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There are some games that live in infamy. Daikatana. Tresspasser. Other M. Pilotwings ( ). This game doesn't quite have the recognition of those, but it's still a disaster of Biblical proportions. Are you ready for Descent to Undermountain(tm)? This game was a multiway trainwreck and there's a lot to unpack right from the title so let me take you back to 1996. TSR, creators of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, was dead. That's not hyperbole, either. Extreme mismanagement through out the AD&D 2nd edition had come to a head with the creation of a trading card game called Spellfire. Spellfire was really bad, but they made a ton of cards and it was the straw that broke the half-dead camel's back. The announced they were putting publishing books on hiatus for a year, a very bad sign when your primary business is book publishing. One of the bright spots for TSR was licensing. A few years before someone said, "Wait, why are we handing one copy a license to do all of our stuff. Let's chop this puppy up and auction things off!" A lot of game companies got rights to use different settings and the big winner in this one was Interplay who got the Forgotten Realms, TSR's more popular setting. Undermountain is a dungeon located beneath the massive city of Waterdeep. It was the setting for a giant campaign box that TSR released where the players were to gradually explore the largest dungeon they ever published. It was filled with pretty much every kind of monster that you'd find in the manual, all hanging out and being used in a lot of separate quests. The box set was one of TSR's more popular releases for Forgotten Realms.  (That's right. "Level 1".) And that finally brings us to our game. After releasing Descent, Interplay had themselves a shiny 3D engine and wanted to do something more with it. So they announced they would be taking that engine and using it to make an RPG: Descent to Undermountain. Initial plans were that it would be released in the summer of 1995 (the fact that I'm telling you this is obviously a bad sign). After years of promising that it would be ready soon, Interplay finally shipped the game on December 17, 1997, precisely one week before they shipped a game that you're probably more familiar with: Baldur's Gate. Behind the scenes, Descent to Undermountain was a fiasco. Descent is a flight sim moved indoors; it's all about freedom of movement. It's the wrong tool to use for an RPG unless it's an RPG about people who live in a zero-gravity environment. Everything was rebuilt from scratch multiple times. The Dungeons and Dragons license wound up harming the game as TSR required things that were bad for computer games to be included. Eventually the game reached a point where they just said, "Does it compile and run? Okay, ship it." It was infamously buggy, ran poorly, and looks hideous. There's tons of fundamentally broken aspects to the gameplay.  The game is a solo dungeon crawl. You control just one character as you wander through the dungeon and have to kill everything action game style. You generate your character using standard AD&D rules, though they do give you five extra points to apply to stats. You start at level one with practically nothing and have to build yourself up until you can take out the spider goddess Lloth, Queen of the Demonweb Pit.  The first problem is that D&D characters aren't intended to stand on their own. The characters need to support each other. And some characters (thieves, mages) are completely dependent on support at low levels. A starting mage has four hit points and in DtU they don't even have a spell. A dagger, which all of the monsters in the first area are armed with, does between 1 and 4 damage. See the problem? And the problem gets compounded as mages get randomly between 1 to 4 hit points per level and damage scales up much faster than that. At higher levels, a wizard can do anything. The wizards here can't even survive a single fight. Clerics are the most self-sufficient class so they'll generally be what you want to use in this game, but to make up for the lack of healing there's health potions floating around everywhere. They actually give fighters a special healing item, but no other characters get this kind of advantage. Even with them, the only way to play this game is creep and save constantly. Let me run down the things that go wrong from using the AD&D rules strictly: - Health potions that recover a random amount of life including possibly just 1 hp - Fall damage - Thief wall climbing ability covers up reading signs or throwing switches - Rolling to hit every time you swing your weapon - If you somehow lose all your money in the dungeon, you cannot leave it - No stats provided on any equipment; hope you have the player handbook open beside you  And here's the things that go wrong because they used the Descent engine: - All doors retract into the ceiling. - No lighting effects (these are in Descent 2, BTW) - Hideously blocky characters - - The worst ladders ever implemented in a video game - You get suck on corner constantly You cannot customize controls at all which is a problem because they are awful. You have to control movement with the arrow keys, activate things with the "A" key. You can attack with the left mouse button or left control. It's a real mess. Then there are the bugs. Don't let a monster land on you or this could happen:  Can't move, can't attack the monster. Time to reload or restart. Even by the standards of 1997, this game looked terrible. Check out this hot elf babe:  Everything is brown and ugly and muddy. It's hard to tell what anything is even full screen and I fall off cliffs all the time because I can't see that there's a problem. Each of the different levels (and each quest is essentially divided up into "levels") does have a different look, they're all muddy and ugly looking. A lot of good people worked on this game including Chris Avellone. I have to assume it was gross mismanagement that did it in. Rather than going, "Hey, this isn't the right tool for this job, let's abandon it and do something else," they kept pressing on. I'll leave you with this picture of the kobold national air force:  Edit: Oh my god, I found the most amazing thing on the inside cover of the jewel case: Brian Fargo posted:You are about toe embark on a new and exciting journey. One that will fill you with a sense of wonder and discovery. Light and sound will mix like a kaleidoscope to thrill you as never before. I'm sure this game brought their customer service department to task... Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 22:42 on May 17, 2015 |
