#coverdisc

[luisfloriano]

Projeto \ Conceito

[manuart79]

Dipinto omaggio al grande EDOARDO VIANELLO - Opera realizzata a 4 mani, insieme al maestro @moscardellipatrizio - #dipinto #edoardovianello #abbronzatissima #cantautoreitaliano #lacanzoneitaliana - #albumcover #coverdisc #paintings #fineart - #myart #manuart79 https://www.instagram.com/p/BySWrxphT6o/?igshid=y0tx3686xas7

[blockygraphics]

ESCAPE.JPG; image from the Amiga ACS Coverdisc 1997-05 (Polish language), via cd.textfiles.com. Signature in bottom right -- “Coner”?

[everygame]

Lords Of Midnight (ZX Spectrum)

Developed/Published by: Mike Singleton / Beyond Software Released: 5/1984 Completed: 12/11/2021 Completion: Destroyed the Ice Crown with Fawkrin on Day 12. 22 Lords under my command. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

It’s rare to say I’m stunned by something, and it’s pretty surprising to say I’m stunned by a ZX Spectrum game from 1984, but holy hell am I stunned by Lords of Midnight.

I’m so stunned by Lords of Midnight I immediately regret not playing it properly earlier (for reasons I’ll detail) because it absolutely deserves a place on the Insert Credit list of Best British Games. It actually gets a tiny mention (alongside Mike Singleton’s later game Midwinter) during our discussion of Damocles, but it deserved so much more. So let’s just all agree that Sonic R isn’t on that list any more and Lords of Midnight is.

So why didn’t I play it properly earlier? Well, because I’ve always been completely baffled by it. I was sure I’d played it on Amstrad CPC--and I may well have--but I can’t see it having been put on any Amstrad Action covertapes of the period where I was religiously buying Amstrad Action, so I am pretty sure it must have been put on a PC Gamer (maybe PC Format?) coverdisk (or coverdisc?) at some point in the mid-late nineties in the form of one of Chris Wild’s ports, either DOS or Windows. It made no sense to me then either.

So let’s discuss what Lords of Midnight is before we get to why it baffled me and why now it astounds me. Lords of Midnight is a big ol’ rip-off of Lord of The Rings, basically, where a “fellowship” featuring an Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo and Legolas are tasked with two different possible solutions to defeating a Sauron: either by successfully attacking and taking the citadel his forces stream from, or by destroying his one ring analogue (the “ice crown”) which can only be done by the Frodo in combination with another character (possibly the Gollum that’s kicking about, if you can find him.) You lose if the Sauron takes the “citadel of Xajorkith”, or the Aragorn and Frodo are killed.

These characters all have their own names: Luxor, Morkin; the baddie is called Doomdark, but honestly, it’s quickest to make sense of it if you just think of it all via the Lord of the Rings. But here’s where things get crazy. The game begins and Luxor (Aragorn), Morkin (Frodo), Corleth (Legolas) and Rothron (Gandalf) are all standing about a tower on the east side of the map, and the game goes: ok, play me.

And you’re like “wait what?”

You see, Lords of Midnight comes from an era when no one really beholden to any genre, and, to be honest, probably didn’t know what else had even come out. So sure, by this point Wizardry’s come out; Ultima has reached it’s third instalment; but if you’re a guy like Mike Singleton working on the ZX Spectrum, you might not even know that, never mind be thinking “ok, well, I do dungeons like this and character development like that”.

Instead what you do is you decide every character will view the world in first-person, be able to turn in eight directions, ensure the graphics always show a relative viewpoint that extends as far into the background as possible, and design a huge open world with plains and mountains and nothing even slightly like a corridor to traverse.

It is, in its own way, a work of actual genius, it just works extremely differently from anything I experienced then and to be honest have experienced now. It has some echos of a board game: you move each character until they run out of movement/action points and “night falls” for them, once that’s done you end your turn and the forces of Doomdark move. And move they do! It’s a simplistic AI, but you’re in a race against time: either to move Morkin into position to nick and destroy the Ice Crown, or to get the other characters to recruit enough lords that you can defend and then push back Doomdark’s forces (or more likely, try to do both.) If you just stood still, you could literally watch the forces move across the map, sacking fortress after fortress.

