f13.net

At long last!!!!!  :heart: :heart:

http://www.gog.com/news/release_forgotten_realms_the_archives

Downside: for now, no Dragonlance, no Ravenloft, no Dark Sun. Hopefully soon   :oh_i_see:

Oooooo.

That's interesting.

Sadly this may be the greatest day of my life.  :why_so_serious:
Could only be improved if they shipped me physical copies of the code wheel and journal. Maybe some 5 1/4 floppies I could pretend to turn over and stick in a hard drive every 30 minutes.

Yay!

The other ones can't be far behind - can they?

I'll pay again for the Dragonlance ones.

I'm gonna have to find where I put my binder full of graph paper.   :drill:

Well I can see a shitton of my future wasting away. And I think I like it!

I couldn't ever get really into these. I played EOB 1 & 2, Menzo and Dark Sun but the actual gold-boxes never caught me like I felt they should have. Never have figured out why that was.

Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 However had me hardcore.

While I finished Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds with my dad (I was 7-8 at the time and none of those games ever got a translation in my language), I didn't really liked them: the P&P (which I bought a few years later) version of the former was conceived more as "quest/monster hub" that you could import in other campaigns as you saw fit, and it shows in the CRPG version too, IMO: too many monsters, random encounters, not enough story and interesting loot. Regarding the latter (Curse), story never really grabbed me.

I started falling in love with those games with SOTSB and Champions of Krynn; while my personal favorite is Death Knights of Krynn, Pools of Darkness was really the pinnacle: story and encounters were really epic. Let's pretend Hillsfar never happened (damn, I played it on the Commodore 64  :awesome_for_real:).

Eye of the Beholder: second chapter was fantastic (dat Mind Flyers level!) but I've always been  too enamored with Dungeon Master and CSB to really appreciate the other dungeon crawlers of the time.

I loved the tactical feel of the turn-based combat (as opposed to the half-assed pause when you want of later releases). Probably why I liked the feel of Temple of Elemental Evil better too. BG and BGII were better stories and more polished, but the I enjoyed the guts of the combat better in the Gold Box games (and ToEE). I still remember the first time I completed the fight against the trolls in Pools of Radiance. That encounter was a bitch.

I sense a disturbance in the Force... as if millions of old men got boners, all at once....

That's just the time-release viagra kicking in.

Oh, let me add: no Buck Rogers games either, for now!!! I LOVED the first one (the Amiga version was great) and the new setting and rules were really a breath of fresh air (hell, even the font was quite a change :D).

And yes, I know you're all waiting for this, too:
(http://www.old-games.com/screenshot/4065-1-spelljammer.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

Anyway, the whole SSI catalogue might also imply some other awesome CRPGs releases:

- Phantasie series (again, can't really explain how much I loved this one)
- Questron
- Wizard's Crown
- Rings of Zilfin (nice one)
- Heroes of the Lance & Dragons of the Flame (yeah, horrible :D)
- Demon's Winter (very nice)

As a kid, I really liked Dragon Strike, but I don't think I would be able to revisit it, nowadays:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Dragonstrike_amiga_game_screenshot_in-game.png)

Dragonstrike was the shit (The mission where you had to lance the Dracolich was ridicolous).

I can still hum the theme song.

Wow am I nerdy today.

I wasn't a kid when these came out, never cared for them, no nostalgia. I'd rather play the modern stuff.

I fucking love this game. I have gone back and played it several times in the past few years. A version that would work with a modern OS and that cleaned up some of the bugs (like not being able to reset dungeons, the golem staff not working correctly, etc) would be absolutely fantastic. Hell, I would back the fuck out of a Kickstarter to remake this with a few graphic and UI upgrades. The tactical engine is fucking amazing for when it was released. I miss SSI so much.

Have almost all of these games readily available in CD collections (Unlimited Adventures was never put into a collection), but I just purchased them all anyway even knowing they'll likely go on sale at some point. Really want to support this.

Pools of Radiance on the Commodore 64 was the first game that ever had me sit and play all night long.  I loved that hell out of it.  I ended up playing all of the gold box games when they were released.

Bought Archives pack 2, installed PoR, and am trying to build a party. In true munchkin fashion, I want each of my characters to have an 18 in their primary stat. There is one problem- I cannot roll an 18 for Wisdom for the life of me. I have spent 20-30 minutes, and another 20-30 checking various FAQs and posts to see if there is a bug preventing it. I have tried both male and female humans (I know 1st Edition D&D had some funky mins and maxs regarding race and gender), but no dice. Has anyone else encountered this? I see 18s all over the other stats, but not a single one in wisdom.

e- I finally gave up and took a 17 wisdom. Then when I rolled up a m/u-cleric I saw multiple 18s. And after I created my party, I discovered there is a Modify character command that lets me set my stats  :oh_i_see:

I like the Gold Box games. Eye of the Beholder was shit though. There were a half-dozen other similar series around the same time period that were better. It's pretty much the bottom rung of first-person dungeon crawling games.

It did have impressive graphics on PC on release though, I'll grant it that.

Eye of the Beholder scratched the itch that Dungeon Master fans were looking for though.  Also, D&D.

