The Legend of Blacksilver / Commodore 64 | January 17, 2025 (Part 5) | Twitch VOD

[@IsaacKuo]

0:50 - Yeah, I hated the thing where the game would pass after like 2 seconds! It made playing those games unnecessarily stressful. But I remember at the time, people thought it was innovative? Ugh, no. It was just a pain. I don't know if Ultima is what popularized it, but it's easily my least favorite "feature" of those games. If I ever feel like revisiting Telengard, I'll look at the BASIC code, to modify it to never time out. I mean ... obviously any game can be hacked to get rid of that timeout, but I'm not expert enough at hacking machine code. Hacking pure BASIC, like Telengard? I could handle that.

[@thegamedesignlexicon]

Oh man, I played soooo much Telengard when I was a kid. I remember running into the first version I played of it on the Compuserv online servers. But the C64 version... :chefskiss: Pretty sure I did a one-shot here on the channel... kzbin.info/aero/PLhLhCaBLUhckB5BBChp-CJwLmwD2lbfBF Yup! Three blocks of it. Such a great game and one of my earlier memories of a 'roguelike'. Mixed in with games like Alternate Reality, The Standing Stones, Sword of Fargoal, Dunzhin, Temple of Apshai, Gateway to Apshai, Sword of Kadash, Gemstone Warrior ... Pretty much solidified my love for the genre Ultima II though is the first game I played where I remember the whole 'pass' timeout mechanic in that type of RPG. I believe Ultima I had it which both predate Telendgard by a year or two. If I ever met Richard Garriott, the main question I'd want to ask him would be, what was he thinking when he implemented that... "let's put a hot-potato mechanic to where if someone doesn't do something the game slowly kills the player..."