The Cellar / Baldur's Gate, or "Old games are really good"

**Posted by Flint** 1/07/2022 4:39 pm

24 years isn't an eternity, but in video games, it's a long time.
Skyrim from 2011 is considered a marvel of longevity--mainly due to no sequel?

I've finally started playing the original Baldur's Gate, 1998 (albeit Enhanced Edition, 2012). This is the ultimate game format-- an ISOMETRIC view RPG. No requirements for the latest graphics card-- the environments are viewed from a fixed angle-- essentially illustrations (with all the artistic freedom this implies). Is Isometric view dated and difficult to navigate? I don't know, ask Animal Crossing, 2020.

Game designers haven't gotten more imaginative or ambitious over the years (some might argue the opposite, e.g. each older title of Elder Scrolls, Skyrim > Oblivion > Morrowind being more immersive and lore-heavy), the limitations were always hardware-based. By the late 90s, the hardware was perfectly able to render an immersive world.

Baldur's Gate may be the best game I've ever played. There's something immensely satisfying about the paper-doll customization, the blurry sprites navigating by point-and-click, and discovering new areas via fast travel, by technical necessity). The save files are half a Megabyte --your complete progress on less than a floppy disc. It's not technically turn-based (my favorite gameplay style), but it does auto-pause in a very customizable way (when enemy sighted, at end of round, etc.). Did I mention, it's faithfully based on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition?

Can't wait to work my way up the Baldur's Gate series, and play the upcoming 3rd title (based on D&D 5th Edition rules), set to release this year (?) with fully turn-based gameplay in an isometric environment (both optional, I believe).

What others are out there? Mid-late 90s, isometric, turn-based RPGs?

*one of my kids is already playing the Mother/Earthbound series-- 80s/90s isometric RPG parody in charming pixel art

Last edited by Flint (1/07/2022 4:42 pm)

**Posted by Clodfobble** 1/07/2022 8:37 pm

Chrono Trigger is another classic with a similar sort-of-real-time-but-you-can-pause system. Not technically isometric (some call it "oblique projection") but it's probably close enough to what you're looking for.

**Posted by Happy Monkey** 1/10/2022 12:02 pm

Fallout 1 and 2 are classic isometric, turn-based games.
Wasteland 2 and 3 came out more recently, but are modeled after Fallout 1 and 2.

**Posted by Flint** 1/11/2022 7:29 pm

@clodfobble-- I've thought about playing Chrono Trigger, I almost downloaded the emulator ROM just the other day. Thanks for the recommendation, I'll almost certainly play this one.

@Undertoad-- never heard of it, but sounds fascinating. I love your description. Steam has an Xcom "complete pack" (5 games) for fifteen bucks, or just the first one for five. Have you played any of the other titles? 94, 95, 97, 99, and 2001

@Happy Monkey-- Very cool, did not know Fallout started as isometric turn-based. Will definitely play these, my son is playing Fallout 3 or 4 right now. Your recommendation comes highly valued, as it is you who recommended I play Oblivion (back in the day when I'd built a gaming rig with two SLI'd nvidia cards), starting my love of Bethesda/Elder Scrolls. Morrowind was my favorite.

**Posted by Flint** 1/12/2022 2:48 pm

I forgot to mention, my son is playing Caves of Qud, a new "old" game.
Beta'd in 2010, but looks like it's running on a Commodore 64.
Highly imaginative and creative, post-apocalyptic RPG with perma-death

Caves of Qud weaves a handwritten narrative through rich physical, social, and historical simulations. The result is a hybrid handcrafted & procedurally-generated world where you can do just about anything.

Assemble your character from over 70 mutations and defects, and 24 castes and kits — outfit yourself with wings, two heads, quills, four arms, flaming hands, or the power to clone yourself; it’s all the character diversity you could want.
Explore procedurally-generated regions with some familiar locations — each world is nearly 1 million maps large.
Dig through everything — don’t like the wall blocking your way? Dig through it with a pickaxe, or eat through it with your corrosive gas mutation, or melt it to lava. Yes, every wall has a melting point.
Hack the limbs off monsters — every monster and NPC is as fully simulated as the player. That means they have levels, skills, equipment, faction allegiances, and body parts. So if you have a mutation that lets you, say, psionically dominate a spider, you can traipse through the world as a spider, laying webs and eating things.
Pursue allegiances with over 60 factions — apes, crabs, robots, and highly entropic beings, just to name a few.
Follow the plot to Barathrum the Old, a sentient cave bear who leads a sect of tinkers intent on restoring technological splendor to Qud.
Learn the lore — there’s a story in every nook, from legendary items with fabled pasts to in-game history books written by plant historians. A novel’s worth of handwritten lore is knit into a procedurally-generated history that’s unique each game.
Die — Caves of Qud is brutally difficult and deaths are permanent. Don’t worry, though — you can always roll a new character.

