Is Curse of the Azure Bonds a worthy successor to Pool of Radiance?
it's alright, secret is the lamest of the four in my learned opinion
>>3640313How are the console versions of these old DnD games? I'd rather have a comfy sesh emulating on the big screen while laying on the couch than on PC but I don't want to waste my time on the shit ones so any input is appreciated
>>3640457>How are the console versions of these old DnD games?They mostly don't exist.>I'd rather have a comfy sesh emulating on the big screen while laying on the couchSounds like a personal problem.
>>3640469>mostlySo they partially do? That's what I'm asking about >sounds like a personal problem In what way is being comfy while playing games a problem? My brother in Christ, if you don't have anything to add to the discussion feel free to go back to swiping on grinder or polishing your bad dragon collection or whatever you fags do
>>3640487Clearly you aren't going to listen to reason so why don't you find out for yourself.
>>3640457Only PoR is on the NES, the others were never ported.
>>3640313It's a lot more linearThey pretty much gave up on por style design after one game and never went back. Curse is one of the better ones though.
The game begins deceptively in an ordinary town. However, things quickly begin to proceed at a breakneck pace. Our party has been marked with cursed runes and we quickly find they compel us to follow the orders of the evil masters who have inflicted them upon us, as we are driven to assassinate the king, but in doing so unwittingly foil the plot of a mimic. From here we are whisked away by the thieves guild into the safety of the sewers, but this is immediately interrupted by an attack executed by the assassin's guild, also known as the fire knives, who have been plotting to overthrow the thieves. We fight our way through the chaos and descend deeper into the sewers. There are already some differences from PoR here. Safe areas are a lot more frequent and generous, random encounters are reduced, and battles are a fair bit deadlier, which I suppose is appropriate since, minus our gear, we have a full tookit of spells at our disposal making us a lot more deadly than the start of PoR. The Knives have released a bunch of monkeys during the mayhem and allied with them, so we carve our way through the apes, and eventually make our way to their hideout. There's a standard array of treasure, various bits of narrative, and secret rooms. The sewer is narrow and we have to play around combat penalties.The hideout itself is newly acquired, and we discover a secret passage not even the Knives are aware of yet, which we use to strategically explore their layer while occasionally retreating to safety. Through our search we learn that the Knives have allied with a mad wizard. We also stumble across their armory and finally arm ourselves with some decent gear, then its on to confront the ring leader. Or at least that was the plan, but the princess he was holding captive breaks free and starts brawling with him, so we fight the mad wizard and a fuckton of Knives instead. Afterwards, we are freed of our first rune, then the king arrives and exiles us, for obvious reasons.
I really didn't like the Azure Bonds book, and the whole Finder's Stone trilogy. Alias and Dragonbait were not interesting characters and Finder was just a retard. It kinda tainted my enjoyment of the game, even though SSI did salvage things a bit.
>>3640313Ehhh... the game kinda expects you to make maxed-out characters, and the NPC ensemble is mediocre (Alias and Dragonbait are good, but you get a mage against Drow...) The locations are not really interesting, the dungeons are repetitive, the random events are cool. I say just get through the main storyline and don't bother the other places. Some magic items are broken (as they don't work, not powerful) so always save before put on something, especially ioun stones
I see a lot of themes in this game that have been repeated in later titles. As mentioned before, we begin kidnapped and afflicted with a blood curse, then fight our way through a sewer. From here we do battle with the drow in a hollowed out mountain and can use their gear so long as its not exposed to sunlight. So pretty similar to something you might see in BG2 there. And of course, while descending deeper into their lair we have an opportunity to bear the mark of the drow's clan to bypass their patrols, not entirely dissimiliar to the mark of the absolute in BG3. So a lot a DnD tropes making their way into a video game for the first time here, which might be notable.Not much in the way of exploration compared to the first game, pretty much feels like I'm going from one big battle to the next with the adventure itself being an underlying subtext to keep the narrative plowing along. I feel like the baseline of encounter design has been improved, but it hasn't really reached the peaks PoR hits yet.
>>3640313the Otyugh was one of the best ecological monsters introduced in fiction, along with the Sand Worm from Dune.This thing solves the "where does the shit go?" in the dungeon plumbing problem.
>>3642251Gelatinous cubes are even better for that
>>3643109The most based monster of all time.Least based is the rust monster.
>>3643123Rust monster is the greatest friend of smithies. Incredibly based.
