The skill system was a real incentive. Every level earned you 5 attribute points but more importantly one skill point, which could be put in one of three skill trees. Each character class had 3 entirely different trees, and new skills were opened up at regular intervals such as 6, 12, 18, etc.  Having more than one point in a skill is also pretty important to get the most out of it, turning the inferno spell from something with insufficient range to be of much use to a devastating flamethrower that can just burn through hordes of enemies. Later they apparently even added synergies where your level in one skill could affect your damage in another, adding bonuses. Example would be say perhaps meteor adding damage to fireball and vice versa.

hmmm, how did the fights work in colosium? I rather like the idea of combining resource management tasks with real time playing, as has happened already in rale racer. It is however one of my absolute annoyences, that there are so many pure stat grinding games on the net, where basically you have to just repeat actions constantly to gain points to spend on stat increases etc, all so that some higher level player doesn't come and clobber you. Usually such games have litle or no actual writing or atmosphere, and the only exploration involved is moving betwene the training ground constant monster generater of doom, and the item shop.

As for shooters, that's another reason i'm slightly sad gma seem to have gone down, sinse I'm sure the engine could've expanded nicely on what Shades of doom started.

I'd particularly like to see a shooter with the hole multiplayer and user created maps business, though for personal preference I'd go for an rpg first.

Hmm... good point there. Granted I think it might be possible. I think us blindies have had keystrokes too easy for too long! lol only kidding..

As for Coloseum... basically, it starts off with you being a slave, who needs to pay off money to the buyer of yourself to gain your freedom. You basically had two types atack. Upper and lower. Square and triangle were for arm attacks, and x and circle, legs. There was a stamina bar on the screen, so it depended on your attacks to either be full or not full. And that would effect your player. If it was full, you had high endurance. If it ran out though, you became slower and more sluggish and weaker as it went down. You would fight in battles where you had to kill a lot of people, hunt by killing animals in the arena, team battling, or once you got there, duels. Basically it's to raise your reputation as high as possible. I would go read gamefaqs reviews for it, because the game itself is hard to explain. Another type of game I would like to see is a fighter like Mortal Kombat in Audio. Technically speaking, all that needs to be tweeked are the menus to speak... and it's done. There's not much that needs to be done.

I'll have a look at colosium, it sounds interesting.

appologies for the slightly bad choice of words, I didn't mean gone down in the sense of out of business, but it does appear that Gma (like Bsc), have stopped developing games. there don't even appear to be any more Lw missions posted recently (though admittedly, I've hardly made a start with most of them, so this isn't exactly a problem).

In prince terms, I was considdering the original 2D game as highly convertable into audio, though something 3D in the same style might indeed also be fun.

I was just thinking that we could probably do with some more reasonably complex 2D audio games, ----- though then again, anything other than a center the sound, rack up score game would probably be welcome.

Nobody's arguing that it's partly GMA and BSC's own fault that people think they've given audio gaming up as a bad job. A news update, even an occasional one to let us know that yes, we're working on a new title, would be nice. I do remember David saying that the new game, whatever it is and whenever it's released, would be something similar in nature to Lone Wolf, though beyond that he didn't say more except that it would probably be mission based.
  As for BSC Games, I've pretty much lost interest in them. For me none of their current titles has much replay value, and they lost major points when they scrapped Castle Quest, not merely because I was really looking forward to playing it, but also because I was set to lend my voice to the project as well. I was one of the volunteer voice actors chosen in May of 2004, only to discover the following November that the title had been canceled. I understand that they had issues with the developer they were working on, but I don't see why they couldn't have continued work on the project themselves. Sure it might have set the release back but it would also have given us a bit of desperately eeded originality and challenge. From the description on the old Castle Quest web site it didn't sound as though CQ would be the usual learn the keystrokes, then have the game beaten within a day or two. It was only with the greatest of effort that I found it in me to try to dissuade a fellow gamer, who shall out of respect remain nameless, from Emailing BSC and demanding that they resume work on CQ. I know Justin's got blindsoftware.com to consider as well, but come to think of it i haven't seen anything new there in a while either. Of course I don't check that site very oten so that's hardly surprising.

