[matthey]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Ok, I digged out my old maps for Dungeon Master and Black Crypt yesterday, after about 15 years for DM, and 10 years for Black Crypt....
DM maps go up to level 8, so that seems to be where we gave up for some reason. I cannot remember exactly why ?! Maybe we just gave up because of lack of time to meet and play, or something alike ?!
At least I remember those red worms in some later level, which were tedious because they re-spawned (something I hate in all games)
However, I also remember that we killed them again to gain some food and experience ?

Monster Regeneration in DM is usually because of a player action like a switch so it is not too annoying. Meynaf even added an inscription on the wall like "supplies" to one of his maps where you step on a pressure plate to regenerate screamers. His maps and puzzles are well designed being competitive with the original DM at times. Play his original DM map (if you have AmigaOS 3.x) as it has advantages like being more system friendly, no copy protection, HD installable, magic mapping, drinking from fountains without a container, clicking on walls to detect if they are invisible, etc. It is faithful to the original and mostly bug free. I played it pretty far and noticed no differences to the maps or items. A compass or map is very helpful when you get to spinners which I believe first occur when you get to rats with some invisible walls. It's not too difficult after noticing what is going on. As I recall, there is a gold key in one of the sewer drains which may be helpful but not necessary on the long, and at first difficult, worm level.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

The rune system was not a blocking issue, but a bit uncomfortable. I would have preferred to have the speels in a list, where I can just select it during the real time combat. It simply take too much time to assemble a spell, when you are busy with clicking on the warriors's weapon hands during a fight, imho.

A good mouse makes all the difference in the world. Tank mice don't cut it. A pregnant mouse or PC optical mouse with adapter is good.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Food and water never was much of an issue for my friend and me, since we had the habit to explore and map a dungeon completely first, no matter what it cost.
Then once the map was completed, we rushed through it in the fastest way possible, including killing all monsters and picking up all items, and then save the game again.
This way we played the levels in a very optimized way, without having to consume too much food & water.

Once food and water are found then training is possible and combat becomes easy. DM should have given significantly reduced XP when monsters are not close. The other big exploit is reloading if stat gains are not good. Meynaf was looking into fixing this by pre-rolling stat gains.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

As for Black Crypt, the old maps I have stop at level 3, so we obviously didn't get very far in that game before we gave up. I also seem to remember that there might have been some bug, which made us stop playing ? (I think we somehow got into a level where we should have been much later in the game, and couldn't kill the enemies, or something ?! I also still have the old savegame disks(s), so I could try again (but I probably have no idea where I was and what I would need to do next, and so on...)

That was probably the unseen (invisible) ones. You need the mask of true sight to see them or killing them is nearly impossible. You have to go down stairs where poison and traps will likely kill you often. Be sure to gain as many levels as possible and get all the helpful items before coming to this area. There is a really good armor behind an invisible wall in the treasure room after killing the ogre (but before going down stairs) which will help. The game does get easier and better after this part.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

What do you guys think about 'Spirit of Adventure' ?
It is a German game, so no idea if it is known to non German speaking people ?
It looks like a 'Blades of Destiny Light' to me ?
Also, it seems there is no real 3D dungeon crawling, but more like '3D city crawling' ?

I've never heard of Spirit of Adventure but there are some good German RPGs.

Dungeons of Avalon

These look like EOB (look really good). I believe I tried to get one of them to work and couldn't.

http://hol.abime.net/449
http://hol.abime.net/450

Legends of FaerGhail

This is more Bard's Tale style. Olaf "Olsen" Barthel is one of the coders .

http://hol.abime.net/860