HP & MP - Excelsior I: Lysandia - ADG Pro 5

[@ExclesiorRPG]

Hi, I am the co-author of Excelsior and just found this video! Wow, what an in depth analysis! I'm glad you enjoyed playing our games, which my friend and I wrote just for fun way back in the day. Somewhere in my files I still have our original HP and MP tables but from what I can recall, your results were spot on. Thanks for taking the time to highlight the game!

[@ExclesiorRPG]

By the way, we still make Excelsior available on our website www.excelsior-rpg.com.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Matthew Engle Good to hear from you again! Last time I got in touch was back in early 2012 when I originally reviewed the game on my webshow and poked fun at Skyrim being inspired by Excelsior due to all the similarities! ;D kzbin.info/www/bejne/oJqwloyEirt-kM0

[@travisbeamon5356]

Damn Kris - your in depth analysis of these old games is both on point and unparalleled. Keep up the great work! :)

[@PlayStationPaul]

For someone who often says they don't enjoy or play RPGs much you sure know how to get in depth with them.

[@Pixelmusement]

+PlayStationPaul Yup! That's because for the ones I DO like, I do get really into them! It's more apt to say I'm extremely picky when it comes to RPGs and that for every one I like there's probably ten GOOD ones where I'm just like "engh". :B

[@PlayStationPaul]

Fair play, I can think of plenty of RPGs I'm like that with even though it's one of my favourite genres. That said I've never got far in any sort of old school Ultima style game. Interesting vid though and almost counter intuitive results. A giant or half-orc having the most HP makes sense but also the most MP? More than an elf or gnome? who'd have thought it.

[@JomasterTheSecond]

I have... _absolutely_ never heard of this game. Still gonna watch the video anyway though!

[@Pixelmusement]

+Jomaster The Second ALL games which show up on ADG Pro or ADG Mod will have shown up in prior reviews. So if you wanna learn about this game first, here's the old review for this one! kzbin.info/www/bejne/oJqwloyEirt-kM0

[@TheMoogleMaster]

Should mention this, but if you keep holding Down the space bar when entering your name you can glitch it out causing you to have really high HP and I think other stats get boosted this way as well.

[@Pixelmusement]

+TheMoogleMaster Yup. One of several bugs in the game. Found another one I never knew about while making this video and have it as a little extra bit after the credits. ;)

[@erinyejane]

I admire the fact that you went through all the trouble to figure this out. It always just seemed too confusing to me and I never gave it much thought. Just knew that golems were great for hitpoints and went from there. lol But I definitely realized the more I played how much more valuable magic points were and I concentrated all of my efforts on that. Great video :)

[@AmyraCarter]

Played this once... Never got far because I had no idea what in the name of Mercy I was doing...lol

[@2HeadedHero]

This reminds me of those Destiny 2 stat breakdown vids, except.... for an Ultima clone. Nice

[@NumosG]

This was a really interesting video. It reminded me a lot of a game on a C64, but that's probably the character-style graphics. Though, with your skill, I halfway expected that you'd decompile it and just look it up in the source code. But, this was way more fun and entertaining.

[@Pixelmusement]

+NumosG I'm not experienced with low-level programming, only high-level, so no, decompiling or investigating assembler code is never in the cards. I just wanna investigate these things the same way someone would without access to powerful hacking tools; just me and the game as it were! (Though worst case scenario, I'll pull out a hex editor or such if I have to.)

[@simovihinen875]

Well played sir!

[@ianeborn6823]

Regarding the next episode: Waaaait--I can think of one game like that, but that was a Windows game, I believe, and I forget whether you cover those for ADG Pro (name notwithstanding). Well, let me take the guess anyway, since it comes to mind: Operation: Inner Space, which included a ship editor. ^_^

[@UltimateCarl]

Ah man, I love this stuff. Min/Maxing the hell out of characters in RPGs (any of them, really) is one of my favorite things ever. Most of the time it's completely unnecessary for any of the content, but there's just something so satisfying about breaking these games in two over your knee. It's actually kind of a problem when it comes to a lot of blobber dungeon crawls, since those almost invariably have rolling for base stats as well as randomized HP/MP gain on level. It's silly and not at all needed, but if it's theoretically possible for a character to have "perfect" stats within a given range and the only limitation is the player's patience, it practically causes me physical pain to use characters that don't. I know, I know, games are supposed to be fun. But I find that kind of number crunching and achieving in-game numerical superiority to BE the fun. At least when it doesn't mean clicking "RE-ROLL" or reloading a save game for hours...

