Help Find Someone With No Time (new Baby) A Game/thing To Play/do!


skeezix

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Ahoy my dear friends; many of you know why I've been so quiet lately, but let me post a mission, and then why, and hopefully someone has a brilliant idea.

- RPG ideally; character creation style, with stats and gear and inventory management.. no FF or that silliness ;) -- ideally 3d-style (even Dungeon Master and so on ..)
- console.. see below. Something one can sit beside a hopefully sleeping baby with (mutable, small/portable)
- Civ III on an EEE is pretty tempting too, though ;) Not sure if it has the horsepower there though :p
- Catching up on some TV or movies (BSG say, where I'm 10 or 15 episodes behind) maybe..

I'm looking to find a good 'old school' style RPG; by old school _styled_, I mean an RPG where you actually create one or more characters and manage their stats and gear, and hopefully go dungeon romping. (ie: this rules out Final Fantasy and games like that.. the J-RPGs are absolutely not my thing, since they're story heavy, but not really character build-up heavy. Think Baldurs Gate on the PC, or Wizardry series, or even WoW and such .. RPGs made outside of Japan. It saddens me greatly that 'RPG' nowadays means FF or FFT pretty much .. thank god Oblivion is waving the flag still!)

I mean, really, where is the mobile Eleder Scrolls or Baldurs Gate PC. Some heavy duty RPG. Why must they always be lightweight J-RPGs?

Phantasy Star is coming out for PSP soon (months away?) so that might be cool, but I've never played one of those games.

What makes it hard is .. I'm playing at night, in the dark (backlight required) while sitting beside a baby. Don't ask.. unless you've had a crazy collicy up-all-night baby, you won't know the joy/pain of it all :) So often I sit for 20mins to 2 hours beside this little tyke one or more times a night.

My current thing is ebooks -- read 'em on my PDA; instant on, backlit, and I've got a decent selection of ebooks saved up. Thing is I'm knocking them off so fast, and I'm rather getting sick of reading so much.

Puzzle Quest is something, but of course since I wrote BattleJewels I've no interest in PQ style mechanics .. I'm over-cooked there :) And no, I'm not in much state to code at night .. brain is perma-fried. Work all day, up all night.. at least the first few months were maybe 3-4 hours sleep a night 7 days a week, but now that shes older we usually get more .. but often not much more :p

So this means PSP, GP2X, Palm, Pocket PC/Win Mobile to me most likely. I dislike GBA mostly, and my DS is pwned by my wife :) I would so love to be on my fine laptop more, but its too big and bright .. would keep the child up, and I'm not setting up a table in her room anyway. I'm not against buying new gadgets. Sanity is important, and I miss my gaming. (I've whoipped the Orange Box finally; consider Portal is like a 5 hour game to most people and it took me like 2 months.. thats how hard it is to get free time :/)

If only Pandora/Craigsmachine would come out soon, since he owes me one of those, and it woudl be ideally suited to a lot of crazy things.. anywaym in due time.

I've been considering Eye of the Beholder on DosBox on my PDA (it runs okay, but is clunky UI due to the mouse management), since classy goodness. Civ 1 is doable on most platforms due to my ST emu, and under DosBox too. Amiga emulation I've not followed much (since I'm an ST guy and not an Amiga guy), so maybe theres some cool stuff there .. ie: the Captive sequal on Amiga.. is that playable? Heck, running through the Gold Box series is rather tempting on my ST emu, or even other crazy games like RoadWars 2000. Maybe the Genesis and TG16 RPGs would be cool.. though I've never touched the CD games on Genesis so maybe theres some cool stuff there.

Anything good for PSP? The RPGs so far tend to be all J-RPG as far as I know; I've got a few, such as Jeanne D'Arc which is great.. but again, not what I'm looking for.

I did delve into Dungeon Siege for PSP a bit, which seemed not bad (I'm a fan of the Baldurs Gate PS2 games.. they're not stat heavy, but they are hack and slash fun..) .. so maybe I should restart that.

Anyway .. ideally something new or recent would be nice (its always nice to see a modern game, right? I'm a retro nerd, but come on.. once in awhile you have to dip your toe :)

Other tangent ideas are .. catching up on movies or TV on various gadgets (gp2x, psp and PDA) with headphones might be a plan.. I've basicly not seen anything in 10 months :)

Oh, the scrap I originally wrote and kept scrolled to the bottom..

About 10 months ago we had a baby here; not just any baby, but a perfectly healthy giant collicy actionpacked super baby :) Born big, shes smart and strong and fast, and this little girl/energy-demon is on the move all the time, non-stop night and day. (And by night, I mean I can read _two books_ a week, only in the wee hours of the night. Thats how little she sleeps, and by her, I mean, all of us :p)

Help me find some gadgety things to do in the middle of the night :)

jeff

Is Dungeon Master 2 playable on any Ami emu (gp2x, PSP?)
 
If I remember right, didn't Might & Magic (or Might & Magic 2) come out on the Genesis? Alternatively, I originally played the first M&M on an apple II c, but it should run on a II. Either of those should be emulated/able and if you haven't played them, I think they might be something to help occupy your time. Character stat / development heavy RPG in first person view akin to Pool of Radiance and the original Bard's Tale titles. Hope this helps.
 
You could try both of the Untold Legend games on the PSP. Both are very similar to Dungeon Siege although they can be finished pretty easily. Thats all I can really suggest in terms of RPGs for the PSP as you said you don't like J-RPGs.
 
Milamber777 said:
If I remember right, didn't Might & Magic (or Might & Magic 2) come out on the Genesis? Alternatively, I originally played the first M&M on an apple II c, but it should run on a II. Either of those should be emulated/able and if you haven't played them, I think they might be something to help occupy your time. Character stat / development heavy RPG in first person view akin to Pool of Radiance and the original Bard's Tale titles. Hope this helps.
So far PocketDOS on my WinMobile PDA performs okay (faster in most cases than Dosbox, though less compatible) .. Wizardry 7 works pretty well. Masters of Magic almost is playable but too chunky .. a shame :) I've had this desire to fire up Fantasy General as I never tried any of the General series (Panzer General) and thought it might be fun.

In the end I've found my ST emu to be the best overall .. The ST had a lto of good originals and ports, and it performs well on all the platforms I built for.. GP2x and PSP notably. Phantasie series is old school but really pretty good if you can stand it.

Theres a lot of J-RPG style RPGs on Genesis which perform really well, but as above they're not my thing. (Phantasy Star and all that.)

M&M on Genesis? That'd be interesting.. theres a lot of surprise stuff on the Genesis I wasn't aware of, like Dungeon Master 2. (An ST/Amiga era game .. who know?!) (I have no idea whats around on Genesis CD..)

A friend of mine is a Xeen fanatic so I should look into M&M. (Most of the old Lord British stuff is on the ST as well)

jeff
 
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I think there is a semi-sequel to Oblivion planned for the PSP. Not out yet but one for the future :).
 
Shadowrun on the SNES was a great underrated RPG back in its day. Ran pretty well on a slightly overclocked GP32 so I suspect it be fine on a GP2X/PSP.
 
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