Seltzer wrote:I played MM7 a fair bit but gave up when I lost the CD image. Also, I had problems with aging too quickly in the game and losing stat points because of it. If anyone can offer a solution to this problem, I'm all ears.
Black Potion of Rejuvenation. Your Sorc can make them after grandmastering in alchemy. And surely, if you "lost" the CD image, it's just a matter of reinstalling the title.
The M&M series can be divided neatly in two. Games 1-5 were completely turn-based. If you didn't move or take any other action, time stopped. Games 6-9 were real/turn hybrids. Time passed in "real" gametime, unless you hit ENTER, causing it to move to turn-based. You'd want to do the latter whenever there was combat oni the horizon, because you were usually attacked by more than one (and occasionally, many) monsters. When taking a turn, each of your party members had its own shot at attacking with melee or ranged weapons, or using spells or scrolls. They could not move separately, being effectively all in one spot. Order and frequency of attack in turn-based mode were affected by such matters as weapon speed, a character's speed attribute, and what spells (if any) were active.
Game difficulty decreased from M&M I through until IV and V (which can be played separately, or fit together--more or less--as a single title). Again, M&M VI was noticeably more difficult (and boring) than VII and VIII.
M&M 9 was very different from the rest. It was the only one in the series not made by the New World Computing team. Trip Hawkins, CEO of 3DO, purchased NWC in exchange from a sum of money and a degree of development autonomy. Hawkins forced M&M8 out early because he wanted the revenues for his ailing company (3DO was not doing well by that time), and when it wasn't the cash cow he was counting on, he took away the development of M&M9 and gave it to a team of developers that had never released anything, before. I suspect he figured that would save money, but he was wrong, and M&M9 was panned for getting wrong so much of what M&M had previously gotten right.
Not that the M&M series lacked for problems of its own. The same game elements were getting tired from being shuffled and reused in successive titles, and innovation was very slow. The engine looked old, which made some image-obsessed DOOM-playing reviewers cry. And combat AI was limited to some enemies moving away if they lost a ton of hitpoints. There was no finesse, in other words. They attacked, and that's all.
But the answer should have been focus groups with players, to find new ideas for development. Still, that was never Hawkins' method of management. After all, he was one of the people who previously ran Electronic Arts. The idea was to buy a company doing well with high expectations, fire all their staff when those expectations weren't met, and use the assets as needed by cheap inside labor to make further cash cows--like the current Ultima Online, the only piece left alive of what was once Oriign Systems.
There's still a lot of fun to be had with the M&M series. I'd recommend M&M III, their first big hit, and M&M VII and VIII, which avoid some of the worst failings of the later titles (repetitive dungeons, endless chains of high damage monsters towards the end).