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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5302144" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 199: November 1993part 3/8Campaign journal: A Spelljammer and Greyhawk crossover this month. (although relocating it to another world wouldn't be hard) The Black Pegasus Trading Company are a bunch of somewhat roguish adventurers who've moved into the space trading business as they went up in levels. They keep their sources pretty quiet while down on Oerth, thus neatly sidestepping the impact spelljamming would have on the technological and political milieu. They also carefully walk the balance between good and evil, tending slightly towards good simply out of self-interest, because it's better for business, and well treated employees are less likely to quit or betray you, while still being quite ruthless in making sure they get maximum profits from a deal. They could well end up as friends or enemies depending on how they're played. With a good dozen sample plots, and half a dozen character stats, this accomplishes what it sets out to do pretty well, giving you a good way to incorporate space adventuring without cutting the characters off from their original world, or changing said world drastically in the process of opening things up. Spelljammer may be pretty much a dead line by now, but this is still a good article for it. The lessons that they would later apply in making planescape accessible to new players are well in effect here. If only they'd learned them a few years sooner.Eye of the monitor: Sandy shows another of his big differences compared to the Lessers. They were very much in favour of family friendly entertainment, getting rather uncomfortable whenever gore or sex came up in games they were reviewing. Sandy, on the other hand, wants to see those options out there, albeit with a parental guidance system analogous to the movie one. Why not just use exactly the same one? It would save time and bureaucracy substantially. What is not amusing is halfhearted censoring that removes the blood, while leaving the actual gameplay completely unchanged. Especially when it's only done in certain regions. Then it's both pandering and hypocritical. Sandy SMASH! Hee. This is a very entertaining intro. It's nice that games can finally do justice to mature themes, and amusing to see people reacting against that. Final Fantasy II (which isn't the japanese II, but a later one, if I remember my geek lore correctly) doesn't have great graphics, but nearly everything else gets praised. The music is good, the enemies are always at just the right level of challenge, and the plot is fascinating. Characters appear and disappear throughout it in highly dramatic fashions, making the whole story seem much bigger than just your adventures. Get yourself some chocobos and go a-riding through the lands. Ken's Labyrinth is another game where the first bite is free, then you need to pay up. However, Sandy isn't tempted, with a whole bunch of rookie mistakes messing up the programming. There are some cool ideas, but overall, the implementation needs some serious refinement. Betrayal at Krondor also gets a negative review for some substantial design flaws. It eats up too many resources, and requires you to pay too much attention to IC bean counting. It also often refuses to recognise your accomplishments, leaving you just plain stuck when the plot can't be advanced properly. Needs some serious debugging. Day of the Tentacle, on the other hand, is a fun Lucasfilm adventure game which really takes advantage of CD audio to allow you to hear every line of hilarious dialogue. The visuals look pretty amusing too. Once again, their development team has pulled together something both high quality and fun.</blockquote>

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