Well, sort of. You see, the original Lords of Midnight only came with a paper map that roughly marked out where everything was, so you were forced to map something that (honestly) feels ten times more complex than a wizardry map even with warps and wrapping and all that shit. If you weren’t extremely dedicated, you’d just wander the map, get lost, and die--not helped by the fact that every screen had to redraw, meaning that you could quickly lose the sense of where you actually stood. So you had better get the graph paper out.

But of course, it’s 2021 and sack that. So I didn’t actually play this on the Spectrum, I played this via Chris Wild’s most recent build of his PC version, which is extremely faithful to the original though might have some bugs (there’s a GOG thread that claims that the battle calculations are off, and either it’s a bug or I missed something in the UI but I feel like there was more information available to me on things like the amount of enemies at a character’s location I could never find, which made the game a bit harder.). The reason to play Chris Wild’s version, bugs or not, is that it includes an amazing automap that fills itself in across successive games and means you can click about each character, know where they are and where they’re actually going.

I think there’s a really good argument to be made, however, that that’s actually a little unfaithful. You see, Lords of Midnight is very much about the experience of, I guess, “real” medieval warfare. A commander might have a crappy map, sure, but he sees the battle from the ground. He doesn’t look at a map and see an enemy approaching; he looks to the east, and tries to work out how many regiments are approaching.

I suspect that’s why the map doesn’t record where Doomdark’s regiments are (even if you can see them) and only tracks things like where wolves and horses are (which don’t move) and while I kind of wish I did, but I respect the decision to keep the thematic spirit of the original while updating it so looking around makes more sense.

That said, this game is taxing. Recruiting lords is as simple as meeting them with a character that they are willing to speak to, building their armies as simple as hitting “recruit” in keeps and citadels, and entering combat as simple as walking to face an enemy army and hitting attack--at which point the combat continues across days until you choose to run away or one side dies. If you’re playing for a military victory, you’ll be tracking the movement of up to 32 lords, each with individual numbers of warriors and riders, facing off against enemies that you also have to track mentally. In my winning game, I was tracking 22 lords and only a couple of active battle grounds, with the majority of my lords just retreating to the citadel of Xajorkith to defend it.

(Chris Wild’s PC version also doesn’t actually have an ability to save, too, increasing the absolute stress of a game where overnight an army can suddenly kill one of the two most important characters. You can restart a day, and take back a single move, but… woof.)

Alright, maybe I’m not selling this to you. Singleton positioned this as an “epic game” rather than something as simple as an RPG, and once you grasp the systems and understand how to navigate the world, it’s undoubtedly the best description. There’s something so much bigger to the story that you tell in a playthrough of Lords of Midnight than there is to (say) the average roguelike, where the story you tell often hews closer to diagetic (“I walked into a trap that spawned this enemy and I died”). Here, I failed loads of games trying to defend the mountain-ridged choke-point above the plains of Blood, but in my successful game I had my miltary forces withdraw to Xajorkith, keeping a secondary force at the Fortress of Kumar (yes!!!!) ready to strike. Morkin recruited Lord Shadows to defend him while Rothron went to recruit the legendary dragon Farflame. Lord Shadows got entangled in a battle in the plains of Ogrim, meaning Morkin had to wind his way around the mountains, eventually recruiting the skulkrin Fawkrin who followed behind him--close but not too close, much like Gollum. I intended Farflame to destroy the ice crown, but right before the tower of Doom Morkin found himself facing a regiment of Doomdark’s men; Farflame flew from Lord Shadow’s side to take them on, dying in the process but allowing Morkin to escape, get the ice crown to Fawkrin, who destroyed it.

Ok, look, it’s not Shakespeare; it’s not even Tolkien. But that’s not all to the story--I haven’t told you all about Corleths’ desperate flight to unite the Fey against Doomdark, ending in (likely doomed) battle of Kor keep, or… I’ll stop.

