Freedroid - For the veteran gamers here I can sum it up as Paradroid, isometric RPG. Give it a try and get some flashback retro goodness. Download links are given at the end.
For those who missed out on
Paradroid, it was an old game on the C64, which was actually very good. It involved you boarding a ship that had a robot crew gone rogue. You started off weak and poorly defended with a simple laser, but your real weapon was a transfer device that let you take control over any robots you came in contact with, provided you could hack into it (via a hectic and fun little puzzle).
Each of the robots had different abilites depending on their role on board. The simple garbage disposal droids were unarmed and slow, messenger droids fast and unarmed, security droids were fast and had good weapons and the military droids were slower but heavily armed and armoured. Some droids were extremely agressive and other types couldn't care less about an intruder. As you defeted robots and completed transfers successfully you gained points. These points could be spent at recharging stations to replace lost energy, but all the droids suffered a rate of decay which was dependant on how well you defeted the droid in the transfer and how high a rank it was. A near draw on a military bot wouild mean you'd be on a sinking ship and would have to either use it straight away or take over another robot, while a landslide victory on a low or medium droid would practically mean it was yours for as long as you needed. Each time you took over a robot of a higher rank you were given a better chance to win in the hacking game by providing you with more pieces to play, so it would be extremely difficult, though not impossible, to take over a high ranking robot straight away, instead a gradual increase in strength and abilities was the natural path and the layout of the ship lends itself to this as each deck tended to have only certain types and levels of droids.
Once you had cleared the ship of all robots (by either taking them over and dumping their robot bodies or by blowing them up with ramming or weapon damage) and taken out the leader of the rebellion, the dreaded "999", you moved onto another ship, and so on. It was all overhead, with simple colours and little animation, but it had me hooked for a long time back then - the horror of the 999's mocking laughter still rings in my ears today. The remake of this simple action game is worth downloading, and is a piece of classic gaming history. This has had a few improvements added over the original. The game is controlled with keyboard for movement and mouse to aim, rather than the old 8-way aim with the joystick. There is also an optional graphics pack to change the look of it to suit your own tastes. The sound effects are better than the old C64 could handle and the game now has a background music throughout, rather than the old throbbing noise of the ship (which caused headaches in some people I know), though the main screen 'music' has been left as it was in the original, allowing new gamers to hear the unique and bizarre music. Probably for a very short time, I'd imagine.
The following is a preview as I have not completed the game, it seems good and I'd rather you hear about it than wait until I am bored with it first.
The
Freedroid RPG has taken the main parts of Paradroid (the transfer device, the robot types, "the robots gone rogue" plotline) and put it into a more traditional RPG body. Part of this transition means a change in perspective to an isometric format. Gone are the basic white sprites and in with animated rendered characters, which for a freeware title are very well done. Equpiment appears on the avatar and matches what you equip them with, similar to BG. The protagonist begins now in a science lab where you learn the basic outlines of the plot and game functions, and from there you wander into an open world, with wandering hostile (and non hostile) robots. You have equipment, stats, trade, experience and dialogue as you might expect in a title claiming to be a RPG. Also comes with free anti-MS propganda for the Mac and Linux user to enjoy (yes, both of them, lewl).
The inventory and the stats screens:
My character in the first town he encountered:
See more and full size screenshots
here.
The new plot sets you in an Earth like world where a monopoly (MS) has gained control of the world and used robots to enforce that control. and then promptly turned to infighting, taking the world down with it. I guess if bad guys were constantly good then it wouldn't be much of an adventure for us players. Oh well. You awaken, with a special case of RPG amnesia, are filled in on some of the plot, told where to get your starting gear and sent packing.
Once you leave the starting area you can come across various towns and outposts as you travel. My first encounter was some small messenger droids which I tried to talk to. Bad move (you do have to be careful about encountering enemies you are not strong enough to battle). After running from the insane floating mailboxes of doom I came across a human party who swiftly dispatched my aggressors. Although wary from before I decided to talk to my saviours, who turned out to be hunting the robots for parts and equipment that they could scavenge and sell. During the conversation they offered to teach me how to scavenge parts from dead robots to sell at the markets, at the cost of money and a training point, which are gained upon levelling up (a system very similar to Gothic).
