RETRO-BLAST 90s

[Wonderful Butternut]

The release on Zomb's Lair has worked for me in the past, though I think my save still got somehow corrupted in the Chodak ruins right at the end. Good game though, definitely will include it in this thread alongside 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites.

Cool, I'll try that. Normally it works fine until something explodes (and there's one unskippable space battle) at which point it shits itself and nothing I do with DosBox helps.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Good game suggestions:
Activision Battlezone remake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1998_video_game)
Mechwarrior II/Mechwarrior Mercenaries
early attempt to apply Idtech to other genres, Shadowcaster https://www.abandonware-france.org/images_abandonware/jeux/35939at10.54.42PM.png
criminally underrated Total Annihilation/Wargasm competitor Warzone 2100: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warzone_2100
trading game/proto tower defense combo Fragile Allegiance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKa5DI98Rus
wonderfully surreal but unfortunately horribly broken minimalist 4X Ascendancy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDeXKf6e46I
Sierra's 90s high point, Quest for Glory 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCbeElchSzo
best PC platformer of the 90s, imo, attempted 2D Doom clone Abuse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6_2ZGBZ0ZE
MDK : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KxhI2xSfTA


"Interesting" suggestions:
Inferno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(video_game)

Psygnosis weird shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darker_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstatica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_(video_game)

forgetton and now virtually impossible play Bioforge, which seemed to singlehandedly invent every cliche of modern cinematic action games fifteen years in advance, despite being a flop that no one remembers : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dimqpJgDTQ

Westwood's failed attempt an online focused Diablo competitor, Nox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyTjktEmuh0 - like a lot of Westwood's last games, this really feels ahead of the curve in presentation and the feel, the feedback from the environment is leagues ahead of Diablo and other games. but the game lacked any kind of spark or uniqueness to make it addictive or enough depth for online play

Weirdly influential but not at all good attempt at Zelda on the PC, Heimdal I and Heimdal II (horrible controls): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heimdall_%28video_game%29

[BJBMK2]

Liminal puzzle goodness

[thelittlemango]

ChuChu Rocket still plays like a dream, I remember every Dreamcast owner in the UK getting it free but can't quite remember the circumstances behind it. Something about signing up to the online service but there being big delays so a free game as an apology? Or just a freebie to get the whole online thing moving?

[Lemming]

It's GAME TIME

Wing Commander (1990)



RELEASE DATE: September 25th, 1990



STORY: Humanity is locked in a brutal, endless war with a race of felines called the Kilrathi. A gang of cocky jackasses get together to fly sorties and wreck Kilrathi operations.

YOU FIGHT LIKE A STILLBORN KITTEN: Well, as we saw in the magazine advert, Wing Commander loves to sell itself on immersion. YOU'LL DUCK AS ENEMY SHIPS FLY AT YOU!!

The game goes on a charm offensive right from the off - it even starts with a cutscene of an orchestra playing the game's theme, which is genuinely fantastic and amusingly pompous in equal measure. Then ships fly by on the screen as you're given the rundown on the galactic situation. It's like watching a film! (Players would repeat these exact words with increasing dread with each subsequent game)

To summarise Wing Commander's gameplay fairly quickly: the game consists of a series of sorties, which you'll fly in various starships. Each ship feels very unique, both in handling and in armaments, so you'll have to adjust your strategies for each craft. There's a variety of enemy ships too, which each require different tactics - light fighters will try to get behind you in a dogfight, while heavy cruisers will need a missile up the tailpipe to take them out.

Verisimilitude is a huge focus of the game, and it shows everywhere - as incoming fire hits you, your ship shakes, consoles and panels explode, and critical systems get knocked out, with consequent gameplay effects. If your comms system is down, you just get static crackling when you try to call your teammates. Your various displays can get knocked out, leaving you without crucial information. Your guns can be taken out, leaving you either defenceless or with only one functioning cannon. Space fills with debris as ships take damage and bits of them fly off.

There's so much cool stuff you can do, like using the comm system to taunt enemy ships. Objectively the funniest thing in the game is if you immediately hit your ejector seat three seconds into a mission right after leaving the Tiger's Claw, which leads to a massive bollocking from your commanding officer. Even dying is cool - you get to see your own funeral.

