Good computer games that I have played

Might and Magic - Millenium Edition

This was a great purchase. It's now available for only $10 and it includes 5 games - Might and Magic 6, Might and Magic 7, plus some older ones (4 and 5 and a miscellaneous one I couldn't get to work).

Games 6 and 7 were awesome. People say the graphics are a little unsophisticated for when they were released but I don't care. These are role-playing games: you make four characters and you take them on a quest, killing stuff and collecting treasure. You see your characters' animated faces and hear their occasional comments as you do all this. It's silly of me, but I especially like getting new armor and assorted other protective clothing and trying it on my characters - you get to see what they look like all dressed up and holding a variety of menacing weapons. Wearing or holding certain items, drinking from barrels, or touching certain monuments, will build up your characters' base statistics fairly quickly, so what starts out in the teens can eventually get near 100. The difficulty level seems about right: you don't often find yourself in a battle where you get killed before you can react, but it's still challenging. It can take quite a while to build up all your skills to master level, especially for a mage. These games provide many hours of playing time and are open-ended enough that you can play them again from the beginning with different characters and not get bored. In game 7, there are two paths that you can choose midway through the game (good and evil), and trying both paths adds even more fun.

Games 4 and 5 are also fun although they might not be right for you unless you're used to games from the early 90's. The graphics are definitely more primitive - 256 colors with a large resolution. Also, you don't have free reign of a 3-dimensional landscape as in games 6 and 7. Rather, you move by discrete steps in one of four directions. You also don't get to see big pretty views of your inventory items or your dressed-up characters.

Ultimate Wizardry Archives

Wizardry 1-7 and Wizardry Gold are included in this package. Wizardry Gold is a slightly updated version of Wizardry 7. I think Wizardry 6, Bane of the Cosmic Forge, was the first game I ever played that was truly addictive. As I recall, it had very primitive graphics with just 3 colors, but it was a grand, sweeping game with many different areas to explore. It took my mom and me many months to finish it. Mind you, I usually see "long" as being a big point in a game's favor. What's the point of buying a game if you're through with it in a week?

Wizardry 7, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, was even better, and just as long. The graphics are of a similar complexity to how I described M&M 4 and 5. (256 colors, large resolution, movement in steps in one of four directions). It's definitely worth playing for the serious adventurer. However some of the things that randomly kill you are just annoying as heck, such as when a random number generator causes you to fall off a cliff. It's tough to build up your climbing and swimming skills to the point where this doesn't happen, along with all the other skills you have to build up. Save often. In both games 6 and 7, every time you make a level, your different base statistics go up or down randomly. It's a little weird when you've made a level only to be rewarded by having a point of strength taken away.

I didn't get games 1-5 until fairly recently (long after finishing game 7) and I must admit they were a little too primitive even for me. It's to be expected, however. Game 1 was made in about 1982. The versions you get with the Ultimate Wizardry Archive are updated so that they are actually playable on a modern computer, but they still include on-screen reminders to make a boot disk - this was before the days of hard drives when you had to start up your computer with a bootable floppy in the drive. There's a fixed dungeon structure which really isn't all that exciting, and there aren't all that many types of monsters or inventory items. I guess I've gotten spoiled now and need more visual stimulation with my games.

Wizardry 8

Wizardry 8 is what I'm playing now with my mom. There was an alarming 8-year gap between the releases of Wizardry 7 and Wizardry 8, but it's finally here. It has better graphics than any of the above-mentioned games. (Dressing up your characters is not as fun as in Might and Magic 6 and 7 however - the characters stay naked (without nipples) and the articles of clothing appear in boxes with arrows pointing to the appropriate body part.) We haven't gotten very far in the game yet, but it seems to have better game-play than the earlier Wizardry games. Your magic points actually regenerate in the course of the day and your stamina doesn't go away so quickly, so you don't have to sleep so terribly often. You have six characters and up to 2 NPCs can join you. All 8 characters have animated faces and their own voices and personalities. A lot of the different classes can learn healing magic, which is a big bonus. One weird thing is that every time you make a level, you get to add some points to the base statistics. Pretty soon all the statistics are high and it's never clear what additional benefit you get from adding to them.

Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast

I'm not quite as big a fan of this one as most people who have played it, but it's still good. This one probably adheres much more strictly to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules than any of the other games mentioned. I never did any RPGs outside of the computer so it's really a moot point with me. It's difficult to make levels in this game. There's an experience point cap which limits most characters to about level 8. Compare this to level 80 or more in Might and Magic and you'll see that level-making is quite a rare event in Baldur's Gate! It's also extremely difficult to increase your base statistics, which seems more sensible than the way it is in the other games. There's just a couple of special items and some books that will increase them.

In all the above games, you view the world through your characters' eyes, but in this one you see the world, including your characters, from above. It adds a completely different kind of strategy, because your characters don't have to travel as a group. You can have a thief hide in the shadows and then scout out the area ahead, or you can have a strong fighter with a speed enchantment on him rush in, whack the monsters a couple of times, and then rush out before the monsters know what hit them or figure out where the rest of your party is hiding. The game is not as replayable as the ones I've mentioned above, because the treasures you'll find in certain locations are always identical. Even the monsters you encounter in each spot are pretty much the same, as well as the loot that the monsters happen to be carrying. I am replaying it with my boyfriend, however, with him on his computer controlling three of the characters and me on my computer controlling the other three.

This game bothers me in that the more difficult battles seem to be only winnable by chance. Your opponents will cast nasty magic on you that takes out several of your characters before you have a chance to do anything. Casting magic on *them* hardly ever has an effect. Everything just moves too fast. I usually have to play these battles over and over again until, by some miraculous accident, my characters happen to resist whatever was cast at them and survive past the first round.

Quest for Glory 5: Dragon Fire

This one is really more of an adventure game than an RPG. You only have one character, and the emphasis is on solving puzzles rather than on building up your skills. You do also kill stuff, but it's not the focus of the game. The storyline is pretty good and there's a big world to explore, but my mom and I didn't feel we had enough interest to play it again using each of the different character classes. Maybe someday, after we've forgotten the plot, we could try it again.

Shareware Games

Click the names to download the games!

Bolo Adventures

Magic Mansion

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