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May 17, 2015 22:23
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Random Stranger posted:Are you ready for Descent to Undermountain(tm)? I remember this. A friend of mine had it, since he was a fan of Ultima Underworld. Alas, he didn't quite get a similar experience. Also remembered that this game had the legendary punchline in the local gaming magazine Pelit, which said that "the gameplay is like a drunken elephant bagjumping, and graphically it's like the backside of said elephant". But that was another piece of crap, AD&D Deathkeep, a 3DO port (what could go wrong there?) Nonetheless, DtU also got a meager score of 50 (out of a 100).
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May 17, 2015 23:03
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That reminds me how much I loved orcs & elves on the ds.
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May 17, 2015 23:57
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 Oh man, ten megabytes? Well, I guess I can delete half a gif.
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May 18, 2015 00:30
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Another fun detail about Descent to Undermountain: The back of the european boxes mentions the game having "4 player modem/network option", a feature that was cut to get the game out the door. When even the box blurb is unfinished and un-factchecked...
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May 18, 2015 02:00
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Random Stranger posted:Descent to Undermountain(tm)  Get me ootta this fookin gaem arrrrggghhhhh
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May 18, 2015 02:03
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If that's Sane Johnson, I'd hate to see the other Johnson.
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May 18, 2015 04:49
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El Estrago Bonito posted:I'd go with something that's slightly larger but cooled better and I'd also lean towards running an AMD APU setup just because they honestly have acceptable onboard graphics support and the Intel HD stuff is pretty awful in my (limited) experiences with it. Plus the Foxconn stuff is cool because it's soooooo small, but it has really limited options for expanding/upgrading/any sort of cooling if you need/want to do that later. All barebones/Mini PC setups like that won't have slots for new graphics cards, which IMHO makes it a less attractive choice than doing your own ITX build but honestly the AMD APU's are good enough to handle even some PS2 emulation, although you might get held back by 2.0ghz quad core as your platform (since due to power requirements the APU based mini PC's tend to go with the less powerful ones). I actually had a lot of trouble running PS2 emulation (PCSX2) on an AMD box. Granted, this was a pre-Bulldozer Phenom II without true SSE4. They stated on the forums that AMD wasn't really supported. I had to run it on an older instruction set and deal with random crashes. Is the situation better now?
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May 18, 2015 05:51
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azurite posted:I actually had a lot of trouble running PS2 emulation (PCSX2) on an AMD box. Granted, this was a pre-Bulldozer Phenom II without true SSE4. They stated on the forums that AMD wasn't really supported. I had to run it on an older instruction set and deal with random crashes. AMD chips remain garbage, in some cases even slower today for certain workloads then they were when Phenom IIs were new.. They've been stuck in a no advancement hole for a good 5 years now.
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May 18, 2015 05:59
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The AMD APU's aren't half bad as a one chip solution compared to Intel and their integrated graphics, but their traditional and enthusiast lines are functionally the same as a Phenom II except with more cores.
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May 18, 2015 06:51
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Wish Microsoft would pull their heads out of their asses and put Freelancer on GOG
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May 18, 2015 07:04
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Elliotw2 posted:The AMD APU's aren't half bad as a one chip solution compared to Intel and their integrated graphics, but their traditional and enthusiast lines are functionally the same as a Phenom II except with more cores. Yeah basically this. AMD stuff isn't great, the Vishera is a really really good processor for it's price point and if you're willing to overclock can do some really serious performance but it's not actually any better than if you have ~70 more bucks to spend on an i5 unless you're making that choice because you literally can't spend an extra $70. The APU stuff is pretty great however for a budget line of processors. The onboard graphics are really good in comparison to the Intel HD things (although they have been slowly getting better), especially at their price point. They are basically ideal for emulator boxes because they have good onboard graphics, low power draw and are really cheap. If I was building a real computer I'd go for an i3 as a cheap processor every time, but for twenty dollars more you can get the Kaveri APU which will out bench the gently caress out of an i3 in this one very specific scenario (emulation, games), especially if you're dealing with small form factors and don't wan't to buy an actual GPU. So yeah, AMD is pretty much trash these days for processors, but in the one realm of small form factor emulation/light gaming PC's they perform really admirably.