In keeping with the game's movie-like qualities, the gameplay itself pushes you towards acts of cinematic heroism. The game's best moments are where the various mechanics intersect in a way that calls on you to do ridiculous shit - one of the best in my playthrough being when my ship was on its last legs and my weapons had been destroyed, and a lone Kilrathi fighter was about to destroy a civilian transport. With no other way to stop it, I hit the afterburners and rammed the assailant head-on in a suicidal kamikaze attack. The resulting crash destroyed the Kilrathi and tore the last of my ship to shreds, but my frontal shields absorbed just enough of the impact to leave me with a scrap of health left, enough to limp home and finish the mission. Cool!!!

Even though you're a lone pilot, you appear to be the single most influential person in the entire galaxy. Your missions determine the fate of the entire war, which is relayed to you in cutscenes. In an early cutscene, Kilrathi marines raid a human science outpost. If you've been doing well, the scientists manage to wage their own Die Hard campaign against the Kilrathi and end up repelling the assault, but if you fucked up and played around with your ejector seat (phwoar), the marines slaughter the outpost, and the war starts to go badly.

The game contains various paths, and places you on them based on your performance. If you do well, you're put on one path; if you fuck up, you head down a different branch. You can redeem yourself or fuck up worse at any point, so still head towards a good ending even if you botch a mission. One thing that struck me as utterly batshit is that the game gets harder the more you fail - the "failure" routes are consistently harder than the "success" routes. That doesn't make sense, surely? The game should soften up on you if you're shit at it, and it should ramp up the challenge to meet your skills if you're winning. As it stands, it's the inverse of what you'd expect - the game punishes skilled players by giving them less to do, and punishes weaker players by making the game progressively more unreasonable.

Anyway, despite the cinematic trappings, the plot itself is very standard - you're an annoying meathead in a group of national stereotypes, who'll say shit like "g'day mate" and "och aye laddie" and "konichiwa, sensei" and "non! sacre bleu!" to you. You've all gotten together to kill Kilrathi, a feline race who are waging war against humanity. Being a Big Strong Man with a Big Square Jaw, you quickly become Rear Admiral of the Whole Universe, become the best pilot in the entire fleet, and become the key to the entire war. The end. The plot's simplicity doesn't matter, because it's so well-presented; it never gets old watching the flight crews run to the hangar bays with dramatic music playing, or watching your ship blow up from multiple angles.

THE GOOD:
- Superb graphics and amazing immersive touches
- Central combat mechanics are great, with enemy ships demanding different tactics
- Excellent soundtrack
- Ship movement feels smooth, and each ship feels distinct

THE BAD:
- Consequences for failure are ass-backwards
- I flew into my own missile once right at the end of a mission, and will be sending Chris Roberts a death threat as a result

VERDICT: The Wing Commander series is a wild ride, that starts here and ends with having to watch Mark Hamill strain his way through some of the worst dialogue ever written. Chris Roberts' desire to make a movie-like game would, in my view, eventually start to become a real double-edged sword, as the movie elements began to override the actual gameplay. But here in the first game in the series, it's pretty much perfect - the story is simple enough so as not to be intrusive, the focus is still very much on the gameplay, but it really does feel like you're playing through a bunch of intense film sequences.

Over the course of the decade, Wing Commander will be repeatedly outdone in pretty much every area - by the Star Wars X-Wing and TIE Fighter games, by Descent, by countless other early 3D flight combat games. But for a moment here in 1990, Wing Commander might just be the coolest action game in the world. Roberts wanted to make a game that eschewed the often finnicky controls of earlier flight sims and instead offered controls that were intuitive and simple enough to allow the player to focus less on fucking around with the keyboard and more on performing wild heroics, and he absolutely succeeded.

Here, Chris Roberts, you may have your first - and possibly ONLY - AI Generated Retroblast Gold Star.

[Mister Six]

EDIT: Wayhey! First review!

When doing the FPS thread I found the rate of technological progress to be astonishing. I still can't believe that Wolf 3D and Half-Life were just 6 years apart.





