A few "Gold Box" games + Eye of the Beholder series finally on GOG

[Velorath]

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.

[Morat20]

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.

[Soulflame]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Shannow]

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

[WayAbvPar]

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

[Shannow]

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

Noob. 

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.

[Morat20]

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.

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 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.)

[shiznitz]

Can you have characters continue from one to the other, or are they completely separate?

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

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Velorath]

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

[WayAbvPar]

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).

[Velorath]

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.

[Shannow]

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!

[Tebonas]

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

[WayAbvPar]

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

[Lucas]

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

[Shannow]

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?

[WayAbvPar]

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  )

[HaemishM]

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."

[Merusk]

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

[Shannow]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Lucas]

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".

 

[Koyasha]

More D&D classics released on GOG, and this time they have Dark Sun!    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.

[Shannow]

Woot.

Krynn series bought.

[raydeen]

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.

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Ironwood]

Most of us, I'd guess.

[Tebonas]

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. 

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. 

[Selby]

Goodbye bootable floppy, we really don't miss you but you were the troubleshooting messiah of your time.

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...

[jth]

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

[Morat20]

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.

[Morat20]

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.