Index > Dead Critic > ZZ Dead > Until fairly recently they were one of the oldest bands to still have the original lineup intact > I saw an article about his illness a couple weeks ago > Re: I saw an article about his illness a couple weeks ago > Avernum chat!! > We've been talking about it pretty frequently for the past few years.
Posted by Paul C (@paulc) on Sept. 7, 2026, 6:17 a.m.
Sounds like I had a similar background with the series. I’m guessing you had a mac in the 90’s?
I came to the series with the shareware version of the 2nd one. The 1st in its original form was too janky even for me.
I enjoyed the shareware section of II, going down the river, but never played the full version. Vogel has said it was a silly idea in retrospect to make the shareware sections self-contained and the size a full game.
III is the one I got fully registered and I have fond memories of it, though I haven’t played it since. Also never played the second trilogy.
I generally liked the old 2D style, but nowadays I tend to find the Avernum games the sweet spot in terms of not looking too basic, but still being visually legible. The latest remake is superficially better, but actually harder to make out what’s going on.
I also found the new remake weirdly brutally hard, though I realised part of that is probably that I used to savescum my way through these games, and I don’t tend do that anymore.
Realmz was the other mac RPG shareware hit, that one has fallen into obscurity though as the developer dropped off the face of the earth. I figured out how to get the mac version running on emulator a while back and might try to get into it.
I heard somewhere Realmz actually got sued because they took a lot of the mechanics straight from D&D without bothering to change them.