I've been pretty quiet around the site lately with the holidays and all. But in the background I've been going full steam ahead with Buck Rogers for Amiga, as well as several C128D projects.
With Buck Rogers I hit what I believe to be an impossible (for my team) impasse. This scene I've made it to is so brutal and unbalanced I'm going to try and backtrack several hours worth to see if I can simply 'bail' and go find something else to do. Pretty awful.
I wondered if it was just me, and every resource I've found that mentions this battle (and they all do) remark how it's simply awful. There are no special tactics to be found, just rebooting the game over and over until the perfect set of rolls fall your way. Well, I've already tried for 3 days with at least 2 dozen attempts. I give up.
Here's the scenario:
You find yourself in a tight little room with 2 (2!) RAM combat bots. These things are nearly impossible to kill in the best of circumstances in a large open space. But in this case they throw two at you, and you're literally face to face. They each have over 80 hitpoints, really low armor classes, and are equipped with rocket launchers which can do 10-40 points of damage to each of your characters. One hit can kill half my party. And they get to go twice since there are two of them.
I typically get to use 2 characters before the annihilation. And most of the time, they simply miss the bots completely due to their insane armor classes. On top of that, many weapons that do hit bounce right off of them.
I've been able to kill one of these things a couple of times, but I'll only have 1 or 2 characters still alive at that point. And then there's the second bot still standing there, and seconds later I'm staring at the screen "your entire party has died. RAM continues with its plans unheeded" or some annoying shit like that.
Anyway, I give up on that battle for now and entire part of the game. I don't care if breaking off from the storyline is "poor taste". That battle is completely unfair and obnoxious. It's a shame, because up to that point I feel like Buck Rogers as it was implemented was near the top of all of the Gold Box games I've ever played. There are some core game design changes that they made I really disagree with (like the system for curing your party's wounds). But the story telling components are 100X better in this game than most.
Bah!