2006-01-14 13:54:36

I only

noticed that now that you mention it... It didn't seem to register at the

time. I guess I was concentrating on something else at the time, maybe it

was the horde of zombies she kept raising tongue

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-14 18:00:33

Well as reguards my website, no it's technically not mine, but does host

lots of my stuff. A friend of mine (one of the people I played through

Rpg's with), is a big Xenogears fan, after we'd run through the entire

game, I thought of novelizing it and she thought of making a website, and

there you go. Unfortunately bits of the novelization now make me cringe, and

anyway I haven't written any updates sinse September, which is making lots

of people unhappy.

As reguards action Rpg's, One of my favourite types

of games are the platform games that verge on being Rpg's, with much

equipping of items and actual story line ---- usually provided for me via a

Faq or Gamescript off the net.
i love MEtroid games for that --- though

admittedly you get lost a lot (though that's all part of the fun).

If I

want a more ongoing plot and some interesting messing with items I play Mega

Man X or Zero games ---- particularly the Zero series on the Gba (gba

player), sinse they involve a lot of ongoing plot, some really fiendish

bosses and even a bit of weapon leveling ---- unusual in a 2D side scroller.



I've also just picked up another game of that type, Astro boy on the

Gba, which has a lot of plot, a leveling system and (being made by

Treasure), some really interesting stages.

I'd certainly agree that non

plot related areas are needed in an Rpg, both to learn the controls (or

combat system depending if it's turn based or not), and also to hide some

extra good stuff like weapons or new plot elements in, the way all the

ultimate weapons and limit breaks in Ff7 were hidden in weerd places,

usually involving plot.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-14 21:34:13

Man, if

they ever made a battletech audio game I'd be playing it for hours.

Battletech mux i just can't get the hang of, just wish somone would help me

with it in-game or through any messenger... It's kick ass but I need lots

of help...

2006-01-14 23:36:36

Orin:
If you have AOL messenger I'm on as cx2 uk
That's all lower

case
c x 2 space u k
I've only been playing the mux a couple of weeks but

I've got the hang of it, and I have background knowledge of battletech too

that comes in handy.

I've also found a site that has sound files nabbed

from Mechwarrior 2 on the PC that might be useful for adding to GMud, only

the site's up and down like a yo yo.

If you can get hold of me on aim we

can maybe try and meet up in the public sims. Is your name on Frontier Orin

as well?

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-15 07:11:57

Yes, it

is. Also, I've added you, screenname is orin9104.

2006-01-15 20:06:57

Ok. I see that this topic has gone from adiction to discussion, but that's

not a problem. I once bought desert storm for pc and I watch my family

members to play that. That helps to understand how to command multiple man

in a row. You grab one, guiding him to a safe place and then come with

others, that takes a lot of time, but it works. Also I think a good game

with a storyline like in mortal kombat, with also some substories like: The

problem of scorpion and sub zero and with milena and kitana. The best site

to check these out is
www.mksecrets.net
www.earthrealm.com
And like in

mortal kombat mythologies and mortal kombat special forces the game should

look like a place where you go around killing enemies and collecting stuff.

At the same time you learn new kombos and special moves.

Languages don't influence the way we think, but they still have a world and worth in themselves. Celebrate your mother tongue, the world is a diverse place.

2006-01-15 22:52:41

I have

to admit I've never been a fan of beat em up games, and I'm not

particularly fond of combos and special moves. I prefer just having tactical

optuions rather than having to fiddle with complicated controls. My ethos is

to play the game, not play the controller. That's just me though, I prefer

to be made to think on my feet.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-16 01:27:50

Ah well...

Beat em ups are good, depending. CX2, the type of

beatemup you wanna play would be Mortal Kombat. It's not complicated, and

it's fun as well. There's a lot of challenge and story. Quoted from a site

I went to:
"Mortal Kombat had, an stil has, the deepest storyline seen in

any fighting game."

Icemaster.

The problem between Scorpion and Sub-0,

that is one thing that make the game so good. And oh by the way, Icemaster,

you should try Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks. It helps a lot to understnad

the plot. Of Mortal Kombat 2, that is.

Discord: clemchowder633

2006-01-19 04:17:09

I play any game for plot and atmosphere, beat-em-ups included. I'd

personally rate Soul Calibur series over Mk in terms of plot and atmosphere,

but there both stil good. My problem is while the mission mode of Soul

Calibur 2 and the Konquest Mode of Deadly allience were both doable for me

provided with a copy of the appropreate script (thanks to Gamefaqs

again),but with the Konquest mode of Mk deception (and I believe Shaolin

monks as well), going into 3D walk around style I won't be able to see

enough to play them --- even given coppies of the script, as I said before,

i don't do well with 3D perspectives, (Beat-em-ups like Mk Deadly allience

are okay sinse your always facing your opponent and only really need to

worry about the edge of the ring, which is usually very obvious).

