The Let's Play Archive

Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic

by CrookedB

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Original Thread: Blue dot, red dot, pew pew pew. Let's play Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic!

 

Introduction



Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic is a sci-fi role-playing game released by Electronic Arts in 1988, back when the grass was greener and cRPGs were thriving. Sentinel Worlds is a real-time game, with space and ground (party-based) combat. In ground combat, you only control the party's current leader, with the rest of your party being handled by the game's (not so good) AI. Sentinel Worlds is a combat-heavy game but, truth be told, the combat is quite simplistic and sometimes downright tedious, so a screenshot LP is probably best suited for it. What it excels in, is its atmosphere, dialogues (to some extent), and a sense of exploration and freedom, however fake that freedom might actually be. The character system is skill- and stat-based, being in a sense, though not quite, your typical RPG fare. As you can tell from its title, Sentinel Worlds I: Future Magic was released with a sequel in mind, which unfortunately never saw the light of day. Still, the man behind the game, Karl Buiter, soon developed another EA-published title, Hard Nova (1990), considered a spiritual successor to Sentinel Worlds and sharing many of its gameplay mechanics.



Why LP this game?
Well, first off, to let everyone know it exists. Unfortunately, despite being a cult classic, Sentinel Worlds isn't as widely known as it (probably) should be. And following an LP is a nice and easy way of getting to know a game - without going through the trouble of actually playing it, you know. Plus, Sentinel Worlds is, plain and simple, a fun game, despite its shortcomings (such as being real-time and hack'n'slashy, not turn-based and tactical, as I would really like it to be). It is atmospheric and in many aspects well-designed, making it, to me, a pleasure to be messing around with.

What kind of LP will this be?
The game was released for DOS and Commodore 64; it is the EGA DOS version I'll be LPing. This will be a screenshot LP. Sentinel Worlds' combat is tedious and videos would get boring fast. Doing a screenshot LP, on the other hand, will (hopefully) allow me to keep things concise and reader-friendly. This won't be a 100% completionist run, because I only played the game once and haven't discovered all the content it has to offer. There will be a lot of quoting the manual since, as befits an oldschool cRPG, things like "Read paragraph 37" tend to pop up quite frequently in Sentinel Worlds.

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