Oh yeah, THAT'S the name of that old game

[MasterWuuf]

I've been trying to remember the name of a really great game I used to play.

I was looking through Gambit's game sales opportunity, when I noticed Lands of Lore 2.

I checked out the L of L3, since I never had opportunity to play that one, when I came across (pause for dramatic effect)
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos. That's the game! It was a real blast! The second one wasn't nearly as interesting to me.

I remember the chubby beast, as you entered the mines/caverns/whatever, that had to be killed with a knife.
The flying moose-creatures were also interesting.

Those games weren't as techno, or full of powerful graphics perhaps, but they were a grand waste of my time.

[Ameena]

I've played the third one - the four-disc thing is annoying, especially since the disc-changes seem to be entirely random. That is, you always change disc at the same points, but the discs don't advance in any order. I mean, you don't start on the frsit disc and hten change to the second later, and then the third. You might find one half of a city is on, say, disc two, but then the other half is on disc four, and then you go outside into the woods and that's disc three or whatever.
Apart from that, yeah, it was a pretty fun game . There's some music tracks from it that I want but I have never been able to find (they don't seem to be available and I've been searching multiple places on the Net for a few years now - I did manage to get hold of one of the tracks I wanted, but none of the rest wre available), and I was actually pondering playing it again some time soon. I wonder whether there's a downloadable version which cuts out the need for discs, though.

[Gambit37]

Yes, the original Lands of Lore was pretty sweet. It used a lot of the stuff that Westwood developed for EOB3 before they lost that gig and went and did their own thing. I've played it only in the last few years under DOSBOX and never finished it; got pretty close though. You can watch the entire game being played and narrated on Youtube if you have many hours to spare, starting here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2k5-viJ78

LOL2 and LOL3 I bought off eBay a couple of years back. Took ages to get to work properly on XP and once Igot them running, I found them awful. They were created during that horrible phase of game development in the mid-to-late 90s where games used simple 3d engines and flat sprites and looked awful. They do not hold up well at all today and I simply couldn't get on with them so they remain unplayed. I think it's LOL3 that has real footage of real people thrown into the mix too, and that looks even worse. It's like some amateur school play!

I'm so glad modern engines have solved all these presentation issues. It's a great thing that we've gone past the growing pains of developing sophisticated game tech and can now actually make stuff that both looks consistently good AND plays well. I love a lot of retro games, but you have to accept that a lot of old stuff just looks really crap by modern standards. (Hand drawn pixel games though will always look good in my opinion. You can't beat that old school hand-drawn charm )

[Sphenx]

Yes, the original Lands of Lore was pretty sweet. It used a lot of the stuff that Westwood developed for EOB3 before they lost that gig and went and did their own thing.

Yes! Knowing EOB data formats helps a lot to extract stuff in LOL
EOB3 used AESOP stuff which is different ... Some consider LOL as the "real" EOB3 - technically, we can say yes.

LOL2 and LOL3 I bought off eBay a couple of years back. Took ages to get to work properly on XP and once Igot them running, I found them awful. They were created during that horrible phase of game development in the mid-to-late 90s where games used simple 3d engines and flat sprites and looked awful. They do not hold up well at all today and I simply couldn't get on with them so they remain unplayed. I think it's LOL3 that has real footage of real people thrown into the mix too, and that looks even worse. It's like some amateur school play!

You said it all. When I started playing LOL2, I did not feel I was playing LOL anymore; and I never played it far...
I prefered series which really began in 3D, like Ultima Underworld and Elder Scrolls.

[MasterWuuf]

I finished the first and second one.

After enjoying the first one, the beginning of the second one had me disappointed.
It took me a long time to get into that one, but unfortunately,
I'm one of those people who hate to start something and not finish.

I'm just glad to finally figure out the name of the game I liked so much LOL1 (laugh out loud 1 ???)

[Ameena]

There's no real footage in LoL3 - it's all just animated characters.
Personally, I'm not too fussed about what a game looks like, just how it plays. I often go back and play old stuff that dates from a decade or two ago because I enjoy it. Whenever EQC goes live, I'm there .

[Gambit37]

OK, must be LOL2 then that used live action. One of them definitely had it and it was crap.

While I concur that gameplay is more important than graphics, sometimes the presentation can be so bad that it stops you getting into the game. So it does matter. If it didn't, we'd still be playing text adventures or games drawn with ASCII art.

[MasterWuuf]

I would agree, although there were many good text games, if you had a vivid imagination.

Wasn't Zork one of them?

Bard's Tale was graphic driven but not to the point I'd brag. Still loved it. Bought BT2 but never got into it.

Can't imagine LOL1 without graphics.

[Bit]

Played LOL1 only, but that was a very good one!

Talking about trilogys...
Took me half an hour to find that one in the net - someone remembers?
http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-st/ ... -nikademus
http://www.mobygames.com/game/phantasie ... creenshots
Graphic was topdown and very simple cell graphic, but the whole gameplay was really fun - a bit short perhaps.

