This week’s episode is very long to make up for the crappiness of last week’s episode, and the crew have fun with the trolling of Target critics this past week.
The news this week includes:
This and Listener Feedback.
I miss old SSI games and all the beauty and wonder they brought me as a child. Perhaps it’s more of the feeling of playing old MS-DOS games and that no worries feeling of playing games all summer long when your parents are out working; no cares in the world but that of the evil dragons and goblins of an RPG world. Secret of the Silver Blades arrived in May of 1990, developed and published by Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI), a company we covered in our gaming history back in TD Gaming Podcast Episode 9.
Secret of the Silver Blades is actually the third in a four-part game series which was eventually packaged in the Gold Box editing of the SSI games. It was a continuation of the game Curse of the Azure Bonds and the first in the series: Pool of Radiance. The cool part of the series was the leveling system where each would let you level to a certain limit just like most modules in D&D games, this game let you get to level seven which means a Mage could use the cool Delayed Blast Fireball spell which was one of my favorite magic spells in D&D (yeah, I’m a dork.)
The graphics were a whopping 16-colors, with slight graphical improvements over the other two prior games. This game didn’t have an overworld map like the others, going full first person for the length of the game. Another great enhancement was the ability to use the arrow keys to navigate menu’s without the need for “hot keys” like older SSI titles, given the game is very much menu-based for combat, equipment and inventory management it was very handy to have the use of those nice little arrow keys.
You create your party and start adventuring in a game engine very similar to all the games before it, so introduction to game mechanics was minimal, you could advance your characters further in level and, most importantly, import characters from previous games. The D&D world is really a character-driven game environment and you grow fond of your characters and understand the best ways to battle with them, importing is key and still, today, is a big part in well done RPG expansions (Guild Wars is a great example). Unfortunately, many games fall short of character import and it kind of blows away some of the magic of an RPG.
One of the frustrating issues with Secret of the Silver blade is the limitation on levels for the Cleric, because they can’t level up past 7 they can’t get the good ressurection spell, only allowed to use Raise Dead which lowers your characters constitution by 1 (much like the traditional D&D rules). However, given its a video game and not a paper-dice based game, the raise dead penalty is annoying, so it was easier to save often and re-load when you died to try again and avoid the penalty. I do recall their being some scrolls or something to get back your constitution penalty… but it’s been awhile I might be making that up.
Anyway, a well done series, classic RPG and helped build a foundation for games like Morrow Wind and Oblivion in my opinion.
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The previous two podcasts got corrupted on upload, and now I have to reedit them completely. Be patient.
This week’s there’s a bunch of minor news items, covering things like Sony’s lawsuit, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 and the Ukraine invasion, Minecraft frogs, various remasters, and the gang talk briefly about the newly released Tunic.
The main news items include:
Let us know what you think.
Gaming Podcast, we get some impressions about gaming reviews and media from our listeners while tackling the gaming flashback 10-Yard Fight for the arcade and NES. We ran out of time on our four stories and didn’t get our gaming history in yet.
This weeks question of the week, what do you think of blaming video game failures on the economy?
Hi Guys, Good Episode. I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while as I have been busy with my newborn son William. I like that you have now expanded to include other game types other thank video games. To Paul’s infamous comment Story is Game Play’s Bitch… I HATE THIS… I really only like games that have stories or enable me to make a story… I hate games that are pointless grinding. I need progression otherwise I stop paying attention and generally stop playing. I still play game from the 90s because back then they had good stories. As for the Steam Machine’s suspend feature, I like the fact they recognize the risk and disable the feature, nothing would piss me off more than suspending the game and expecting it to start back up and finding that the session had expired/become corrupt. It would be great if they can fix it but I don’t think that would change my buying decision. As for the steam machine, I don’t mind the idea if the boxes are cheaper and outperform my gaming PC… otherwise they don’t really make much sense. If I want to play my PC games on my TV I would connect my PC to the TV. Otherwise… keep recording and I’ll keep listening.