How did you start playing LBA?

[Mia]

For me, it was an uncle who bought LBA 2 for my older sister for Christmas. (she was 10 at this point) because he thought "The characters on the front looked fun". I got Barbie Detective and the mystery of the carnival. I finished this game 3 times in half an hour, and went over to my sister's PC. She was struggling because she wasn't sure about getting to the weather wizard.
I sat there. And I was hooked. I loved the graphics, I found the storyline intensely amusing, and I wanted a go. But she wouldn't give it up!!
The next day, my dad was having a go. He said it looked a really good, complicated game, and declared it his next project. I sat there in awe, watching him direct this guy in a blue tunic around and beat up people.
He then sat me at the computer, showed me the controls, and sat beside me, helping me defeat various villains and showing me how to get money from garbage cans.
I never gave up since. I never finished the game at that age, but as I got older, I played for myself and discovered for myself its magic!


Funny, I was idly playing LBA the other day, and I beat up the nurse. She said "You killed him!" in this shocked voice. I said, "yeah, well he was hitting me in case you didn't notice!" She said "you could have hit him back if you didn't like it." "I did! Not my fault he died from the injury!"
Then, out of the blue, she said "i always liked beating up random people in LBA2, like the fisherman, and the motorcycle guy, and Bob!"
Hmmm....

So how did you first come across LBA? Was it 1 or 2? What made you decide to pick it up?

[morshem]

I thought that such was in the common threads thingie... Anyway, to shorten a story I told several times, I saw it at a friend's house when it was a new game, but only played it for the first time in 2001.

[LBAWinOwns]

I don't remeber the year, but it was with my big brother (no, not the celebrity one ). He had to translate the imporant things so i had to play together with him, sometimes i played alone, had no idea what they said so i had no clue what to do alone...

Also we played lba2 after lba1, so it was naturally to shift-use the ferry ticket, and you get the rest of the crazy story .

LBA1 = included in CREATIVE CS100 SPEAKERS
LBA2 = bought, my brother wanted red alert so we nagged so i think dad like got us both

[Schnitzel-Man]

LBA1 - My brother brought a copy of the floppy version from a friend, when I was 11 years old. A few years later I got the CD version as part of a promotion for a computer magazine.

LBA2 - Actually that's a funny story. I sent a walkthrough of LBA1 to the same magazine, and won my choice of game from a list of games. One of them was LBA2, so of course I chose it. Unfortunately, the game wasn't out yet... so I took Time Commando instead. A few months later, when LBA2 finally came out, my cousin borrowed it from a friend, so I borrowed it from him

[Lightwing]

My brother was showing me these cracked games he got from a friend and Relentless happened to be one of them. It didn't have any music, speech, or FMVs but I loved the gameplay.

The begining really reminded me of BioForge. In BioForge you also start out in a prison cell and have to fight a guard. And then both games have a CG shot of the main character lurking in the shadows.

BioForge Screens

I remember the Asylum level in LBA being extremely difficult. I was never able to escape while I played the ripped version.

Then, on my 11th birthday, my bro gave me Relentless and I remember being totaly astonished when I heard the voices and the FMVs. When I finally got out of the prison, my jaw dropped. This was back in 1995, where an interactive world like LBA's barely existed in any game.

[PlasmaStorm]

LBA2: Well, i got this Activision demo disc from somewhere nad it had
Twinsen's Oddysey listed on it. So i played it and the game looked awsome.

A few years later, my bro got the full version. I played it, I loved it! After my
win 95 pc broke down, i could never play it again. but one day,i found
dosbox! Now i can play it again! got up to emerald moon in a few days.

LBA1: Saw it in EB for playstation, didnt get it. still hope to find another copy.

[ender wiggin]

I saw my roommmate playing it during my last year of uni (earlier 1996), I did not have a descent PC at the time (x486 monochrome laptop), but 6 months later after I graduated I got my first PC (Pentium @ 233 MHz) and saw Relentless (LBA) on sale for $20, I brought it and started playing, and have been hooked ever since. Several months later Twinsen's Odyssey (LBA2) was released and I brought it immediatly. It is odd considering all the games I have played over the last ten years, these two still are still in my thoughts amd such a big part of my life.

Maybe I need to get a life!

[ishashobar]

Originally Posted by morshem

I thought that such was in the common threads thingie...

maybe we should make a sticky thread thingie then
anyway used to buy every game that got good ratings back in 97
and he got twinsen's oddessy!(a.k.a LBA2 for those who don't know)

[elmuerte]

this review:

[Battler]

Well... the first one I played was LBA 2.

But the story about it is a bit weird. Well... me and a friend of mine (who, coincidence or what?, was also my next-door neighbor), who were both almost 11 at the time, finished the Tomb Raider 2 demo, and we wanted the full version. So, me and my mother went into the local game store, and she bought 2 games - one was the full Tomb Raider 2, and the other was LBA 2.
I was so much into Tomb Raider 2, that I didn't want to play LBA 2, even though she insisted. But then, she started playing LBA 2. I was sitting there and watching. The whole game astonished me! I quickly forgot about Tomb Raider 2 and started playing LBA 2 with my mother (it was very difficult for the first time). And to mention that we finished game without the protection spell (we didn't know how to get it)!

