__N__ostalgia, they say, is a thing of the past. But in a world in which the phrase "That's sooo two minutes ago!" is spoken with continually less irony, a little nostalgia is often welcome. The Ultimate RPG Archives is a time machine on five CDs, a gateway to the days when men were real men, computers were 8-bit, and "automap" was a mispronunciation of a famous deli in New York City.
Of the 12 games collected here, all but one (Stonekeep) truly deserve the term classic. Half date to the mid-1980s and feature 16-color (that's color, not bit) graphics, PC speaker sound, and the much welcome absence of cinematic cut scenes. You want cut scenes? Read the numbered paragraphs when you're told to, fanboy. (That's what we had for cut scenes in my ill-spent youth, and we liked it that way!)
Those of you used to modern games - thin on depth, thick on bells and whistles - will be either pleased or distressed by this anthology, depending on your tastes. You will also be introduced to the joys of boot disks and the alphabet soup of EMS, EMM, XMS, IRQ, et cetera.
A couple of early problems: While a thick tome reprinting some of the original manuals accompanies the set, it's missing some key components - maps and vital background info for solving some of the games, not to mention answers to in-game riddles, a form of early copy protection.
My recommendations: The Bard's Tale Trilogy for major-league munchkin hack&slashing, Dragon Wars or Wasteland as an example of the best 8-bit games, and Ultima Underworld I to see a program doing most of what Quake does, eight years earlier.
If you can get out of that latest&greatest& flashiest&coolest mindset and settle down to actually playing a game, you'll find there's a lot more enjoyment in just one of these clunkers than in any 10 Quake or Warcraft knockoffs.
STREET CRED
Speech Recognition - To Go Dutch Hitmeister
When the Background Eclipses the Game
Remembrance of Things Past
