I recently played Ultima 5 and enjoyed it very much. If you can stand its' really ancient graphics and really difficult to learn UI, I recommend it strongly. With its open world and interactivity, it's really a masterpiece after all these years. Today most of the RPGs do not have these two properties.
You can find all Ultima games and many others in this site: www.oldgames.sk
ROFL thats an epic list. I've played most of them, but theres some names in there I dont recognise:
Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession
Ravenloft 2: The Stone Prophet
Menzoberranzan
Phantasie III
Might have to write that all down as reference.
Buck rogers was better than I wanted it to be. I only played one of them, don't remember which and i never clocked it.
Darksun! I bought that at a garage sale only to find I didn't have the copy protection codes it hit me with after escaping from the arena. I think i'll play that one next if I can find a crack or something. Ive been saying that for the last 10 years though xD
I recently played Ultima 5 and enjoyed it very much. If you can stand its' really ancient graphics and really difficult to learn UI, I recommend it strongly. With its open world and interactivity, it's really a masterpiece after all these years. Today most of the RPGs do not have these two properties.
You can find all Ultima games and many others in this site: www.oldgames.sk
I fired up ultima 4 few days ago but it doesnt seem like theres much to play. Ultima 3 was even simpler.
Its so hard to decide what to play when you have literaly hundreds of options. I should choose one and stick to it. I have thousands of books and never had problem to sticking to few until I have read them. But somhow it doesnt quite work with games.
My first option was to play from oldest to newest. I managed to do that with varyind degree of success with wizardry, ultima and ad&d gold box. Currently I should start wizardry 6 and finish ultima4/curse.
Recent = within the last 5 years, and I certainly didn't play all of them to the end
For example, I wouldn't recommend playing U4 and 5 to completion - too frustrating and repetitive. U4 is good to get to level 8 and do most of the virtues and get some decent weapons and U5 I normally stop after downing the shadowlords. Meanwhile I have completed U7 part 2 5 times - the entire forgotten realms series twice but finished Curse of the Azure bonds at least 3 times.
With some of the series I didn't list all of the games because I consider the ones not listed to be inferior or too similar (although they may still be reasonably good) i.e. lands of lore 1 vs lands of lore 2.
I recommend reading related AD&D fantasy novels while playing. Most of the games of the series have them. It will greatly enhance the playing experience. I have the entire works of forgotten realms and dragonlance on my e-ink reader. So far I have finished three of them while playing the games.
Pools was first and Im currently playing that series. Have finished pools, hillsfar and almost curze. Theyre okay I guess even if a bit unpolished here and there. The turnbased battle has aged good. Its still interesting.
Hell? Not really. More like a nice short distraction with arena fights and horse riding and you get to boost your characters stats before you continue to curse.
The other silver box games I skipped. I didnt even like them when I played them on C64 tape 20 years ago. But then they were almost the only "rpgs" I owned and I had just read the dragonlance books so there was little choice.
I had exactly the same experience. Just finished the Chronicles trilogy and then Heroes of the Lance shows up on the shelves. I grabbed that in 10 seconds flat and begged my mom to buy it.
Got home loaded it up and …….disappointment. I tried for a few days to like that game, but it was brutal. I don't believe there were any save points, the corridors all looked the same and those monsters were difficult with very little in ways of healing. I still have happy memories of the few first hours of playing, but after that frustration.
I finished hillsfar about 15 times on the c64. I only had curse and hillsfar at the time and kept transferring the characters between them. I think I could finish curse in a couple days and hillsfar in about 4 hours even with the c64's slow load times.
