the transitions between levels more organically. Instead of just putting you in some levels with different landscapes there’s a logically progression of why you go here and there. The gameplay is simple, just reach the end of every level while killing legions of enemy sprites. Sometimes you have to solve some simple puzzles. The game feels at times a bit repetitive and especially the infinite respawning of simple enemies can be quite annoying. Fun for one time through, but that’s it.
Rating: 3/5
Frozen Depths (2005)
by Glowie . (Download)
playable on Ubuntu: ./fdepths
There was a time when I looked upon roguelikes with some sort of incomprehension. Why still creating games with ASCII-graphics, when you can use real graphics? What’s the appeal? And then some day it clicked. Playing roguelikes at times feels a bit like reading, a part of your mind is constantly layering simple symbols with more layers of sensation, pictures, smells, sounds. It’s like a skill, while a first-time-player of roguelikes and an advanced player may look upon the same thing, they actually don’t view it the same way. One of the them is simple seeing symbols and tries slowly to translate them into dungeon walls, monsters and everything else. The advanced player doesn’t need translating anymore, his mind providing everything to instantly create a fully grown world in his mind.
So far, I haven’t talked much about Frozen Depths, which is a very simple roguelike. Go down fifty levels to kill some evil, and then try to get the hell out of there (which is nearly impossible to do without cheating, the rising heat kills you too fast). The theme, as the title implies, is about a dungeon that gets colder with every level. The deeper you go, the more you have to pay attention to avoid freezing to death. The rest is standard fare, kill things, collect items, explore, go deeper. Every ten levels you have to face a boss demon. Overall, a nicely done game.
Rating: 4/5
Arcanum (2001)
by Troika
unofficial Patch by Drog Black Tooth . (Download Patch)
Arcanum is a fantasy world where the Industrial Revolution has set in. Magic and technology are at odds; and old powers like the elves or monarchies begin to weaken while those who use steam engines or guns are on the rise. Like the big dragon skeleton you’ll find in the game the atmosphere is a little filled with melancholy about the past. Once magic things roamed the lands, once kingdoms were in full bloom, but all that has changed. But like often it’s a question of viewpoint. For some the Golden Age has gone by and the future only looks bleak, but for others the Golden Age is yet to come and technology is one of its harbingers.
Arcanum sports a highly modifiable character with seemingly endless options on how to develop him. Along the way to save the world of Arcanum from some evildoer (yes, it’s the classic save-the-world-plot, but with some nice twists added) you can recruit a diverse lot of other characters, ranging from pure good to bloody evil. If you like RPGs that don’t allow you much to stray from a well defined path, you’ll probably get lost easily, but if you want something along the line of classic RPGs like Fallout or Ultima, this one will do nicely. One of the best RPGs I played in recent years. Great style, excellent plot, and most of all the gameplay (after fully patched) makes this one very enjoyable. Glued me to the screen for some time.
Rating: 5/5
So, after completing Arcanum, I wanted more. Seeing that there’s an editor for creating modules with the game engine, I looked for some mods and tried those made by Troika itself (and the one that was already included with the main game). Most are short and not really something that I would recommend, but Vormantown (the one already included) is really good and Time is nice too. Mods can be found on Terra Arcanum, a neat site dedicated to the Troika games.
Buried Secrets (2/5)
An extremely small mod that makes you search for a mystical book. There’s a small temple, a mini dungeon and that’s it. The smallness of it makes it hard to give much of an opinion at all, since it feels like it’s over before it even started. Ten minutes or so, not much more.
Deathmatch (1/5)
I thought Buried Secrets was short, but Deathmatch proved you can be even more sparse. There’s a pit, people standing around, and you can go and fight in it to the death. If you actually survive all fights, you can’t leave, but if you die get back outside. After that you can’t do anything anymore, or at least I didn’t found anything to do anymore. Rather pointless.
Dusty Dunes (2/5)
You have to save a guy who got himself lost in a small swamp that is full of monsters. You get in there, save him and go back (alternatively you can also go forward and enter a camp full of monsters that guard a dragon skull with some crystals as eyes). Then get back. Similar small as Buried Secrets, takes only some minutes to complete.
Hellgate (2/5)
Like Woodmir Race this mod was a bit bigger than the others. You have to reach a town to find the person who is responsible for opening a hellgate and allowing demons to decimate the townspeople. Nice idea, but I never found out who was supposed to be behind it and got stuck, and hadn’t the motivation to finish it.
