Author: Jason Frear (05-050.026.popsite.net)
Date: 04-28-2001 20:36
I agree with you. Its not only the shoot-em-up action games that aquire a following. Alternate Reality surpasses any game made in the past 15+ years in its depth, playability, immersiveness, and intricateness. I would say though that this applies more to Alternate Reality: The Dungeon than The City.
If you never played The Dungeon your missing out. The City was created as a developement platform for a Character that you would later take into other Alternate Reality installments (Dungeon, Arena, Palace, Forest, Revelation, and Destiny) so there was no quests and no ending per-se to The City.
Character allignment in Alternate Reality was much different than Ultima. Ultima is rigid. The game requires you to be moral to play. You can't lift up Mondain's skull in Ultima 4 and expect to continue playing out your mission to become an Avatar. In Alternate Reality you have levels of good and evil as in real life. It ran on a point system from 0 (the Devil) to 255(Saint) with 128 being neutral. You could continue to play the game if, lets say your robbed the bank vaults. It also affected what guilds you could join, interaction with other monsters, what types of spells you learned and cast, how moral/immoral weapons reacted to you as you carried them, and to some extent how vulnerable you were to specific types of attacks.
NO other game has this depth of play so simular to AD&D.
If you never played The Dungeon I would highly recomend it. There are Alternate Reality pages on the Web. Here are a few:
http://user.tninet.se/~lan318o/alternate-reality/ The Original Alternate Reality
http://members.nbci.com/webtitan/atari/ar/ Alternate Reality Page
The first link really has everything possible realated to the game, including disk images and links to emulators to play them. Its perfectly legal to download the images since the origionator and copyright holder of AR, Philip Price, has released the game to the Public Domain. Philip is also working on an online version of AR, although no one has heard much from him lately.
Jason.
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