FRESH
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Hacker News Hacker NewsIf you're more into JRPGs, Bitmap Books has got you covered as well [1]:
[1]: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/products/a-guide-to-japanese-rol...
A discussion of that list might be interesting, since it will always be very subjective. In particular, I tried really hard to like Planescape: Torment since I like story-driven games, but I was only able to tolerate it for maybe 8 hours before I put it down and never picked it up again.
Arcanum is also interesting to be at #5, and I agree with the text of the reviews; it does such a good job of almost succeeding at so many of its ambitions that its easy to forgive how bad the rest of the game is. Kind of a "shot for the stars and landed on the moon" sort of game.
I was also mildly surprised to see Betrayal at Krondor at #16 with no mention of how the last third of the game is mediocre. I think the first 2/3 of the game would put it closer to #10.
Also somewhat surprised that the core Ultima (as opposed to Underworld) games were as low as they are and that IV ranked so far above V (even one of the reviewers for Ultima V said it was a far better game than IV).
[1]: https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/all-books/products/t...
"When thinking about where a book dedicated to computer RPGs might come from, one might Germany, Canada, UK or the US."
The only real weakness this game had was how easy it was to completely break the combat system. Skin of the Dragon is the most OP spell in the world. It's basically invulnerability for X rounds. And when I say invulnerability, I don't just mean physical attacks, but also magic, status effects—basically everything. It's cheap enough from a mana perspective to just have Owen quickly throw it on all your party members at the beginning of any combat situation.
Did I mention you can pick up the spell for free near the beginning of the game? I used to deliberately avoid it just to help balance things a bit.
Anybody have further suggestions for books about games I should own?