Then came LBA 1. I was wondering how it was, then I found it on the February 1996 CD of a computer magazine. It was the demo, the very same demo which is now also available for download from the MBN. Again, I started playing it with my mother. We managed to get out of the Citadel, but then... surprise! The game "finished" after we tried to get ahead in the outside scene. And we both wanted the rest of the game. So my mother then ordered the full game from that very computer magazine (yes, they had a section, where you could order full software and games).
We got the game and started playing it (and at some 60% of the gameplay, my mother found out we already had the full game on a pirate CD - it was the 1994 floppy version, which unfortunately got lost when we moved to Slovenia ). It was amazing! So we were playing it, all 3! Me, my mother, and my neighbor/friend. My neighbor/friend was also the one who actually found out how to skip that crazy bulldozer on Polar Island, and how to climb onto the mountain with Sendell's Well.
So the game was finished. Then I played the 1994 floppy version - had those slide shows instead of the videos - and I played with my neighbor/friend, since still only he knew how to avoid the crazy bulldozer (I figured out how to climb onto that mountain by then) by then.

But I wasn't really active in the LBA's campus for some time, until... the summer of 2002. I found the MBN site and El's LBA DeCOMP. This is when I got into the LBA modding universe. Of course, the LBA DeCOMP didn't give me a lot of modding possibilities - even its archiving/de-archiving possibilities were kinda limited. And I knew nothing about Zink's programs (which by then did NOT include the now most famous LBArchitect). So some years passed with the LBA DeCOMP.
Then came the winter of 2004. It were February, March and April (April 7th being when I registered here). I was never really interested in the forum, until a new friend of mine, known here as N-SoftInd, told me that this was a cool place to be. Then also lbaguy3d registered, and finally me (this was my first time in foruming ). Well... then I wrote my first LBA programs - the LBA HQR/DeHQR utility (today known as WinHQR, in future as LBA Resource Manager) and I also had N-SoftInd's LBA Text File Editor. So I published both here.

And well, you all know my story from that point on.

P.S.: And of course, by now, I have played both LBA 1 and LBA 2 several times, and I now know myself, how to get rid of that crazy bulldozer (not that it's not possible to remove it with either LBA Story Coder or LBA Scene Manager ).


I think I told it all now.

[Purple Sheep]

You registered on my birthday...

I first heard of LBA2 when my brother came home from a friend's house telling me about a really cool game in which you have to find a cure for your pet, a dinosaur-type thing. Then he got the game for his birthday. A few years later we decided to buy LBA1 (it was still in the shops at that point). He told me the graphics wouldn't be as good, and I prepared myself to be disappointed, but on playing it I still thought they were great.

[Streg]

Nice thread.

Me and my brother were looking for some game as it was a long time we didn't get new games, then we went to a game store. The LBA2 box was there, with a funny man with a weird hair on it, we bought it. As soon as we got home we started playing the new game, it was amazing. The nice graphics, the funny video animations, the funny characters impressed us a lot. We had (and still have) a friend that used to play that game a lot, we only found that out after we killed the Tralu. We tried to complete the game together, everything some of us found out told the others, but we got stuck at the island of knartas. We had 3 of the 4 fragments, we weren't able to find out where the francos fragment was!! We read the letter so many times, trying to use that pickaxe everywhere...
It was me who found out where it was! I called everyone, was very excited, we were so near to the end of the game? We ran to celebration island and put the key in the center of the room. We stared at the screen looking the animation. When we 'found out' Dark Monk was actually FunFrock we didn't know who this guy was, but we didn't care about that too much, we were interested in saving all the kids all the wizards and Twinsun!

After we finished the game we wanted to 'test' the first sequel of lba1. After getting a demo and thinking we could spend some money to buy the full version we started playing also LBA.
It was much harder than LBA2, but we didn't get stuck anywhere, I think we finished it in a month or something using the same "team strategy" .
But I liked lba2 much more than relentless, so I started playing it on my own a lot of times, and I'm still doing it. We were all waiting for a sequel, and when we got the internet we got the TERRIBLE news about LBA3. ;_;

Well, that's all.

[Lightwing]

I just noticed how many of our cases involve family members.

[Mia]

Well many of us were younger than being quite able to play LBA on our own back then?

[Yassilus]

Hi and hello,
I'm new here and it's refreshing to see that the LBA series still got a lot of fans and an active community. I was really happy when I found out about MBN. Good job!

I started playing LBA1 together with a friend back in 96/97ish. I was like ten years and three apples high, and more important, I was totally sold on the game. Gosh, I still get tears in my eyes when I think about playing this really nice game. We made it through the game (not so clever, we replaced Phil Vacheys wonderful music with a greatest hits disc of Björn Skifs) at last and let it rest for some time.

