It looks like there were also a bunch of scenarios released for Realmz. I’m trying to remember…I definitely remember playing City of Bywater. I don’t know if I’ve played the other scenarios, though.
If you haven’t played them and can round them up, might be that you’ve only played about a fraction of the content out for Realmz, if what you’re after is Realmz-like stuff. :-)
While new scenarios were released throughout the game’s history, also typically packed along with the game in the next Realmz release, the game ultimately ended up with 13 official scenarios:
City Of Bywater (developed alongside Realmz by Tim Phillips)
I’ve definitely played City of Bywater.
Prelude To Pestilence (1995, Sean Sayrs)
Assault On Giant Mountain (1995, Tim Phillips)
Castle in The Clouds (1995, Jim Foley)
I seem to recall the above names, though I don’t remember the scenario content, if I did play them. Nothing after this rings a bell at all.
Destroy The Necronomicon (1995, Tim Phillips)
White Dragon (1996, Jim Foley)
Grilochs Revenge (1997, Sean Sayrs)
Twin Sands of Time (1999, Sean Sayrs)
Trouble in the Sword Lands (1999, Pierre H. Vachon)
Mithril Vault (1999, Tim Phillips)
Half Truth (2000, Nicholas T. Tyacke)
War in the Sword Lands (2000, Pierre H. Vachon)
Wrath of the Mind Lords (2002, Pierre H. Vachon)
EDIT: There’s also apparently a pretty-inactive Realmz subreddit at /r/Realmz. No GOG Realmz release either, though. Some abandonware sites appear to have it.
Hah! I didn’t know this. Back when Jeff Vogel — the Spiderweb Software guy — was just starting out, Fantasoft, the company that did Realmz, published the first three Exile games too.
goes through the rest of the list
I don’t think that anything else they published were RPGs, though I’ve played some of the non-RPG games.
Yeah, Dwarf Fortress too, but at least Dwarf Fortress has an extensive, well-documented wiki. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead had a not-very-up-to-date wiki at one point, but then whoever maintained it had it go down at some point in the past year, and I’d say that the game has also been constantly updated and more-dramatically-rebalanced than Dwarf Fortress, so learning to how to play involves scouring Reddit, YouTube, and Discord to try to figure out what information is current. I think that the current recommended route on the subreddit to learn how to play is to watch recent YouTube videos of some streamers playing, which is…kinda nuts. It’s not uncommon that a question on the subreddit as to an authoritative answer on game mechanics is “go check the code”…
There are also some military sims I’ve played that are probably reasonably approachable to players who are familiar with the military hardware involved from prior to the game, but for players who aren’t, they’re probably in for a lot of reading and understanding mechanics, and some milsims don’t bother to document that, so you really need to do outside reading beyond whatever the game documentation has.
I get free reducing the barrier-to-entry, but I kinda look at games in terms of “how much is the ratio of the cost to how many hours of fun gameplay that I get?”
I mean, I have some games that I briefly try, dislike, and never play again. Those are pretty expensive, almost regardless of the purchase price.
But the thing is, if it’s a game that you play a lot, the purchase price becomes almost irrelevant in cost-per-hour of gameplay. I’ve played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead — well, okay, you can download that for free, but I also bought it on Steam to throw the developers some money — and Caves of Qud a ton. The price on them is basically a rounding error. And the same is probably true for the top few games in my game library.
You could charge me probably $2000 for Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and it’d still be cheaper per hour of gameplay than nearly all games that I’ve played, because I’ve spent so many hours in the thing.
If people are playing these like crazy, you’d think that the same would hold for them. That the cost for a game that you play like crazy for many years just…doesn’t matter all that much, because the difference in hours played between games is so huge that it overwhelms the difference in price.
Realmz was out about the same time as Spiderweb Software’s games (Exile series, later re-released as Avernum series). Both were popular RPGs for the Macintosh (though I believe both had Windows releases as well).
