I’m kinda frustrated with computer roleplaying games. The Baldur’s Gate remake has intense strobing built in. [P.S. as well as the animated clock]. Others have jitter animation. Others rely on first-person point of view, so the spins are disorienting and the game requires more orientation skill.
For me, the old Shadowrun games are at the edge of playability due to the flickering streetlights. I had to pause Dragonfall for a year. Some Winter Wolves games are better.
Jeremy mentioned the old gold-box D&D games. Does anyone know if they’re worth playing and if they’re safe? I suppose the old Ultima games and/or Bard’s Tale games are another possibility.
Would something like Darkest Dungeon be amenable? It’s side-scrolling, and doesn’t have strobe-like effects until the very final level. I picked it up last Christmas and haven’t stopped playing.
I don’t know. I have a hell of a lot of trouble with carousel and slideshow animation, so I don’t think it’d be good for me. I don’t know if it requires good timing and coordination either-- parts are turn-based, but other parts aren’t.
Are you OK with turn-based roleplaying games? I notice that Wizardry 6 and 7 have been rereleased for Steam… you can turn down the flashy (sort of) effects in Wiz 7. Wiz 6 has EGA-type graphics. Movement in both games is turn-based on a grid system (so step by step). Wiz 7 draws a map for you. Wiz 6, you need to break out the graph paper. Both have dense stories with multiple endings and are rather difficult. For Wiz 6 in particular, you probably shouldn’t get too attached to any characters under level 5.
How are you with rogue-like (not Rogue-lite) RPGs?
I like stories, especially with plenty of choices and plenty of ways to help people. I don’t like random worlds. I think roguelikes tend to the latter.
Apart from the flickering lights, I’d consider Shadowrun: Dragonfall one of the best I’ve played, if that gives you any ideas. Loren: The Amazon Princess is ridiculous, but it’s fun, and has important choices, and abstracting out space solves a lot of problems. Avernum: Escape from the Pit is also ridiculous, how do you get an ecosystem down there?, and it’s occasionally flashy, but usually playable.
Well, Wizardry 7 has a pretty off the wall story leading off from Wiz 6, but you don’t need to have played Wiz 6 to play Wiz 7. You have multiple NPC factions to deal with and you can decide who you want to side with both for RPing purposes and different factions may correspond better with your party composition. The game is heavily into random combat, just to warn you. The map is fixed, though and the enemies you encounter depend on character level and location in the world.
Did you play the original Fallout, btw? I don’t remember it being too flashy and it has an isometric view with lots of tactical combat.
It’s ma-a-a-gic! Literally so - according to Avernum lore, Erika Redmark crafted all the staples of life in Avernum.
You might want to consider the original Avernum series, or perhaps even the Exile series (even cruder graphics, if that’s possible). Escape from the Pit is the start of the second remake of the series, borrowing some of the gameplay concepts from his (Jeff Vogel’s) Geneforge and Avadon series.
Choice of games is pretty good if you’re interested in a well-written, modern, choose-your-own-adventure / interactive fiction format. Choice of Broadsides is famous because they added the option to play as a woman some time after the original release, and they implemented it by gender-swapping all the characters, so you can roleplay in the alternate universe where only women served in the navy.
I have the opposite problem. The interface and controls of games are managed in a way that usually satisfies. When the interface is laggy and bad and frustrating, apart from the content, people stop playing and don’t buy the next one. Contrast this to the user experience and spending of IT departments the world over. Windows can’t manage windows.
So I like games for their control smoothness and not their visual smoothness. Strobe effects and loud noises in games, for some reason, don’t affect me the way the same crap from the street outside turns me into a foam-flecked madman of the variety which is “get off my lawn with your Harley bullshit, your ‘sport exhaust’ bullshit, your use of your car horn for any fucking reason, and when the never-ending line of slow-moving cars doesn’t stop for pedestrians, somebody’s gonna get fucking CUT.”
Maybe that’s what I do that’s different. Instead of recoiling in pain only, I turn the pain into theatrical anger.
Well, for me it’s pain, and anger, and in some cases, blinding, double vision, disorientation, unbalancing, stumbling at random, and developing migraines, with more pain, and once vomiting…
I’m sure it would be difficult. As much as my path is similar to yours, it’s very different in a lot of ways. Our roles give all humanity latitude to act badly or well in a lot of ways so long as we conform to our roles. What throws a wrench is when the roles become irrelevent to any coherent sense of moral thought or surviving.