Monthly Archive: April 2012

Over in the forums, Pylonhead wrote an awesome preview for a game called Legend of Grimrock.

Back in 1988 I was a freshman at a small liberal arts college called Pomona.  Roughly 98% of all pomona students live on campus and I was no different, getting placed with a small group of incoming students on the third floor of Smiley Hall, which has the distinction of being the oldest college dormitory west of the Mississippi.  Or so we were told.  If you had had to use the plumbing you would believe it.  But that’s a different story.

One of the kids down the hall had an Atari ST.  It was an amazing machine for the time, specifically an amazing machine for games.  It had built in graphics and sound hardware years before this became standard on IBM machines.  He had a lot of great games and I overstayed my welcome in his room numerous nights playing Oids and Roller Ball, and lots of other games.

But the one that really made my eyes light up was a dungeon crawling RPG called “Dungeon Master”.  It was a grid based dungeon maze, not unlike earlier games like Wizardry and Bard’s Tale, but the graphics and sound were really cutting edge, and rather than be turn based it was played in real time, giving it a bit of an action game feel.  The dungeon was chalk full of clever puzzles, horrible monsters, and fiendish traps.

There were several nights where I kept playing in this guys room long after he and his roommate had gone to sleep.   Not sure how he put up with me.

Well, apparently I wasn’t the only one who loved this game, because Finnish game developer Almost Human has gone and created a game with nearly identical mechanics to the one I loved more than 20 years ago.  The graphics are completely updated, and the story and dungeon are completely new, but the game is just the way I remember it.

And the puzzles, traps, and monsters are all there.  For around $15.

Here’s the website: grimrock.net

Force Strategy playing for an hour:

If you like these sort of games, pick this one up.  I’m having an amazing time.

Just a friendly reminder: All links claiming to have Cube World’s beta for download are scams. The game hasn’t been released in any way shape or form into the wild yet. Wollay even claims on his blog that anything claiming to be a beta is a scam.

I decided to try some digging to see how many are out there claiming to have the beta for download. There are several Youtube videos that claim to have the beta in the description but all the links are to downloads requiring a purchase or survey first (obvious scam is obvious). They don’t show ratings and comments are approval only so there’s definitely not going to be any negative comments about it being a scam allowed. There are a few random blogspots out there that do the same. I tried reporting them all and flagging them as malicious, but they’re just going to crop up again somewhere else.

Just a reminder: If you really want a beta, follow Wollay on Twitter or his Blogspot and keep an eye here because we’ll be letting you know when a Beta really does get released.

UPDATE: The alpha version is out and you can buy it from Wollay’s site. Check out our new post on this for more details.