Our next stop is a fortress town that has been smashed into ruins by a recent battle, and soon we discover it houses a cult that plans to revive Moander, the deity of rot, corruption, and decay. The kid gloves pretty much come off at this point, as the game begins throwing upwards of 10 casters at once at you that can, and will, spam the absolute fuck out of hold person, and they're usually sitting comfortably behind a lot of meatshields, so battles become moreso about keeping their casting interrupted while dealing with either a swarm of little guys up front or some hulking monsters that are immune to just about everything other than hold monster and hit like tanks.We're finally joined by the characters on the cover art and stumble upon Moander mid revival, interrupting the ritual and severing the fingers off his hand as he reaches through a portal into this realm, which then transform into monsters we must do battle with. This isn't actually even that hard, but afterwards the entire facility is alerted and I hope to god you've already charted an escape route because you've just been tossed into the random encounter hell dimension. At the exit the final confrontation has no less than 20 assorted threats stuffed into a tiny room, which conveniently remove all the party's buffs. Really the cleanest way to finish this is to just blow a whole in one end of their frontline with a fireball rather than favoring a large area of effect then have the martials push in and pincer them while the backline interrupts stray casters with arrows, but the entire time you're getting hammered by shambling mounds so its pretty messy. And that just about wraps up the third rune.
>>3640313>make party of humans>all warriors>level up to 13>two attacks per turn>change class to magic-user>level up to 14>no we are all level 13 warriors on top>all the hps>all the attacks>all the spellsAnd that's how I beat Pools of Darkness.
>>3643577>have 5 human party members, 1 dwarf>pure class except for f/t dwarf>use good tacticsAnd that's how I beat Pools of Darkness as a teen.
>>3640313I just played Pool, Curse, and Secret. I had only played Pool before.In my opinion, Pool of Radiance is an all time classic, Secret of the Silver Blades is great, and Curse is actually bad.Here's the main problem: Curse of Radiance has garbage dungeons consisting of very small hallways. What did the game designers do to disguise this? Extremely high encounter rate where 50% of the monsters spam hold person on turn one, making it a coin flip whether every encounter is a wipe or not. Terrible.Secret is higher level, has a manageable number of casters per encounter, more tools to handle them, and saves the absolute bullshit until the end, where it belongs. Curse starts with the bullshit nearly immediately after you get out of the first town.Funny thing about these games. When I was a kid, I thought they were unplayable archaic relics. Today, I think they are great. Clearly games never "aged", perception and hype culture is the problem, not the games.
>>3643882Obviously Curse of the Azure Bonds, not Curse of Radiance, which is an interesting typo.
>>3643882>Extremely high encounter rate where 50% of the monsters spam hold person on turn one, making it a coin flip whether every encounter is a wipe or notThey really expect you to have dex maxed, and even go so far as to provide you with several dex raising items. Following this, your only other line of defense is really dispel. Encounter rates are actually lower than PoR though, or at least in most cases there's a low threshold for max encounters. Like 5 encounters and then a whole area is safe. I actually don't like this because it makes the already isolated maps feel pretty small. And even with encounters still going its like a hard 20% chance to have your sleep interrupted every 8 hours, which is nothing given how generous the game is with safe areas and how short it is. Like you could easily go through the entire game and never have your rest interrupted.
>>3643882>When I was a kid, I thought they were unplayable archaic relicsWhen I was a kid I thought they were great, and I played them in the mid 90s.
>>3643903It is possible the severity of the encounters is colored the perception of their frequency.Pool does have high encounter rate, but you're supposed to just clear them all anyway.Anyway, I'll likely play Darkness in the near future. Been having a good time with these games.>>3643904I'm pretty sure I got the Forgotten Realms collection after Baldur's Gate, and using keyboard only controls was a huge breaker for kid me. Of course, today, I prefer the speed of it, and I actually don't like the mouse support they added in the later titles.
>>3643919>the perception of their frequencySomething else to consider is that it has a fair bit of "scripted" random encounters, like a Wizardry game, where if you step on a certain tile a fight is guaranteed. So it can feel like more than it really is.
>>3640457I think only Pool of Radiance got an half-assed NES port
>>3646024I've never played the port, but I've seen footage. It has more pleasant graphics in parts, actual music, better portraits. Doesn't look half assed at all. I'm sure it is less fun to actually play, but it looks like a very competent job. Seems it has far fewer enemies, though, so you'd probably not want to max out your character stats (this is what causes absolute hordes of monsters in the PC game - it has difficulty scaling based on your stats).
>>3646026the main problem with the console ports (I just remembered that the first Goldbox Buck Rogers game got a Genesis port too) is missing content compared with the computer versions
>>3640313Best story and NPCs, worst and most brutal combat. The Savage Frontier games had the best of both worlds: good dungeons, good overland campaign, good story and NPCs.
It is pretty cool once you get to Pools of Darkness and are greeted with pleasant VGA graphics. The aesthetic is sort of an in between of Pool of Radiance and Shattered Lands. Horrid SFX though, had to disable that.