It’s wonderful. I’ve talked many a time on this site about how these early games are imagination engines, and I understand now why people obsess over this game still nearly 40 years later. It could desperately do with giving the player more information in a more succinct UI, but if you suddenly cluttered the main screen with all that info it wouldn’t just be these wild, spectrum vistas full of possibility. It’s a bit hard to recommend Lords of Midnight to any but the historian, but if you want to be amazed at what was possible, and imagine another future (imagine if this had become a huge hit in Japan instead of Wizardry?) you’ve got to experience this once. Just remember that it’s a first-person video game. I genuinely think that I couldn’t grasp that on that first screen you’re viewing the world through Luxor’s eyes back in the day!

Will I ever play it again? So, look, I’ll be honest: I probably won’t play this again, simply because as I said above trying for a military victory is so mentally taxing and also brutally long (I was amused to see the difference between an optimal ice crown victory and a completionist military victory youtube videos: fifteen minutes vs. over six hours) that unless a new version of this was to dilute the concept with a tactical map with full information I don’t think I’ll ever do it. However, Doomdark’s Revenge was out at the end of 1984, so I’ll play it, why not!

Final Thought: Mike Singleton very sadly passed away in 2012, and Lords of Midnight is another game with a complicated lack of a legacy, as a singular vision that broke the boundaries of its hardware to the point where no was really capable of ripping it off. I mean, it’s probably more sensible to just make an adventure game, or an RPG, or a war game. But here’s to a guy who went for it anyway and fucking smashed it. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi, either via a one-off donation (pay what you like) or by joining as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[orejasderatonbylu]

Siento que estoy lista para la portada de mi disco: Éxitos de los 90s 😎🙆 #90s #90smusic #coverdisc #cover #photo #sabroso

[tranzmitternetlabel]

Coming soon 》》》 [TREC018] Human Robot - Machine Rises by Tranzmitter Records. 🔈🔉🔊🎹🎧 #tranzmitter #records #buy #newtrack #newrelease #techhouse #musicsaveslives #musicbank #techno #beatport #junodownload #itunes #djtunes #album #deezer #symphonicdistribution #coverart #coverdisc #musicnonstop #humanrobot #soundcloud #spotfy

[synaptikmetal]

Hey Metalheads. Please check out the new issue of #TERRORIZER Magazine UK ......#Synaptik are on the Cover disc with an exclusive track "Human Inhuman" from our new album "Justify & Reason" (not our debut as the print inside says as that is sadly incorrect :/ ) Doh! New album is out March 10th and pre-orders are available right now at www.synaptikmetal.com/shop Enjoy #terrorizer #ukmetal #magazine #coverdisc #album #metalheadsofinstagram #metalonloud #metalheadsforever #thesnakesonfirerecords #metalheadsonly #Metalhead #terrorizermagazine #fearcandy #humaninhuman #justifyandreason #melodicmetal #progressivemetal #nevermore #controldenied #deathmetal #queensryche #watchtower #ironmaiden

[56k-modem]

Maximum PC CD-ROM coverdisc, September 1998

[benpaddon]

This may look like a magazine coverdisc from the late 90s. And it is! But there's a story here. • This CD contains additional content for Worms: The Director's Cut on the Amiga. Not just maps (though it has some of those) but the ambient CD audio and FMV videos from the CD-ROM versions of the original Worms. As WormsDC was only released on floppy disk, the idea was this content would be enabled using tooltips in the WormsDC icon. • Sadly, this wasn't ready for the final retail release of the game, and though the ReadMe file promised it would be included in a patch at a later date, that patch ultimately never arrived. A shame, really. • With this. New acquisition, my physical WormsDC collection is only missing one thing - a physical copy of the v1.05 patch disk sent out by Team17 to a handful of people in '97. My chances of snagging one of those is slim, though. Heigh ho. https://www.instagram.com/p/CYC0u4lPMRf/?utm_medium=tumblr

[luisfloriano]

[blockygraphics]

Images by wilma, from the Amiga ACS Coverdisc 1998-02 (Polish language), via cd.textfiles.com. Dated 1/1/09 and 4/1/98.

[fueradefocomagazine]

Vuelve la ceremonia del verano

Rock En Baradero tuvo su presentación oficial

Fotos Myriam González

Con la presencia de grandes artistas y medios. se llevo a cabo en The Temple Bar de Palermo se realizó la presentación oficial.

