My Retro Gaming Encounter Table

On 12/25/2014 at 05:33 AM by KnightDriver

After thinking about randomly selecting old games to play during holidays, and reading a lot of old D&D stuff, I came up with an interesting idea. Why not make a monster encounter table for games. I used the genres listed at allgame.com (when it was up), and the stats I came up with few month ago on my gaming habits. The result is below.

d%	Genres
1	Fighting
2	Educational
3-4	Adventure
5-6	Sports
7-8	Simulation
9-11	Racing
12-14	Puzzle
15-18	Traditional
19-25	Compilation
26-32	Strategy
32-49	Role-Playing
50-74	Shooter
75-100	Action

So I had numbers on how many games of each genre I had played and then determined the percentage of the total each represented to make the table. I don't have a column for numbers of games that would appear, but I'm thinking about that. I don't think I can get through more than one or two games on a weekend though, so I may not need one.

Once I've choosen a genre by rolling 2d10, or just going to random.org, I look down the list of games on the pages I saved from the allgame.com database sorted from highest rank to lowest, and then choose something I want to play. It's kinda neat. . . and, I guess, super weird.

My first roll went thus:

DM - "You have rolled a 3. That's Adventure. Now choose a game from this allgame.com list."

KD - "Hum. . . Maybe King's Quest II. It's on Steam, but it looks like it's dubious whether it'll run on Windows 7 64 bit. It's on GOG.com and seems to say it will run fine on Win 7, but, I'm still PC shy. What if it crashes. Plus, after watching some video reviews, I really don't want to do those text commands. I'm a point-and-click man. Hum. . . down the list. Oh look! It's Resident Evil and it's available on PSN right now! And Silent Hill! Also on PSN. I think I'll break out my much neglected PS3 this New Year's Party weekend and play them. Cool!"

DM - "The Resident Evil approaches."

You can tell, I'm up late and can't sleep can't you. You only do stuff like this when you can't sleep. Yawn. Maybe now.

Super Step Contributing Writer

12/25/2014 at 10:29 AM

I've usually been ok running stuff intended for other OS on my Windows 8.1 laptop.

If you're ever wondering about a game's performance on your PC, Can You Run It? gives you some pretty good rundowns.

KnightDriver

12/25/2014 at 09:49 PM

I'm pretty sure I could run King's Quest II, but after seeing the review, I realized you have to type in text commands like in a pure text adventure like Zork, and I was kinda not into that right now. My other issue is payments. I don't want to put a card online, so I need another solution.

12/25/2014 at 10:30 PM

If you don't want to put a card online, one route is to pay at Gamestop to get a code for some Steam Wallet money or whatever the equivalent is on the service you use. Of course, I have no idea what other services GameStop supports, but you can always check.

12/25/2014 at 11:47 PM

Yea, I think there's something like that for Steam. GOG, I'm not sure though.

12/26/2014 at 12:05 AM

Well, there's definitely that for Steam. That's how my friend gifted me $20 on Steam.

12/26/2014 at 12:11 AM

Gifting is so cool. I wish I could do that on the consoles.

12/26/2014 at 01:25 AM

I would think you could. Like buy a code for Xbox Live or PS+ money and give someone the receipt with the code on it.

12/26/2014 at 03:52 PM

Yea, there's that, but sometimes I want to demand a friend play something with me and the only way to get them to do it would be to gift them the game directly. If I hand them points, they'll just get something else. What's a gaming dictator to do?

NSonic79

01/07/2015 at 03:36 PM

No excuses! You rolled a King's Quest II so you get a King's Quest II! have you know honor? have you no shame! Honor the roll!!!! Respect the bones!

01/08/2015 at 03:38 AM

Well, I don't roll the actual game. I tried that once and it was a little too restrictive to be fun. So now I roll the genre and then look through the list and choose one. That's been way more fun than going totally random. I heard though that there will be a new King's Quest game this year, so I'm excited for that.

PixlBit