That's the same as the time between 2017 and now! I think the only innovation we've had in that time is RTX, which looks hugely variable.

Mind boggling. Hard to imagine a similar leap ever happening again, visually at least.

Started looking through specific machines' offerings now... these are all games I was oddly fascinated by but (mostly) never played...

AMIGA
1990
Bonanza Bros
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (DIGITISED TITS!!! THE PREQUEL)
Shadow of the Beast 2
Wings
James Pond
Creatures (not the virtual pet of the same name for the PC from 1996)

1991
Gods
Moonstone
Chuck Rock
Eye of the Beholder
Mega-lo-Mania
Magic Pockets
Hunter
James Pond 2: Robocod

1992
Waxworks
Shadow of the Beast 3

1993
Arabian Nights
Wibble World Giddy: Wibblemania
Hired Guns

1994
DreamWeb
Universe

1995
Biing! Sex, Intrigue and Scalpels (actually I'd never heard of this before but found it just now)

1996
Tin Toy Adventure in the House of Fun (not really, I just remember it being about the last game to actually be advertised in Amiga Power, so I threw it in here)

MEGA DRIVE
1990
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (absolutely mint)

1991
Streets of Rage
Toejam and Earl

1992
Ecco the Dolphin
Rolo to the Rescue

1993
General Chaos

1994
Earthworm Jim
Bubba 'n' Stix

Okay bored now, byeeee!

[The Culture Bunker]

- Ship movement feels smooth, and each ship feels distinct

Yeah, that's something I do remember very clearly from the time. You start off with the Hornet, a light-fighter, and you could very much tell the difference when you moved up to a lot more clunky medium class job. I did chuckle when you talk to someone in the bar (Hunter, I think) and he calls that ship a piece of shite, because he was bang on the money.

Same with the enemy ships - that horrid feeling when the heavy fighter with six forward facing guns came at you in a pack.

[falafel]

I was going to say The Journeyman Project because I always wanted to play it when I was a kid, but I just watched a video and it looks like absolute water torture to play.

[Old Thrashbarg]

I'm going to nominate a couple of Mega Drive games I had that I struggled to get anywhere with, despite knowing they were good, purely because of my lack of skill:

• The Lion King - side-scrolling platformer based on some film or other that looked great, with varied and incentive gameplay, but felt nightmarishly difficult for 7 year old me
• Ranger X - side-scrolling shooter that I remember spending a lot of time with, but didn't progress far because of a level I now can't remember, but found impossible to beat

Also, Ballz - entertaining beat-'em-up that tried something a bit different and looked great; contained lots of balls.

[JaDanketies]

GTA2 is great. I played the hell out of it when it came out and have dabbled since. I've even managed to get to the last level without cheating, which is as good as finishing it in GTA world. Hell I might have even finished it. Do agree that the save system was a PITA but so was GTA1, and GTA1 is far more impossible to complete without cheating than GTA2. I'd say it's almost impossible to reach the third location on GTA1 without cheating.

[seepage]

forgot Master of Magic from 1994

[Lemming]

Was trying to figure out how to best choose the order to play games in, when it occurred to me that it might be interesting to do one game from each year to start with, so we get to see the technological progress of the 90s in fast-forward. So the next game would be from 91, then 92, and so on, and after 99 we'd be back to another game from 1990.

With that in mind, how about 1991's Another World (aka Out Of This World) as the next game? Let's check the ad:

It's fun to see how "this game is like a movie!" was a boast back in the day, whereas nowadays people would be more likely to use it as an insult for a game that's light on gameplay and heavy on cutscenes.

[Mister Six]

Looking forward to watching my knee get cut by a fucking slug 300 times in a row.

[Waking Life]

GTA2 is great. I played the hell out of it when it came out and have dabbled since. I've even managed to get to the last level without cheating, which is as good as finishing it in GTA world. Hell I might have even finished it. Do agree that the save system was a PITA but so was GTA1, and GTA1 is far more impossible to complete without cheating than GTA2. I'd say it's almost impossible to reach the third location on GTA1 without cheating.