[@Pixelmusement]

+UltimateCarl This raises an interesting point in game design: When creating a game, you ultimately need to make decisions which either allow the player more freedom to do what they want to do, in return for having less game balance. The more freeform a game is, the harder it becomes to maintain that balance, plus the more possible it becomes for sequence breaking. Beyond all of that though, "fun" is what you make of it when it comes to games. How you find fun in a game is not up to the developer to decide, because when they make that decision for the player, it means fewer players will fit that mould and thus fewer players will enjoy the game. It can be a really tricky thing to figure out when you're making a game. :B

[@Meta_Mage]

I played this a lot as a kid.. the shareware episode at least but never managed to finish it. Probably didnt help that my grasp of english as a foreign language wasn't that great.

[@TheMoogleMaster]

What is the best race/class to play as?

[@Pixelmusement]

+TheMoogleMaster Tricky question. Some races have one or two more initial primary stat points, but those are all maxed out by the end. Some races have more initial secondary stat points, but only ever luck or charm, while EVERY race which has the 1.5x HP modifier has reduced charm. In terms of classes, if you want to really let loose with magic you pretty much have to choose Mage, Cleric or Paladin, otherwise the only other long-term effect the class choice has is what equipment you can use, as even though it affects which skills you start with, you ultimately acquire ALL skills. :B

[@warlock415]

Sounds like a memory editor would have been a great help to you. Remember good ol Gamewizard32?

[@Pixelmusement]

+warlock415 I like to try to avoid tools like that if I can; placing myself in the shoes of someone back in the day who wouldn't typically have access to stuff like that, but if I ultimately have to resort to memory scanners and hex editors to figure stuff out I will. :P

[@Darkstar2342]

I guess this would have been much easier and quicker by simply using a debugger ;-) At least less stressful than replaying the same part of the game again and again for hours... but maybe that's just me :)

[@Pixelmusement]

+Darkstar But less authentic to the experience of trying to figure this stuff out without tools like that, as back when the game was brand new the average kid wouldn't have any of that. ;)

[@Darkstar2342]

well, I guess I wasn't "average" then ;-) For me, finding stuff out via Turbo Debugger was more fun than just playing the game a dozen times to see what changed and how. Learning assembly language, how tables are stored in memory, how the game loads files or overlays, stuff like that.... I was hoping that ADG Pro would also feature something along those lines, but it's still at the beginning, who knows, maybe at some point ... ;-)

[@Christopher-N]

(7:31) Well, your Glynn is +1 charmer, isn't it? He's not 10. If you need that extra push over the cliff, you crank his charm stat up to 11.

[@Dalzedur]

Huh, didn't realize race mattered that much for hpmax, given that I've pretty much only played with glynn. I do think that there is some difference between different versions of the game, since I have vivid impressions that I've seen both hpmax 515 and hpmax 315 characters at lvl 10, which is kinda confusing after watching this one. 515 in the version where dark eyes didn't provide a spherical vision of a few tiles in darkness but instead just kept the areas explored from being overtaken by darkness again when you left, and 315 in the one where it did provide a radius of vision while previously explored areas would be overtaken by darkness when you walked away, I think. And naturally, in both cases I had strength maxed out asap.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Dalzedur It's possible later versions and/or the Windows version has minor alterations to the stats, but I prefer the original DOS version for a number of reasons so that's what I went with here. :B

[@kdhlkjhdlk]

Nice video. It's a shame the sequel didn't keep the art style. Never played it due to how ugly it is.

[@Pixelmusement]

+kdhlkjhdlk Yeah, the funny thing about that is that the sequel's graphical style was meant to emulate the kind of progression other similar RPGs had, but the trouble is that they kinda lost some of the charm in the process. So it looked good for when it came out, but in retrospect the original holds up better in terms of graphics. :B

[@erinyejane]

I agree.... The style of Phase Two did not appeal to me at all.

[@lilwyvern4]

So basically this game was an Ultima ripoff?

[@JarlFrank]

One of the dozens of Ultima clones of the 80s and early 90s. There are so many of these in existence, and they all look very similar due to the simple visual style.

[@Pixelmusement]

+Torcularis "Clone" would be a better word. "Ripoff" would suggest copying every aspect of Ultima beyond just its gameplay, which it doesn't, the story here is original and well written and many of the mechanics are either unique to itself, or better handled than in the Ultima games. When I reviewed this game awhile back I actually had a running joke that Skyrim was inspired by it and pointed out all the similarities between both games! ;D

[@TheMoogleMaster]

What game would be closer to an Ultima ripoff?

[@kdhlkjhdlk]

Except for the story, mechanics, graphics and gameplay, sure. Just like Ultima