As

reguards commanding multiple men, I've downloaded and bought Galaxy Ranger

from Vip Gameszone, which I'm most impressed with. I've never been able to

play real time stratogy games like War Craft (the original), or command and

conquor. While the game could be a litle more complexwith more military

units and a bit more work on resource management, it's stil fun to play.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-19 05:15:29

I

personally think strategy games such as Command and Conquer are non-starters

for us. The terrain complexity is huge, and the numbers of units involved

can easily run into the dozens. This is quite aside from the fact that these

games can currently only be played by mouse.

Warcraft 3 might be slightly

different, I gather rather than commanding individual men you order an

armies around. Apparently each army, regiment or whatever has a leader and

they act together. I'm not certain on this point though. I know all

mainstream RTS games allow you to command groups, but that's more in the

fashion of multiple selected units rather than one big integrated mass.

Again though I think the terrain complexity would be very hard to overcome,

along with the need to multitask between different combat areas and base

building.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-19 06:50:40

Isn't Multi-tasking part of the fun? That's what I've noticed with

galaxy ranger. though obviously it's a bit more along, I'd say Gr is to

Audio Stratogy what Last Crusade is to Audio Rpg's, a good start.
the

grid system is a pretty good ideafor keeping track of your units, and the

message system is handy too. You could use grid referencing to know where

your units are, perhaps having a feature where you could pause the game and

move the curser around the squares you've uncovered, telling you what land

features or units were on it. You could also have a list feature, telling

you what all your units were doing and where they were, again requiring

pausing of the game.
Provided the combat was fairly quick and simple

(rather than the targiting of Gr which can sometimes take a while), i don't

see a problem, the commands like charge, attack, defend or whatever could be

activated by keys when the current unit was active, or by a menue, the way

scouts work in Gr, ditto for base resource management.

I see what you

mean about the mouse problem, but I think if the pause and review features

were good enough and if you could activate and command units with only a

couple of button presses things could possibley work.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-19 14:33:16

Have

you ever had any experience of the maps used in strategy games? Not only do

they have a lot of detail, they are also very, very large. Working out how

to get a unit around a cliff would be possible, but you could easily then

get to a point where you went around the wrong side of the cliff and can't

get to where you want. Even mainstream strategy games will use grids, but

will be based on thousands rather than the GR system.

And the problem

with multitasking is that each force would likely be in a very different

area. The detail in a small area of the map would be comparable to a whole

map for an audio game.

I have considered in the past that the original

Homeworld could be adapted using coordinates, given that the game is set in

space and has much more sparse "terrain"... but the land based ones would

just be too much. I've tried to think of ways around it before, if there is

one then I certainly can't find it. We have to accept that some types of

game are just too reliant on the visual, I'm not necessarily happy about

this but it's just the simple facts of the matter.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-19 15:41:21

Indeed, the maps are huge and the land features on terane are extremely

complex, I'm not saying you could directly port any of the main stream

stratogy games into audio format, particularly not the modern ones with

extremely realistic terain.

But as we've said about other types of

games, I don't think the developement of Audio Stratogy has reached the

limit of what's possible, and I don't think every avinue has been explored

yet. At least some work has gone into making stratogy games so we can hope

more developement is being done, unlike Rpg's where nobody seems to be

developing anything now that Cq has shut down and Eamon seems defunct.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-19 16:50:49

That's

certainly true. It would need simplified maps, but I'm sure something could

be arranged for strategy games, even if it was only turn based. A lot of

people would stick their noses up at turn based games, but I have many happy

memories of the XCom series, as well as the original Civilization and the

spin off Alpha Centauri.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-19 17:14:09

Personally, turn based would be fine with me, provided it had the

atmosphere and complexity to keep me busy and the interface was reasonably

easy to handle. I've wanted to Run Star Trek final conflict but can't get

net framework to work(probably due to my university internet), but that

might give an idea of how turn based stratogy could be ddone.

I can't

pretend to know as much about stratogy series as I do about main stream

Rpg's, I was just thinking of games like dune 2, and early civilization.



but unfortunately once again, we're at the mercey of a small number of

game developing companies, some of whome I'm fairly certain haven't been

in touch with main stream stuff at all.

Please don't think I'm

flaming, it's probably because I'm a fairly recent comer to audiogames and

expecting more than there is, but it does seem audiogames have a lot of

developement to do to even vaguely catch up with the complexity of main

stream stuff, and with so few developers I'm not sure if we're going to

see it happening.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-19 21:48:37

I

totally agree on the last points. I went from being a big mainstream gamer

to being unable to play anything for a year or two, then finding audio

games... that were reminiscent of mainstream shareware games in the mid

90's. I understand the challenges, but am simeltaneously frustrated by the

lack of progress.

