#bigboxgames — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bigboxgames, aggregated by home.social.
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when i was a kid, buying a new DOS game in Canada was usually in the $60-$90 range and would take me months to save up for. Ultima VIII: Pagan was an $80 game at launch here. i owned very, very few new games for that reason.
but $20 in my wallet often meant i had *just* enough to buy a game from a bargain bin.
in the mid 90s, EA released "CD-ROM Classics" editions of several games from the Origin and Bullfrog catalogues. they were $20 each, and came without the physical feelies (cloth map, the fancy manual, objects, etc).
collectors today only care about the feelies, and have entirely forgotten just how exciting it was to have get a bunch of great games in a compilation pack for twenty bucks in 1996. in the end, i played these two games for hundreds of hours, and they took me through my high school years into my university years.
sadly, 20+ years ago I decided that compilation packs were beneath me, and that collecting the "real" big boxes was way cooler. i donated the boxes and regretted it ever since.
today, i met up with an older fellow who had bought these both in 1997, with the intention of "some day playing them in his retirement". 30 years later as a retiree, he never got around to it, and now just wanted the space back on his shelves. i am beyond thankful he saved them 🙏
the funny thing was that he had printed off the exact U8 hint guide i also downloaded from ftp.ea.com in 1997. i found it tucked inside of the U7 box.
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when i was a kid, buying a new DOS game in Canada was usually in the $60-$90 range and would take me months to save up for. Ultima VIII: Pagan was an $80 game at launch here. i owned very, very few new games for that reason.
but $20 in my wallet often meant i had *just* enough to buy a game from a bargain bin.
in the mid 90s, EA released "CD-ROM Classics" editions of several games from the Origin and Bullfrog catalogues. they were $20 each, and came without the physical feelies (cloth map, the fancy manual, objects, etc).
collectors today only care about the feelies, and have entirely forgotten just how exciting it was to have get a bunch of great games in a compilation pack for twenty bucks in 1996. in the end, i played these two games for hundreds of hours, and they took me through my high school years into my university years.
sadly, 20+ years ago I decided that compilation packs were beneath me, and that collecting the "real" big boxes was way cooler. i donated the boxes and regretted it ever since.
today, i met up with an older fellow who had bought these both in 1997, with the intention of "some day playing them in his retirement". 30 years later as a retiree, he never got around to it, and now just wanted the space back on his shelves. i am beyond thankful he saved them 🙏
the funny thing was that he had printed off the exact U8 hint guide i also downloaded from ftp.ea.com in 1997. i found it tucked inside of the U7 box.
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it took 35 years but i finally have all of the Berkeley Systems screensavers and games i grew up with and love
The one new experience was Triazzle. I had never heard of this little puzzle game, and it is gorgeously animated.
it’s hard to imagine software that shaped my sense of humour more than these classics.
#retrocomputing #win31 #win95 #startrek #simpsons #bigboxgames
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it took 35 years but i finally have all of the Berkeley Systems screensavers and games i grew up with and love
The one new experience was Triazzle. I had never heard of this little puzzle game, and it is gorgeously animated.
it’s hard to imagine software that shaped my sense of humour more than these classics.
#retrocomputing #win31 #win95 #startrek #simpsons #bigboxgames
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after 15 years of waiting for a copy i could afford, i finally have an original copy of an underrated graphical adventure: Inherit The Earth - Quest for the Orb.
this is one of those strange games that gets dismissed by adventure gamers because it never cleanly fits into established genres. the mix of traditional 2d side-view art and isometric tile-based adventuring is in itself unique to this game. it pays off with a strong world/setting, and a surprisingly interesting final chapter.
you really get the feeling that the team *cared* about this project, and wanted you to enjoy what they made. because of this, the originality and authenticity more than make up for the (at times) uneven craftsmanship.
April Lee's ink illustrations in the manual were a welcome surprise. you might recognize her work from card games like Warhammer and MTG. less well known is that she was a staff artist at New World Computing, on several Might & Magic games, including HoMM. and then also did contract work for the Dreamers Guild.
best of all, one of the Dreamers Guild founders - Joe - continues to support the game with patches and new versions for Mac/Windows/Linux every year:
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after 15 years of waiting for a copy i could afford, i finally have an original copy of an underrated graphical adventure: Inherit The Earth - Quest for the Orb.
this is one of those strange games that gets dismissed by adventure gamers because it never cleanly fits into established genres. the mix of traditional 2d side-view art and isometric tile-based adventuring is in itself unique to this game. it pays off with a strong world/setting, and a surprisingly interesting final chapter.
you really get the feeling that the team *cared* about this project, and wanted you to enjoy what they made. because of this, the originality and authenticity more than make up for the (at times) uneven craftsmanship.
