Do you dare to enter the dangerous world of 1400s Mythic Germany and fight back against Satan and his followers?
Do you dare to learn what those 4-character abbreviations stand for because we didn't have enough room on the screen to actually type out the full name of each skill?
Do you dare to enter the DARKLANDS???
(It took me like 3 goddarn hours just to create my party while writing down what my reasoning is. I'm exhausted. Will post it someday.)
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Now is this a traditional SA Let's Play through images and text. Or are we talking Chris Chan let's play with video?
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Definitely not video. My reason for doing this is it's one of the greatest games ever but very inaccessible to a modern audience. So I'm going to try to distill the bits that are actually interesting.
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Neat.
I'll definitely throw you a follow. We need more retro gaming centric posts on here. If you finish this and are successful, I await your Wizardry IV playthrough.
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I'm not quite that old school.
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I just wanna see someone suffer through it lol.
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To who? I've never heard of it once over the years. Doubt it cracks the top 500 list even.
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Argument from ignorance.
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Gee, you'd think if a game was worthy of being called one of the greatest someone under the age of 50 might've heard of it.
Microprose alone made several other games that I've heard of before, and four entries on this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered_the_best
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Don't try to tell me about my lived experience in the early 1990s.
This is the game that Microprose poured way more money and time into, to the point where it's one of the main reasons they went bankrupt. It was insanely overambitious, probably the most complex game ever released in history up to that point. When it was released it... had a few bugs... some of which would corrupt other parts of the user's hard drive. 
Because in the DOS era you could do that. Eventually they fixed all the bugs, but of course back then you couldn't just push a Steam update. Customers would have to ask you to send them a floppy disk with the patch by mail. All customers, including new customers, because they have to go to their local story and buy the game, which is on about 11 floppy disks, then get the patch disk sent to them. And did I mention that it was extremely demanding on hardware of that time?
So it bombed back in 1992. None of these things are issues today. You can download a bug-free version of the game from Steam in a matter of a seconds.
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speaking of Micropose, I'm hyped for this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286220/Sea_Power__Naval_Combat_in_the_Missile_Age/
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Cold Waters was pretty good but it was in the uncanny valley of realism. Real enough that I have to be bored a lot of the time like a real submariner. But it didn't try to model how sonar works which is what submarine warfare is all about. Dangerous Waters did this really well 20 years ago if you want to go the realistic route. But these guys, I dunno, I like their games but I'm not getting the dumb fun of an arcade game with Cold War submarine inspired art and I'm not getting anything realistic enough to tap into the neurodivergent boy reading Jane's Fighting Ships in the library during the Cold War either.
I'm sorry, I'm complaining too much. They're good games and I'm sure I'll like this. I'm only bitching because it's good enough that I think it can be improved.
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Wouldn't you know it I was just checking out some old scans of Computer Gaming World and was reading Scorpia's (pretty even-handed) review of it. Starts on page 52: https://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_101.pdf
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Scorpia is a queen
but she's wrong on this one. I totally agree with everything that Johnny Wilson wrote. She's being a little too spergy and trying to fit the game into her preconceptions of what a "CRPG" has to be when Darklands was doing something way beyond that. Her bitching that her characters saved the world but lost some strength points in the process especially shows that was not really engaging with the material except as numbers. One time my dad saw me playing this and he pointed that if you changed the art and text, it could just as easily be simulating running a laundromat. Which is true. If you have no interest in trying to get into the mindset of a person in 1400s Germany, the bare mechanics of the game are not that interesting. If you want a game with great mechanics and don't care about story, play Troubleshooter. If you're not a sperg play Darklands.
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What was wrong with devs in this era
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You could have sharp text or you could have 256 colors. What's the matter? You think you deserve both at the same time?
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nethack manages both
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I think this was the first game I ever played in which you could create/gear a whole party on your own. Also my first real open world/open-ended game. The detail put into the mythical Holy Roman setting with stuff like the wild hunt ganking you and praying to different saints giving different stat bonuses blew little kid me away. It's one of the few classics I would love a remake of just because of the hardware upgrades since then (if there's still a studio that could do it without putting a chick in it and making her gay).
I remember hating the combat system. I'm a turn-based kind of guy.
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Yeah the combat system isn't that impressive. There's actually some interesting stuff going on behind the scenes but it doesn't show you enough of what's going on.
People in the industry like Josh Sawyer have been saying this forever, but if they can't raise the money to do it then I guess nobody can.
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Keep yourself safe
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Despite being an extremely difficult game, there's actually not many situations where your characters will get killed. It's only when you're facing particularly satanic enemies. (Although that does include wolves at low levels.)
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I remember playing this game and spending most of my time just visiting villages and accusing the village of being satan worshippers, which they tended to be more often than not. Maybe I should go back and actually try to beat that game.
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I should try doing that in real life.
If you go into the village and actually investigate there's a bunch of really clever subtle clues when they're actually satanic.
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It takes place
in Africa, b-word?
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Good question. Arnold Hendrick envisioned this a system where he would do the Germany part and it would interlock with others so you could take a character from one country to another. You see these as things you might potentially do but they're always darkened out. Go west to France in the Hundred Years War, go east to Poland and Russia (trust me bros this is great roleplaying game country), go south across Brenner Pass into Italy. A country much richer and densely populated. Don't have to worry about physical wolves there. But they're so devious.
Unfortunately my boy Arnold Hendrick was 10-15 too early to pull off that vision.
Think of where it could go from there. After Italy you could make a game about North Africa. Bring in a new set of rules about how prayer worked in Islam at that time.
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Go play Svea Rika bro
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At least have the common fricking curtousy to link me to something.
After that time when Snally told me to search for "bocu no picu" I am extremely wary of typing in search terms someone else gives me.
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I should not just have searched for bocu no pico
This is it BTW,
Old paradox title initially based on a board game, first game only let's you play as Swedes but 3 let's plat as all the northern lords
You have to speak a Scandinavian language though
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/crown-of-the-north-gm1
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