While I did play and enjoy Realmz back in the day, I personally preferred the Spiderweb Software games. More complicated interaction with the world, and I preferred the writing. Less-pretty, though the Avernum re-release was isometric and had new graphics. Have you ever tried them?
I don’t know if I can recommend them in 2025, but if you’re still enjoying Realmz, I figure that the Spiderweb Software stuff might also be something of interest.
EDIT: The current Steam sale, which runs for another two days, appears to have a bundle of all of their games on sale for 60% off. I didn’t personally enjoy the Geneforge series as much as the Exile/Avernum series, and the Avadon series is considerably simpler, and didn’t really grab me. But a lot of the games are also on sale individually, so…shrugs
EDIT2: It looks like Realmz has not seen a Steam release; thought I’d check to see if it was on Steam too.
7.1% of the total hours spent were on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive / Counter-Strike 2
6.4% were in League of Legends
6.2% were in Roblox
5.8% were in Dota 2
5.4% were in Fortnite
That is a lot of people playing free-to-play competitive multiplayer games.
I’d kind of like to see someone review retro games on a “equal standing” with current games. That is, sure, they’re using old technology, sure, but see how they stand up to current games in terms of what you pay and the time investment in playing them.
While I remember having fun with Chrono Trigger, I don’t know if, in 2025, I’d recommend it or any older RPG to someone who has never played them. By the standards of its time, it wasn’t very grindy, but speaking broadly, older RPGs have a lot of repetitive combat.
On the other hand, a lot of, say, older shmups are, I think, still competitive. I don’t feel like the genre has changed as much (though I’ll concede that I haven’t spent a lot of time on modern shmups). So I’d probably be more-inclined to recommend an older shmup, even though I’d say that Chrono Trigger was probably, in its time, a better Super Nintendo game than any Super Nintendo shmup.
EDIT: For an extreme example, I think I first played Tetris on a Game Boy around 1990. I think that that’s probably still about on-par with the 2018 Tetris Effect: Connected with a VR headset. The thirty intervening years haven’t really seen that much change in the fundamentals of falling-block games.
So, to expand on that, at least in US law (and I’d assume elsewhere), if you let people use your trademark for other products and don’t legally challenge it, the trademark can become genericized, which means that you lose the exclusive right to use it.
I don’t know if that was the concern here, but generally, it’s true that there’s an obligation on trademark holders to actively defend their trademarks or lose them.
Unfortunately, I have to take down this project. The team at Playstack reached out to me in a very polite and professional manner, requesting its removal, and I fully respect their wishes.
Those are all mature systems, and I’d say that rankings for games on old systems are reasonably consensus at this point. You can just search for “best system whatever games” and get lists, look for games in genres you like; I’ve had luck doing that in the past, as that avoids a lot of the chaff.
I personally probably have gone back and played Super Metroid the most on the SNES, but depends on what one likes. If you like RPGs from that era, different set of games.
I didn’t hate it, but it just wasn’t Fallout: New Vegas, and I walked away a little disappointed after hoping for a new Fallout-like game.
Some of the major elements from Fallout just weren’t there:
Fallout provided neat perks/traits that substantially-impacted how one played; that’s a signature part of the series. The great bulk of the perks in The Outer Worlds were things like small percentage increases. They didn’t have a significant impact on how the game played out.
The weapons didn’t “feel” very different other than across classes, with the exception of the “science weapons”, so there wasn’t a lot of variety in gunplay over the course of a game.
While the world was open in that one could technically always backtrack, there wasn’t much reason to do so.
Most of the content was in “cities”. Yeah, sure, there was wilderness, and maybe that added a sense of scale, but it was mostly just filler between cities. If you’re wandering around in Fallout: New Vegas or Fallout 4, there was interesting content all over to just stumble into. One only really got that in cities.
Not a lot by way of meaningful, world-affecting decisions. Okay, you can also criticize Fallout 4 on these grounds, but if you were hoping for a Fallout: New Vegas…
There were some things that I did like. In particular:
It was pretty stable and bug-free. The Fallout series has had entrants from a number of teams, but one consistent element has been a lot of bugs at release.