All Time Bangers

a history of RPGs…

  • Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

    Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

    Released: Sep 16, 1985
    Version played: DOS (1987)

    I’m going to keep it real with you, I did not finish Ultima IV. I didn’t finish Ultimas I through III either, though I sampled them a little just for context. It didn’t seem worth writing about any up til now though, and I stuck with this one for much, much longer, because the seeds of something beautiful begin to sprout here.

    Ultima is like the total opposite of Wizardry in that Wizardry is perfect in an almost elemental sense. There’s nothing that needed to be added or removed. Wizardry is Wizardry and you can go on Steam right now and buy a ten, fifty a hundred games that are still pretty much just Wizardry. Nothing is like Ultima.

    Richard Garriot’s ambition with these games so far outstrips the capability of the hardware at the time that the sheer fact that these even shipped is an absolute miracle. Ultima IV has a fully developed world full of named NPCs, a (less intense but still present) hunger and survival system, an entirely naturally occuring form of fast travel that requires understanding of the phases of the moon to decode, full party control in grid based combat, a vast bespoke open world replete with towns, shrines and dungeons, different forms of terrain that affect your navigation – and so on, and so forth, you get the idea. And I didn’t even mention the morality system that is the game’s entire raison d’être.

    It’s utterly overwhelming. This game released the same year as Super Mario and Gradius. No wonder that to a certain type of kid this game was utterly life changing, it must have seemed like the absolute coolest work of art, utterly blowing open the possibilities of a scene that truly hadn’t exited the bleeps and bloops era yet in the cultural consciousness.

    And yet, as I pushed further and further into Ultima IV the true heart of its brilliance was none of that. Ultimately its systemic complexity was a massive timesink attached to the real star of the show, the dialogue system and quest design. Talking to NPCs, figuring out keywords, understanding how information from one NPC could give new context in another conversation, the way all these different – and ultimately extremely simple – prompts interlocked to provide a true and genuine sense of discovery was constantly enthralling. The actual bulk of the video game of Ultima IV, the exploration and combat, is this strange mix of far too simple and far too complex that it simultaneously overwhelms and bores me, but when take a route you heard about in town and find the pass to reach a new destination, and ask the innkeeper about the rumour you heard three towns over – the guy said ask around town – and the game responds back to your intuition with the next piece of the puzzle; it’s genuinely electric.

    But it’s also extremely funny to walk away from the most ambitious and complex game of 1985 going yeah this would have been better as a pure text adventure.

    One note before moving on: the story here is pretty good finally. I did not like the stories of Ultima I-III, if they can be called such things. But the juxtaposition of self serious fantasy with juvenille reference humour just isn’t my bag at all. I get why the games start like that, they are the passion projects of a literal teenage nerd making goofy games for other teenage nerds, and it certainly is more than a little silly to five years in suddenly say that Lord British, a stupid joke username you go by, is testing you to philosophically ponder the path to true virtue and enlightenment, but the more consistently sincere tone is one that befits the adventure better.

    Interestingly enough this is not a contradiction that has ever gone away. They are spending perhaps billions of dollars to make the new Grand Theft Auto, the most realistic simulated recreation of American Urbanism that money can buy, crafted by a global army of artists working tirelessly for the better part of a decade and also the beer is still going to be called Pißwasser. Perhaps the only conclusion to draw from all this is despite the rapidly changing conditions of the medium’s production there is one constant that remains tragically true; games are usually made by gamers.

    headfallsoff

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  • Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

    Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

    Released: Sep 01, 1981
    Version played: Digital Eclipse Remake (2024)

    On the very first floor of the very first Wizardry game, in a corridor shrouded in mystical darkness, there is a small room that is impossible to see from the outside. In that room is a grumpy Wizard, and he does not want to be interrupted. He demands you begone, and instantly teleports you back to town. In mechanical terms, this is a simple shortcut that lets you warp out near the elevator rather than journey the now unthreatening first floor. It could have been a simple warp point, the game has tons of them after all. But instead it’s a man. You can’t talk to him and find out what he’s doing down here. He always sends you away.

    Wizardry is basically perfect. The RPG emerges in digital form essentially fully formed, they are still making games that are just fucking Wizardry. But even beyond that, the amount of games and genres that share the core loop of tense exploration leading to difficult combat with the release of returning safely to town to upgrade and do it all over again are so numerous that it is not inaccurate to claim that Wizardry is video games. The sense of atmosphere as you take every step is overbearing and purely mechnical; it’s no wonder this game was such a sensation with wireframe graphics and no music whatsoever. And yet it is the Wizard in the cupboard that is the standout moment. It’s never dwelled on, never explained, but it is the seed that will flourish into something unimaginable at the time. Wizardry’s gameplay loop may be the bones of the genre, but that strange man is the heart; anything could be down here.

    This is Shin Megami Tensei, this is Dungeon Meshi, this is Earthbound, this is Pokemon and this is Dark Souls. This is Planescape Torment, this is Binding of Isaac and this is Morrowind. This is why people play Dungeons and Dragons in real life, this is the worth of a good Dungeon Master, a moment of pure authorship that takes the experience beyond the mechanical. After this moment, you never know what could be on the next tile, and you’re never sure where the boundaries are.