Rock en Baradero 2020  tendrá lugar el 22, 23 y 24 de febrero.

Con el correr de las horas el evento de presentación se transformo en fiesta, al ritmo de canciones y baile, el espíritu del rock vivió una jornada de celebración encendiendo los motores el verano.

De esta manera continúa la cuenta regresiva para el ritual de todos los veranos.

Cada vez falta menos para su sexta edición y el rock así lo celebra.

Bandas en vivo, artistas plásticos, activaciones, todo en un ambiente ideal de aire al puro al lado del río a solo 100 kilómetros de Buenos Aires y Rosario, con opciones gastronómicas variadas para relajarte mientras disfrutas de la música la naturaleza y el compromiso ecológico de siempre: el festival es también un llamado a la conciencia ambiental a través de sus contenidos.

22,23 y 24 de febrero es la fecha de llamado a toda la feligresía, porque Rock en Baradero es un culto al rock que año a año crece y se renueva.

Las entradas abonos ya están a la venta en "www.livepass.com.ar y puntos de venta:

Locuras Once,  Museum, Teatro Opera de La Plata y Coverdisc en Baradero

Más fotos en:

https://www.facebook.com/myriamgonzalez2018/posts/2508395736095481?__tn__=-R

[krispypenguinbird-blog]

Beatos No Século XIX. Arquitetura E Urbanismo De Uma Cidade Em Movimento

Cores de tintas para paredes externas Decore como um Arquiteto. Educador deve procurar agir como elemento incentivador do interesse das pequenos pelo enredo, comportando-se não somente como conciliador das histórias, porém, também demonstrando exalo e curiosidade, como mas um ouvinte interveniente no planeta do imaginário. Rose Hill Drive Download free music from Rose Hill Drive. Notably because of this a flaw in the games coding may make the game impossible to complete (the issue occurs fighting 3 robots in the Slaughter House Medial Hall, and the key not appearing). The Vocal History Center is a research program of the University of California, Berkeley, working within The Bancroft Library The Vocal History Center preserves the history of the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and the Western United States. Programs from San Francisco Government Television. A collection of feature or short silent films uploaded by archive users. Produced from electronic files provided by the bureaus and offices of the Smithsonian Institution. Topics: videogame, patch, videogame patch, Red Alert, Westwood Entertainment. Entretanto, com site há três anos no atmosfera, os usuários da pouco acessavam as páginas no qual figuravam os materiais de espeque da Videoteca e nenhum mentor havia enviado seus relatos de prática, conforme aguardado. The majority of these games will not run correctly acessível modern operating systems. It was an attempt to follow on the success of the company's ColecoVision video game console. However, we will also include already digitalized material of varying quality from other libraries. Since the movie's 1989 release, they have played exhibition games, performed comedy routines, taught kids' baseball clinics conectado the Field of Dreams and at ballparks around the world. Topics: X68000 utilitário, magazine coverdiscs, Japanese computers. disco-ROMs released 1993-2002 containing uploads to the Aminet, an Amiga utilitário collection brought to the world in 1992 by Urban Müller that became the largest of its kind in the world. Selections from daily televisão news programs produced by national broadcasters throughout the Middle East are featured here. Summary by Jota. Hall For further information, including links to conectado text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording. Released 1991 Platform DOS Genre Strategy Perspective 3rd-Person Perspective Theme Real-Time, Turn-based Description It's all-out war in Scorched Earth, an artillery combat game. Click for next video or program guide Date: 2001-09-11 12:48:09 UTC Air Time: 2001-09-11 08:48:09 EDT Length: 0:41:41. Book from Project Gutenberg: Andersen's Fairy Tales Category: Audio Book, human-read. Pioneering a new type of independent media based acessível exchange and participation, Open Democracy spans the globe and covers the key questions of our times with interviews and contributions from renowned authors and marginalized voices alike.

[luisfloriano]

Capa para Banda de bluesrock Bad Whiskey Trio de Porto Alegre

[blockygraphics]

OCZY.GIF, by Dariusz Burkiewicz; from the Amiga ACS Coverdisc 1998-02 (Polish language), via cd.textfiles.com.