[SirFozzie]

I have an urge to play some of the old Gold Box games. Which ones? Well, that's up to you. Let's see what you think:

Pools Series (Forgotten Realms)

Games:

Pools of Radiance
Curse of the Azure Bonds
Secret of the Silver Blades
Pools of Darkness

The original series, this four pack of games take heroes all the way from little known nobodies helping rebuild the city of Phlan to world spanning heroes defeating the plan of the Evil God Bane to snatch several cities off the face of Faerun. Pretty standard series of games, but by the time you get to Pools of Darkness, things can get slightly ridiculous (Characters can hit up to Level *FOURTY* in a class in Pools of Darkness).


Krynn (Dragonlance series)

Games:

Champions of Krynn
Death Knights of Krynn
Dark Queen of Krynn

The second series of AD&D featured the world of Dragonlance, one of TSR's hottest properties at the time. Don't let the Pulp-ish title fool you, this is a pretty good series of games, offering some different things then the other Gold Box series (three classes of Knights, kender, etcetera). Does suffer from some of the same problems as the first series (the final game has you travel to the Abyss to deal with Takhisis, the chief evil goddess), but has some of the coolest bad guys ever (including Lord Soth, the aforementioned Death Knight)


Savage Frontiers Series (Forgotten Realms)

Gateway to the Savage Frontier
Treasures of the Savage Frontier

The second Forgotten Realms series, this was licensed out to a new development team (Stormfront Studios, who made a ton of hit games, the Tony LaRussa baseball series, the first PGA Tour Golf game, the Madden series, etcetera). They created two pretty good games in the series, (set in the Savage Frontier region of the Forgotten Realms, far away from the previous Forgotten Realms series) and the follow up to the series was the first ever Graphical MMO, America OnLine's Neverwinter Nights (not to be confused with the more recent series).


Buck Rogers duology (Buck Rogers)

Countdown to Doomsday
Matrix Cubed

Doesn't seem right, does it? Above, we have 9 sword and sorcery games, and here we have.. Buck Freaking Rogers? Well, therein lies a tale.

It seems that head of TSR at the time (who had taken control of the company from Gary Gygax in a semi-hostile takeover, going so far as to sue Gygax when he formed his own company and attempted to create a new fantasy RPG) held the rights to Buck Rogers , and decided to use TSR as a launching point to reintroduce Buck Rogers to the modern audience.

This led to "Buck Rogers in the XXV Century" The RPG (based off AD&D rules). The RPG was not a huge success, and it (along with over optimistic expansion plans, and a huge flop with a collectible dice game, Dragon Dice that started pretty strong, but when TSR flooded the market with expansions (as well as trying to sell through book retailers), the market collapsed, and TSR was holding the bag for millions of dollars in losses (which eventually led to the company's sale to Wizards of the Coast).

While I have not played the two games before, they are pretty well reviewed, so I figured to provide the option if folks wanted me to play it.