ScottVee Gaming

There was a street fair in town on Sunday,  and though we almost never see a product we want or need anymore, one table had a little game console with 700 retro arcade games installed.   I couldn't say no to having a treasury of games like that at my fingertips. It was easy to set up.  It turns out that about half of these were Japanese editions that I would not be able to read,  though there would be some surreal element to not knowing what is being said. Still,  that left a few hundred,  including classics like Defender, Galaga, Ghostbusters, Arkanoid, Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Panzer Attack, and others.  Scrolling through a list of hundreds of items is tedious. It is really odd looking back now, how these games had so little memory or file space.  It's amazing they could deliver so much content with so few resources.  These days,  for a simple game, we'd probably pack a dozen mp3 tracks for music, but each of those files is 1...

Playing with WarZone a bit this week, I discovered that there is an "Idle" campaign at the bottom of the main page.  Either that's new, or I just didn't see a year ago when I first wrote about this great app. The Idle campaign is set up in a very interesting way.  The maps appear to be the same sequence as in the main game: you start with the standard Risk world map.  But now, you have a certain amount of money and armies shown at the top right as W and A values.  You gain some amount of each per second, and each space has an army value shown on it.  So maybe Brazil starts at 96.  Click it when you have 96 armies and it's your without a fight. Some spaces have "resources", which include Army Bases (where you can buy armies for W's), Caches (some amount of Ws and As), Mines, Forges and Crafters.  Some of these can be upgraded by spending Ws to get more per second.  You can forge ores into ingots like so many other games and sell all the resources f...

I accidentally started a new map on WarZone before bed last night.  This one is a simple grid where every 3x3 block is a territory worth 5 armies each.  So, you spend a lot of time on those making sure to complete your territories while busting the ones your opponents control.  I guess that's true of all Risk-based games. Anyway, it was a lot of fun watching all those little numbers extending arrows and fighting over spaces.  Last week I failed at a few other community maps, but this one was generic and balanced.  I filled in my corner ... only to find that the board wrapped around when I was attacked by a long, stretchy arrow from the top edge.  So I slowly extended my control to one block beyond my core territory so I had at least one move's notice when attacks were coming my way. So here I am, the deep blue state (ironically, being in California in this particular election year), and it turns out the pink state was my ally.  Pink was almost wiped ou...

Another game from the classic era (1990s) that I played a lot back then.  "Master of Magic" by Microprose.  There is a version available from gog.com for $2.99 which comes nicely packaged with a launcher app called "Gog Galaxy" that knows how to setup DOSBox behind the scenes so the game just came up full screen, ready to play. Of course, considering the anticipation, I got one of the worst starts I have ever seen.  I was stuck on a tiny island no more than 5x5 hexes.  Nowhere to build a new settlement, and the few pieces I did build ran out of money quickly due to bad location of my only town.  But it was nice to see those old familiar screens again. This was a clone of the original Civilization (which I also played for hours on end), except that your generals are wizards who have spells that can affect the battles.  There are also power nodes of various elements, and a whole other dimension you can expand into.  Instead of the usual troop types and ...

Continuing my previous post of retro "2-1/2 D" games from the 90s, I was able to get Moraff World running in DOSBox at a usable size by hitting Alt-Enter for full-screen mode. After playing for another hour or so and finally dying, here are some tips and observations: The main hazards are the unmarked pits ("chutes") that drop you down to lower levels where you are less likely to survive.  As soon as I fall into a pit, I look for the nearest ladder back up, but sometimes fall down another pit before I can get there.  Once you have found a pit, it stays on the map as a "*" symbol.  I ended up down on level 10 as a level 2 PC, and it did not go well. One time I fell down a chute to a room with no ladders or doors.  You can bump into walls to look for secret passages, and sometimes walk right through the wall.  But when there are no exits at all, you have to hit D to dig a hole in the floor.  This is pretty funny, with some text messages to entertain you....

This is another dungeon runner.  You make some PCs and start in the City where you have the usual choices.  Go into the Dungeon any time, where you are a small blue box moving through hallways and getting into fights.  I don't mind minimal graphics.  Sometimes, that's a charm. The class system in this one is interesting: everyone starts as a Nomad with all stats set to 1, and each time you level up you get a "+" button to update one stat.  You change to a real class by leveling up to the required stats and going to the Guilds area to switch.   The City My team made it to level 5, and now exploring level 1 is too easy, most of the foes can be taken out with two clicks.  You just have to keep an eye on your hp bars running low.  Bring lots of the red life potions to heal.  I've been to parts of level 2 and 3 and it's more of the same layout with some different foes.  Still no rhyme or reason. I got one of my PCs up to Dexterity 7 so he cou...

Following up on the last post about old "roguelike" games, I looked at a few of the entries to the 7-Day Roguelike Dungeon Challenge, and here's one that went in a completely unexpected direction ... HyperRogue has your PC running around on a hyperbolic world.  You're essentially in the middle of what looks like a hex grid, but on a hyperbolic space, the paths double again and again as they near the edge, so as you walk in any direction, more hexes unfold in ways that hurt the brain.  I can't imagine trying to find my way back to a previous location.  It's not technically hexagons, either, the space expands by including heptagons in just the right places, and each of those brings in a new branch of tiles. There is an extensive Tour/Tutorial where you hint Enter to get to the next slide, and it turns out there's a massive world here divided into about 40 regions, each with unique tiles and mobs.  There is an explanation of hyperbolic geometry, and how the n...

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs...

I was tinkering around in a game called Moonshades, which I would classify as a "semi-3D" dungeon crawler.  The scenes have 3-d elements, but they are fairly static.  You can walk (forward, backward, left or right, or turn left, turn right) to step one chunk at a time through a maze.  Fight monsters, take their stuff, level up your characters.  I find these relaxing, and really enjoy the highly creative names for the hundreds of items.  These modern games have some amusing cheats, like having teleport pads in every main encounter area so you don't have to walk all the way home through every level just to get to your drop chest.  I have also heard "two-and-a-half d" for these. While this is a fine game, with plenty to fight, and lots of abilities and spells to learn, and even some crafting, it got an old memory stuck in my head. So last night I was trying to remember one specific game from the 90s, a really early game of this type.  It was a DOS game wi...

I had not been on Empire & Puzzles for about 6-8 months, and popped on this weekend hoping to see a new Season 6 map.  I finished the big Season 5 Egypt map about a year ago, and after that they just added "Untold Tales" which is a disappointing and repetitive stack of over 100 fights with fish and sea creatures. This time, there were some extra splash screens pointing me to the new section of the game.  Dragonspire is essentially a whole new city/castle to build, a Stronghold and new kinds of buildings producing and storing new kinds of items.  This time it's dragon training, storage for eggs, fish and dragonstone, and the promise of more buildings unlocking as we level up the Stronghold.  There's a whole new Heroes screen where every character is either a dragon or a puffed-up dragonlike version of a normal animal.  I completed level 3 only to find that level 4 is Coming Soon.  There are new items, ascension items, training tomes and more to find, wit...