Time (3/5)
Together with Vormantown the biggest mod for Arcanum made by Troika members. You find a “depeopled town”, go into nearby ruins to find out what happened and travel to the past to fight the evil that has risen there. It has some nice, long dungeons (but it’s annoying to go through twice) and is overall a good diversion. It even has a nice ending screen, like the main Arcanum game.
Vormantown (4/5)
Probably overseen by most people who played Arcanum, this mod is actually quite neat. Unlike all the other mods it’s the one that references the main themes of Arcanum the most. The atmosphere and the style of this little piece is very well done. You appear in Vormantown, an utopian experiment in society design. Sadly this aspect never amounts to much, but the two side quest for the elves and the dwarves turned out to be fun and actually gave you important plot pieces for finding our what had happened to the creator of Vormantown.
Woodmir Race (3/5)
Woodmire Race is slightly bigger than Dusty Dunes or Buried Secrets. You have to find a mystic sapphire in a building, that has a dungeon full of undead creatures. Woodmire Race has a bit of Diablo feeling, running around, killing everything without much plot or other gameplay elements than killing monsters. It’s fun for the short time it lasts.
Wizardry 8 (2001)
by Sir-Tech
8th Wizardry game
Whereas Might & Magic slowly became more and more zombified with each new sequel after the ending of the Xeen saga, and Ultima slowly devolved into an action adventure that never fulfilled the promises of the 7th part, Wizardry got a conclusion fitting for kings.
That is not to say that the 8th part is without problems, but to me they seemed minor. While BotCF and CotDS were as combat heavy as W8, the new 3d environment made the fights cumbersome. Just battling a swarm of insects could take ten times as long (or even much longer) than in previous games. But that Sir-Tech actually implemented the fighting modus from the previous games in a 3d environment is applaudable.
Again your party has gone to another world via spacecraft, this time trying to stop the Dark Savant from ascending to the status of a Cosmic Lord. Old friends and foes from previous games are also around. This was the last game by Sir-Tech, which is sad, and yet, at least they left with a bang. After finishing the game I got what I missed after finishing CotDS, a proper conclusion that left me completely satisfied, both on the plot and the gameplay level.
Rating: 5/5
Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992)
by Sir-Tech
7th Wizardry game
The absence of the Cosmic Forge (mighty, magical pen) in Wizardry 6 has allowed different factions to find a world long hidden in the depths of space, where a powerful artifacts rests. You go there via spacecraft, to find the artifact before everyone else does, especially the Dark Savant, a sinister and mystical character.
CotDS is superior to BotCF when it comes to graphics (VGA, still block movement) and gameplay. While still using the same core engine, the interface became much more mouse friendly. The gaming world is much bigger, and it seems compared to the predecessor, that there’s more of everything. And it has a map feature.
Often hailed as one of the classic RPGs, it has one big problem that annoyed me to no end. Like every middle part of a trilogy, the ending left me extremely unsatisfied. Sure, 9 years later I got a proper conclusion, but when I finished CotDS the first time, I was, WTF!? Is that it, nothing more? In comparison, BotCF left me much more satisfied at the end. Still, as part of the Dark Savant trilogy, it’s a good game.
Rating: 4/5
Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990)
by Sir-Tech
6th Wizardry game
This is the first in the Dark Savant trilogy, since the events in this one made it possible for W7 and W8 to take place. Mind you, the Dark Savant never appears. There’s a mighty, magical item, the cosmic pen. Anything written with it becomes reality, and somehow the pen is lost in a haunted, derelict castle.
This is one of the old-school RPGs, where you still move in block-mode. EGA graphics (16 color only) and controls are mostly for keyboard. It can be played with the mouse, but this doesn’t work as efficient as using the keyboard. The game engine was a much needed update over the earlier Wizardry games (I thought the first Wizardry game engine so annoying that I never completed earlier games in the series). You have more races and professions to pick from, a new magic system and a vastly expanded skill set.
The story is, like in many cRPGs compared to their console counterparts, spread all over the game. Little pieces of information the player has to assemble, to understand what happened in the past of the castle. For such an old game I found it extremely playable with an excellent interface (a bit dated these days, but still nifty to use). The only annoying thing is that there’s no map feature, a common problem of older RPGs.
Despite it’s EGA graphics, the game has an excellent style, and the dated graphics makes you actually feel like this is really a decaying castle you’re exploring. Coupled with some really smart puzzles and a great plot, it makes for a great game.
Rating: 5/5