[MasterWuuf]

Never ever heard of that one, BIT. And it was originally made for the ST?
Suddenly, the world is a darker and more lonely place (because I didn't play that game )

[Bit]

I wonder if we could grab it somewhere, maybe I even have it somewhere. It was very old style!

[Trantor]

I remember reading stuff about Phantasie III in the good old Power Play magazine. It was the game with baby dragons and the ability to replace injured body parts with body parts from other races, right? I have never played it, but it seemed to have some sort of small cult following.

[Bit]

Baby Dragons! Yes, I remember! And that with the body parts was also funny. And I believe you never really died there.
SSI did release of lot of pretty odd games, just a very few have been really successful, and I remember one which was really just a mess, you could complete it in two hours or so. That should have been one part of the D&D-series and they made a great ballyhoo out of it because of the 'true adaption'. Nothing it was - really nothing! Let me try to find that too.

@Wuufy:
Let there be light (if possible - not for me, restricted for my country): http://www.oldgames.nu/Phantasie_3/Phantasie_3/2196/
Nice site btw - surely something for Ameena too

[Ameena]

Oooh, that site's got loads of stuff on it...I'll have to download stuff from some of these sites at some point, when I've got nothing else to play .

[raixel]

Whoa. Due to this thread, I found LoL(Lands of Lore). How the *heck* did I never play this before?! Seriously.

[raixel]

There was a game I used to play. All I remember of it was you were in hell and trying to get out and jim jones pours a poisoned drink down your throat if you mess up at a certain point. It had graphics similar to the Serpent's Star or the Mask of the Sun (Anyone remember those?) Anyone know what this game was?

On a side note

For anyone whose into old games I recommend The Dark Heart of Uukrul.(I I had it on my apple IIe in 1991. Finally beat it on my old 486 in 2001. Its really really good. But REALLY hard. The only reason I finally beat it was because of the wonderful internet and walkthroughs. My dad and his best friend and I tried for years..
The game came originally with a giant manual with a 25 page intro story, history of magic and how it relates to the game world (and is really cool), ect. Main fun is that items you can interAct with in different ways. So say you get an ointment. You have the option of eating it which might hurt you, or applying it to you wounds, which might heal you (you can eat silver stick-pins, wave bones in the air for the hell of it, read from the necronomicon ect) If a char dies, they might not be able to be ressed if you wait too long to get to the healer's, and you have to go the adventurer's guild and interview new people. Graphics arent that great, but they dont need to be. Combat runs similar to the old SSI gold box games. I still play it. Its up there with DM in 'raixel's top 10'

[beowuuf]

How could you miss Patrick Stewart's voice?

Looking at it now, download link and extra stuff for PC seems to be here:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/475/D ... ,+The.html

[raixel]

Patrick Stewart's voice was in the Dark Heart of Uukrul??

Oh, no wait.... damn. Here I was thinking that I missed a part of a game Id beat 3 times. Heh, and then years later he becomes Uriel Septim.

[beowuuf]

Lol, yeah, I Was taking about LoL Wait, that looks odd. Wonder if I could have made that a palindrome?

[Jan]

Yes. And if you succeed, this could be your Falkland Islands.

Sir Humphrey: "And you could be General Galtieri."

[beowuuf]

Never stop quoting Yes (Prime) Minister

[raixel]

Whoa. I d/l'd the Dark Heart of Uukrul from the site you posted, Beo. And the colors are different. Not drastically so, but enough that it's noticable. For instance, on my old copy (486/apple IIe)the walls were blue, and in this one they are beige. And the party members in this one are colored with like a difference in clothes and skin tone, in the old one they are solid white. Interesting thing is too this version isnt cracked while the one on my 486 which I got from a different abandonware site in 2000 was, so make sure you d/l the copy protection doc if you want to play. I still have my original copy protection doc somewhere. Its in that deep red anti-copy machine color a lot of game's copy protection was printed on in the late 80s-early 90s (before CDs). All that it ended up doing was make it hard to read the black ink on burgundy paper. I remember painstaikingly copying the doc by hand (it was supposed to be a pic of 4 different amulets with runic symbols your party members wear) for a friend that wanted a copy of the game. Ahhhh, the good old days. Wonder what caused the difference in graphics though. Its not huge, but it would be like if you had never seen the Amiga monsters of DM and then played a copy with those graphics.

EDIT: The manual is crap. It's just like 10 scanned pages of what was a huge manual. And the backstory that provides all the history (why a tiny weak party is challenging this insane demi-god overlord) is missing. I'm currently searching online for the copy I had years ago, that was a txt version. If I find it ill link it here. If I ever get my 486 running (which is unlikely. My bro fried the BIOS) or bother to pull the hard drive I'll host it and link it here. Game is still playable as the copy protection and spell docs still are good (the spell and prayer docs are the exact same text docs I had years ago, with the history and words of each spell/prayer written out. Worth it just for that, but I want the damn backstory.)

Oh, btw, if theres no sound or mouse, it doesnt mean its not working. The game has neither.