>>3648197I do love TSF, but Pool of Radiance actually feels like a competent DM designed a milieu with readily available goals for players to pursue and a quest chain that has an interesting villain to defeat.I also have a soft spot for the Jim Ward novels too, they aren't great lit but it reads like a replay novel.
https://youtu.be/xpwI1Z0I3F8
Finished with Zhentil Keep. I remember someone crying about Dexam here a few years ago so I thought it would be hard, but both he and the medusa actually went down on the first turn thanks to haste being more than enough to simply bludgeon them to death.
>>3650120>I also have a soft spot for the Jim Ward novels too, they aren't great lit but it reads like a replay novel.The wizardess accidently using a wish to give herself 18 strength and thinking she's hideous was funny as hell.
>>3640313It was okay, could have used less wyvern poison instakills.
>>3651339I haven't encountered anything that really felt threatening yet, there's just a lot of combat compared to the first game. The problem is that in PoR resources were thin and you had to manage them because safe areas were sparse, but here its not really a problem at all. A lot of old games leaned into long term planning/resource management rather than moment to moment tactical encounters, and that element just isn't here. Like Wizardry objectively has pretty braindead combat, but the element of studying your enemies and effectively applying your resources synergizes well with its exploration to make it much greater than the sum of its parts.
Hap is the frustrating section of this game. Maybe it's because that was the first place where I went after Tilverton. The fire lizard cave and the wizard tower back-to-back are a sort of endurance test.
>>3652007If you equip drow gear its not very tough, and if I'm not mistaken there's a secret passage you can rest in freely.
I completed the game. Being that I had so little to say about it along the way compared to Pool of Radiance is kind of indicative of its issues. It kind of stays the course and then just... Ends. There are really only 2 gimmicks with map design, a long narrow vertical dungeon folded into a singular map space or a series of minor setpieces strung together in a gauntlet, which is repeated and they all feel pretty similar. There really isn't anything terribly exciting or fun to do within the maps themselves either. Every fight is generally the same as well. With the exception of the Moander battle, each boss fight was resolved by walking my hasted martials around a big pack of fodder to blow up the boss in the back then mopping everything up with fireballs and necklace of missiles. By no means an awful game but a weak showing compared to PoR.
>>3640313How can people enjoy these games? they look very old
>>3654755no one really enjoys thoseppl play them for elitist contrarian points
>>3654755They look old because they are old. If you actually play them, you'll find they are quite good. Particularly Pool of Radiance.
>>3654803>play a beloved classic to be a contrariani'm confused by your thought process here
>>3654808Oh I'm sure they are good, but they are inaccessible at this point.I want pretty graphics and smooth animations and good audio design.
>>3655090well, shocking as it may be, other people might not need those things. so the answer to "How can people (blank)" is that they aren't you. hope this helps.
I just ran falcom soundtracks in the background and it played just fine to me.
>>3655096bill evans is a much better fit.
So, when's SotSB?
Anyone here ever tried to solo one of the Gold Box games with a single character? Is it even doable? 2e had pretty strict level limitations, right?
>>3658547>Anyone here ever tried to solo one of the Gold Box games with a single character?No.>Is it even doable?Yes, easily. You get exp at a 6x rate, just make a 3 class multi. Encounters scale with total party HP with the exception of setpiece encounters which you'll outpace anyways.
>>3658556i've never tried this but you could only do this with the low level game though since level limits crush demihumans in the later games. though the krynn games have far more relaxed level limits. the scaling is a bit more complex than total party hp as well.
>>3658547I completed Death Knights of Krynn with a single solamnic knight.I didn’t do the extra postgame dungeon, Dave’s Challenge or whatever it is. The main game was no issue except for the last fight.
>>3659036That sounds like a painful experience of constant reloading and tactical boredom.
>>3658327Why bother, this place is overwhelmingly shit now
>>3651339I remember in at least some of the gold box games if you cast neutralize poison on a character that died from poison it actually resurrects them on the spot, like they were just in an "effectively dead" comatose state even though it just says dead. That was a 1ed AD&D rule IIRC.
>>3654677Pretty much all of the non-PoR Gold Box games feel like this to the point if you play them all you'll regard CoAB as one of the best of them. SSB in particular is awful.
>>3659296Because you'll never leave? It's the Goldbox game I have the least memories of and the only one I'm interested to see you play.
>>3660796>Because you'll never leaveSTALKER 2 releases tomorrow and its not an rpg. With PoE2 delayed and MENACE not releasing until December, and Q1 2025 being a grim goyslop-fest with the exception of Burden of Command there is not much discuss RPG-wise. There's no point in making the occasional thread on old games when the board is being so aggressively shit up constantly. I'd rather play stalker 2 assuming it is even in a playable state on release and just talk about manga on /a/ or something. This place just sucks which is unfortunate because it's not hard to fix.
I pick out the Neo Geo Pocket. Boy, do I love the Neo Geo
>>3660816So you aren't leaving, right?
