Hi. appologies for yet more random thoughts, but after waking up last night and not wanting to do anything serious, I found myself playing some more Eamon delux.
In my usual predictable way I've started with the first adventures and gone on from there. I've thus far completed, ---- ie, found everything obviously or obscurely findable, rescued all those that need it, and smacked every monster in all of the beginners adventures, and all the Don brown adventures accept for the castle of count fuey. now for my thoughts. Many of these adventures were, ---- Donald brown's in particular were written in 1980, in the days of low computer power, and before many of the sterriotypes in fantasy game playing (even D&D was I believe only about 7 years old or so at that point). Thus, they are fairly symple, you wander a dungeon, smiting monsters and grabbing loot. The odd thing is, how addictive and fresh I actually find them. While I freely admit the stock description dungeon passages and rooms can be really irritating, ---- especially in large dungeons, to enter a new room, get a modicum of description, find a unique object/mmonster, ---- even if all that makes it unique is it's name and attack value, is actually proving to be astoundingly fun. When I ask myself why I, the one who dislikes grinding is perfectly happy with a monster hacking dungeon crawl I get a one word answer, ---- exploration! The dungeon rooms, elements and passages are unique enough to satisfy me that I'm actually getting somewhere new, and give me the feeling that I actually moving around a dungeon map exploring. Only some dungeons in Sryth, ---- those with a high proportion of unique room descriptions which do not rely as much upon the generic map have given me this feeling. while I've also got it from gamebooks, sinse they obviously are more focused on a centralized narative approach than actually exploring a location, I don't usually get the sense of space. Again, interactive fiction and the Zork successors have done this very well, ---- though I often find myself really hitting my head against a wall in several of the cave crawl style interactive fictions if the puzles are too obscure (especially when we get into guess the verb situations). Pluss of course, sinse Eamon does have the combat elements, your exploration always has that sense of danger. when I met the principle character in laire of the minotaur, I really did have an "oh heck!" moment, sinse with those few lines of description about the minotaur, I was already thinking of a huge, bull headed beasty, ---- and when he took a swing at my girlfriend I had another one. Admittedly, my gf was entirely superfluous to the adventure and didn't do mutch beyond holding inventory items and fighting along side me, but at that stage I was so much into the adventure that I really did want to see her get out alive (sinse I'd gone in to find her anyway). I'm impressed in general in Eamon about how litle is needed to evoke this sense, and it makes me all the more irritated at stat grinding games, where the monsters are merely names and sets of acconpanying stats, and may be always found in one location by clicking "fight" Just my thoughts. Beware the Grue! dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
