On Sun, Jul 21, 2002 at 09:36:20PM -0400, Gaertk at aol.com wrote: > The Riftwar was pretty good, though I disliked the ending to > _Magician_, and all the following books made that ending > worse. When _Rage of a Demon King_ was announced, my first > thought was "Pug finally realises that Macros is the > archvillain and kills him." Unfortunately, that didn't > happen. Heh. > On a positive note, the Empire trilogy he co-wrote with > Janny Wurts is pretty good; most people prefer it to > anything either wrote solo. I rather enjoyed it. > > The PC game Betrayel at Krondor, otoh... wow, that > > was a great RPG. > > I'm a purist: I reserve "RPG" for games where you can truly > roleplay, and so far I haven't seen a single-person game > that manages that (Star Control 2 and Ultima 5 come > closest). Ah, Starcon2. Beautiful game, well-done. One of the designers was also on the design team for a much older game called Starflight, which accounts for the similarities between the two. Though, from the descriptions I've heard of a game called Elite, that game would probably have the features necessary for you to call it an RPG; the most notable of which is that it is completely open-ended. > But BAK is definitely one of the all-time great fantasy > adventure games, and I really love how magic was handled > (spell effectiveness proportional to mana used). Too bad > the spells implemented were horribly unbalanced. I liked the mana-usage as well; the aspect that really made it enjoyable for me was the realism (as opposed to, say, a Final Fantasy game, to use an example with which the greatest number of people will probably be farmiliar). Kat