Evening, all. Here’s hoping you can help me with another game ID, having successfully nailed the last one I brought to you. Unfortunately, this description is miles and miles away more vague than my last.
The time was the early 90’s, I think, probably like 92-94. We had a Mac desktop computer - I don’t know what model, and I only remember it being a Mac because of the “Finder” menu button and Apple logo in the top right corner of the big CRT screen. On it, there was an RPG game that I just loved to play - and that I remember very little about.
This was in the era that Macs were greyscale machines, and the Finder window that encompassed the game had the grey-and-white lines across the top (there was a break in them just long enough to encompass the name of this damn thing, which is close enough to drive me batshit fairly soon). I have no idea if these details are helpful - I have so few that I’m just throwing what I’ve got at you.
The game itself was some sort of RPG affair. It was all in black-and-grey-and-white, and mostly you played from a top down view in an open world. I remember a three-quarters isometric view at once point when going through a forest, I think. There were two text areas at the bottom of the screen - I think one was a combat log and one was an inventory log.
There was a barbarian character. And I think when you had your mouse over the game window it turned into a sword.
I am fairly certain that there were multiple party members, so maybe one of those text boxes was a combat menu. I don’t remember if all of the party members were displayed at once though. Now that I think about it I’m sure there were multiple party members because I remember a mostly naked barbarian and a wizard with a stick. Neither one were done in any detail, mind you.
I can’t help you with a specific title, unless it was possibly Pool of Radiance (not top-down, though). Dungeon of Doom was a popular Mac game (dating a bit earlier), but you only had one character.
You may want to try searching at Moby Games to see if they have it. They’re indexed by genre and year, so you can browse through to see if any strike your memory.
(Meaning, maybe some difference in text box placement, art style, etc, but generally similar), then it was probably one of the many old games made with World Builder, which will make it hard (but not impossible) to ID.
I’d recommend going to this abandonware site and just browsing through the titles (accompanied by screenshots) until you find the one you’re looking for. There are so many that appear to fit that mold that we’d just be shooting in the dark. My best guess right now is maybe one of the Might & Magic games.
This, I fear, is it. I’ve been running through screenshot after screenshot of games from that period trying to find something familiar and that’s the only thing with a style that comes even close. After plowing through just about every link on that Moby site (and spending an almost embarrassing amount of time there, but wow, what a site!), I’m fairly certain that this search has no happy end.
Oh well - thanks all! I sincerely appreciate the help, and a few of the linked games look pretty interesting. I’ll have to check some out. Thanks!
Well, don’t give up all hope. I thought about World Builder games but thought it unlikely since you said there were two text areas, and WB games tended to have just one. If it was a WB game, the one that everyone seemed to have was Radical Castle, but the graphics weren’t top-down, so that doesn’t sound right.
This one looks like a possible match: Ultima II. And here’s a list of more World Builder games if you want to look through them.