Curious on this, as I completed the first GTA (and London incarnation) without any cheats. Some of the timed missions were a pain in San Fran and remember they were close to the wire but I don't remember it being horrendously difficult. I'm not a great gamer either and left a lot of PS games uncompleted.

I gave up on GTA2, but just because I didn't enjoy the vibe.

[madhair60]

Looking forward to watching my knee get cut by a fucking slug 300 times in a row.

ha ha ha you weren't very good at a shit old game

[Lemming]

Looking forward to watching my knee get cut by a fucking slug 300 times in a row.

Just started playing now, was absolutely convinced I'd make it through the first few screens since I memorised them by playing so much as a kid (sprint-jump-bunny-hop uber alles), and yet:



FUCK

[Lemming]

How's that for speed, already beat it!

Another World (1991)



RELEASE DATE: November, 1991



(i took these screenshots from the 20th Anniversary Edition, available on GoG. You can switch between new remastered graphics and the original graphics at any time!)

STORY: During a daring experiment, an equipment malfunction causes a weedy scientist to be suddenly whisked off to a harsh alien world, seemingly under the control of some kind of brutal military.

NO FUNNY QUOTE AVAILABLE BECAUSE NOBODY SPEAKS IN THIS GAME: I picked this game off the list at near-random but it actually makes a really good companion to Wing Commander, as odd as that sounds. As the magazine ads show, a big goal back in the day was to make games more movie-like. The challenge with that, of course, is finding the balance between "movie-like game" and "game that's just a fucking movie" (a lesson Chris Roberts would continually fail to learn).

I remember when I was a kid, the best thing you could say about a game was that it was like "being in a movie" - people were using that for Half-Life all the time. Another World is a very good early-ish attempt to make a "cinematic" game in that sort of ethos. Basically every room you enter causes some kind of spectacular scenario to play out, with you forced to react and survive (or die) in a series of split-second decisions.

This means running gunfights, rooftop parkour, narrow escapes from overwhelming odds, heroic leaps over spike-filled caverns, and, weirdly, faffing about with an alien tank that you don't know how to use.

The controls are simple - arrow keys to move left and right, down arrow to duck, shift to jump, control for "action" (which covers everything from firing the gun to pressing switches).

When the game flows and you broadly understand what you're being asked to do, it's pretty incredible - one of the best moments in the game is when you're suddenly grabbed by an assailant who lifts you in the air and starts to choke you to death. Pressing action causes you to kick him in the nuts, then you've got to sprint towards your gun, dive to the ground to dodge the laser he fires at you, grab your gun with a roll, and then return fire. It works and a lot of players will get it first or second try, since the controls are all doing what they're meant to do.

But sometimes, there's ideas introduced which are only used once and which you have no information about. My least favourite was a brief puzzle in the caverns where you've got to leap to some stalagtites (or whatever the roof ones are called) and shimmy between them. At no point before or after this scene can you grab and climb any object like this, meaning you have no idea you can do this or that you're expected to do this. To make it worse, the room below has spikes, meaning that jumping towards a random bit of scenery is the least intuitive thing you could possibly be doing. I was able to breeze through the game because I have a lot of it in my memory, but this one room confused the absolute fuck out of me.

Luckily, the checkpoint system is fairly comprehensive. Not only is it generous, but it also prevents you from softlocking yourself. If you appear to have been sent back a couple screens further than you expected, it's because you missed something on those screens and the game's giving you a second chance. The puzzles are all well-compartmentalised, so there's no adventure-game style shit where you've got to backtrack 3000 screens or anything - everything you need to solve any given puzzle is in the small area you're in, which is fantastic.

Probably the most consistent mechanic you get is combat, which is kind of fun for what it is - pressing control once causes you to raise your gun but not fire (this is used once in the whole game and it does barely anything), pressing again shoots a red laser, holding fire down generates a forcefield in front of you, and holding it down even longer generates a plasma shot that can blow up forcefields and walls. Considering how barebones the mechanics are, some of the shootouts are actually really fun and tense.