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May 18, 2015 07:29
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AlmightyBob posted:Wish Microsoft would pull their heads out of their asses and put Freelancer on GOG Or save the genre by making Freelancer 2!  
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May 18, 2015 08:05
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THE BAR posted:Or save the genre by making Freelancer 2! Let me tell you about  Star Citizen... 
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May 18, 2015 08:08
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SA:DRGE2 Canada I don't mind sending to another country. NES, SNES, Genesis, SegaCD, GB (Colour), GBA, PS1, GameCube Would prefer no sports games; I love adventure games, puzzles, and platformers. I've been reading this thread for a while now as I've been re-organizing my collections. I love picking out presents for people, so I think this is going to be fun! Carbon Thief fucked around with this message at 22:54 on May 21, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 08:13
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8-bit Miniboss posted:Let me tell you about If I wanted to play a EVE but with flight sim controls I'd hit myself with a loving hammer.
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May 18, 2015 09:10
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Carbon Thief posted:GB (Colour) You just made me look it up, it was known as the Gameboy Color even in places where they spell it "colour". Neat.
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May 18, 2015 11:45
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Is there any discernible reason to buy a PSX if I've already got a Japanese fat PS2? One popped up for sale locally for $200 and a big stack of Japanese PS2 games (most of which I don't care about). I want to get it because it's so loving slick looking, but it's hard to justify the price tag if it's not really giving me any new functionality.
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May 18, 2015 14:34
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Agrias120 posted:Is there any discernible reason to buy a PSX if I've already got a Japanese fat PS2? One popped up for sale locally for $200 and a big stack of Japanese PS2 games (most of which I don't care about). I want to get it because it's so loving slick looking, but it's hard to justify the price tag if it's not really giving me any new functionality. The biggest benefit was the DVR for Japanese analog TV on Japanese frequencies (which are significantly shifted from US ones so even if analog was still broadcast here it'd be useless). But if I remember right, Japan has also dropped analog so it might as well be a ps2 with a brick taped to it.
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May 18, 2015 14:41
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Man I actually thought AD&D: Deathkeep and AD&D: Slayer on 3DO were way better than Descent to Undermountain. They at least aren't afraid of what they are, have some cool music, some focused effort was involved to get around the 3DO's limits and so on. Undermountain is just nuts. Interplay really drank the kool-aid on the Descent engine. Even the back of the box for Normality mentions it despite it not even using the Descent engine!!! Then after Normality came out to middling reviews Gremlin went on to make the ambitious and interesting Realms of the Haunting. A good video game which Interplay inexplicably decided not to tell anyone about. The "best" thing about Descent to Undermountain is the unfinished level geometry with trees, dead bodies etc. often floating a foot above the ground.
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May 18, 2015 14:49
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RE: PSX, I agree that it's no better than a normal ps2, but drat does it look good. I mean, I have a bunch of devices that will play DVDs but you'd better believe I'd snag a Panasonic Q given the opportunity.
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May 18, 2015 14:52
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Neo Rasa posted:Man I actually thought AD&D: Deathkeep and AD&D: Slayer on 3DO were way better than Descent to Undermountain. They at least aren't afraid of what they are, have some cool music, some focused effort was involved to get around the 3DO's limits and so on. Undermountain is just nuts. Interplay really drank the kool-aid on the Descent engine. Even the back of the box for Normality mentions it despite it not even using the Descent engine!!! I think Deathkeep is more playable than Descent to Undermountain as well. It's a bad game, but Descent to Undermountain is a disaster. And the back cover spends more time bragging about how awesome Descent is than talking about the game. It's a good engine, but it's completely the wrong tool for this. Realms of the Haunting is great and I'm thrilled that it's been made more available to people through GOG and Steam in the past year.
