I was wodnering if anyone had some suggestions on old CRPGs that stand out - I'm currently playing my way through an old favourite: Buck Rogers - Countdown to Doomsday, as well as Megatraveller 1, but I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on others that may prove a worthwhile playing experience. Preferably Sci-fi, or puzzle-less IF if you can't think of any others.
Oh and fantasy is ok too, but it'll need to be real goog.

How old? The sci-fi CRPGs I recall fondly would be:
Fallout 1 & 2
Wasteland
Sentinel Worlds: Future Magic
Starflight 1, and to a lesser extent, 2
Star Control II, in many ways a more modern, more action-oriented (and excellent) Starflight.

Others:
I thought the Megatraveller games were bad. Poorly designed, even taking the day and age into account.

Planet's Edge was playable, barely. Much better than Megatraveller, though.

Autoduel was fun on an Apple computer back in the day, but is totally not going to stand the test of time.

Star Command was fun, but it's another game that's been superceded thirty times over.

BattleTech: Crescent Hawks' Inception, I guess. I don't care for it much now, though.

There are a kazillion RPGs for the PS/PS2, and I think many of them are sci-fi, but I don't have any experience with these.

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Downloads aside, Home of the Underdogs (http://www.the-underdogs.org) would be a good site to look over. I thought I played a lot of games in my misspent youth, but that lady has played more games than I'll ever hear of, and has opinions on nearly all of them.

Good ol' underdogs is where I've been getting my Oldies fix, my good man!
Fallout games I adored, and still adore so I suppose it's only logical i try wasteland.
As for the traveller games - you realy thought they were badly designed? I'd not say they were perfect, but I found them to be entertaining and fairly free-form for the time of production.
Star Command... ah yes. Despite my oung years I count that game a friend from when I was but a mere 8yr old stripling, back in 1989 on my Amiga 500. Needless to say, I d/loaded it recently and finished it within a day, just for kicks
I think thus far my later list is going to be thus: Starflight and wasteland.

Any other old-school suggestions out there?

Mines of Titan. Interesting game, but I always loved it for the combat portion. Similiar to Crescent Hawks Inception.

Jagged aliance 2?
It's more of a turnbased strategy rather then a full scale rpg ,but it's very good. if you allready have beat the game there are atleast 2 full fan made campaigns with storylines and new maps.

iscreamuscreamicecreamicecream!!

uh, magic candle...3?

picked it up for free in some shovelware back in 1993-4ish.
very dated, but i played it through, i was expecting to drop it in short order.

not an rpg, but _pushover_ was also fun. I did drop it, but mostly b/c it got too hard for me. it was a domino puzzle game.

Magic Candle?
Uhm. Ok. I'll at least have a read about it And as for JA:2, I had a quick go at the Wildfire version, and was totally unprepared for how hard it actually was! Therefore, I stopped playing it. I did remind a fair bit of the X-COM games though, which is no bad thing!

i suspect wildfire was based on the unfinished business campaign/tools. unfinished business was ridiculously hard, but just right for ppl that just got finished with JA2.
JA2 at least eases you up to ridiculous, Unfinished business and I presume wildfire, kinda drops you in the deep end and then releases the pirannas to help out the sharks.

if you finish JA2, try download some mods. urban chaos is kinda fun, a bit dense, and very challenging. it eliminates a lot of the waiting to slog through 4 strategic squares problem early on in JA2.

biggest problem (partly solved in the UB features) in JA2 is probably evaluating cover and line of sight, particularly over open field. rocks suck as cover.

suggestion, get used to using crowbars in the early game.

Right now i'm splitting my time between writing (the main part) and the following games: Homeworld2 (with the PDS 5.0 mod), MegaLoMania, Eve-Online, LSL:MCL, and The Longest Journey (fab game!).
Homeworld 2 is a much better game with the PDS mods installed. Much more interesting to play.

Longest Journey has a sequel in the works.

http://www.longestjourney.com/news/general/sequelannounced.html

dreamfall (assuming they don't change the title)

I'll have to find that HW2 mod. had fun in hw2, but it wasn't quite as addictive as the original (in the retail release)

currently slogging through crashes in Evil Genius, lovely atmosphere, but if you have a low tolerance for bugs you should probably avoid it, although if you can get a good price it might be worth buying and sitting on until they fix everything.

I tried evil genius, and while I thought that it had it's charming moments, I found it pretty tedious to play though.
For example, I had to stand my genius in the barracks, jsut to keep the loyalty of my minions up! Perhaps I should have executed more fo them... And if i'm honest, I'm not playing much of anything at the moment, but I *am* 14000 words through my 50000 word story. It's killing me, but I love it to death

pah, obviously you're not working them hard enough...

they have time to hang out in the barracks
yeah pain the ass to keep the base from getting blown to bits b/c you aren't paying enough attention to all the red dots that keep popping up all over the place.
I only really find it tedious when i've just gotten large numbers of minions destroyed and i have to wait for their replacements to get trained up. otherwise i merrily keep myself preoccupied continually remodeling the place, but i'm still learning the game.

ah, writing.
much more time consuming than any game.
gotta be careful of that love-death cycle you have going there though

*laughs*
Should have over 20k written by the end of tomorrow, it's going really well thus far.
i was thinking i might try one of the gold box series when i have a little free time and my new p4 3ghz w/hyperthreading is up and running suggestions?

gold box as in SSI Dnd gold box aka (Pools of Radiance, Azure Bonds, Silver Blades, Pools of Darkness) or the newer collectors edition gold boxes?

I'd suggest going with PoD or SotSB if so. i tried playing PoR and AB from the collection not Too long ago and well, having other games on the schedule made the experience suffer. (in other words the interface was a bit clunky and i was really only looking for that fine moment when you get fireballs and run out to toast a few goblins...ahhh beauty pomf, pomf, pomf...)

if not you'll have to be a little more specific. are we talking home of the underdog hall of belated fame type games or something else?

I disagree, personally. I thought Pool of Radiance was the strongest one in the series. The formula was running dry by the middle of Curse of the Azure Bonds, and just degraded from there. I don't really remember much about Secret of the Silver Blades, though. I think there was a lot of ice involved somewhere.

But PoR has more rewards set up (like exploration bounties, town quests, etc.), it has the overhead map, and leveling up is generally more interesting than in the later games where everyone's grossly overpowered.

I found Pools of Darkness tedious. Plus you lost your good equipment a lot in that game, and equipping your whole party got old fast.

yup. lots of ice. long corridors of ice.

hmmm. i don't remember the equipment loss too well for PoD.
all i really remember for PoD was that island place after the campaign was over and kinda giving up b/c i couldn't make heads or tails of it.

only problem with PoR was going back to it after a long time. it just wasn't the same. i agree that the design was really nice given the limitations and it was a lot of fun playing at the time, but to me it didn't age well, but as i mentioned...i was mostly looking to fry some kobolds and goblins