sábado, 18 de septiembre de 2004

Sunday's Game: RuneSword 2

I met the original freeware RuneSword 1 at gamesdomain.com (now Yahoo! games) some years ago. At that time, their creators had developed yet RuneSword 2, and they sold it online. I never bought it since I was unsure about posting, handling and custom dues, so I was frustrated when I looked for RS1 tomes at the internet and google returned many, many RS2 pages.
But my luck has turned, because some months ago, the boys at
crosscut who developed RuneSword have reseased RS2 as "opensource" at sourceforge. I haven't checked the source yet, but I've had fun playing it! Here are my comments on RS2:

Runesword 2 has small differences from RS1's interface or graphics (I wonder how they could use the original miniature models scanning of RS1 in the "pay version" RS2, ... or maybe they went back to the original graphics when they opened the source?) As its predecessor, RS2 is turn-based and dice-based; this meaning it would be nice for those who started playing RPGs at their kitchen table, as I did, but not for the many people who has played realtime computer-based RPGs only.
Fight is an essential element, as it is in any RPG, so you should carefully choose "heavy-armored" characters, and a good healer. But the original tome desging didn't forgot to add some enigmas and quizzes for the players to solve.
Despite of this, RuneSword 2 is higly customizable. You can't only create custom "tomes" (scenarios), designing maps, objects, monsters, traps, quizzes and tests, with a detail level that lefts you create, i.e., a Dragon-container bottle or a Self-cutthroat-sword, but you can also alter the global values (characteristic names, character classes, world map, region names, food system) that define the entire game world.
I like RS2 much, but I have to concede it still has two things I don't like:
First of it, RS does not allow the use of international characters in tomes. So I can't made spanish tomes.
And second, authors forgot
(quandoque bonus dormitat homerus) to correct small bugs present in the four included tomes, bug they should know because they were documented, and even solved, at RS2's official forums. So if you test RS2 and see something does not work as it should, go to the forums.


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