top-down

[PsychicMonk]

Wasteland was my first top-down rpg.
Before Wasteland I didn't even know that such a thing existed.
The only crpg I knew was BT1 - Tales of the Unknown which I played a lot with a friend.
Usually he was walking while I was drawing.
I really enjoyed that in Wasteland there was no need to draw maps

[Celtic927]

True, kids today will never appreciate the pain of drawing maps. Phantise was another top down RPG I remember from Childhood

[PsychicMonk]

True, kids today will never appreciate the pain of drawing maps. Phantise was another top down RPG I remember from Childhood

Yes, a good rubber and lots of patience was needed.
One of the worst things I remember were those nifty invisible teleporters sometimes ending in a location looking exactly the same so it could take some time and wrong mapping until you noticed that you had been teleported.

I have never played Phantasie (is it still worth checking out?).
Although I prefer top down rpgs until today back then we mostly played these pseudo 3D rpgs.
Getting new games was pretty hard for us compared to today standards.
Going to a store that actually had some computer games was a pretty rare occassion and we could only buy
what was available. Most of the time we didn't even know on the way to the store what games we would buy in the end.

[Chiba City Blues]

Is Phantasie worth checking out? To be quiet honest, they were great games for their time, but, having retried the games in emulation in the 2000s, only Phantasie 3 is still worth playing. The interface in the first two games is so archaic that they're almost a chore to play.

To be fair, by the time I tried Phantasie 2 on my C64, I had (in addition to playing its sequel) already played Wasteland, Bard's Tale 3, and Final Fantasy 4, all of which have vastly superior interfaces.

This isn't a knock against old games in general (Hell, I'm replaying Wasteland right now), as I had a few grating issues with Super Paper Mario, mainly dealing with the fact that the game came out in 2007, and yet I played games from the 1980s with less grating inventory management systems. JRPGs generally had crap inventory management systems until close to the mid-1990s (try playing an early Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy game, and then play an Interplay RPG from the same era to see what I mean), but some of them got very good at it afterwards, particularly Square games, which is somewhat ironic given as how the first Final Fantasy was among the worst offenders when it came to interface design.