Summer Games Challenge 2017 - Begin when ready!

[Ack]

There were a few that did, such as community patches to improve game stability and add in features the devs had once promised but later reneged on. Oblivion Lost was probably my favorite, with randomly occurring blowouts that would make you run for cover and randomly change the locations of anomalies. It also made nighttime pitch black, so you tended to stick to daylight hours.

[Exhuminator]

Yeah I tried Oblivion Lost and didn't like it. But hey if you got more mileage out of the game, more power to ya.

My favorite part of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was Lab X-18.

[Ack]

I got a kick out of just wandering the open landscape. I remember one time I came across a handful of fellow stalkers hanging near a ruined bunkhouse, when suddenly a horde of feral, mutant boars came charging over the hill at us. We unloaded into that pack of fetid swine, but they just kept coming, eventually ripping into the ranks of the NPCs around me. I swapped to my trusty shotgun and blasted my way out, doing enough damage to escape to safety. Went back the next day and looted the corpses. Plenty of 7.62 ammo. Pricks had been holding out on me.

[Xeogred]

I played vanilla STALKER myself, with whatever the newer official patch was at the time. I still think it was quite easy around the middle portion, but it took me awhile to realize that the side quests were just infinite and I was royally stocked up on items and good gear. The final stretch after the big woods part beyond the mercenary camps, that portion was still insane though. And I think I remember you getting some Robocop level armor, frequently. It kind of goes full in on becoming linear hardcore run and gun at the end but it was amazing.

It's amusing my favorite portions of STALKER might be the underground areas and my favorite portions of Metro are the above ground areas. Namely just in terms of atmosphere though, since Metro was linear they were able to make the above ground sections way higher detailed than STALKER's open environments.

In the end though I still think STALKER is a lot better.

[Kuruwin]

I haven't played Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 for a long time but i have fond memories on it and i played that game several times. Yeah, i do recall some of the bosses being little annoying but i don't remember any of them being hard.

The cutscenes that game had looked amazing back in the day but now that you look at them they are pretty embarasing.

[Ack]

Well, Dungeon Master has arrived, while Descent II and Thief 2 are installed. All need to be tested. Eye of the Beholder 2 I will be picking back up, while I need to install Ultima III. Then I will be completely good to go with my five choices.

[Sarge]

You might want to consider using DXX-Rebirth for Descent II if it doesn't work very well in DOSBox.

[Exhuminator]

Ack has some great picks, nice dungeon crawls!

Some day I'm looking forward to him playing through two of the greatest ever; Arx Fatalis and Ultima Underworld II.

[Ack]

Well, Arx Fatalis sadly was not playable on the machine I tried it on, but I will test another later. And I will get around to Ultima Underworld II eventually.

Despite being an RPG fan, there are many WRPGs I missed out on, particularly many big names. Slowly but surely I'm getting to them.

[MrPopo]

You might want to consider using DXX-Rebirth for Descent II if it doesn't work very well in DOSBox.

If you're using a joystick then I'd definitely recommend DXX-Rebirth so you can bind more than two buttons (technically you can use DOSBox's key mapper but at that point it's more trouble than its worth). As I recall the DOS version is also very CPU sensitive for homing shots; it recalculates trajectory based on the clock cycles, so a faster CPU means the homing stuff is more and more accurate.