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May 18, 2015 15:06
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Agrias120 posted:Is there any discernible reason to buy a PSX if I've already got a Japanese fat PS2? One popped up for sale locally for $200 and a big stack of Japanese PS2 games (most of which I don't care about). I want to get it because it's so loving slick looking, but it's hard to justify the price tag if it's not really giving me any new functionality. It looks super cool. Get it.
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May 18, 2015 17:16
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Agrias120 posted:Is there any discernible reason to buy a PSX if I've already got a Japanese fat PS2? One popped up for sale locally for $200 and a big stack of Japanese PS2 games (most of which I don't care about). I want to get it because it's so loving slick looking, but it's hard to justify the price tag if it's not really giving me any new functionality. If I had a nice dedicated retro space with a CRT, I would go for it. It's like having the Ultimate SD PlayStation. (assuming it works)
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May 18, 2015 17:51
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Honestly unless you're wanting one to sit as a display model in your collection PSX Playstation 2 should be avoided like the plague. While they're neat the cable function is 100% useless now and they have an internal IDE HD that is locked to the system in a very crazy way. When that HD dies the system is 100% useless and non-functional. Nobody has yet to figure out how to swap in new hard drives so yeah, ticking time bomb of worthlessness.
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May 18, 2015 17:59
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drat it, now I'm going to have to follow up on the PSX and see if it's still available. 
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May 18, 2015 18:03
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Agrias120 posted:drat it, now I'm going to have to follow up on the PSX and see if it's still available. Seriously read the warning above your post: flyboi posted:they have an internal IDE HD that is locked to the system in a very crazy way. When that HD dies the system is 100% useless and non-functional. Nobody has yet to figure out how to swap in new hard drives so yeah, ticking time bomb of worthlessness. Buy only if you want a decorative thingy.
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May 18, 2015 18:16
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Saoshyant posted:Seriously read the warning above your post: flyboi posted:Honestly unless you're wanting one to sit as a display model in your collection PSX Playstation 2 should be avoided like the plague. While they're neat the cable function is 100% useless now and they have an internal IDE HD that is locked to the system in a very crazy way. When that HD dies the system is 100% useless and non-functional. Nobody has yet to figure out how to swap in new hard drives so yeah, ticking time bomb of worthlessness. Oh, wow, thanks. I somehow completely missed flyboi's post when I responded. I know this particular unit still works, but if there's no valid recovery option, I'll probably end up passing. I have enough ticking time bombs to manage between all of my CPS2 carts (and those are at least preventable/recoverable).
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May 18, 2015 18:23
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If you just want 'em as display models they go as cheap as ~$100. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-PSX-DE...=item5b114a4eb8 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Japanese-So...=item1e9e86bd6c
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May 18, 2015 18:36
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Found the interesting tidbit re: PSX systems http://thepsx.blogspot.com/ quote:Next is the Hard drive firmware, the PSX HDD (and other SONY drives, most common, the 40gb drive bundled with FinalFantasy 11) is equipped with custom firmware, this CFW is used mainly for extra drive features and granting access to certain parts of the disk. It also acts as another level of security as this FW is checked before boot. However it looks like this guy dumped the NAND so it could potentially be possible to write that check out of the firmware and allow other drives to the system at some point. Seems like development is exceptionally slow so don't hold your breath.
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May 18, 2015 18:50
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flyboi posted:Found the interesting tidbit re: PSX systems Thanks for the further info--I'll be reading this blog for the rest of the afternoon! He might address this on the blog in a section I haven't gotten to yet, but I've seen a few listings in the past that noted the HDD being dead but discs still being able to be read, which conflicts with the info that the DVRP has to check the HDD at boot-up? Unless having a disc in bypasses the HDD/DVRP check completely, which seems unlikely since it uses a proto-XMB. It's probably more likely the listings were purposely misleading in their wording.
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May 18, 2015 18:58
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Agrias120 posted:Thanks for the further info--I'll be reading this blog for the rest of the afternoon! He might address this on the blog in a section I haven't gotten to yet, but I've seen a few listings in the past that noted the HDD being dead but discs still being able to be read, which conflicts with the info that the DVRP has to check the HDD at boot-up? Unless having a disc in bypasses the HDD/DVRP check completely, which seems unlikely since it uses a proto-XMB. It's probably more likely the listings were purposely misleading in their wording. It checks if the hard drive has the security sector but doesn't care about the integrity of the drive. If it's dead then the XMB won't function and HD functions are gone. I think you can likely boot games from this/save to memory cards but when the drive is completely gone it's a brick. From his videos on how to use FreeMCBoot it seems like the XMB can be entirely bypassed with such a setup. Obviously since the drive is "dead" you can't use a hd loader but ESR should work fine. ESR lets you boot patched PS2 games (and converted PSX games) while not using a loader. I believe OPL would work over samba mounts/usb but from what I remember compatibility really sucks over the two versus direct HD loading.
