glin@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU (George Lin [900116]) (11/27/90)
Out of the 3 SSI D&D games, the first one (Champions of Krynn) was the best of out the 3. It's is fast and easy to navigate/command. (keyboard OR mouse) Pool of Radiance: Better sound than the other two but sloooow with a lot of encounters that usually consists of more than 20 level 1 creatures at each encounter. Due to the game speed, it takes more than 20 minutes just to go through 1 round. Graphics sucks. Game navigation: uses both mouse AND keyboard which is a pain. Curse of the Azure bond: sound is like Champion, graphics a little better, game navigation: uses mouse and keyboard-pain. And guess what--SSI used a different company to do each conversion! They should've used US GOLD (I think that's the group that did Champions.)
hclausen@adspdk.UUCP (Henrik Clausen) (11/28/90)
In article <1278@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU>, George Lin [900116] writes: > Pool of Radiance: Better sound than the other two but sloooow with a lot > of encounters that usually consists of more than 20 level 1 creatures > at each encounter. Due to the game speed, it takes more than 20 minutes just > to go through 1 round. But then, it runs nicely on the A3000! So does Champions, and Curse will run under 1.3. At 68030 speed, _everything_ is fast. Even some stuff that should've been slow (Grin). > And guess what--SSI used a different company to do each conversion! > They should've used US GOLD (I think that's the group that did Champions.) Pool Of Radiance is said to have been in a lot of trouble getting to the market, and it's not really debugged. Some bugs are real tough, like my 8th level figther who's dead, and PoR crashes with a Division by Zero when I raise him. Or the Cloak of Displacement that causes an instant reboot! My favorite was when I got 65535 Jewelry sets to end all my finance worries :-) I had to discard 64300 of those just to be able to walk away from the scene. Money IS a problem - if you collect what you get, your pockets are so heavy the monsters will run circles around you :-) Moving on to CoK Real Soon Now -Henrik | Henrik Clausen, Graffiti Data | | ...{pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmehq!adspdk!hclausen | \__"Do not accept the heart that is the slave to reason" - Qawwali trad__/
spierce@pnet01.cts.com (Stuart Pierce) (11/30/90)
Pool of Radiance doesn't show off the Amiga's graphics or sound, but it is a lot of fun. I've spent more hours playing it than any other game that I've bought recently. I haven't experienced any bugs in 68000 mode, but it is sometimes a little quirky in 68020 mode. Too bad, since it is sluggish in the standard mode. Still, I liked it well enough that I'm going to purchase Curse and Champions. The forthcoming Eye of the Beholder is supposed to have much more sophisticated graphics. Time for a mini-review. Picked up Corporation. The only disappointment I have is that it crashes if I try to boot in 68020 mode. Corporation is kind of like Dungeon Master set in the future. One of the big differences is that movement is continuous. Instead of moving from square to square, you sort of glide in whatever direction you choose. You can rotate 360 degrees. Anyway, you are exploring the 16-level headquarters of the corporation headquarters. You have only 1 person in your party, and they may be either human or android. Infra-red sensors and cameras will alert the guards to your presence and must be destroyed. The mouse pointer becomes a gun-sight that you move to aim your energy pistols. The building seems to be made of sparsely detailed but solid vector graphics. The monsters are nicely detailed and more colorful than those in Dungeon Master. I have only scratched the surface of this game. I also have a demo copy of Captive, which I was unable to find for sale. It also failed to run in 68020 mode. In this game, you control a party of 4 androids. It is more like Dungeon Master than the other one, I think. The graphics are not of the vector-type, and so contain more detail and shading than Corporation. My only complaint is that the game occasionally slowed to a crawl. This is only a demo copy, so I can't say if this happens in the real thing. Overall, both games look to be excellent, though I think I like the 'look and feel' of Captive better. Stuart W. Pierce