Tag: IBM PC

bookmark_borderBelow The Root: Exploring Topside

Posted on by lostwolfe

Hours Played: 6

The Wiki entry for Below The Root suggests that the game was created to correct an “error” that the author introduced to her works. That “error” seems to be that the main character of the books was killed.

Upon receiving multiple letters from adults and children alike who’d read the works, she saw a way for the game to continue the sequence of events started in the books – and even – to build a new little bit of plot on top of it.

In that sense, Below The Root is both fascinating for what it’s trying to achieve as much as it is interesting to play.

It’s very rare that a game will continue a book [or movie’s plot] and so so in such a very authentic way, but I think that it helps that the author was on board for this particular creation. She helped flesh out the place the player would spend time in, and she made sure that the plot of the game was consistent with what had been before.

The nature of the plot was something I’d guessed at, but wasn’t sure about when I started playing, but now that I’m six hours in [hours that I’ve mostly spent exploring], I’ve come across two direct affirmations that largely cemented my suspicions.

My travels above ground have also yielded some interesting mechanical details that – again – the manual just doesn’t mention. [But these are non-surface level details that you’d have to learn by playing the game – the manual can’t pin down EVERYTHING you can and cannot do. That would be non-nonsensical.]

Chief among these mechanical details is the fact that every character starts off in their own Nid-place – their home. Each home has items in it that can be picked up. Fruits and tokens and Shubas [more on those in a moment] and the like.

The mechanical wrinkle is fairly simple: If I start with Neric and I travel to Genaa’s Nid-place, I DO NOT get access to her items, even though she’s not in her home and even though those might be useful to me.

The mores of Green-Sky are prevalent even here: if it’s not yours, you can’t take it unless it is offered to you. I genuinely like this.

I like it, because it subverts years and years of “training” in games that suggests that if something isn’t nailed down, you can just yoink it.

But I also like it, because it re-enforces one of the central axioms of this particular game, and that is: be kind.

As for the Shuba – these are flying-squirrel-like capes that the characters can don, so that they can get around the world a little faster. They do this by gliding from one branch of a tree to another.

I haven’t spent a lot of time using one, mainly because I’ve been trying to trek everywhere on foot at least once, so that I know where I can and cannot go.

My to-do list has grown since I posted last, to whit, I have to:

  • raise my spirit stat in the garden. [I’ve found the garden. I’m not sure what I have to do.]
  • search the heights of Grand Grund. [I’ve done this and we’ll talk about it a little in the next post.]
  • get underground. [I know EXACTLY how to do this, but I’m trying to be methodical in my explorations. My next plan is to actually get this done.

And that’s it for right now.

As the game would say:

Peace and joy to all questers!

bookmark_borderLostwolfe: An Introduction.

Posted on by lostwolfe

Hello, and welcome to The Infinite Playlist.

I’m your host Lostwolfe and together, we will be playing games played by other people on different blogs around the internet.

My History With Games

I started playing video games in the very early 80’s. The very first few games I ever encountered in the wild were Pac-Man, Frogger, Asteroids and Space Invaders.

Most of these were in arcades or little corner stores, where for a little while and a couple of cents, I could lose myself in the rhythmic shuffle of the invaders, or I could outsmart Pinky and the gang, or I could have the zen experience of trying to dodge asteroids.

An image depicting some of the very earliest video games I ever played. From left to right: Pac-Man, a game about eating pellets and ghosts, Frogger, a game about crossing a road - as a frog, Asteroids, a game about surviving in space in an asteroid field and Space Invaders, a game where you were earth's last hope, repelling invaders...from space!
I have fond memories of playing all of these.

In the long run, though, none of these games held a lasting appeal for me. My hand-eye co-ordination was never really great to begin with and these games were very much just testing those skills.

What I didn’t know I wanted was an actual COMPUTER game.

I didn’t know that I was looking for a kind of game that was slower and that didn’t so much depend on me hitting the fire button at the right time while I was in the right place for things to work out.

This notion of a slower game only ocurred to me one summer in 1986, when I visited a friend and they showed me both King’s Quest III and Space Quest I.

An image showing a pair of old Sierra games. The top half of the image is devoted to King's Quest 3, in it, the hero Gwydion is walking down a treacherous pathway to a valley where he might find items to aid his quest. In the bottom half of the image, we have Roger Wilco, the protagonist of Space Quest, battling against a Spider Droid [which explodes on impact] and an Orat, a strange, rather violent creature that lives on the planet Kerona.
Tread carefully!

After that, all bets were off. I had an old machine that was in the process of dying [my trustworthy, but ill-fated Spectravideo computer] and I traded that in for a regular old PC.

That PC was solid as a rock and lasted me almost right until 1991, where I had to buy a whole new machine.

During that time, I finally got my hands on and played Space Quest I and King’s Quest III, which then opened other vistas: The Secret of Monkey Island, occasional dalliances with the Gold Box games. An aborted attempt [with a bad disk] at playing Hunt for Red October.

I’ll readily admit that none of these games /looked/ as good the games in the arcades at the time, and I desperately wanted some developer to create something is beautiful as Toki, but in the end, my patience won out.

This is a screenshot of the game Toki, in which a man gets turned into an ape and must save his girlfriend from the clutches of evil. It's a proto-typical [though very difficult] platformer. Here, Toki must ascend a vine and shoot a mid-level boss to proceed.
A VERY difficult platformer, but look at that beautiful pixel art.

VGA and Soundblaster both ushered in something of a golden age of gaming and I was there for it.

But times change. At this late juncture, I can no longer enjoy the AAA half of the industry. It’s too greedy, too cynical and too mired in Live Service nonsense for me to give it much of my time.

So, I have branched off into indie games, but also back tracking some, to where things all started. Which leads us to here.

The Infinite Playlist

As of late, I’ve been reading blogs by other people and been thinking about back tracking – playing – and sometimes re-playing – old games for pleasure and documenting the act.

At first, I wasn’t sure how to tackle this idea, but then I hit on two concepts I really liked. One was the written Let’s Play and the other was appreciating other people’s accounts of their time with these older games.

I figured I could do a little bit of both of these things.

So, this blog will be devoted to:

  • highlighting other blogs that have covered these games
  • playing them through for my own enjoyment.

First up, we’re going to tackle Below The Root.

This is the cover of Below The Root, for the PC. The picture depicts the land of Green-Sky which exists on two planes: an upper plain, which is beautiful and serene and a lower plane, which looks dour and frightening. There is also a person floating down from on high to the little village depicted above-ground.
This is so evocative. I wish we still got interesting covers like this.