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Castle Quest is the game my family measured all games against for couple of decades following its release. There is no way that game will live up to my expectat

Castle Quest is the game my family measured all games against for couple of decades following its release. There is no way that game will live up to my expectations if I attempt to play it again now.

sshagent 6y ago
i should have read your last sentence before i shattered some childhood memory of the graphics of Citadel.
- mrspeaker 6y ago
  I think nostalgia hits me harder than you: I yawn at the latest PlayStation demos with a gazillion polygons - but after image-searching "BBC Citadel", I'm all "take my money!". I gotta play that this evening. I'm sure the game play will be awful, but I love the graphics ;)
  - sshagent 6y ago
    I don't care for graphics really, dwarf fortress is the best game ever, IMO. this was more how my memory from 35 years or so compares to reality.
iainmerrick 6y ago
Agreed on Castle Quest, on both counts. Did you ever play Imogen? I think that one honestly holds up, graphics included. And of course Elite and Exile.
- zem 6y ago
  i'd never heard of imogen, which surprised me given that it made the top 20. i'll give it a play through.
- momentoftop 6y ago
  When I got hold of a BBC emulator, I played many of these games through to completion with the use of "save state". Castle Quest ended up being pretty underwhelming. Exile, on the other hand, is absolutely insane in its level of complexity. This is the full map: www.stairwaytohell.com/gamehelp/MAP-Exile-BC.png The game is still genius to me. I love the teleport mechanic: in the game, you're invincible, but if you sustain too much damage in a short period, your suit teleports you away to safety so you can recover. You can "remember" up to four teleport destinations, with the ultimate fallback being your spaceship. Being forced to teleport is usually bad. You can potentially drop important items in a dangerous area, or find yourself having to redo a tricky navigation back to the area you teleported from. The brilliance is that the big-bad Triax and his three robots have the same teleport mechanic. The only way to destroy them is to hit them with massive amounts of damage before their teleports kick in. This meant using physics puzzles, because damage sources would stack: I could destroy the final robot by luring it to and blasting it in the face with the experimental thruster, shooting it with the remote-controlled cannon, and using the icer simultaneously.
  - iainmerrick 6y ago
    I’m amazed that anyone ever actually solved Exile. I think I might have gotten as much as 30% of the way through... I reached the windy tunnel, but didn’t collect much in the way of exotic equipment beyond the icer. I love the emergent gameplay that comes out of that clever teleportation mechanic, and the amazingly robust physics. As you say, it plays fair -- the enemies use the same teleporters you do, and the monkeys jump in honest parabolas. It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available. I used to enjoy just zooming around the central cave with my jetpack, dodging the guided missiles that one of the tall robots launched from its side-tunnel. If you infuriated it enough, it would fall off the ledge and end up at the bottom of the cave! Wonderful game, and an amazing technical achievement.
    - momentoftop 6y ago
      > I’m amazed that anyone ever actually solved Exile. I think I might have gotten as much as 30% of the way through... I reached the windy tunnel,... This was about as far as I got without a walkthrough. And I fear it wasn't close to 30%! > It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available. Yes, I loved this. A significant part of the map, letting you into Triax's liar, is behind a "rune door" that must be destroyed. It seems that the game developers intended you to destroy this door by acquiring two radioactive rocks and dropping one on the other over the door, creating a massive explosion that would destroy it. But I read in a few places that people had successfully destroyed the door by very carefully collecting and stacking grenades to cause damage above the required threshold. And there was a standard set of cheats for the game, one of which allowed you to fire cannon shot from your normal gun. It makes short work of that rune door. I really like this way of designing games, where your puzzles aren't simple boolean rules (you must use the red key in the red door) but more real valued (you must deal x damage in y timeframe). For exile, it meant there were multiple solutions to puzzles that I suspect the designers had never considered.

Castle Quest is the game my family measured all games against for couple of decades following its release. There is no way that game will live up to my expectations if I attempt to play it again now.

sshagent 6y ago

i should have read your last sentence before i shattered some childhood memory of the graphics of Citadel.

mrspeaker 6y ago
I think nostalgia hits me harder than you: I yawn at the latest PlayStation demos with a gazillion polygons - but after image-searching "BBC Citadel", I'm all "take my money!". I gotta play that this evening. I'm sure the game play will be awful, but I love the graphics ;)
- sshagent 6y ago
  I don't care for graphics really, dwarf fortress is the best game ever, IMO. this was more how my memory from 35 years or so compares to reality.

iainmerrick 6y ago

Agreed on Castle Quest, on both counts. Did you ever play Imogen? I think that one honestly holds up, graphics included. And of course Elite and Exile.

zem 6y ago
i'd never heard of imogen, which surprised me given that it made the top 20. i'll give it a play through.
momentoftop 6y ago
When I got hold of a BBC emulator, I played many of these games through to completion with the use of "save state". Castle Quest ended up being pretty underwhelming. Exile, on the other hand, is absolutely insane in its level of complexity. This is the full map: www.stairwaytohell.com/gamehelp/MAP-Exile-BC.png The game is still genius to me. I love the teleport mechanic: in the game, you're invincible, but if you sustain too much damage in a short period, your suit teleports you away to safety so you can recover. You can "remember" up to four teleport destinations, with the ultimate fallback being your spaceship. Being forced to teleport is usually bad. You can potentially drop important items in a dangerous area, or find yourself having to redo a tricky navigation back to the area you teleported from. The brilliance is that the big-bad Triax and his three robots have the same teleport mechanic. The only way to destroy them is to hit them with massive amounts of damage before their teleports kick in. This meant using physics puzzles, because damage sources would stack: I could destroy the final robot by luring it to and blasting it in the face with the experimental thruster, shooting it with the remote-controlled cannon, and using the icer simultaneously.
- iainmerrick 6y ago
  I’m amazed that anyone ever actually solved Exile. I think I might have gotten as much as 30% of the way through... I reached the windy tunnel, but didn’t collect much in the way of exotic equipment beyond the icer. I love the emergent gameplay that comes out of that clever teleportation mechanic, and the amazingly robust physics. As you say, it plays fair -- the enemies use the same teleporters you do, and the monkeys jump in honest parabolas. It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available. I used to enjoy just zooming around the central cave with my jetpack, dodging the guided missiles that one of the tall robots launched from its side-tunnel. If you infuriated it enough, it would fall off the ledge and end up at the bottom of the cave! Wonderful game, and an amazing technical achievement.
  - momentoftop 6y ago
    > I’m amazed that anyone ever actually solved Exile. I think I might have gotten as much as 30% of the way through... I reached the windy tunnel,... This was about as far as I got without a walkthrough. And I fear it wasn't close to 30%! > It’s great how just about everything is destructible, although usually needing much more firepower than you have available. Yes, I loved this. A significant part of the map, letting you into Triax's liar, is behind a "rune door" that must be destroyed. It seems that the game developers intended you to destroy this door by acquiring two radioactive rocks and dropping one on the other over the door, creating a massive explosion that would destroy it. But I read in a few places that people had successfully destroyed the door by very carefully collecting and stacking grenades to cause damage above the required threshold. And there was a standard set of cheats for the game, one of which allowed you to fire cannon shot from your normal gun. It makes short work of that rune door. I really like this way of designing games, where your puzzles aren't simple boolean rules (you must use the red key in the red door) but more real valued (you must deal x damage in y timeframe). For exile, it meant there were multiple solutions to puzzles that I suspect the designers had never considered.