CRPG Addict - Review Roundup (Part Seven)
More reviews from the past by CRPG Addict.
The Faery Tale Adventure: Book 1 (1987)
The game is fairly non-linear. I'll give it that. But the huge game world offers nothing valuable. It should have been contracted to 1/4 of its size. It's far too easy and offers no replayability. (..)
Final score: 27. Definitely one of the lower-ranked games on my blog. My apologies to those of you who disagree, but I just don't understand what you see in the game. The game manual brags that it features 17,000 screens. The developers should have put something in them.
While I continue to like this game and think that it has promise, I don't look terribly forward to my gameplay sessions. First, the process of constantly translating is a little tiresome--why do the French games have to be the wordiest games? (..) Second, the overall uncertainty the game leaves me with respect to items, food, and leveling makes it hard to just sit back and enjoy it.
You have to give it points for originality. Sure, the world itself is fairly standard fantasy fare, and the peasant-rises-up-to-defeat-the-evil-warlord has been done to death, but the framing device of the Galactic Museum is quite original. (..)
The final score of 38 puts it about on par with 2400 A.D., of which it reminds me a bit. Both of the games were short isometric outings in fairly limited and somewhat boring gameworlds despite interesting sci-fi framing plots.
I like games that are challenging but not impossible; Mission: Mainframe strikes me as impossible. Unlike some roguelikes, it's really not replayable--the "classes" offer the same experience--there's no real opportunity for role playing (especially since the game world is so goofy). (..)
Final Score: 25. That puts it lower than everything except Ultima II and the original Rogue, and frankly I think I gave Rogue a raw deal (the GIMLET scale was new back then). It ranks higher than Rogue only because it has an economy and the encounters are a little more interesting. If you like traditional roguelikes, you'll likely disagree with this assessment, but I wouldn't be upset if this was the last one I played.
[Equipment] is perhaps NetHack's strongest suit. You find an enormous variety of weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and wands randomized throughout the dungeon, and all of them are unidentified when you discover them. (..) This adds an enormous amount of strategy to the game: when should I try to use an unidentified item, and when should I play it safe? (..)
The final score of 42 seems a little low, although keep in mind that I didn't get to experience everything, and I might have ranked it a few points higher if I did. I hear that later versions have more NPCs, more complex dungeons, quests, and such, and I expect a significantly higher ranking then.
- Game 38: Nethack (1987)
- Five Adventures, Five Fates
- Playing, Dying, Screaming, Restarting
- Enough For Now
- Final Ranking
- Ascended!
After that CRPG Addict added an editorial On Roleplaying and Roguelikes, in which he described how the possibility for the player to experience or construct a sensible narrative in a game's context is very important in order to make a game a good role-playing game.