Otherwise... let's get the obvious out of the way, the game looks amazing. It's absolutely breathtaking. You can get a 15th and 20th Anniversary Edition, both of which offer graphical remasters, but honestly I'd stick with the original pixel art, it looks superb.

The story is, of course, not much of a story, but there's some fairly evocative stuff regardless. You really feel like the odds are desperately against you, especially towards the end of the game, and it's always a relief when your ALIEN MATE shows up to bail you out of shit. I remember as a kid I was captivated by the bathhouse near the end, too, because it's so different from everything else - every alien you've met so far, even BEST MATE, has been an absolute headcase who punches the shit out of everything, then suddenly there's this opulent building with intricate stained-glass windows and people inside just living peacefully. Maybe you just teleported into a really unfortunate bit of the planet and would have gotten a much warmer welcome elsewhere. Atmospherically, it's almost like a precursor to 1998's "Unreal" - an alien world that causes a really pleasing sense of confusion and alienation.

One complaint is that the platforming controls are pretty unimpressive. I like that your jump sucks and you feel weighty, because that lines up with you being some random twat in a t-shirt, but a couple of the jumps in the underground cave can get irritating. It also definitely doesn't help that the game opens with those fucking slugs, which are, bizarrely, probably the hardest jumping challenge in the game.

I'm struggling to say much else about the game, so why don't you just watch the whole thing? Here it is (video not mine, obviously, my playthrough had a lot more instances of violent failure):

THE GOOD:
- Wonderful graphics
- Checkpoint system ensures you never get softlocked and know where to look for solutions
- Great variety in challenges

THE BAD:
- No consistent mechanics, making some puzzles unintuitive
- Game is very short
- Anti-climactic ending
- Platforming controls can be quite sluggish

VERDICT: It comes from a time when people had a lot of ideas about how to make games more like movies - and when that was still seen as a desirable goal. Another World is maybe a bit too light on actual gameplay, and the mechanics change too often for you to ever get a real feel for much of anything, but it still offers exactly the exciting, cinematic experience it sets out for.

Torn between Gold and Silver, I think we'll go Silver mostly for the game's very brief length.

[Mister Six]

Honestly, the brevity would bump it to Gold for me, in this age of horribly bloated repetitive bollocks.

Like you, I was also mesmerised by the bathhouse bit, and the other little glimpses of civilisation in this otherwise odd and extremely inhospitable world. It does feel genuinely bleak and frightening and weird, and I always felt sorry for poor Lost Scientist Man, even if he drove a sports car like an absolute cock in the intro.

I can also remember the exact combo to win the gun battles: shield-shield-shield-shield-MEGABLAST!-ZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAPZAP-shield-shield-shield-shield...

There's a sequel, Heart of the Alien, where you play the alien bloke, but I never tried it - I think it was only released on Mega CD or something.

[Mister Six]

Ooh, and it's only $3 on the PS Store right now! Nice one. Shame I won't be within spitting distance of my PS4 for a few days, but I've bagged it anyway.

[Lemming]

^^ interesting about Heart of the Alien, I never tried it either. Looks interesting, alongside Flashback. Watching a playthrough now and the little tie-in moments to Another World are ace, seeing GINGER BLOKE in the background of certain areas doing bits from the first game.

In other news, in the first of many BROKEN RETRO-BLAST PROMISES: we should be picking a game from 1992 next, but I started playing 1991's "Eye of the Beholder" which is an old favourite, and it sucked me in to the point where I'm so far in now that it might as well be the next game. So...



Like never before! That's right - eat shit "Pool of Radiance", fuck you "Champions of Krynn", we're moving onto the NEXT GENERATION of D&D games. It's like nothing you've ever seen before! Except 1987's "Dungeon Master", which it's virtually identical to... but that wasn't D&D, so the ad's claim stands!

[Mister Six]

I've heard of IBM and Amiga but I've never played a game on a Clue Book before.

[badaids]

^^ interesting about Heart of the Alien, I never tried it either. Looks interesting, alongside Flashback. Watching a playthrough now and the little tie-in moments to Another World are ace, seeing GINGER BLOKE in the background of certain areas doing bits from the first game.