And then, in fairly short order, it was followed up by the unbelievably excellent EOTB2.  Which, I think you have to agree, was the dogs bollocks.

If you don't agree, I don't reallllly know what to say to you. 

The only thing out of the bunch I can't play anymore is Menzoberranzan, man that game really didn't age well.

I've also forgotten how much convenience was not in Pool of Radiance but was added in the later games. Not that this makes Pool less awesome. Before Shadowrun hit I was already well on my way towards my First Fine Composite Long Bow. Ah, memories!  :awesome_for_real:

I have to admit I just finished wizardry 6 and imported a party into wizardry 7 that i then plan to take into wizardry 8.  I am having a fabulous time, those old games were amazing!  (and hard.....  Oh look a bunch of spectral crows, hey my whole party is now insane and killing each other, whelp reload!)

Edit:  Oh god wizards crown, the nostalgia.   I remember that was like the first game I was ever excited for after I read a review in Dragon magazine.  I loved that game.

Very stoked for these! I had the Gold Box games on an old Wizardworks CD years ago, but they somehow borked PoR. I forget exactly what it was but the game wouldn't launch or save properly as it would try to look in a non-existent or read-only drive path. That collection had 9 of the Gold Box games on it IIRC. Amazon currently is selling a new copy for $149. Not sure if it's the same version I had though. Box art looks a little different.

Yep, when I first played it, I couldn't understand why they would allow you to put 18s in every stat (something that me and my father did right off the bat :D); then, later on, I read the appropriate paragraph in the manual and discovered that it was a feature included so that you could match your P&P character/s stats/hp if you had any.

Why put 18s when you could hex edit all 25s?

I will admit to doing this.   :awesome_for_real:

Never did that, but I did like that when you transferred characters from Curse of the Azure Bonds to Secret of the Silver Blades if you had a character equipped with the Girdle of Giant Strength they'd permanently end up with 24 STR even though you get stripped of all your items.

Am I the only person who liked Dark Sun?

I think it was pretty well-received at the time (though DS2 was bug-ridden and in general not as good as DS1), I liked them enough to replay them once or twice. Dark Sun is also the game that's sort of the granddaddy of the Infinity Engine games, so I think Bioware / Black Isle liked it too.  :grin:

Just noticed that each game comes with a .pdf of the original Clue Books which is nice.

I liked Dark Sun, but I was sad there was only ever the one.

There was the multiplayer TEN version.

There were two (aside from the one Trippy mentions) unless you're ignoring Wake of the Ravager because it was fairly broken when it came out.

Huh, no, I never knew about it.  Can you have characters continue from one to the other, or are they completely separate?

You can import characters from Shattered Lands.

I wonder if they're gonna do Buck Rogers? I have some fond, if increasingly vague,  memories of playing that.

I don't think I ever beat Curse of the Azure bonds though.

I love Gold Box back in the day.  Especially Dragonlance.  Death Knights of Krynn...

Now I'm tempted to play through the Wizardry 6-8 I have on Steam.

Who knows? Everything GOG got has been previously released before in collections running on DOSBox. There are a handful of games that never got included in any sort of collection though for whatever reason. The Buck Rogers stuff obviously doesn't really fit in with D&D collections so that might be why they've been overlooked so far. Having just played through Heroes of the Lance and Dragons of Flame today, those are a little rough running on DOSBox (had some control issues). War of the Lance, Shadow Sorcerer, and DragonStrike have also been notably absent as has Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace.

I don't remember being so short on money to train and ID magic items in PoR. I have had to wait to train guys for quite a while (had to finish Sokol Keep to catch up). I am still using 5-10 magic items that are not IDed because 200gp per is fucking expensive! Am I missing something? Identify is sadly not among the spells a magic user can choose from when leveling up, so no help there.

You haven't hired the level 4 mercenary guy and sleeped killed him a few times for his magical eq?

Not yet! Didn't even think about hiring and looting mercs.  :grin:

Noob.  :grin:

I also remember doing the whole save cheat thing to replicate nice pieces of equipment. Fuck that used to take a long time on a c64.

I read an article indicating that what took so long on the Gold Box Games was finding the actual owners. I think it was some holding company or something that had it. GoG bought the property outright, so they own it free and clear now.

I suspect getting to run on Windows was a bit of a cakewalk compared to the legal sleuthing required to find out who owned the licenses. (I think it was implied the company that owned them didn't even know they owned them.)

IIRC, you could certainly move your characters through the series but your equipment did not carry over.

Whipped the shit out of the trolls and ogres last night. I am dragging around the 5th level cleric you get from the Temple of Tyr for a quest, so he has been useful. Still short on cash though, especially for identifying magic items. I can figure out what 99% of them do by equipping them and checking THAC0 and AC changes, but I like to see the +1s and +2s, dammit.

If you ID and sell some of the ones you don't need you should have plenty of gold.

You don't make more on ID'ed items, do you? That is my first clue that they are magic (by how much the merchant offers for it).

I was fairly sure that they sold for more after being identified, but you've just seeded doubt into my mind. You could always try it and reload if it doesn't work that way.

