Anyone with any experience on these older CRPGs?

I am looking for my next game to playthrough on my blog, and I have been doing some research on some CRPGs.

I want to play something I haven't completed before, and some games that stick out to me immediately are the following:

Soulbringer (Win)
Challenge of the Five Realms (DOS)
Centauri Alliance (C64)
Ambermoon (Amiga)
Waxworks (DOS)

If you have completed these how would you rate them in terms of length, challenge and overall fun factor?

I have read up on them on Mobygames and various other sites, but curious as to what a more hardcore CRPG crowd would say.

Thanks!

Malifax said:

If you have completed these how would you rate them in terms of length, challenge and overall fun factor?

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From those listed I have only played Ambermoon and that was way back when Amiga gaming was still in full blossom.

Length: Pretty lengthy, although considering that disk swapping took probably most of the time, it should be manageable.
Challenge: Should be no problem for a seasoned CRPGer.
Fun: 90% for me (back then, don't know how it would compare to today's standards)

BTW, we have our very own, albeit short, Ambermoon thread.

Waxworks is more of an adventuregame than a roleplaying game. There are RPG mechanics in it, but you are basically playing four different characters like in 4 mini-rpg's who's items and stats do not carry over from one world to another. In the end the game boils down to finding the right items and figuring out where, when and how to use them.

The game's length builds on it's four different storylines which each are long enough to tell a story but none in any depth. What lengthens the game really is the actual puzzles that if you aren't used to adventuregames can be very frustrating since in this game you are likely to die just for wasting time. If you run the game with a walkthrough it can probably be finished in a single day or splitted in four (taking one chapter at a time).

If you skip it's age and hardcore difficulty I would rate the game above average for it's time, especially if you're a horror fan. It's unique in that I know few games like it, the only game I might compare it to is Sanity's Requiem on GameCube that also use the different-characters-different-eras device to build it's plot.

While wiki describes Waxworks as "a first-person dungeon crawl style role-playing video game", in my, admittedly hazy, memory the game is actually more of an adventure game, or at least I remember its adventure elements a lot more prominently, maybe because these were the main source of the game´s difficulty.

Anyway, it´s a kind of horror game where the horror comes not only from audiovisuals/setting/story, but is also well maintained via some of the gameplay aspects - dying in this game is really easy, some scenarios contain time sensitive elements and it´s possible to screw up and end up in a dead-end and these characteristics are rather effective at evoking anxiety on their own.

The bulk of the game consists of four pretty much self contained stories in distinct settings (Egyptian pyramid, mutant overrun mine, Jack the Ripper-y London and a graveyard at night) and is rather short (say around 5-8 hours) if you know what to do.
However, without a walkthrough, you´re likely to spend a lot more time finishing it because, as I implied earlier, the game´s adventure elements make it quite a bit of a challenge and solutions are not always exactly intuitive.

Anyway, I´d recommend checking it out because I remember it as one of the better horror games I´ve played, but keep in mind that roleplaying elements are pretty light (iirc, your character stats and inventory reset between each segment) and the game leans more towards the adventure genre (I think there were some Myst-y puzzles, but mostly it´s about combining items in the inventory and using an item at a right place).

edit: well, that was redundant , blame a phone call in the middle of writing the post

I haven't played any of them, but Centauri Alliance is considered one of the longest and hardest CRPGs ever. It was made by Michael Cranford, who also made Bard's Tale 2.

"Soulbringer" looks to me as if it was an Windows 3.1 game. But that's just a guess.

I wonder if Windows 3.1 games are still runnable today ? I guess that you'd need an emulator for them, or a virtual PC environment into which you install a Windows 3.1 specimen. I heard that for DOSBOX it should be possible to install Windows 3.1 on it.

Soulbringer was actually released in 2000.

And getting Win3.X games to run these days is tricky. There are not a whole lot of them, most were made for DOS, but those that were purely made for Win3.X are probably the hardest games (on average) to get to run today.
And Win3.1 has known stability issues in Dosbox.

That's why I had once downloaded Microsoft's "Virtual PC" program (the older 2007 version had DOS utilities which the newer version has not !) and installed my old Windows 3.1 system there.

Fnord said:

And getting Win3.X games to run these days is tricky. There are not a whole lot of them, most were made for DOS, but those that were purely made for Win3.X are probably the hardest games (on average) to get to run today.
And Win3.1 has known stability issues in Dosbox.

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I'm surprised no one has created some kind of emulator specifically for Win3.x programs yet.

JDR13 said:

I'm surprised no one has created some kind of emulator specifically for Win3.x programs yet.

