It's true, most of my week was taken up by Wasteland - but I'm not ready to write about that just yet. Partially because of a sick day that pushed my schedule back, partially because of an infamous night in the Las Vegas Sewers, and partially because I still have a little more left before I finish the game. Later this week I'll write about my time in Wasteland, but first! I wanna get into how cool my Saturday stream was with regards to looking at modern DOS games!
I started with the original BEATS OF RAGE, the homebrew Streets of Rage clone with lifted King of Fighters sprites and pilfered music all over the place, and even with mechanical limitations vs. most beat 'em ups, the work of a few people on this in DOS was impressive.
After that I played ZOZ - and after moving from DOSbox to the Windows ZZT interpreter, it was a great time! Big secret - I'm not often really thrilled when somebody puts a deckbuilder in front of me. Past the original Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons (if it counts), and Library of Ruina, so many of them feel like they're chasing a trend that was manufactured in response to worse trends of larger games and often it comes at the expense of better game design. But ZOZ had such a great story hook and accessible system, as well as incredibly well done worldbuilding and character design (not just for an Textmode based game but for a game full-stop), that I couldn't put it down.
Spent a few moments with DOS port of the modern version of Gates of Integrity, a dungeon crawler that started on the Amstrad CPC back in 1989 and went through a few different iterations. Didn't get very far in it before I realized this was a game I wanted to commit way more time to than I could, especially as how I'd spent two hours in ZOZ. No regrets over that, as it's leading me to cover ZZT stuff a little more often in the margins of my larger games. At the same time I recognized that two time sinks in a row on what's ostensibly a variety stream could be a threat to productivity.
Also spent time with two very short but fun CGA game jam titles from Czech dev Petr Kratina - this year's The Settlement and 2017's Silly Knight. I enjoyed Silly Knight more on account of it feeling more like a complete game, but The Settlement definitely had promise and a solid framework for a longer story to be told.
A bunch of the games that I played were built in either QuickBASIC or QBasic - like Cross Country Trucking, Chronicles of Galia, Lala the Magical: Prologue, and Joe Starman on Planet X. Of these, the most impressive in gameplay was Chronicles of Galia - it's one I'll probably continue (along with its sequel) sometime next year. Still all of these were pretty interesting, and Lala had very impressive sound and graphics for being built in QuickBasic.
I gave a decent amount of time to a few other games: Sos Sosowski's P (incredibly amusing for a couple of runs, much like the McPixel games), the original DOOM, The Roguelike (way more brutal than I thought, but at least I got to do funny voices for the opening), Dungeons of Noudar 3D (cool designs but the gameplay loop didn't give me as much satisfaction as other dungeon crawlers), the DOS demake of LIZARD (incredibly cryptic so I couldn't focus to give it the time I wanted, but a programmer making complex NES audio and animations in DOS was mindblowing), the alpha demo for Acronia (fun platformer in the style of Apogee/3D Realms's early 90's work, even if it was short and softlocking was a threat), and Episode 1 of Neut Tower (really neat puzzle design, and I hope more work is put into it).
I got to close out the main schedule with another CGA game jam title, a complex maze game called Perils of Treasure Mountain. Neat graphic and sound design that managed to do a lot more with the pallette than I would have expected to, but in a different way than Petr Kratina's games did. Afterwards I gave a bit of a teaser for a special modern game I'm streaming on Christmas night that's also playable in DOS - DOOM, but in the form of John Romero's SIGIL.
Coming up this week is the finale of Wasteland and then we go right into Heroes of Might and Magic II, and I'll have a special giveaway coming up later this week - once I figure out how to do this.
Awesome, it was real fun to see chapter 1 of ZOZ on stream - glad it felt like it came together for you, most deckbuilders leave me cold as well so I tried to be thoughtful about how I approached things. Next time you're looking to set up some ZZT let me know!