In other news, in the first of many BROKEN RETRO-BLAST PROMISES: we should be picking a game from 1992 next, but I started playing 1991's "Eye of the Beholder" which is an old favourite, and it sucked me in to the point where I'm so far in now that it might as well be the next game. So...



Like never before! That's right - eat shit "Pool of Radiance", fuck you "Champions of Krynn", we're moving onto the NEXT GENERATION of D&D games. It's like nothing you've ever seen before! Except 1987's "Dungeon Master", which it's virtually identical to... but that wasn't D&D, so the ad's claim stands!

This is my second best Amiga game behind Wings.

The level with the spiders well shits me up still.

[seepage]

I was crap at Eye of the Beholder [and Dungeon Master] as it's 'real-time' and gave up on it. Was I being a wimp and should give it another go?   

[Lemming]

If you had trouble with the combat, try having a couple of rangers in the party's back rows - you can beat a good chunk of the game by just moonwalking away from enemies while firing arrows, having the melee fighters at the front move in only if you get backed into a corner. Given that the game gives you some melee NPCs pretty early on, you could theoretically make the entire starting party rangers, or like three rangers and one cleric so someone's available to use Turn Undead and spam Cure Light Wounds.

Even in melee combat though, there's nothing to stop you from just circling around the enemy and hitting them while they fruitlessly try to reach you, which feels hilariously cheap but is totally within the rules of the game.

[badaids]

I was crap at Eye of the Beholder [and Dungeon Master] as it's 'real-time' and gave up on it. Was I being a wimp and should give it another go?   

Dungeon Master was too complicated for me.

Get Legend of Grimrock on yer PC, it's da dead good dungeon crawler Reboot.

[Famous Mortimer]

As if by the sheer power of @Lemming 's post, "Another World" is 80% off on GOG.com at the moment.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

It also definitely doesn't help that the game opens with those fucking slugs, which are, bizarrely, probably the hardest jumping challenge in the game.

You can press the action button to kick them to death.

It feels like a real trailblazer, not just for obvious follow ups like Flashback. The comparison to Half Life is spot on with how your always moving forward and doing something different.

[Mister Six]

I think it's also pretty impressive how much variety the game manages to pack in on a controller with just one button. Yeah, figuring out what the context-sensitive controls will let you do this time means some bits are awkward, but I remember being a bit disappointed that Flashback traded it in for a more repetitive/formalised control system and gameplay. There's something to be said for a couple of hours of surprises and variety vs six hours of the same thing over and over.

Speaking of Flashback, it too had a forgotten sequel - Fade to Black, which I picked up second-hand but pretty much bounced off of, as it was cumbersome and kind of dull. Give me top-tier VGA sprites over bargain basement PS1-era 3D any day.

[Lemming]

Eye of the Beholder (1991)



RELEASE DATE: 1991



STORY: A group of adventurers are hired to investigate the source of evil under the city of Waterdeep, but find themselves entombed in a vast underground complex by a mysterious force.

SOMETHING IS MOVING IN THE FLOOR DRAIN: A copy of "Dungeon Master" so complete that it's amazing Westwood didn't end up in court, here's 1991's "Eye of the Beholder"!

Like most AD&D games, we start with party creation. My party, with thanks to a Forgotten Realms random name generator I found:
Zerla, Female Human Paladin
Venna, Female Gnome Cleric
Farris, Male Elf Ranger
Rawley, Male Human Thief

This party was fine to beat the game. There's no rhyme or reason behind the race/class combos I chose, and I think Rawley was total fucking deadweight for the whole game. Either I don't get how to use the Thief class effectively, or it sucks. Races mostly just have a few minor things, like being able to read Kobold (which comes up once in the whole game, I think).

As with the other SSI Gold Box games, you can "modify" your characters' stats. There's therefore absolutely no barrier at all on you just setting all your characters' attributes to the maximum of 18. This is ostensibly so you can bring your own beloved pen-and-paper characters into the game. Well, by sheer coincidence, I - along with everyone else who's ever played a Gold Box game - just so happen to have four pen-and-paper characters who all mysteriously have maxed out stats!

