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Gaming: Where are the old school RPGs?
Sun, 06 May 2007

The baby is keeping us pretty busy so not so many posts of late, but I just have to squeeze this one in. Got five hours of sleep last night (not bad!) but taking a break from baby laundry and vacuuming to listen in on the new Rush album ('Snakes and Arrows') so I've got a moment to type. I've got the late-night shift and hate to sleep in bite-sized chunks so just stay up through two or through a.m. then go for a good coma before work. During that a.m. shift if the baby is sleeping nicely I can usually catch a bit of low volume TV but occasionally my brain is functional enough to debug my new game a little bit, or better still.. play a game. Rare pleasures indeed! This is where the PSP and such has turned in handy.. instant on and off.

Anyway, I find myself looking for a good single player old-school RPG. I've mentioned before there being at least two schools of this sort of game -- Japanese style (or J-RPG) and Everyone Else style. I'm not so into J-RPGs where you're walking a predetermined story and have overworld versus tactical turn based isometric combat. I'm a dungeon crawler. To this very day I miss Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, Wizardry, you name it. Back in the day there were dozens of RPGs at any given moment.

Not that long ago we had a lot of great titles .. Baldur's Gate, heck even Wizardry 8 and the Might and Magic games. The latest Elder Scrolls game - Oblivion - looked like a recent game to scratch the dungeon romping stat-managing equipment gathering itch, but alas it puts too high a demand on my meagre machine (during real time combat, even with Oldblivion mod) for me to much get into it. There are the Neverwinter Nights games as well I suppose, so there are a couple of notable RPG entries of late. I suppose Thief III needs mentioning; not an RPG per se, but you do get to sneak around in first person stealing wallets from the unwary. Not bad.

I worry the MMORPG industry is really hurting the solo RPG one; not all of us have time (anymore ;) for such games that are designed to require real investments of life (thousands of hours very literally), yet they do have crazy stat management and gathering going on, appealing to our gamer inner core. You just can't solo a dungeon therein.

Anyway, I suppose I've half defeated my question but something is missing. No more Ultima? No more Wizardry with Sir-Tech long gone under. No more Eye of the Beholder. I refuse to see the truth, that the days of manually clicking on inventory slots in your solo backpack are gone. I like crawling through a dank dungeon, looking for secret buttons to open passage sinto the lairs of Crom-only-knows-what seeking better lootz. I want The Sword of Fargoal Undieing Firestrength to grant my Strength +10 damnit.

Given a two year old laptop, any good RPGs out there? (Yes as a retro nutjob, I know very well I can run games from just a few years ago, to a couple decades back. Now while PC gaming is down (and on a rebirth in my humble opinion!), we still have Civilization and Galactic Civilization waving the strategy flags; Dawn of War and Warhammer and good ol' Command and Conquer for RTS.)

Anyway, I'm just rambling away; sorry about that.. not nearly enough sleep the last little while :) (And I know I know, we should get a Wii and/or XBox 360 for our game fixes. Too bad, we're cheap :)

So if you can .. riddle me this -- where are the old school RPGs?

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