Trying To Remember a Dungeon Crawl Game From The Early Years

Caliane

Caliane

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so, lets be sure. it wasn't a dungone master type game. so not Eye of hte beholder or dungeon hack.

it was top down with icons, like a spiderweb game? was it a spiderweb game? exile, avernum, blades of exile?


exile 2?
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Exile II: Crystal Souls - Free Games Utopia

Download and play Exile II: Crystal Souls: a liberated RPG game developed by Spiderweb Software. Exile II: Crystal Souls is available for Windows, Mac OSX.
www.freegamesutopia.com www.freegamesutopia.com

wow.. random Emil connection.

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said that Exile III: Ruined World appears at first to be "a shareware game with primitive graphics" but reveals itself to be a "remarkably deep" traditional role-playing game with deceptive complexity. The reviewer praised the "well written and witty" NPC dialogue and elegant interface.[10] Emil Pagliarulo reviewed Exile III positively for the Adrenaline Vault, rating the game four out of five stars and calling it an "engrossing, thoroughly entertaining [...] epic computer role-playing game" with simplistic presentation and "enormous depth".
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velk

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Rajaah said:
I believe everything was on the same general overhead screen. The character models were essentially .ico files that fit inside a square and moved around the map one space at a time. They'd bump into each other and do attacks / cast / whatever all on the same screen.



Naw this game was like rudimentary shareware circa 1995, but really good simple D&D derived gameplay.

The giants were just the bosses. No dialogue that I remember. I think the boss of level 1 was like the Hill Giant chief and there were a few other Hill Giants right before him that were regular mobs, and the other 3 levels each had a similar situation with a commanding giant and some underlings, after fighting through lots of other monsters. Maybe I did beat the first level because I kinda remember it being like "buy full version for the remaining 3 levels". Think it was Rock, Ice, Fire giants.

This was probably a super obscure game and probably one in a sea of D&D knockoffs.
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After a bit of research, I am pretty sure that is Castle of the Winds: A Question of Vengeance.

Does this look familiar ?

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Rajaah

Rajaah

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Caliane said:
so, lets be sure. it wasn't a dungone master type game. so not Eye of hte beholder or dungeon hack.

it was top down with icons, like a spiderweb game? was it a spiderweb game? exile, avernum, blades of exile?


exile 2?
www.freegamesutopia.com

Exile II: Crystal Souls - Free Games Utopia

Download and play Exile II: Crystal Souls: a liberated RPG game developed by Spiderweb Software. Exile II: Crystal Souls is available for Windows, Mac OSX.
www.freegamesutopia.com www.freegamesutopia.com

wow.. random Emil connection.
Click to expand...


It was similar to these Exile games, but even less complex visually.

velk said:
After a bit of research, I am pretty sure that is Castle of the Winds: A Question of Vengeance.

Does this look familiar ?

View attachment 521096
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Yeah, it looked just like this. This might even be it, but I don't see anything about the Giants being the villains over four levels.

The game I played was like super basic and probably a knockoff of one of these. But yeah it looked like this, with extremely basic visuals and icons for sprites.
 
Slaanesh69

Slaanesh69

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Caliane said:
god damn, that sparked some 100% forgotten memories. pretty I had played that or a clone and completely forgot about it. the 3d view is not sparking memories, but the window based object/spells, and party info is. as well as automap.

oh, god yeah. someone has had to remake this for modern pcs...
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Yeah, after watching that video, this is def the game. And I want to play it or its clone again, but I don't want to go through the conniptions of compatibility to make it work.

I put that Wizardry I remake on my wishlist in Steam, but I'll be fucked if I pay $40 for a remaster of a game I played in 1987.
 
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velk

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Rajaah said:
It was similar to these Exile games, but even less complex visually.



Yeah, it looked just like this. This might even be it, but I don't see anything about the Giants being the villains over four levels.

The game I played was like super basic and probably a knockoff of one of these. But yeah it looked like this, with extremely basic visuals and icons for sprites.
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The revenge you are getting in castle of the winds is against Surtur the fire giant and his minions. The final boss of the shareware bit is Hill Giant Utgardhalok .
 
Rajaah

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velk said:
The revenge you are getting in castle of the winds is against Surtur the fire giant and his minions. The final boss of the shareware bit is Hill Giant Utgardhalok .
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That's it, that's the game. Surtur was the bad guy, I remember now. It got me to go and study a bunch of D&D books that I found abandoned in a musty basement (true story) which pretty much catapulted my entire interest in fantasy, RPGs, games in general... Jesus H.

I don't know who left all those D&D books in an empty abandoned room but I'm glad they did. I still have them, all 30 or so of them, and they're probably worth many thousands now. The only thing I've got that I probably wouldn't sell.

Surtur was in one of them. Maybe Deities and Demigods? From that point on Fire Giants were always super-interesting to me. I'd love to play this game again and actually see the rest of it this time, since all I saw was the first 25%. Now begins the quest to get the game and get it working on a modern system.

Edit: Yeah this is 100% the game I was looking for. I remember the paper doll style inventory, which was the first time I saw anything like that. I must have actually played this in 1993 because it pre-dated me playing any other games or having any consoles. What a huge blast from the past.

Looks like Part 1 is the first "quarter" and the part I played, while Part 2 is the non-freeware rest of it. Also I was wrong, it isn't four dungeons with a different elemental giant running each one. Far as I can tell the first big boss is the Hill Giant and the last boss is the Fire Giant, but in-between are a bunch of other dungeons and bosses that aren't giants. Maybe my brain just filled in the blank by thinking there were two other giants and four dungeons.

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