raginrayguns:

@kontextmaschine said:

Played the original Exile series off shareware CDs and keygens in the ‘90s, big Spiderweb respecter

me too, except I was a small child and my friends and I would like run around and pretend to be defending a castle from nephilim or whatever… I remember us doing that at least once anyway. One of my biggest regrets is never playing past act III of exile II, even though my older brother eventually did pay for registration… whatever, I played a shit ton of blades of exile scenarios, and made my own really stupid ones full of ridiculously overpowered items. In retrospect that was a better use of my time actualy, more like the kids today playing minecraft. The fact that Exile came with a way to make your own exile games, so simple that a kid could use it (I think around age 12, 2002?), is just so fucking cool. And really played in to my love of grids, and difficulty with 3D visualizatoin… I loved to sit around making like mazes and tunnels by selecting which square would be “wall” or “not wall”, I didn’t just do it in blades of exile, I also did it in Microsoft Excel, and even Microsoft Paint by zooming inso far that i could colo ror uncolor single pixels. A focus on square grids and difficulty with 3d space is still a big part of my distinctive mathematical style

But yeah now I’m playing avernum 2. Finally going through the portal to The Tower of the Magi, this mysterious thing I had heard my brother talk about, and being like, “it’s just another square fucking exile 2 town”, was a weird moment. Like I was acccessing some 10-year-olds understanding of what it would be like… idk, multiple floors, a whole culture of wizards, who knows what I was expecting

I could swear Jeff Vogel did a map-design trick once where a 1-space void in a map wasn’t a secret room

Oh well, I remember after Exile III he was like “I’ve designed the Tower of Mages for the last time” and well

Remember when you had to have food to regenerate health when you rested but the rapids at the end would spoil it?