After a while we found out about LBA2 and once and again we played through a LBA game with much joy. This time we kept the music.

Even though it was a while since I last played the game I remeber a lot about it, both the games and the feelings when I played it. Needless to say, I've never had a gaming experience like the LBA games.

[SebZ]

Welcome Yassilus. Enjoy your stay here!

Lba2: My mum had bought the game, thinking that I'd put it away like all my other games. No, I kept this game out. Played it non-stop at my grandparents down in Tasmania. I remember, that I couldn't even figure outmuch of what to do. Lol. That was funny. Anyway, then we flew back home. I installed it to my pc, and 1 year of happyness and anger went by when I couldn't figure out how to get the last fragment. The fragment of the Wannies. I asked around at school, and one kid said to throw my magicball down at the lava, it exploded and I got the fragment. I knew it wouldn't work. 2 years later, and I pull the CD back out, and start from the beginning. 5 months later, I was back up to the same part, and I asked my cousins ages away (Who has both games) how they finnished it. They couldn't remember, but that was the first time I heard about Relentless. After a few hours after the conversation, I got the last fragment, and 3 weeks later I finished the game for the first time!!! Now, I'm up to 26 times.
That's it really.

Lba1: I got off eBay. (No discription for that. Haven't finnished it yet!)

[Vultures]

I had LBA1 when it comes out in 1994 and also LBA2 when it comes out in 97...
My dad liked Fred's game, so I also had AITD when it comes out in 92 and Time Commando in 96.

[the_angry_monkey]

first got LBA back in 1995/6 when it had just come out on budget label EA. Back then I couldn't afford new games and my 486 wouldn't run them anyway. Bought it with my younger brother and we played it for like a week solid. The smell of the inside of the box still makes me nostalgic Of course I did have to spend many hours getting the bastard sound card to work with it properly, but that was the joy of DOS

LBA 2 I didn't get until 1999 as I still had the 486 at that point and didn't get a P120 until 1999. Had played the demo of LBA2 when it came out and after waiting for ages for a budget version decided to splash the cash anyway.

[Lightwing]

Originally Posted by Mia

Well many of us were younger than being quite able to play LBA on our own back then?

LBAs can get pretty challanging, but I don't think that we couldn't play them on our own (I played Relentless when I was 11, so that may be why).

But I think that they're just such great games that everybody wants to share the experience, rather than play them behind closed doors.

[Streg]

Originally Posted by Lightwing

LBAs can get pretty challanging, but I don't think that we couldn't play them on our own (I played Relentless when I was 11, so that may be why).

But I think that they're just such great games that everybody wants to share the experience, rather than play them behind closed doors.

Exaclty. I was very angry when I learned noone at school had lba2 and I coulnd't talk to anyone about it -.-

[SebZ]

Originally Posted by Lightwing

(I played Relentless when I was 11, so that may be why).

Lol, I was 9 when I first played Lba2.

[Kieron]

Originally Posted by LBAWinOwns

LBA1 = included in CREATIVE CS100 SPEAKERS

hehe snap, i got lba in my creative cdrom+soundcard+games pack ^_^ along with alone in the dark 1 and 2 and a few others... *sigh*

[Vultures]

Originally Posted by Lightwing

(I played Relentless when I was 11, so that may be why)

Originally Posted by SebZ

Lol, I was 9 when I first played Lba2.

I was 8 when I had LBA1 and I remember all the time it took me to get out of the citadel !!! It was hard and it's why we all liked this game when we was young.

[d0X]

I first played LBA 1 on the PSX around the year of 1997 on an "Essential PlayStation Mag" demo disc (some other the other games i loved back then were also on it... Tomb Raider, Time Commando ect.) I loved the game, it was so hard because i were 8 or so years old at the time, but i completed the small demo that day.
After about half a year or so i totally forgot it but then one day my brothers friend brought a demo disc over with one of my other favourite games on it, Dark Forces: Jedi Knight! We went through all the games, i can barely remember the names of them, but besides JK, there was two others, Carmageddon (which my brother loved) and LBA 2! I played it then i was saying to myself "wait, i think ive played this before!" Then i relised it was the sequel. I loved it more than the first... the graphics, game play and atmosphere... like how the citizens walked around and talked to you and how there was a rain storm going on. It was so cool! And this may sound pathetic, but because i was so young and never thought of buying the full version i used to go round the Island making up pretend quests, story line and try to explore areas you couldn't get to

Early 2004, i remembered the game and got both LBA 1 & LBA 2 off eBay
I also found this website around the same time, but only reg. recently

EDIT: I also remember my friend won his copy of LBA 2 off a TV game show!!

[Lightwing]

Originally Posted by astrik.sega

EDIT: I also remember my friend won his copy of LBA 2 off a TV game show!!

Jeesh. A TV game show, eh? That's pretty major. I didn't know LBA was that popular.