Alternate Reality: The City Download (1988 Role playing Game)

In this old first-person RPG, you are one of many people who have been abducted from earth by aliens and transported to an alternate dimension where you are dumped in a strange, yet familiar city. Your quest is to explore the city, and find the clues that will lead you to your captors and help you get back home.

In addition to standard first-person RPG's of that era, like skills, stats, experience points and a repertoire of shops and places to visit, the game offered moral evaluation of your character, and depending on your actions you would be good or evil, and that affected how the environment reacted to you. Encounters were not necessarily just resolved with combat, but you could also try to trick, charm or bribe opponents, and the storyline was very non-linear, for example allowing you to take a job in order to enhance a particular skill or just to pass away time.

Alternate Reality: The City is the first part of an unfinished series of five planned RPG's.

This is yet another Commodore 64 classic that failed to attract a following among PC crowd. An immensely detailed RPG (with various weather effects!) on an epic scale, Alternate Reality, like Might and Magic, integrate science and fantasy in its plot and gameplay. A very nice-looking 3D RPG with almost an unlimited number of realistic choices (i.e. you can get a job, practice skills, etc.) . I just wish I can control more than one character. Definitely one of the most replayable RPGs ever made, and a must-have for every RPG veteran.

Note: Alternate Reality was designed and coded by Phillip Price, who has given approval for redistribution of this game. This was not a C64 game per se, but was coded directly for the Atari 800 series computers, then ported to other platforms such as C64 and IBM and Atari ST. Phillip used Atari's Display List Interrupt capability extensively, getting an unheard-of 256 colors onscreen in high-res mode. This color feature was undoubtably lost on the C64 and IBM. The best news to fans is that he's working hard on a remake of this classic :)

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

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