April Lee's ink illustrations in the manual were a welcome surprise. you might recognize her work from card games like Warhammer and MTG. less well known is that she was a staff artist at New World Computing, on several Might & Magic games, including HoMM. and then also did contract work for the Dreamers Guild.
best of all, one of the Dreamers Guild founders - Joe - continues to support the game with patches and new versions for Mac/Windows/Linux every year:
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several years ago i did a major purge of my unplayed/underloved dos game collection. within a few months, i began to have some serious regrets. one of those major regrets was The Bard's Tale Construction Set.
last week, i learned that this was one of Tim Cain's first major gaming projects before he took the helm on Fallout. He took the BT3 code base and did a major rewrite, generalizing many hardcoded words/creatures/places/items, and making it all scriptable.
he has a wonderful (short) history of what it was like getting hired at Interplay to build this game-making program in the early 90s here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9j5k3K29Rw -
several years ago i did a major purge of my unplayed/underloved dos game collection. within a few months, i began to have some serious regrets. one of those major regrets was The Bard's Tale Construction Set.
last week, i learned that this was one of Tim Cain's first major gaming projects before he took the helm on Fallout. He took the BT3 code base and did a major rewrite, generalizing many hardcoded words/creatures/places/items, and making it all scriptable.
he has a wonderful (short) history of what it was like getting hired at Interplay to build this game-making program in the early 90s here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9j5k3K29Rw -
sigghhhh
psa: if you've got games on a shelf, please keep them away from any direct sunlight.
i ordered what was originally a gorgeous copy of this game from ebay, and the seller had left it on a sun-facing bookshelf for months or years while they waited for it to sell.
sun/UV rays selectively damage specific colours, so you end up with colour shift instead of 'fading'.
if you're in doubt, compare the two spines of any box. the sun damaged spine will have a completely different colour tone than the spine that sat in the shadows.
(the third pic is its original colour before it was sun damaged)
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sigghhhh
psa: if you've got games on a shelf, please keep them away from any direct sunlight.
i ordered what was originally a gorgeous copy of this game from ebay, and the seller had left it on a sun-facing bookshelf for months or years while they waited for it to sell.
sun/UV rays selectively damage specific colours, so you end up with colour shift instead of 'fading'.
if you're in doubt, compare the two spines of any box. the sun damaged spine will have a completely different colour tone than the spine that sat in the shadows.
(the third pic is its original colour before it was sun damaged)
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every once in a while the thrifting gods take pity upon me 😻
i’ve never actually played a Build engine game, nevermind one of its best ones. $10 later i can finally find out what it’s like.
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every once in a while the thrifting gods take pity upon me 😻
i’ve never actually played a Build engine game, nevermind one of its best ones. $10 later i can finally find out what it’s like.
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a long, long time ago one of the only places you could find MS-DOS abandonware was on Home of the Underdogs. every week I would crawl through its RPG and Adventure sections looking for the next underrated gem I had never heard of. among their “Top Dogs” were two infocom games: Circuit’s Edge and Mines of Titan.
although infocom became synonymous with text adventures/interactive fiction, it was also a publisher of graphical RPGs designed by westwood associates. these were fascinating games - a blend of dungeon crawling, text adventure, and NPC dialogues.
Circuit’s Edge is unique insofar as it is set in a futuristic middle east. the world is based on George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails series, a cyberpunk setting with cybernetic implants, islam, and money. Effinger himself wrote all of the ingame text.
decades later I was finally able to buy physical copies. i always liked the cover art for circuit’s edge, and that they used artist Jean-Francois Podevin’s pre-vis sketch for the manual cover.
-
a long, long time ago one of the only places you could find MS-DOS abandonware was on Home of the Underdogs. every week I would crawl through its RPG and Adventure sections looking for the next underrated gem I had never heard of. among their “Top Dogs” were two infocom games: Circuit’s Edge and Mines of Titan.
although infocom became synonymous with text adventures/interactive fiction, it was also a publisher of graphical RPGs designed by westwood associates. these were fascinating games - a blend of dungeon crawling, text adventure, and NPC dialogues.
Circuit’s Edge is unique insofar as it is set in a futuristic middle east. the world is based on George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails series, a cyberpunk setting with cybernetic implants, islam, and money. Effinger himself wrote all of the ingame text.
decades later I was finally able to buy physical copies. i always liked the cover art for circuit’s edge, and that they used artist Jean-Francois Podevin’s pre-vis sketch for the manual cover.