Its funny because in CotAB you have so much money you end up leavining millions of gold behind because it encumbers your party. Only gems and jewels , we travel light!

So you do in the later parts of Pool of Radiance, only with Copper und Electrum pieces!  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah I have already run into trouble carrying copper. Fuck kobolds, the cheap little bastards.

My hatred for kobolds started even earlier with the first Bard's Tale, but yeah: fuck kobolds, always.

On a side path of this old nostalgia trail, anyone remember having to specifically configure their extended and expanded RAM to get a game (in this case Pools of Darkness) to work on their PC?

I remember having to do it for Wing Commander and some others. I am not sure if I ever played Pools of Darkness (but that is gonna change  :grin: )

God yes. I remember Origin games being the worst about requiring it, including making individual autoexec.bat files on bootable floppies for each separate game. I worked at Electronic Boutique when this was all the rage, and we used to have to try to explain to people how to do this shit to stop them from returning games that "didn't work."

Yeah, Master of Magic. Had a special dos boot disk for it and everything.

Pools of Darkness was damn good, big sprawling story, the body of Moander was cool. Going back and playing PoR and Curse without the Fix command (por) and automem (Curse) is kinda painful too. Delayed Blast Fireball is the greatest spell ever.

edit: Using MS-DOS is the 'walking 5 miles to school in the rain' of our generation. When my son complained he couldn't get a Skyrim mod to work I sat in my rocking chair and told him about the time I spent 2 hours learning how to manipulate the different RAMs to get Clash of Steel to work.

If you have ever dealt with modding Minecraft, it is pretty much the same bullshit. A bunch of obscure hoops to jump through and hope that things work. WoT mods aren't much better. You can use a modpack, but if you want to customize it you have to go pretty deep in the weeds to figure it out.

So many memories of me and my father struggling to understand all those lines in config.sys and autoexec.bat while we were trying to boot up Ultima 7, Strike Commander and other games (they would boot up, but then you had to make sure the IRQ and DMA values were correct :D ). Like I said, Pool of Darkness is, if you want, the...well, "Baldur's Gate II",  of the FR Gold Box games. I  remember having quite a hard time in Zhentil Keep with the drows and their fuckin' high saving throws to ANYTHING :P

MS-DOS made me the man I'm today.

EDIT: yes, Delayed Blast Fireball is basically the greatest spell ever created. When you finally got it, you were like "ok, this is it folks, game over".

 :cthulu:

More D&D classics released on GOG, and this time they have Dark Sun!  :heart:  Shattered Lands and Wake of the Ravager for $9.99. 

Also Ravenloft and Krynn ones, that I never played in the old days.  Will probably wait for those to be on sale, but definitely getting Dark Sun right away as I loved them back in the day.

Woot.

Krynn series bought.

Pshaw. That's nothing. Three hours of MemMaker and some hand config tweaking to get the CD version of TES:Arena to load with 614k of free base memory. That was the first and probably last time I actually felt like a DOS god. No more 'Memory List Blown' messages for me! Well, ok, maybe a few but not as many as before. I eventually had a 6 or 7 level config.sys/autoexec.bat combo depending on what games I wanted to run. Top level was with no memory manager for games like Comanche and Ultima 7 which had their own mangers, and then slowly adding bits as needed down to level 6 or 7 where I could load generic stuff along with 95/98. That setup was a labor of love and desperation but could handle just about any game or program I would throw at it. Rebooting all the time was a bitch though.

Late to the nostaliga bowl, but man...Ultima 7/7.5 are probably my favorite old school games but Origin used its own memory manager that was kind of flaky.

But yeah, box of install discs...and a box of boot disks with config files. Going through a box of crap at work I threw out my last floppy boot disk (for Win98SE). Goodbye bootable floppy, we really don't miss you but you were the troubleshooting messiah of your time.

I wonder how many of us work in IT now because we learned how to config a PC for gaming back in the 'good' old days.

Most of us, I'd guess.

That would be my guess, too.

You managed to get all those Dos games to work by juggling around drivers between EMS and XMS and optimizing Base Memory, you could run circles around all those professionals that regarded home computers as a nuisance and a waste of time that could be better spent finding the perfect way to make sweet sex to their mainframes.  :awesome_for_real:

I learned about computers by managing to get at least one game to run at each and every one my father put in front of me. I even had to install Ygrasil Linux from scratch so that I could program "Hunt the Wumpus" into it. The things you do to avoid being bored when sitting in your fathers store after school.  :grin:

I still have my bootable floppies and several Win95 boot disks. Solved many a problem that people had over the years with those disks. I still have a functioning 5.25" disk drive that I've used recently...

I got my first "real" job because I knew how to use a bootable floppy & how to boot NT4.0 correctly on a failed computer...

These are now on sale, 50% off as a bundle.

Picked them up plus a whole host of old Star Trek games.

I honestly suspect Steam will try to buy out GoG sooner or later.

Another big sale. Just snapped up a ton of old Star Wars games (Tie Fighter, X-Wing, X-wing versus Tie Fighter) and then a big LucasArts adventure collection.

It's like my college gaming years are coming back.