You can also bolster your party with new recruits you meet in the game, as well as by resurrecting the bones of dead adventurers who can then join you.

When party creation is done, we're plopped into a FULL 3D DUNGEON FOR A DUNGEONS & DRAGONS EXPERIENCE LIKE NO OTHER. Navigation is pretty much identical to Dungeon Master - you move around on a grid and keep an eye out for loose bricks and levers and other things that can be interacted with to reveal new paths.

There's no map and no automapper, so it's back to the grid paper. Some people adore this; I fucking hate it, especially when there's bullshit like spinny corridors and teleporters that fuck your entire map up and render it totally useless. If you get really fucked, there is a "clue book" which contains full, annotated maps of each level. No shame in saying that I whipped out these after a while. I couldn't get past the level with the cunty dwarves camped out in the middle without a map, and as soon as I hit the Drow levels, I wound up just alt-tabbing to the maps every five steps.

I'll mention here that there's a fan mod called The All-Seeing Eye which adds an automapper to the game. I played a bit with it but ended up turning it off, because it renders the whole thing a bit trivial, but if you're coming to this from something like Legend of Grimrock, you might find the game a lot more fun with an automapper. And really, it's probably not that different from my method of obsessively looking at the clue book anyway.

The bulk of the game is in navigating the dungeon, keeping an eye out for traps, keys, and puzzles. The dungeon design is generally superb and this is where the real fun of the game lies. But of course, enemies await. The combat is actually pretty weak, mechanically - you right click the weapon you want to attack with, then click it again when the cooldown wears off. That's literally it. You have to juggle between all your party members, of course, but that's all there is to it. You can also cast magic if you can be arsed, and want to set up camp immediately after to re-memorise your spells.

The only other real consideration is positioning - only the two people in the front row can deal melee damage, and will receive all front-facing melee damage. So, to really optimise your chances, you'll also want to rapidly switch fighters around, cycling all your melee fighters rapidly between the front and back rows. I have no idea what the hell this is meant to look like in-universe. Remember that bit in Red Dwarf where Rimmer wants to go in front of Kryten and behind him, so they end up circling each other while moving down a corridor? I think that's what your party is doing in Eye of the Beholder.



The combat is also a bit trivialised by the movement system. I like blobbers where the party is locked into turn-based combat, but in Eye of the Beholder, everything remains real-time and you can disengage freely. Fights thus turn into farce every time as the best strategy is consistently to backpedal away from enemies, hurling projectiles at them as you moonwalk. In the event that a melee is unavoidable, your best bet is to dance around the enemies by pirouetting in a graceful circle, spamming attacks while the enemy slowly and ineffectually turns to try and keep up with you. It's Looney Tunes shit every time. I never understood why Legend of Grimrock copied the same system so closely, because it has the same results there too!

The magic system is the same as in other AD&D games - you must rest to memorise a set number of spells. To be honest I've never really understood the idea behind this system, and I've never thought it works particularly well in videogame form - as with in the turn-based Gold Box games like "Pool of Radiance", you basically just wind up camping constantly so that the healers can memorise, cast, and re-memorise their healing spells. The penalty for resting in Eye of the Beholder is that each party member has a hunger meter which you must keep on top of with rations, but really, it never becomes an issue. I was overloaded with rations in the first 30 minutes and started just leaving new ration packs on the ground, never needing them.

THE GOOD:
- Superb graphics
- Simple interface which means the game is easy to learn
- Dungeon design is mostly good

THE BAD:
- Fairly simplistic combat with a movement system that's very easy to abuse
- IT'S NOT FUCKING FUN TO GET POISONED BY SPIDERS WHEN THERE'S LIKE ONLY ONE FUCKING ANTIDOTE ON THE WHOLE LEVEL

FINAL SCORE AND VERDICT: The combat might be a bit wonky, but for the most part, the game is good dungeon-crawling fun, with all the switch puzzles, teleporters, and hidden areas you'd expect.

The game's sequel (which I might play later) is a step up in most regards, from what I remember. You can transfer your save to play with the same party - COOL. Let's go Silver on this one.

[bgmnts]

Howling at the Rimmer and Kryten party positioning visual.