I agree about Bsc cancelling Cq, but I'd stil prefer another game from them over nothing, sinse at least while games are developed things will hopefully be evolving (look at Rail racer for a really good example of Audio game evolution).

from what I've heard recently though, it does sound as if Justin's job has well and truly put pay to anything more from Bsc games.

something else from gma would be nice, ----- perhaps they could even devolope that desert strike Gunship 2000 esque hellicopter game we were talking about earlier, ----- they've already done land, see and space, so air's the next logical setting for a game lol!

As far as shooters go, I'm not convinced of converting any of those light gun style games such as time crysis until we actually have the capacity for a light guhn style control system for a Pc that wouldn't cost the earth (the way a touch screen or something similar would at the moment).

the majority of those sorts of shooters are self-scrolling, with the challenge to the player being hitting all the targits in a given amount of time on each screen, and learning how to hit hidden targits for extra bonuses (such as blowing up the explosive barrels hidden in Time crysis so as to get rid of the thugs faster).

while something like this would be incredibly fun in audio given the same 3 dimentional set of targits to fire at (obviously with appropriate audio kews), at the moment would probably devolve into a glorified space invaders game, ie, center the sounds of the baddies and shoot, then listen to your character walk to the next ambush, rince and repeat.

I do like the idea of more fully 3D style shooters ala Halo etc. More games like shades of doom and technoshock would deffinately be welcome in my book, ----- and multiplayer support would just make things even more fun.

which reminds me, I really ought to give audio quake a try!

by the same token, a multiplayer tank game would be fun, though I'm not sure about the getting out of tanks bit. My biggest problem with tank commander is that it's a comparatively short game. It's a pitty gma couldn't give us a map and mission creater for the game, even if you'd probably have to have Mister Sapi as your commanding officer!

Well Dark, sounds as though you've heard more than I have regarding BSC. I just had anoter idea though. I got to thinking about old NES games that would benefit from being converted to audio. One sch game is Battle of Olympus from Broderbund. For those of you familiar with Greek mythology, this game told the story of Orpheus and Uridice (though the game developers changed her name to Helene for some reason), and you played the role of Orpheus. Your mission was to travel through Greece, finding and using items in order to gain entry to Tartarus to confront Hades and rescue your woman. It was a cool game since at various points you'd have to talk to various gods in order to gain certain items. Notable names included Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Poseidon, Artemis and, of course, Zeus. In fact you couldn't talk to any of the other gods without first seeing Zeus, and as he was in the area where you started (arcadia to be precise), that was easy enough.
  Another game I enjoyed as a kid was SunSoft's Blaster Master. You played as Jason, a High School student on a quest to find and escue his frog (yes, a frog), which he intended to use as a science project. Unfortunately, Fred the Frog fell into a sewer outside Jason's house, which happened to be contaminated with some bizarre mutagenic chemicals. Jason somehow managed to follow him, were upon he discovered a tanklike vehicle and a suit of armor that seemed designed for him. Curious, he put the armor on and climbed into the tank. Thus begins your adventure as you struggle to find and recover your frog, while on the side saving the earth from a hoard of vicious mutants which humanity itself unknowingly created.
  Actually Dark, both these games might be right up your alley, since they both involve a fairly high degree of exploration. Blaster master in fact is very similar to Metroid. There's lots of platform jumping, hazzards to avoid and things like that. The cool part about BM was that at any time you could get out of your vehicle and proceed on foot, which in fact you were required to do at various points, usually right before boss battles. The both Jason and his vehicle had special weapons that they could find and use, not to mention more powerful upgrades to their primary weapons. And on top of that both games had cool music. Battle of Olympus had fittingly Greek sounding music while Blaster Master had a kind of adventury soundtrack.

I always thought it'd be cool to have a game that allows you to, as a cheat code, or by beating the game, switch places with the computer opponent. So like in GTC you could become the helicopters and shoot at the player's tank, which would be controlled by the computer, stuff like that.

There have been mainstream games that allowed you to use the computer units in multiplayer actually. I think the idea is allowing you a selection rather than just sticking everyone in the tank.

Perhaps this could be an alternate deathmatch mode where you can pick from the various computer tanks or the helicopter, since the player's tank would probably be far more powerful than any one of these.

Ah, yes. Or, to have a challenge they could leave the vehicles as is, and if a player tank shot something at you you could hear it coming and it would be your duty to swerve out of the way, or get your body blown sky high.

Well, I'm hoping they have something... because I'm getting twitchy waiting. lol. BTW, Dark, have you looked at Coloseum yet?