Mail Order Monsters was one of the greatest games ever for the C64.
I just watched it on the ut00be. Can't believe I never ever ever saw this game b4!@??!?
Pretty much everything by EA (Deathlord, Legacy of the Ancients, Wasteland, etc. etc., at that time) was, and it's a huge loss that they were never ported to the Amiga.
+999
Skipping all the technical details in the above posts, are you guys saying that Total Chaos is anything like M.O.M.? If so.... aaaargh! I might have to somehow make room on my coffee table for an AGA system! ;-)
Total Chaos is "anything" like it, in that I wanted to make a game where you fight your monsters against each other in an arena. But I did it as a boardgame cause I am a big fan of board games.
I had thought about having an optional arcade battling option (like the battling of Archon or M.O.M.) but I decided not to code it myself due to I wanted the game to be 100% netplayable and you can't do good 2D battling over the net. The random lag ruins it. (3D games get around the problem by LYING and CHEATING and FAKING everything. In 3D games everything is a big illusion and you can't get away with that stuff in a 2d game that needs 100% accuracy.)
Ok so I added in some code to Total Chaos so that any random person could code in gfx fx for the game using any random programming language of their choice. I did that and it worked. I also offered to put in "subgames" using the same technique. One guy coded a breakout subgame in Blitz Basic. Nobody coded an "archon / M.O.M arcade battling subgame" tho.
I have 4096 unfinished tasks on my plate already so there is just no way I can code an action battling subgame. But if someone else wants to code one then I am sure we can integrate it into the main boardgame.
Basically when a battle is supposed to happen the game calls a CLI command (which is the battling game written in any language by anybody) with some parameters such as a big block of chipram that can be used for the screen, the player names, the player units involved in the battle, etc.
Then we'd have it.
In M.O.M. you get money and they u get to go BUY any body part or weapon you want.
In Total Chaos you have to go out and FIND the body parts, weapons or whatever and then you cast them (with magic) onto whichever monster you want. M.O.M. had like 12 body parts and 11 weapons while Total Chaos has a megabajillion different ways to customize your monsters. Total Chaos just plain has a lot more "statistics" for each monster so there are more ways to customize them and build them up.
Many ppl have played Total Chaos continuously for several years and they still write in with crazy stories of new combinations they found that created some totally wacked out new type of monster.
Sometimes you will find an addon that doesn't seem very good but then you realize later that if you could find just exactly the right kind of monster to put this addon onto then you could
win the game! Yar!Other addons are obviously excellent but then you must strategically decide which of your many monsters do u want to add this awesome addon onto?
One statistic that I did not see in the youtube video was FLYING. All the monster battles I saw were conducted by ground units only. In Total Chaos there can be walls, rocks, castles and things on the battlefield that get in the way of walking and fighting. But FLYING creatures just fly right over them.
Also any unit might gain the ARCHERY skill which lets your monster shoot OVER the walls.
When fighting in a maze, either of the above 2 skillz is quite good to have.
In Total Chaos there are a few monsters that you can ride around on, like Centaurs and Unicorns but you can obtain magic spells that let you make ANY monster be Rideable (mountable) even a Tyranasaurus Rex or a Triceratops or a Red Dragon or anything! And Red Dragons Fly! That means you could ride around on a flying Monster!
I didn't see any wizards casting magic spells onto their monsters in M.O.M.
In Total Chaos you are a wizard and you are dealt a deck of random spells each game that you can strategically decide to cast on your monsters (or against the enemy monsters). For example maybe you just got lucky and have a Replicate spell in your spellbook. It lets Replicate anything on the gameboard. Do u have the patience to wait until you build up your monster into something like Godzilla? Or do u you just cast it right now onto the best good monster you have?
You can also play with the Scrolls option which litters the battlefield with a random collection of Magic Scrolls. Now you not only have to decide which magic spell to cast from ur hand and which monsters to move and which monsters will attack and which will stay back and be defensive but now u have to decide which Magic Scrolls you will pick up and which u will pass by. Sometimes there can be powerful scrolls that you just hafta have but zomg! its right next to a Monster Generator! Or maybe it is closer to your enemy than it is to u. What do u do? Do u run after it? Or just declare it a loss? Or do u do something devious to distract your opponent(s) so they won't grab it for themselves and u can sneak over and grab it later? Augh! Its Total Chaos!
