Tag: RPG

Fallout Mac Review (1998)

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From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published September 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

Publisher	MacPlay
Tested on	Performa 5260/100
Gameplay	5 / 5 apples
Graphics & Sound	5 / 5 apples
Interface	4 / 5 apples
Difficulty	5 / 5 apples
Bugs	4 / 5 apples
Overall	4.5 / 5 apples
Reviewed by	Jonathan Dreyer

You are a vault dweller, your vault is in trouble, their water chip is damaged and it’s up to you to go out into the post-nuclear wasteland and find a new one. Although Fallout is advertised a Role Playing Game, I found it to be more like a hybrid cross between an RPG and an Adventure game, not quite either…

Gameplay

Fallout is a very detailed and complex game. Your main quest is to find a new Water Chip for your vault but, in order to accomplish that there are numerous other mini-quests to accomplish. As you travel the wasteland you will come across many different towns or villages, each filled with different types of people, be it Merchants, Police Forces, Gangs, Ghouls, or maybe even some Super-Mutants. One of my favourite parts of the game is all the different weapons you can find, using a flame thrower and watching your enemies be incinerated, or use the laser rifle to slice your enemies in half. I also liked the turn-based combat, so for people like me whose reflexes aren’t the greatest still have a chance to kick some ass in combat!

Fallout is still mainly a RPG, you can create your own character or use one of the pre-made ones. As you advance in the game your character gains experience points and advances levels by destroying your enemies or completing mini-quests. As you advance your character’s level you are presented with choices of perks that allow your character to for example carry more weight or attack first in combat.

Graphics & Sound

The graphics in Fallout are good, not award winning good but still pretty good. I noticed that there were only a few actual “different” character graphics, like you see a guy with a red baseball hat in just about every town. Also, there were only a few different “town” graphic settings, just about all of the walls of just about all of the buildings were the same, I found it a little confusing to remember which building is which.

The sound effects in Fallout are great! It seemed to me that almost every different gun had a different sound effect. To get the best out of the game I recommend that you use stereo headphones or a good pair of stereo speakers, heck you should do that for EVERY game.

Interface

Fallout has a interesting interface, it does not use any of the “Mac” dialog boxes that we are all used to, instead Fallout seems to be completely Operating System independent. I read that Fallout was programed using a platform OS independent programming library. I really hope that more and more game companies will begin to follow Interplay’s example

Difficulty

Fallout isn’t that difficult, there are no really complex puzzles or anything but, there are a lot of quests to go through to complete the game. I played about 4 hours a day for just over 2 weeks to complete the game. So I’d estimate that this game would take the average person about 40 to 70 hours to complete but, believe me it’s time well spent.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am glad to see such a high quality game make it to the Mac. I found Fallout to be one of the best games I’ve played all year. It has a complex and rich plot that should provide any normal person with hours of enjoyment.

Find a copy

Fallout has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Fallout on Amazon.

September 21, 1998

Diablo Mac Review (1998)

This post has affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published June 1998 and is reproduced as originally written, with the original screenshots (click to enlarge). More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

Publisher	Blizzard
Tested on	PowerMac 8600/300 w/32 mb RAM
Gameplay	4.5 / 5 apples
Graphics & Sound	4 / 5 apples
Interface	5 / 5 apples
Difficulty	2.5 / 5 apples
Bugs	5 / 5 apples
Overall	4.5 / 5 apples
Reviewed by	Jonathan Dreyer

Diablo is here! Finally, after a long and painful two year wait for the much anticipated PC “Game of the Year 1996” it is available on the Macintosh. Was it worth the long long wait? Probably not. But is it a fun and addictive game? You bet! Does Diablo have it’s share of drawbacks? Of course…

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Gameplay

One of the main draws of Diablo is it’s unique role playing game style with real time combat elements. In Diablo you play one of three different styles of character’s, a Warrior, a Rogue, or a Sorcerer, each have there own special skills and abilities to be used at your discretion in your quest to defeat the evil Diablo. Using a local town as your starting point you advance underground thru the Dungeon, Catacombs, the Caves, and finally to Hell where you will face Diablo. Throughout those sixteen levels of action you gain experience points, learn new spells, or find more items and weapons to try to cram in your space-limited inventory. An interesting note about Diablo is it’s randomization factor, every time you lay the game the underground levels will be different, you will never play the same game twice! Single player Diablo, although fun, is easily beaten within a few days of playing and then becomes boring and repetitive. The really fun part of Diablo is multi-player over the Internet thru Blizzard’s Battle.Net server system.

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Easy to access multi-player gaming is definitely the gem in Diablo’s crown. Using Blizzard’s Battle.Net server thru the internet made Diablo the easiest game to setup I have ever played over the internet. The biggest problem with Battle.Net internet play is the large number of PC players online using hacks and other cheats to make a lot of Battle.Net games very unfair to Mac users who have no cheats available to them. Still, if you can find legitimate games to take part in you can have some real fun.

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Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Diablo are definitely nothing to brag about! Although they’re decent gaming graphics a few minor flaws are exaggerated through some of the games features. One of the most annoying features of Diablo is the zoom feature, game zooms in on your character but the graphic begin to getting very pixilated. They should have just left that feature out entirely for all of it’s usefulness. Another inherit flaw of the game is it’s fixed view point. There is only one view of you character, no on the fly rotating, just one fixed view, which while in deep battle can become a very mean curse.