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May 18, 2015 19:04
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flyboi posted:It checks if the hard drive has the security sector but doesn't care about the integrity of the drive. If it's dead then the XMB won't function and HD functions are gone. I think you can likely boot games from this/save to memory cards but when the drive is completely gone it's a brick. From his videos on how to use FreeMCBoot it seems like the XMB can be entirely bypassed with such a setup. In my experience, OPL's SMB functionality works alright for normal play. Load times are a touch longer, but it's not terrible. The real flaw with it is streaming video from the "disc". In SMT: Nocturne, I was getting maybe 10 FPS for the cutscenes.
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May 18, 2015 19:27
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So going back to N64 analog sticks, this piece... http://www.ebay.com/itm/X2-Controll...=item58aa933b99 ... doesn't fit in the goddamned controller. Oh, you can screw it in fine, but when you go to close the controller you can't. And you can't gut them and put the pieces in the old casing because the workings are different. And it's basically impossible to even put the fucker back together after you do open it 
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May 18, 2015 19:32
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Codiekitty posted:So going back to N64 analog sticks, this piece... There has to be a better alternative than just using the original N64 controller design. Even as a kid I hated that controller. Are there any alternative controllers that can be plugged into the original n64 system?
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May 18, 2015 19:41
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With all this PSX talk I thought I'd ask about one I am going to be fixing soon. My buddy says when he goes to play discs on his system it will start to read, then crash. Stuff plays from the HD just fine. I cannot find appropriate technical stuff that's not in full Japanese. Nor can I find anyone online with this actual problem. Does anyone know what it might be before I go and open this guy up? I'm hoping just cleaning the lens will be enough. Why the gently caress did they name it the PSX? Make it impossible to find info.
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May 18, 2015 19:55
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CountingWizard posted:There has to be a better alternative than just using the original N64 controller design. Even as a kid I hated that controller. Are there any alternative controllers that can be plugged into the original n64 system? I cannot speak to their quality, but options do EXIST, anyway. http://www.raphnet-tech.com/products/gc_to_n64_adapter/ Because gently caress the N64 controller, I hate that stupid thing. Kazvall posted:With all this PSX talk I thought I'd ask about one I am going to be fixing soon. My buddy says when he goes to play discs on his system it will start to read, then crash. Stuff plays from the HD just fine. I cannot find appropriate technical stuff that's not in full Japanese. Nor can I find anyone online with this actual problem. Does anyone know what it might be before I go and open this guy up? I'm hoping just cleaning the lens will be enough. Why the gently caress did they name it the PSX? Make it impossible to find info. Nobody is quite sure since they (and everyone else in the free world) had been using PSX as an abbreviation for the original console for a number of years prior to it existing. Not that I'm much help in your situation, I just hate having some  choad try to "school me" on the PSX when they should (appropriately) be saying "wtf, Sony". I wish I could be of more assistance besides my grumbling!
Caitlin fucked around with this message at 20:09 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 20:06
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Kazvall posted:With all this PSX talk I thought I'd ask about one I am going to be fixing soon. My buddy says when he goes to play discs on his system it will start to read, then crash. Stuff plays from the HD just fine. I cannot find appropriate technical stuff that's not in full Japanese. Nor can I find anyone online with this actual problem. Does anyone know what it might be before I go and open this guy up? I'm hoping just cleaning the lens will be enough. Why the gently caress did they name it the PSX? Make it impossible to find info. It could be a laser replacement but just a warning I believe the system has two separate lasers for game & tv mode. Check that blog I posted earlier or message the guy, he knows a ton about the systems.
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May 18, 2015 20:15
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Seriously, buy that $70 PSX before I do! I don't need more junk in my life!
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May 18, 2015 20:15
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RadicalR posted:Seriously, buy that $70 PSX before I do! I don't need more junk in my life! I'm debating it now. I'm driving down by VA Beach on Saturday, I wonder if I could arrange local pick-up. 
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May 18, 2015 20:20
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