I'm in the middle of a
weird situation with Curse of Azure Bonds, which I hope to have resolved later this week. Once I do, my plan it to give that game the complete attention it deserves and try to beat it.
But in the meantime I'm in the process of collecting all of the necessary assets to play the original
Dungeon Master (DM). When I first started this love affair with the Amiga, one of the first (really dumb) things I did was I bought a box of Amiga disks. I had no idea what was in there, and what was even "good". Most of the disks - at the time - seemed to be broken. I was trying them on my weird NOS North American PAL machine. I thought most were bad. Little did I know they simply weren't compatible with OS 3.1. Like an idiot I thew a bunch of them away... But not all. I kept some even though they seemed to be broken.
Recently I pulled one of the disks out of the "dead box" and gave it a go in my A2000. And ho-lee smackers. It worked! I'm talking about Dungeon Master. From what I can tell, this game is a outright legend. It innovated, for all intents and purposes, the 3D dungeon crawler genre. Some even say Eye of the Beholder was a clone of Dungeon Master. When I first read that I kind of bristled. But today I started walking around and figured out how to cast a spell and even fight a monster. And... wow. Just, wow. It's really a remarkable little game that I can see I'm going to fall in love with.
The UI is really interesting and, to be honest, I'm surprised more games didn't steal more from it. The way you can change the order of your 4 characters (the fact that you even
have 4 characters in a dungeon crawler), the really interesting spells you have to "mix" and you even decide how much mana to "spend" to affect their duration. All kinds of really cool ideas. It really kind of blew me away. And heck, I think EoB may indeed have not only stolen some of the look and feel, but even the sound effect of a metal door opening....
So I know DM's going to be a game I'm going to want to attack not too long after Curse is behind me.
The
Dick Tracy game I got and unboxed recently I've not been able to get working, unfortunately. Something weird going on there.
And I've been playing an incredible (non-Amiga, but worth putting in the Lounge or Retro channels) game for the C64 which is new. Yes, new.
Pond Software in England publishes a few games for C64's still. You can tell they are labors of love from 40-something die-hards who have stuck with the machine for over 3 decades. I think the game I'm playing, Bear Essentials, was under development for a over a year probably in off-hours by the key developer/designer, Graham Atkins. Anyway - the quality is
high. The game is
gorgeous.
In their first printing of boxed games they made 250 total . I got #209. They've since sold out (they were on sale for only a little while). But I do believe they plan on creating a second printing. I got my 5 1/4" floppy in the mail last week. The boxed version comes with a disk with the full compete game. They do have a
free 2016 version though available for download. More on the full game in a different post soon.
So:
Curse of Azure Bonds
Dungeon Master
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
Bear Essentials
Those are all on my immediate radar. Since 3 of the 4 are really big time investments, I'll probably be looking for some quick-hit arcade-style games to put in-between them. Not sure what yet.