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they were kind of rare. even some of the early W95 games actually ran in DOS mode due to some sort of deal with Microsoft.

sometimes you can get them to work by emulating for W95 or W98. couldn't name any though. Filemgr.com was was still available on these OS's in order to maintain some backwards compatibility with Win3.x

I remember playing Soulbringer when it was new and being generally disappointed, but honestly I barely remember it.

Lucky Day said:

they were kind of rare. even some of the early W95 games actually ran in DOS mode due to some sort of deal with Microsoft.

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Yeah, I vaguely remember that there was only a version check ?

DOSBox works just fine for that. My quick playthrough of Uninvited with loud breathing and really bad English were played with DOSBox.

Thanks for all the replies guys.

I noticed Soulbringer was on GOG and optimized for Windows. I also thought it was a 3.1 game, so that was a interesting surprise.

I'm also looking at other titles, but those were the main ones I had questions about. Thanks for the advice and info, you all have been very helpful!

My vague memory is that I enjoyed Centauri Alliance quite a bit. I also remember that at some point I got stuck and could not figure out how to proceed (and this was back when you couldn't just look things up online) but up until that point I really liked the game.

JDR13 said:

I'm surprised no one has created some kind of emulator specifically for Win3.x programs yet.

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If they could make one that is not reliant on code owned by Microsoft, then that should at least be possible to create. But are there enough games (because other programs rarely drive emulation of old systems) released (almost) exclusively for Win 3.X to actually make it worthwhile to spend the amount of time & effort needed to create a stable and fully functional emulator?

JemyM said:

DOSBox works just fine for that. My quick playthrough of Uninvited with loud breathing and really bad English were played with DOSBox.

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Oh, I remember watching that LP of Uninvited, it was pretty good! Anyway, I tried to run Shadow of the Horned Rat in Win 3.X in Dosbox, but it just kept crashing (Shadow of the Horned Rat is one of the few games that actually supported Win3.1(1) & Win95 specifically, rather than going the DOS rout).

Malifax said:

Soulbringer (Win)

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Never played it.

Challenge of the Five Realms (DOS)

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Had a very detailed skill system with a CYOA-style character creation system (akin to Ultima IV/V/VI) - most of the situations presented during the character creation could have made for great quests. As for the game itself, it was a pretty standard isometric RPG (aside from the size, since the world was *huge*) with a quirk, which could be either very interesting or extremely annoying depending on perspectives: cities in the gameworld get destroyed in a 100-days time span.

Centauri Alliance (C64)

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Basically Bard's Tale in space, it was a good game with an original setting (there weren't many space RPGs at the time). Some interesting gameplay situations (you could find yourself in a space thieves guild where you had to overcome some challenges, then you could choose a skill to learn among three - this allowed you to solve some puzzles in different ways afterwards). Still, i'd suggest to play the Buck Rogers games instead of this one (much more extensive skill system, more flexible gameplay, just better in pretty much everything).

Waxworks (DOS)

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Pretty similar to Elvira, albeit much better in terms of gameplay, it's an horror RPG/adventure hybrid where you play five-six different scenarios of various length and quality. Features heavy puzzle solving, whereas the RPG elements are pretty light (some attributes and - mediocre - combat, but that's pretty much it). Atmosphere wise, it's absolutely excellent (the Jack the Ripper scenario in particular). If you want a similar game with a stronger focus on RPG elements, play The Legacy (you should play it anyway, since it's probably the greatest horror RPG ever made).

Ambermoon

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You'll need WinUAE if you want to play this one, since it's amiga only (otherwise you could play its prequel, Amberstar, which came out on pc as well and was a very good game or even Albion, which is a pseudo-sequel, albeit much more simplified a linear, but still worth playing). Had some very interesting elements (very large world, languages you had learn to interact with some of the NPCs, many ways to travel - you could even find something like a magic carpet iirc). All in all, it was a good game and definately worth playing.

Don't bother with Soulbringer. I played partway through a while back and lost interest. Poor story and clumsy to play.

Thanks guys. I decided to go with Stonekeep from Interplay. I started it a long time ago and never finished it. I'm going to make it my next playthrough.

Ambermoon is definitely on my short list as well, the more I read about it the more interesting it sounds.

Malifax said:

Thanks guys. I decided to go with Stonekeep from Interplay. I started it a long time ago and never finished it. I'm going to make it my next playthrough.

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I tried to play through Stonekeep last year. It actually starts out really good imo, but I lost interest about 2/3 through. Keep an online walkthrough handy because the game can be pretty vague about what you need to do sometimes.