Wasteland 1 - Playable in a Browser

Ball_Breaker writes in with an interesting one - a site called DOSDose allows you to play Wasteland (and other old games) via Flash on a browser. Word from Ball_Breaker is "It supports mouse usage and a sensitivity slider also".
More information.

Just wanted to take a peak at Wasteland to see what all the fuss is about … holy crap!!! This isn't old school, this prehistoric/dinosaur school.

If there was any doubt before there certainly is none now: I'm *NOT* an old school RPG'er

Originally Posted by fatBastard()
Just wanted to take a peak at Wasteland to see what all the fuss is about … holy crap!!! This isn't old school, this prehistoric/dinosaur school.

If there was any doubt before there certainly is none now: I'm *NOT* an old school RPG'er

That was the funniest thing I've read in weeks.
You are right, it has aged badly.

Hehe, yeah, there's a line..

Oh cmon now, it's not THAT bad…

Are you making fun of the graphics? or gameplay?

Graphics I can understand, but the gameplay was great and is great to this day. Sure it's still a little raw, but the amount of skills in this game can and does rival most RPGs released now-a-days.

I wouldn't want W2 to copy the same combat gameplay, but for the time it was decent. All those lovely skills so I could customize my characters, I loved those skills. Although a few of them had no real use or were only used once or twice, but still that leaves a ton of others that had actual uses in the game.

Originally Posted by blackcanopus
That was the funniest thing I've read in weeks.
You are right, it has aged badly.

Yeah, only I didn't say it.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Yeah, only I didn't say it.

I didn't get your post at first, but now that I check it again… I don't know how it happened. I clicked the 'Quick Replay' button under Fat's post, but your name is in my post! I think this is a bug and has happened before.

Found it, here it is:
http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showt…post1061125621

Isn't KQ4, the perils of Rosella, from around the same time as Wasteland1? around 1988-1990 or so? Perils of Rosella features nice graphics, even to this day, a voiced cast, I think, fully voiced?, and great gameplay as well. I know it's ad adventure game, but just to make the notion that all games that's over 20 years hold can be considered prehistoric/dinosaur school.

However, aren't we promised a free copy of wasteland 1 with our purchase of wasteland 2?

Originally Posted by skavenhorde
All those lovely skills so I could customize my characters, I loved those skills. Although a few of them had no real use or were only used once or twice, but still that leaves a ton of others that had actual uses in the game.

Toaster repair was very curious to me just because it was so obviously different but was pretty useless even when you could use it though. I liked that you could frequently try multiple attributes or skills to pass skill checks. My favorite parts about this game was climb and rope was used quite a bit. I remember using rope to cross chasms under vegas that I couldn't figure out how to procede otherwise. Too few games allow you to interact with the environment these.

Tried playing this browser version for a few minutes, but it seemed sort of buggy. The mouse is extremely laggy for me, and if I get too close to the edge of the game window it converts back to my regular mouse pointer, even though it's supposed to be locked to the game window.

They really need to get Wasteland on GOG.

Originally Posted by aries100
Isn't KQ4, the perils of Rosella, from around the same time as Wasteland1? around 1988-1990 or so? Perils of Rosella features nice graphics, even to this day, a voiced cast, I think, fully voiced?, and great gameplay as well. I know it's ad adventure game, but just to make the notion that all games that's over 20 years hold can be considered prehistoric/dinosaur school.

However, aren't we promised a free copy of wasteland 1 with our purchase of wasteland 2?

Isnt Jeff Vogel's stuff from around that time also dinosaur old school?

Originally Posted by aries100
However, aren't we promised a free copy of wasteland 1 with our purchase of wasteland 2?

Absolutely not.

inXile does not have the rights, which still reside with EA.

Originally Posted by aries100
Isn't KQ4, the perils of Rosella, from around the same time as Wasteland1? around 1988-1990 or so? Perils of Rosella features nice graphics, even to this day, a voiced cast, I think, fully voiced?, and great gameplay as well.

Absolutely not. I don't think there were ANY games that were fully voiced in 1988, since the CD-ROM was pretty much non-existent in the computing world back then. Tex Murphy: Mean Streets from 1989 was one of the first on PC using speech and that was done over the PC speaker unless you connected it to an amplifier. Sound cards and VGA were not commonplace back then. KQ4 had EGA graphics which were pretty nice for what it was, but largely comparable to Wasteland, if you ask me.

Not that I played Wasteland back then.

Originally Posted by aries100
Isn't KQ4, the perils of Rosella, from around the same time as Wasteland1? around 1988-1990 or so? Perils of Rosella features nice graphics, even to this day, a voiced cast, I think, fully voiced?, and great gameplay as well. I know it's ad adventure game, but just to make the notion that all games that's over 20 years hold can be considered prehistoric/dinosaur school.

Here is Moby's game list from 1988. See and compare for yourself.

You have Ultima 5 being released the same year. Pretty much the same in terms of graphics although I think Ultima 5 was a bit better. Then there was, like you said, KQ4 and also Space Quest 2 which was a lot better, but totally different genres with different focuses.

Thaurin's right about speech. Your comment about full speech made me laugh. Not laughing at you, it's just funny because back then the only speaker I had was the one that came inside the computer. Lot's of bloops and beeps, but no speech or even music.

I don't even know if Soundblaster or other audio cards were around back then. I'm sure they were around, but way too much for my parents back then. The first fully voiced game I played was Lands of Lore and that was amazing. The first time my computer spoke to me was in Battletech 2. A few lines here and there. The amazing thing was that it used the computer speaker (still didn't have a soundcard then). This doesn't mean it was the very first games to have speech, it's just the first game I played with speech in it

People actually used to make home-made 8-bit D/A converters with some diodes, solder and a 25-pin parallel connector. Do you remember those? I sucked at soldering, but they worked (although I also paid someone to make one for me later). You could connect it to your amplifier and have actual digital samples in games. I think the Covox adapter was sold as a commercial option to this. Good times, before I spent 600,- of my own pocket money on a SoundBlaster.

Originally Posted by Thaurin
People actually used to make home-made 8-bit D/A converters with some diodes, solder and a 25-pin parallel connector. Do you remember those? I sucked at soldering, but they worked (although I also paid someone to make one for me later). You could connect it to your amplifier and have actual digital samples in games. I think the Covox adapter was sold as a commercial option to this. Good times, before I spent 600,- of my own pocket money on a SoundBlaster.

Got one of those. If I remember correctly, it was a combination of diodes and resistors. I designed it myself first, but it didn't work as I expected. Later, I found a schematic on one of those 300-or-so electronics books, and it didn't work as I expected either.
Many years later, I found it in a shelf somewhere, I connected it to my PC and I wrote a program in Borland Delphi to make sounds with it. It sounded like a sick cricket.

Making your PC sound like a sick cricket is pretty cool.

There was a game for the C64 that had voice in the intro. It was called Impossible Mission, iirc, and the guy said, "Another visitor, stay awhile, stay forever". It came out in 1984 and I think it was my first game that had any voice in it.