The combat is realtime* and is comparable to the Diablo games. Left clicking to move and right clicking to use an ability or weapon and each click triggers another use of this, if you click on a hostile character the PC will begin attacking with the selected weapon and keep attacking until you move him away or the enemy is dead. The PC will also move forward with the prey to save you repositioning. Don't expect the non stop clicking of Diablo or the numbers of enemies of that game. The game includes melee and ranged weapons and a "magic" system. Abilities can be learned using books, again, the same as Diablo.
While you may have already imagined this to be a poor Diablo clone wearing the stolen corpse skin of a C64 classic, it is more.
In one of my earlier abortive attempts to play through I travelled to an outpost owned by a seemingly good scientist who owned a kind of prison and rehabilitation centre for Robots. He offered my PC some help and advice on the quest, and at the time I decided that I was going to play it as a melee combat PC and my character was evil (a psychotic butcher). Avoiding the guard I followed the scientist until his bodyguard was gone, whereupon I quickly killed him. In the process I alerted the guards and ended up in combat with both the insane prisoners and angry guards. I died. But I was glad to see that I had the choice of whether I wanted to listen to the waffling scientist or butcher him.
In my more recent attempt (one where I decided to follow the slightly more obvious path as intended by the designer, rather than wander aimlessly looking for things to "pwn" and came across the hunters) I manager to make it to a walled town. Upon entering the gate guard warned me against causing trouble and allowed me to pass. The rest of the guards near the entrance were even less inclined to talk and simply told me not to cause trouble. After meeting a citizen and gaining some history on the town and its purpose I was able to ask about joining the town guard, "Go see the Chief of the town guard", I was informed. A short distance away, a few minutes and the helpfully labelled Chief was answering my employment questions. He was interested in seeing how I could help the town, but as a stranger I would need to prove myself and gain a good reputation before I could join the town guard. This then was logged as a quest for me and several other possible quests were mentioned by the guard as needing doing, locals needing help and the town guard itself.
The music is fairly simple stuff, but most importantly has not annoyed me yet, and that is a success for most background game music. The sound effects are functional and I have no complaints there. The only possible niggles would be the somewhat misguided attempt to include voice-overs for some of the dialogue and incidental comments as you pass by NPCs. The quality of these voice-overs is pretty poor and often changes an amusing text line to something cringe-worthy, or a dramatic line into unfortunate comedy. The other problem is when you have the same person voicing both sides in the same conversation, and he has made no attempt to disguise his voice, making it sound like the PC has gone mad and has begun arguing with himself, or calling out to himself in the street, "don't cause trouble". Thankfully not all the lines are spoken, and you can click past text and VO, avoiding slow torture.
The game also comes with a map editor, which I've only played with long enough to nearly ruin one of the maps, looks interesting.
Overall it seems very promising, is basically complete and now only gets the odd patch, and recently a HUD upgrade. They have a wiki and are looking for suggestions. I am sure that folks here are never shy about voicing an opinion.
Click
here to get to the download page.
To play the old retro Freedroid in windows download "
Freedroid Classic-1.0.2-win32.zip" (the newest at the time of writing), which weighs in at around 5MB. There are Mac and other versions available for download on that page too.
To play Freedroid RPG download "
FreedroidRPG-0.9.12.exe" (newest at the time of writing), this is around 58MB.
Both games are well worth playing for their own reasons. I'll be playing the RPG for a bit more to see if I get bored with it and what I think of it by that point, the classic game I know like the back of my hand.
*you wouldn't believe how tempting it was to put "the combat is turnbased and done in realtime"
EDIT: Been playing a bit more, the combat is pretty flat at times and sometimes quirky and the VO only gets worse. Some of the text is dodgy too, with misspelled words and odd phrases. I'm hoping it'll get more interesting as I get into it, still near the early town.