They also have the Gold Box series <wistful sigh>. You wanna hear a story about “Progress Quest” chilluns? I tell you a story.
My first computer had two low density 5.25" floppy drives. And CGA Graphics. I got Pool of Radiance, and it came on 6 5.25" floppies, but (and few of you will remember this) this was basically the game files compressed. To have a functioning game you had to have your own floppies to copy out working game disks to. In this case twelve (eleven + one disk for storing saved games on).
Extracting the game took about a day. After that, to settle in to play for a bit, I would slowly swap in and out (and this is running two drives concurrently, mind) about 6 of the disks to load the game. But each would take about 5 minutes or so to read the data from, so it was (and I timed it one time) easily 25-35 minutes of loading just to start the game. The other disks were data for different areas, so every now and then I’d need to stop for 5-10 minutes to load a new neighborhood of Phlan, or whatever. 5 minutes easy to load or save a game. And I died a lot. So any time I played I had to devote at least one hour just to fiddling with floppy disks.
Also, I got about halfway through the game the first time and the entire save disk became corrupted.
Somehow my friends’ dinky C64s with a single diskette drive only needed six disks, took about a 10th as long to load, and it ran in 10 colors, although I think there were limits to their games.
I ground through Curse of the Azure Bonds the same way, but then I got a hard drive in time for Secret of the Silver Blades, and that ordeal was over.
There is a middle ground. Hit point in Japan do two very nice ones, kitty collector and travelling frog. About one minute four times per day. Lovely. Nearly finished both.
And for pointlessly watching numbers get bigger there’s http://www.swarmsim.com/ which will reward you every half hour or five days, depending on your level of commitment.
I remember this! Not for Pool of Radiance but other mesozoic games. Come to think of it, I can’t remember any of the games, but I can remember frustratingly switching out floppies
Ladies, Gentlemen, and all you Other Beautiful People, do any of you play Fallen London? It’s a fancy texty RPG-lite that you only play a few times a day.
I noticed the kittens game link has one more click than the sandcastle builder link. I can only assume that’s because one person who clicked it is still there.
Well, it’s a 2000 hour long movie that you aren’t expected to watch all the much, but that you check in on every now and then. Wait, is that a soap opera?
