Been waiting forever on these. Me and pool of radiance have a lot of catching up to do.
Man, these were some of my first RPG experiences ever, so much nostalgia for those. Definitely gonna pick them up.
What are the differences between the 3 packages and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each package?
Package 1 is First-person maze games. Limited party size (4 + up to 2 occasional NPCs, IIRC).
Package 2 is almost the entire old gold-box collection. Pretty faithful to the old 2nd Edition AD&D rules right up to the spells lasting different amounts of time if cast in or out of combat. Bit of a + and -, there. 6 or 7 member parties, I think. No auto-mapping.
Package 3…I’m less certain of - I was never a fan of Drizzt (protag of a crapton of books), and they don’t even have a screenshot of the other one AFAICT.
They still don’t have the Dragonlance games, Dark Sun games, Spelljammer game, or Buck Rodgers game.
Thank you…looks good.
Pool of Radiance has the honor of starting the series but Curse of the Azure Bonds was a technically superior game with the Fix command and other quality of life improvements. God only knows how many times in PoR I’d find a safe place with no random encounters and just Rest for two months rather than cast my healing spells, re-memorize them all, do it again, and again, and again… Plus, CAB had a better story.
Secret of the Silver Blades had those long canyons full of random giant and griffin encounters every three feet that drove me batty.
I really loved these back in the day but there’s no way in hell I’d play them now. Even way back then a lot of things were tedious, now I don’t think I could endure the aged UI and running around trying to find something but running into constant random encounters instead. If I want a nostalgia fix I’d rather play a modern homage game like Pillars of Eternity or Legend of Grimrock.
This is cool. Ironically I still have my originals but no longer have a floppy drive and could never install them even if I could get them to run without the rejiggering GOG does.
ETA I agree that PoR gets credit for being first but suffers for it too.
When asked what classic game(s) I’d like to see re-made, I always say the Gold Box games. Pretty up the graphics and sound, and definitely overhaul the UI (by the gods, it was dreadful), but keep the turn-based, grid-based combat.
I have very fond memories of some of those games. I had the Mac version of Pool of Radiance, which looks like it was programmed in Hypertalk. It was the game in which I independently discovered the joys of save scumming; make a fortune gambling at the tavern, find the weapon shop that sells Fine Composite Longbows, and then lay waste to your enemies. The Dark Queen of Krynn was one of my favorites, too.
I also greatly enjoyed the Buck Rogers games which were basically Sci Fi versions of the same Engine. One of my fondest Video Game memories was desperately trying to get my almost completely wiped out party across the Martian desert and my only surviving member was what they called a Tinker Engineer which was basically a support class that fixed stuff. The little guy survived random encounter after Random Encounter and got to a safe haven. so I could heal the party.
Man, I miss those Dragonlance ones. Dark Queen of Krynn FTW.
I got a hold of Curse of the Azure Bonds in my Freshman year of college. I carried around floppies with the game and my saves. I’d duck into computer labs and skip class while I explored and graphed. It’s odd now how much I didn’t know about D&D back then. My D&D was two versions of the Basic boxed set that I never really had a chance to play with other people. By the time I got to college in 1990, I had never seen AD&D, and certainly not AD&D 2nd Edition. I also knew nothing about “campaign settings” in general, or Forgotten Realms in particular.
I got a job at a computer lab, and got into a conversation with a guy who had actually bought Cures of the Azure Bonds. At the time, it seemed odd that he was reluctant to let me simply copy the game, which was really simple. I was basically straight from the C64, in which you needed special software to copy a lot of games. But on the MSDOS machines I was learning then when I got a job as a Lab Assistant at a computer lab (back then, any familiarity with computers was somewhat rare, so the fact that I hadn’t really worked with IBM PC-style computers didn’t even come up – the fact that I’d learned to program a TI-99-4A at 11 was impressive in those days).
Since my job in the computer lab mostly entailed clearing the queue when somebody tried to send a binary file to the printer, I had lots of time to play games. And the games at that time were really easy to copy. If I sat down at a computer where somebody had installed a game on the hard drive, I could pretty much own that game with some finagling. But Curse of the Azure Bonds was my first introduction to CRPGs. I had the game on floppies so I could play at any DOS PC I had access to. This resulted in me skipping Chemistry class far too often.
In subsequent years, I gradually developed a consciousness that game developers need financial support. Coincidentally, this tended to scale with my ability to provide such support. I have now bought these old Gold Box games several times. I got the Amiga versions, when that was the state-of-the-art. Later, I bought various sets of PC compilations of the old games. Now, it seems that I’ll probably buy the newest GoG release. But it’s not a huge priority right now. I have a lot of newer games to finish.