[Tulac]

Ermmm, and what does "almost released" mean other than beta?

Besides juding by the screenshots on UG, it is most certainly the game in question.




This is the description from UG:

This is a beta of a game that's in the works for a very long time and was announced to be released sometime this year, although it was announced several times before.

Some info from the internet:

An In-house Game captures the golden age of RPG's.


Its been in the works for 5 years now, and its really shaping up! One guy named Cleveland Mark Blakemore is making this game, no official company, or publisher, this game will be Shareware! Now some things in the Shareware version will be limited, but purchasing the full version will unlock all the features!

Grimoire is a turn-based, 3D, first person perspective Roleplaying adventure in 800x600 256 Color SVGA. The 3D is pixel perfect and smooth scrolling with zero distortion handcrafted graphics.

There is not a rendered image present anywhere in the game, nor has any artist used rendering tools in the production of the graphics.

The style of play is very similar to that of CRPG'S during the golden age of computer Roleplaying before 1992 like Eye of the Beholder, Bane of the Cosmic Forge, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, Might & Magic, The Bard's Tale and other classic games.

The emphasis in the game is on the story, exploration, discovery, character advancement, puzzle solving, strategic phased combat, treasure hunting, inventory management and interaction with the non-player characters encountered during play.

Grimoire will only require the following system requirements:

* 386SX Motherboard or better (Pentium 90 or better recommended)
*DOS / Win 95 / NT / OS-2 / Macintosh PowerPC, 8 megs minimum, 16 megs recommended
* VESA Compatible Video Card
* Sound Card
* Microsoft Mouse
*30 megs Hard Drive Space

Some computers may require Sci-Tech's Disk Doctor or the UniVBE drivers to assure VESA compatibility. A chipset specific mode will be available but it may not run on all cards out there. The default is VESA support, but the user will be able to configure it to run on direct video calls to the video card BIOS if his chipset is supported. This can result in speed and performance similar to Direct X or X-mode. Grimoire in chipset specific mode can attain frame rates of 24 fps on a 486. Pretty good for a pixel perfect SVGA game.

The above system requirements are most likely not the same as for the beta because I don't think it runs in Windows, but I tried it in DOSBox and it runs just fine.

The current site is: http://www.grimoiresystems.com/