Last edited by Flint (1/12/2022 3:39 pm)

**Posted by Flint** 1/12/2022 5:02 pm

Yeah, there seems to be a resurgence of those good old games. Thank god, for ppl like me and my neurodivergent kids, we don't need the ƒucking GRAPHICS to tell the story.

The right thing to do with better hardware is make the devices smaller, like Nintendo Switch running Skyrim on a hand-held, and looking just fine.

With my potato laptop I'm usually running mods to scale DOWN the graphics of games, like rendering less polygons and simpler mesh. Older games, it turns out, were just fine. The most they ever need is re-skinning the UI or updating controls to respond to WASD.

**Posted by Flint** 1/13/2022 4:41 pm

Apparently the developer Beamdog has been porting these old RPGs to mobile. Mixed reviews, but the developers seem active in the comments section.

I'm talking Baldur's Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale, etc. ported for your phone.
I've always thought you should be able to run a pretty solid RPGs on these devices.

Last edited by Flint (1/13/2022 4:41 pm)

**Posted by BigV** 1/13/2022 8:00 pm

Old games *are* really good.

QFT.

By the way, you had me at "games". Some of the old ones are pretty good, even the ones that were good before electronification. Electrolyzing? Graphidaptibility? Computerating? You know what I'm talking about.

But old games with screens are good too, like Lunar Lander. Pong.

**Posted by BigV** 1/13/2022 8:04 pm

Oh!

Zork.

"You have been eaten by a grue."

**Posted by Flint** 1/14/2022 4:13 pm

BigV wrote:
But old games with screens are good too, like Lunar Lander. Pong.

Just watched an "what is the oldest video game" video, and interestingly many of the oldest games used vector graphics on an oscilloscope. However, CRT tubes actually get there first, because Williams tubes were used to store memory in the static charge of phosphor "bits", leading to CRTs subsequently being used as a diagnostic monitor to display memory contents, and finally leading to people "hacking" the diagnostic monitor to play draughts (checkers) in 1952, followed by tic tac toe on a 35 by 16 CRT the same year.

Sorry to infodump the spoilers, but I would have said Pong was the first "video game" but it was 20 years too late. And even Pong was a less impressive copy of "tennis" on what would later be commercially released as the Magnavox Oddyssey system (the one with physcial screen overlays on your TV).

Also, somewhere back in the earlist electronic games, some used "indicator lamps" or similar output, arguably disquaifying them from being classified as a "video" game. And even these only beat the CRTs by a couple of years at best.

Another cool thing on an oscilloscope was the first "computer animation" --of a bouncing ball, which was actually a physics simulation. Also from the early 1950s.

There's also 1947's patent for the Cathode-ray tube amusement device, but it didn't execute a program, or store anything in memory that could be altered by user inputs. Also they never actually built one.

Last edited by Flint (1/14/2022 4:33 pm)

**Posted by Happy Monkey** 1/19/2022 12:06 pm

The "Little Big Adventure" series is a charming little set of classic isometric, and is available on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/397330/Twinsens_Little_Big_Adventure_Classic/

At least the first one is also available on Android.

Last edited by Happy Monkey (1/19/2022 12:06 pm)

**Posted by Flint** 1/19/2022 1:06 pm

Looks really cool, but I'm curious about the controls in the first title. Sounds like the enhanced version uses mouse controls, or console-type controllers, but not standard PC keyboard. If you played this, what did you use, and how comfortable were the controls?

**Posted by Happy Monkey** 1/19/2022 11:41 pm

I played keyboard on PC when it first came out, and with my finger, presumably mouse-ish, on android a few years ago. I think keyboard is probably better, but I'm not sure what other enhancements are in there that you'd give up by playing the original.

**Posted by Flint** 1/20/2022 3:35 pm

Were the keyboard controls using the arrow keys? Baldur's Gate was arrow keys, but (at least in Enhanced) able to map to WASD. I read that the original Little Big Adventure used "tank controls" of the sprite (forward relative to the character means "up key" regardless of placement in environment), it just sounds confusing, I'm a little suspicious.

**Posted by Happy Monkey** 1/21/2022 10:25 am

Yes, it's tank controls. I assume it's arrow keys, but haven't played the original in decades. I doubt you can remap in-game. It's isometric, so tank controls are actually better. Otherwise the effect of the arrow keys either has to be rotated, or you need to be fiddly when going along a diagonal (isometric straight) path.

**Posted by Flint** 1/21/2022 1:19 pm

aw, yes, good point. I'll probably check it out this weekend.

I'm drawing out Baldur's Gate as long as possible but I think I'm nearing the end of completionism