ToEE: Barely started

After a few more games of Madden 2007, I finally pulled out Temple of Elemental Evil for my PC, which I'd purchased on the cheap several years ago. Realizing it was notoriously buggy out of the box, I updated quickly.

Welp, it's AD&D all right. What else can I say? Worst problem is that it seems to take much longer than I remember to digitally virtually search a town for "NPC Who Lets You Continue the Game" than a similar legacy reality virtual search with a human Dungeon Master.

Magic Missiles look cool, but the fact that I can't, at any moment, choose to take the party outside to sleep and rememorize spells drives me crazy. The Phantasmagoria-like search with the mouse for hot-spots is pretty clunky as well. And how do I know where to search for hidden doors? It's much easier to tell your DM, "My elf is going to check for secret doors while they open the chest and heal," than to click for movement, click through the menu system for searching closely, and repeat 30 times.

So the quick first impression is that AD&D doesn't remediate so well to the computer in ToEE. I've enjoyed some AD&D ports before that weren't nearly so full of interesting eye-candy, but in ToEE's drive to completely duplicate the AD&D environment (oxymoronic, I know), they've only served to frustrate this old-school player.