And the reason I suggested turn based is so that we can

get the interface there. If it was real time you'd need a pause function,

which I'm not keen on. Turn based means you're continuously aware of

what's happening, and still leaves the door open for multiplayer. I'm

stillb hoping for more multiplayer games...

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-20 03:10:42

Ah. Yes, Soul Calibur is cool, yes. So are the next two

games.

Dark.
At least someone's up to date on MK! Shaolin Monks

doesn't have a comquest mode, it was pure adventure unless you count the

versus mode, or of course, the classic MK ii. It has a co-op mode though.

Discord: clemchowder633

2006-01-20 03:49:40

MMMMM Sorry Assault freak, I should have checked more about the game, thus

far I've only been looking at the plot faq on Gamefaqs. Konquest mode or

not though, I'm guessing it's full 3D, thus probably not possible for me

to play, oh well, I've stil got lots of coffins to open in the deadly

allience Crypt.

I really sympathise with not being able to play main

stream games. I've always wanted to play ful Rpg type things but never been

able to, and even now my brother's swinging through World of Warcraft while

the best I can do is Sryth the age of Igtheon, an online text rpg.

the

thing that irritates me most, is that as far as I can see from the

Audiogames I've tried, the basic elements of an Rpg like menue structure, a

map to walk around and speak to charactors on, an inventory and quick

checking of various stats are all there! used in other games!
I can't see

that anything revolutionary would need to be done to make an rpg accept

putting these elements together and then piling on the content.

Not

being a programmer, I'm probably talking out of some hole not connected to

my sensible bits (if I have any), but this is what I think whenever I play

an audiogame, great sound, good foundations, wheres the rest?

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-20 04:46:28

I won't deny that...

Well, Shaolin Monks is easy to play, if you

can find a walkthrough that tells you exactly where to go... I know there is

one on gamespot, and probably on gamefaqs.

Discord: clemchowder633

2006-01-20 05:36:35

There are several walkthroughs on Gamefaqs, including one by a chap called

Mike Zilinski, the same kind person who transcribed all of the text from the

Soul Calibur 2 Weapon Master mode and MKDa, he certainly writes complete

Faqs ----- even down to discribing every single Loading screen! and I have

sent E-mails thanking the guy, something I do when somebody writes a really

good handy faq that lets me play the game without being able to read the

game text.

well Assault Freak, if I'm write about Audio rpg's not

taking any huge amount of new and complex prgramming compared to what's

gone before, then my opinion of the developers of Audiogames has just

plummited a bit.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-20 19:23:57

I'd

just point out that even were I still able to play mainstream games world of

warcraft would be out of the question for me, the subscription fee is as

much as some people pay for the internet.

And yes some of the elements of

an RPG exist in audio games, but you can't just copy and paste. It would

require a new engine to be developed, and the more you add to one engine the

more complex it gets. Double the features and you increase the complexity by

a much greater factor, it's exponential. Also I could be wrong, I haven't

played the last crusade, but none of the other audio games I've played

include attribute and skill systems, such an in depth inventory system, and

the style of shopkeeper system we would expect.

cx2
-----
To live by honour and to honour life, these are our greatest strengths and our best hopes.

2006-01-20 23:18:34

To be honest The last Crusade is extremely basic, but it does include

Armour class, hit points and defence and attack stats as well as basic shop

keeping. I know programming isn't as simple as cutting and pasting features

from various places but it does seem that's the way main stream games have

developed, the Original Metroid borrowed the stats and exploration elements

from the first Rpg's for example.

As reguards game engines, looking at

the way Shades of Doom works, I don't think you'd need a huge amount of

modifications to create an action Rpg similar to Zelda, Sod already features

armour class and multiple weapons. As for turn based engines, obviously

something would have to be developed, but I'm extremely surprised that

nobody has even begun with the acception of Last Crusade.

Obviously we

couldn't expect a Final Fantasy 7 or Diablo immediately, but I'm sure

something similar to the early Rpg's could be possible.

Btw, Reguarding

shaolin Monks, unfortunately it seems the game's main perspective is 3D, so

it's a non starter for me, thanks for the reccommendation though Assault

Freak.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-21 02:17:32

No prob. It works though. I play all the time...

Discord: clemchowder633

2006-01-21 02:32:35

Unfortunately I have a bit of a problem with over complex views, I've

tried things in 3D but always end up getting confused about where the walls

are, and distinguishing sceenary from real objects. I usually end up walking

into lots of walls, In 2D this doesn't come up ---- though most 2D games

aren't graphically that complex anyway. If I can borrow a Ps2 or Xbox (I

only have a Gamecube at the moment), I might try wrenting the game though.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2006-01-21 08:08:06

Well, here's some good news... when you get the tokens, and when

enemies come out, big surprise... it's in stereo! So, just go near your tv

and you should hear it.

Discord: clemchowder633