Castle Paradox

[J.A.R.S.]

I have to agree with Moogle1 here. The early times of ohr saw plenty of much better games than this if you agree it had mediocre gameplay. It is no surprise that I remember a lot of titles and that walthros, a game I've played, didn't strike me as one of the ones I had to recall until now... such as say, Golem!...........

[The Wobbler]

[Battleblaze]

Well tome OHR had more games and people then...making it the golden age I guess. But to me at least 90% of the games were vewy primative. (ye sI know it snot their fault the engine was/is WIP). Allz I was saying was that in the days of Tron,Fatfrog, and the diaper gang Walthros was a shiny penny in the unwashed hordes of filth.

But my opinion is all it is...

ANd my opion is usually the standard for shittty round ere...
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Indy OHR! and National OHR Month Contest going on now!

"Aeth calls PHC an anti-semite; PHC blames anti-semitism"
-squall

[The Wobbler]

[Rinku]

I wouldn't consider 2002 early either. The Ohrrpgce was released in 1998, and had been out five years when Walthros came out.

I think that although there were plenty of bad games back then, the *number* of good games released per year is what you should judge an era by, not the number of bad games released or the average quality of the games.

EDIT: I wrote this before seeing PHC's reply, which says much the same thing.
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Tower Defense Game

[Pepsi Ranger]

Actually, for those of you commenting on the 2002 OHR season (which I remember very little about), I think you're off a year. Walthros came out the same month as my "cult classic," in December 2000. So, I think you all are thinking of the 2001 season, which was also the year that Operation: OHR really started taking off, which featured a fair share of decent games--at least compared to what the last three years have offered. Scour the old game archives to see what gems were released that year.

I actually wrote a response to the mythology question about three months ago, couldn't post it for some reason, then copy/pasted it to a text file to save it for another day, then forgot about it until now. So the following segment will break sequence a bit, but if you reread the first few posts on this thread, it'll make sense:

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I'm not responding to this in regard to the bookclub, since I haven't played this game in about three years, and probably won't again. But I do think the question about creating a mythology is an interesting one.

For starters, no story can accurately tell the entire scope of things in one sitting. Any story that tries will become bogged down with too much information. For a story to develop well, it has to allow the reader/player a chance to discover things as he goes. Sometimes that means continuing the story into later installments.

But it also means giving the player a new world to devour, which most of us want.

Ancient mythology incorporates this technique. Even though stories like The Odyssey include a lot of mythical information within its bookends, it doesn't include everything. In fact, many of the characters' origins have to be defined in other works, as does their fates.

For example, where do the Sirens come from? We know what they can do, but The Odyssey doesn't really detail why.

I see characters like the Ralz (in Walthros) defined the same way. We know they're bad, but we don't have to know why they're bad on the get-go. If PHC ever wants to make an official sequel (a less parodied version), the sequel might be the place to divulge that information. Or maybe a trilogy is in order--we really don't have to understand PHC's logic at this point, because that would be a near impossible thing to do anyway --or maybe the short parodies are better suited for individual revelation.

In any case, I don't care that certain elements, like the origin of the Ralz, are left out of the story. I think the characters and the presentation are defined as well as they need to be. The only problem I have with the game is its heavy-handed inclusion of philosophical ideologies about war and fools. I don't mind an epic story including philosophies in its subtext; I just don't like it when it tries to hit me over the head with it. It makes it hard for me to think for myself, or to empathize with the character if it's a philosophy I can't bring myself to respect.

I seem to recall Walthros rubbing me that way.

Personally, I think the only thing that matters in this episode of the Walthros universe is the unfolding of Bob Surlaw's personal journey. I think the other characters, good or bad, can have their time in the sun when the story is ready to call on them as dynamics. Obviously, this story doesn't call on them. Likewise, I have enough confidence in PHC's storytelling ability to trust his reasons for not developing it further, whether it's inconsequential information or inappropriate merely for the sake of pacing.

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And there you go.
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Progress Report:

The Adventures of Powerstick Man: Extended Edition

Currently Updating: General sweep of the game world and dialogue boxes. Adding extended maps.

Tightfloss Maiden

Currently Updating: Chapter 2

[TMC]

(Pity, archive.org's 1998 snapshots of HR seem to be down) I consider 2002 pretty recent, because I was around back then. Archives show the OHR had quite a lot of games already by Feb 1998.

I agree with Pepsi, it must have been 2001. I discovered the OHR ~ Jan 2002, and Walthros was one of the first games I played (and for a long time my favorite). Back then, the demo went up to shortly before the last temple or whatever it was, where all the party members would meet up. When PHC released the final version a little later, I was reluctant to play through the whole thing again to complete it. I'm a lazy gamer. I still haven't finished the game (or played it in years), but I want to someday. I have a huge backlog of games just like it however.

Back then, I didn't find the graphics primitive, I liked some of them. But I hadn't been exposed to much professional pixel art, indeed I hadn't played a single SNES or Genesis game, and hadn't even heard of FF. I think Walthros had a revamping of graphics some time around then? I'm not sure, I think it must have been before I played, or it may have been with the full version.

The battles, which everyone here seems to remember badly, I found tiresome mostly only right at the beginning of the game, when there wasn't anything to them, and at the end of the demo I played, where I found the apes quite a pain. I agree the gameplay wasn't great, and the speed was nasty, but at least it was above the average unbalanced game, and had several interesting elements (at least, that's how I remember it, it's been several years).
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[The Wobbler]

[Artimus Bena]

I was referred to the engine sometime in 2000 by a cool asian dude who worked at best buy.

For a while (four years it seems) I didn't even know about the community.

I still have yet to play a lot of ohr games. Many just don't interest me.
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