Lands of Lore

This has nothing to do with my work, but it’s related to computers anyway and life’s not work all the time, is it.

There are two reasons why I don’t play games anymore these days. First of all, with the amount of time I’m already spending every day at the keyboard, I prefer other ways to relax in my free time. Second, I’m probably getting old but I really miss the type of games I used to like the most – RPGs. There are lots of RPGs published nowadays, of course, but I find it more and more difficult to find one that would meet the standards I was used to once. I’ve tried a couple of the new ones over the past few years, not enough to get a proper picture, I admit, but all of them seemed to follow the same path – make it as straightforward and easy as possible, the worst case scenario is that the player gets stuck, doesn’t know what to do next and has to stop and think for a while. So make it simple, select party members in an instant and click yourself through the whole game. The only exception I put some faith in is Dragon Age, but I can’t afford to spend too much time playing it at the moment so I’m saving it for a time when I can.

Last week, I was thinking nostalgically about good old RPGs like The Elder Scrolls: Arena, Albion, Ishar and others and then I remembered that there had been many others I didn’t like for some reason back then in the 90’s, either being too difficult for me or I had troubles following the plot in English. For whatever reason, the thing is that now there’s a golden chest of old classics I didn’t play back then and I miss old RPGs now so the obvious thing is to quickly install Dosbox and pick a game. The first one is Lands of Lore, which I didn’t really take to in its time, but I have to say I’m enjoying it tremendously now whenever I can spare some time for it.