NFOpocalypse

In Dominus, you control the ruler of a small province, which consists of a castle, outlying towns, city walls, forests, and the like. It’s divided up into about thirty different area maps. Your goal is to defend the province against eight invading tribes, which have randomized personalities. You combat these tribes using your own armies of monsters, traps, and spells. Additionally, you have four generals at your disposal, which you can use to automate setting up area defenses and other attacks. You win the game when all of the invading tribes have been eliminated, either through warfare or diplomacy.

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One of my hobbies is collecting old PC games. Over the years, however, I’ve amassed a large number of games that I’ve never gotten around to playing. I would like to play all of these eventually, but I don’t have a lot of time to invest into playing them all to completion. Therefore, I’m going to play them all for an hour or two and discuss my preliminary findings. I’ve chosen to start with strategy and war games.

Home of the Underdogs calls Silicon Knight’s 1993 D&D-licensed title Fantasy Empires as “one of the best fantasy games ever made.” I was not as impressed.

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Okay, let’s put aside the fact that war doesn’t really make much sense in real life. We’re talking about games, here. This is a gaming blog.

I’m not a historian by any means, but I don’t think I need to be one to tell that something’s a bit off when one of the CPU-controlled players, with whom I’ve had very little contact, declares war on me even though I’m not controlling an important resource, blocking some strategic position, or otherwise being much of a threat. Potentially, I could turn this into a long rant on why AI in 4X games can be so lacking, but I don’t think that’s the actual problem, here.

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I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.

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NFOpocalypse’s resident RPG expert reviews Captain Comic 2, a little known sidescroller from the 90s which was written by Michael Denio and released only on the PC, and rants about how modern game stores are boring.

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In almost every town in Dragon Warrior 7 there’s a well. Most of these wells don’t contain anything. Some of them contain quite a lot.

In Dragon Warrior 7, there’s an item called a Tiny Medal. You can collect these, and eventually give them to a medal collector to get special items and equipment based on how many you’ve found. It’s sort of like the Golden Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or the little red gems in Illusion of Gaia. Sometimes you find these in wells.

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