    Unfortunately, Wizardry reserves these moments for its early floors. The first half of the game is somewhat of a test from Trebor, as you explore every crevice to find keys and statues that ultimately unlock the keys to the elevator that takes you down to Werdna’s lair. It is immensely satisfying to put the pieces together, to map out the dungeon physically and understand how information in one place grants you access to somewhere new on an entirely different floor. Wizardry is also Resident Evil, by the way, it really is every video game.

    After recieving the Blue Ribbon and delving down towards the endgame there is disappointingly little to discover. There are no more key items, and if you already know where to go then the spot where you unlock the Blue Ribbon is around 20 or so tiles from the final Boss Rush. The only thing to discover are dead ends, the only thing to do is fight, and the only rewards come from random drops. It is a disappointingly weak second half from a game that starts out so incredibly strong and satisfying, but I can forgive it since they were inventing RPGs after all and also the second half being full of reused content and nowhere near as intricate as the first half is a time honored tradition that the genre continues til this very day.

    But those first few hours are genuinely a miracle, and this is a game I think everyone should play at least once. To see how complete it already is, how little has changed in over 40 years, and how totally engrossing it can be when you give yourself over to the dungeon.

    headfallsoff

    ,

  • Introduction

    Introduction

    I love RPGs.

    At this point, such a statement is basically meaningless. After all, when everything is an RPG, nothing is an RPG. We are coming up on fifty years since Wizardry began diffusing into almost every genre of video game, which over time started slowly evolving back into Wizardry again like crabs with character sheets. The numbers, long included, must be removed; long excluded, must return. Thus has it ever been.

    And yet it remains true. We can be formalist pedants all day about RPG mechanics being everywhere, but when I say I love RPGS, I don’t think anyone would get me confused with someone who loves to prestiege in Call of Duty (do they even still do that?). No. I love talking to every NPC in a town. I love crawling through dungeons and building out parties. I love getting a sword that has +20 damage. I do not love getting a sword that has +0.5% poison resist on Thursdays. I love RPGs.

    However, there is one problem: there are too many of them.

    A few months ago I built out a Backlog of RPGs I’d like to get to one day, and the sheer length of it struck me with mortal terror. I am thirty-one years old! On some level I have to make peace with the fact that just isn’t happening. Yet at the same time, I do want to clear it. And when faced with a giant list of video games that I want to play, I did what I always do and started playing them in release order. I immediately downloaded that new Digital Eclipse version of Wizardry 1. Which is excellent. They should port all 5 of the original campaigns to that engine now the bulk of the work is done.

    That was about three months ago now. As I played these games, I turned over in my mind exactly what I wanted this project to be. I wanted some kind of product to show for my work, something to be proud of. But at the same time, I didn’t want the desire for A Project to overtake my primary goal, which is to play a bunch of RPGs. The games are at the heart of this.

    I thought about doing more youtube videos, or twitch streams, two platforms I have briefly experimented with but never truly kept up. They might be the more popular platforms of the day but, as mentioned earlier, I am thirty-one years old at time of writing. I needed to abandon the modern ways and retvrn to tradition. I needed to start a blog.

    So that’s what this is. Welcome to ATB: All Time Bangers.

    Here’s the plan: this is the backlog. You will notice it has over a thousand games on it. First of all I just want to reassure you/disappoint you: I wil not be playing over a thousand RPGs. I would love to, but I just don’t think that’s going to be realistic time-wise. That is, if our society somehow avoids collapse before 2045, an RPG a week for near enough twenty years. No: the backlog is just a guide. I will skip games, I will drop series, I don’t want to force myself to play anything I don’t want to. Again, the project exists to give structure to enjoying some RPGs, not the other way around.

    This is also not an encyclopedic history, or comprehensive critical analysis. I’m not going to be writing 40,000 word retrospectives that are 70% development history and plot summary.

    What this is then, is a Diary. I’ll journey through the backlog, from past to present, and leave on this site some short reflections on my experience. I’m aiming for around 500 words, but there’s no hard and fast rule. There’s nothing I love more than coming up with a project that I re-orient my entire life around then abandoning it six weeks later, so I’ve deliberately made this one as casual and low stakes as possible, while also holding off on announcing it til I have enough games already finished to have some publishing runway.

    The backlog as it currently stands definitely favours JRPGs, as if you know me you know that’s where my interests tend to lie. But there’s plenty of CRPGs there too, as seeing the divergent evolutions of the genre across the 90s and 2000s fascinates me. I want to play Baldur’s Gate alongside Suikoden II. Those are the kind of fun comparisons you get to make when you do a ridiculous release order project such as this.

    I don’t want to say anything more definitively, this is intentionally loose and casual, and I hope people enjoy reading an extremely 00s-core blog. I ripped out like all the features from wordpress and yelled at it til it gave me the simplest homepage possible. Just the posts in order, thank you. There’s an RSS feed at the bottom of the page if you’re still living that life, and to everyone else I’ll be posting out articles as they release on Bluesky.

    Thank you to everyone for joining me on this journey, and I hope we can enjoy some RPGs together…

    headfallsoff