The sound effects in Diablo are average for a game these days, nothing spectacular or exciting just your average everyday sound effects. The music on the other hand was horrible! I found the music so annoying to play with I just turned it off all together. I don’t know why Blizzard would put such mediocre music in a game like this.

Interface

Interface’s like the one found in Diablo are seeming to becoming the norm these days. Interfaces with in-game graphical control boxes and no Mac-like interface dialogue boxes. I assume this is for faster porting times but, I don’t see how this would be the case in Diablo.

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Difficulty

Diablo has no difficulty. Not literally but in a manner of speaking, Diablo simply is not challenging under single-player playing. The only challenge in Diablo comes from multi-player play where you have to match wits and might against actually humans.

Conclusion

During the long porting time of Diablo for Mac it appears they really did a good job of optimizing and bug checking it. I encountered no bugs over the 100 plus hours of time I spent playing it.

Diablo is a great “multi-player” game! I would only reexamined this to gamers with lot’s of internet time to spend on Battle.Net, forget about single-player gaming altogether.

Find a copy

Diablo has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Diablo on Amazon.

June 4, 1998

Heroes of Might and Magic Mac Review (1998)

This post has affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.

From the archive: this review first ran on the Mac Gaming Alliance (MGA), the Mac games site that lived here on DimensionZ in the late 1990s. It was published around 1998 and is reproduced as originally written. More in the Mac Gaming Alliance archive.

Publisher	New World Computing
Tested on	LC475 (25MHz 68LC040)
Gameplay	5 / 5 apples
Graphics & Sound	3 / 5 apples
Interface	5 / 5 apples
Bugs	5 / 5 apples
Overall	4 / 5 apples
Reviewed by	Jon Ostenson

Heroes of Might and Magic is a fantasy strategy game that pits you against three other warlords, vying for control of the realm. Your abilities and armies are based on the character class you choose (Warlock, Sorceress, Barbarian, or Knight). With spells and armies you will march across the land, encountering strange artifacts and places, as well as engaging the other warlords in a battle for complete domination.

Gameplay & Interface
Heroes is remarkably simple to learn; there is a tutorial included in the manual, but the game’s installer didn’t put the tutorial game on my drive and I couldn’t find it on the CD anywhere. But, in all truth, it’s probably best just to jump into this game, consulting the manual now and then to find out what you’re supposed to be doing. The game’s main screen organizes vital information well, and allows easy access to most of commands and functions you’ll use while playing. Combat and recruiting armies might take a little perusing of the manual, but it doesn’t take long to figure those out. The packaging includes a nice laminated reference sheet with all the recruitable creature types and building paths which really aids gameplay.
Your main tasks in this game are to recruit heroes and armies in order to gather enough strength to crush your opponents. Recruiting is tricky, since you’re limited by the kind of castle and character class you are, along with the fact that new recruits become available only once a week. You can spend a lot of time exploring, though, and gathering resources as well as improving your skills and abilities as a hero (which, in turn, effect the fighting ability of your armies). Combat is handled well, is simple to learn, and entertaining to watch. There are quite a few creature types and spells in the game that provide for lots of variety and challenge during combat.
Heroes offers single scenarios that you can play, or campaign games that test your abilities in a number of situations. You can also connect to a network and play against other long-distance human opponents. I did not test this feature of Heroes, so I can’t say how easy it is to setup (although the documentation makes it seem fairly simple), or how well Heroes deals with this type of gameplay.

Difficulty & Replayability
Becoming familiar with the game and its interface isn’t the tricky part of Heroes–conquering the game is. Be prepared once you start a game to spend hours in front of your computer (enjoyable hours, that is) before you finish it, even at the easy level. Campaign games are guaranteed to last for quite a while, but the scenario games can be quite challenging as well. You’ll usually have one or two weak opponents, but the longer it takes you to conquer others, the more time they have to gather resources and recruit heroes and armies.
Since Heroes is a strategy game, the potential for playing it over and over is nearly limitless. Gaining an idea of which creatures do best against which enemies, and which spells are most powerful will take you some time. In addition, each scenario will provide numerous challenges as far as gaining resources goes; resources are most important in the game, for they are what allows you to gather heroes and armies to your side.

Graphics & Sound
Heroes has some nice graphics, including even some creature animations during combat. The creatures, buildings, and heroes are all cartoonish in nature, something which I think could be improved upon with today’s technology. There are quite a few sound effects, both during combat and while you’re searching the land for armies and resources (although some of these, too, seem “cartoonish”). Neither the graphics or the sound detract from the game, but I don’t think they add as much as they possibly could.

Conclusion
All in all, Heroes is a very good game that, if you let it, can keep you glued to your mouse and monitor four hours on end. It strikes a nice balance between role-playing games of the AD&D nature that encourage individual character development, and other strategy games that focus on things like troop movement and resource development. I would like the game to offer more choice in the character classes of the heroes you recruit, and to offer more control over what class can be recruited. I felt a bit limited, too, in my choices when it came to recruiting armies.

Find a copy

Heroes of Might and Magic has been out of print for years, but used copies of the original Mac release still turn up, and some classics have been re-released for modern systems. Search for Heroes of Might and Magic on Amazon.

January 15, 1998