Curing the Plague - One NPC at a time.
Wow. I'm not sure what's worse, the cold or the medication.

Inflicted with such disease as I am, I am reminded of an old RPG that I doubt very many people remember... Twilight: 2000. I played both the pen & paper version and the CRPG (by Paragon Software, later assimilated into Microprose, which was later assimilated into... yeah, you get the idea)

One of the randomly-generated missions you could encounter in Twilight: 2000 (the cRPG) was one where you had to heal everybody in the town who had contracted some kind of disease. It meant using up some of your supply of antibiotics. You had to hunt down everyone still infected with the disease, and use the medication on them (I can't remember if there was some kind of skill check against your medical skill or not).

Finding the last couple of diseased villagers was always a chore. They would appear as a different colored dot on your mini-map, but it was still hard to locate that last randomly-wandering-around NPC who was preventing mission completion.

There was a similar mission (or "quest," if you prefer) where you had to interrogate everyone in town to find a spy. Similar gameplay, but the interrogation skill was used.

At the time, I thought those were the most boring, lame quests ever in an RPG.

Then I came across the "Kill the giant rats and bring me ten giant rat-tails" type quests in MMOs. And sadly, in some single-player RPGs. And then I realized, to my dismay, the Twilight: 2000 quests were brilliant in comparison. After all, in those quests, you could at least locate the one or two targets you needed to tackle to guarantee success.

Okay, time for me to lie down again.

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:14 AM (Permalink)