Hi everyone,

I could not resist picking up a Surface 2 Pro. Are there any good old games that can be played purely with just the touch screen? (specifically RPG's)

I picked up Pylon from the app store, but I was looking for something a bit more old school... (in style at least) Maybe Legend of Grimrock?

Thanks!!!

I can't really play games as complex as RPGs on a phone or tablet, but Bard's Tale is available on Android devices, and it is a fun little RPG playable via touchscreen only.

You may want to give the Baldur's Gate series a try (or any other game made with the Infinity Engine for that matter: Icewind Dale series & Planescape: Torment).
I think they all should work just fine with the touch screen, and I just can't think of a better old school RPGs.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is now available on the ipad and iphone. So I guess that one is now touch screen compatible.

There are a couple of things which require a right click/keyboard use, but mostly they're shortcuts rather than requirements. Provided you play BG1 in the BG2 engine (so you can go into the inventory to do things the long way without the game unpausing) that should be fine.

The only other issue I can see is that you won't be able to hover over objects for tooltips on what they are, or hold tab to have containers highlighted. I pity you attempting to work out which npcs are special in, say, the city of Baldur's Gate by talking to all of them...

Still, that's a minor issue, all things considered.

You have some good points there :P

But since he bought a Surface 2 Pro he might be able to use the included pen to overcome these issues.
I don't own a Surface tablet so I just can't be sure about it though.

hrmm.... downloading IWD now, but it does not sound promising. maybe Ultima Underworld? I will give that a try (and maybe grimrock) and report back.

I haven't played any of the Infinity Engine games other than BG1 and 2 (yet!) but I suspect that you'll have most success with IWD 1 and 2: they're more heavily combat focussed, which will reduce both the problems I mentioned significantly.

Last time I played Ultima Underworld I was about 10 years old, so I don't remember much about it .

At any rate, let us know how is it playing IWD is on your new shiny tablet :P

Yes keep us posted. I will be purchasing a Windows 8 tablet and it would be good to know. Just wished you had one of the Atom powered ones like the Venue Pro. I don't want to fork out the $1000 that the Surface Pro 2 will cost.

Ultima Underworld = No
Icewind Dale = Yes (but looting is VERY difficult and you can not highlight containers, etc. with alt key)
Legend of Grimrock = Yes (There is a tablet mode and you can also add the directional movement keys to the HUD. It responded a bit slowly, but it works great)

I have not played through Grimrock yet, so I think that I will just go for that one (unless anyone here has another recommendation for me to test).

If you want to play games in the desktop mode, you can try doing this:

1. Run the game in window mode instead of full screen mode.

2. Download the onscreen touchpad so that you can use it as a touchpad/mouse replacement without a physical mouse. To find the onscreen touchpad, google "Touchmousepointer" as this forum prevent me from posting url link.


3. You can use the built-in virtual keyboard in Windows 8.x for quick keyboard input. And if you need more keys provided by the default keyboard (such as numeric keypad etc), you can open up the "On-screen keyboard" instead. To access that, pull up charm bar, do a search, type in OSK and select the on screen keyboard option. You can click on the onscreen keyboard to force it to display the numeric keypad as well as other normal keys on a 101 keyboard.

Responds slowly? Sounds like you could have trouble with several timed puzzles. The time limits are not at all generous.

Avernum, but that's because its mostly mouse navigated.

Perhaps Fallout? I remember using exclusively the mouse with it, plus it's turn based, so response time isn't much of an issue. Granted, I am biased, since I find turn-based RPGs to be much better than the real-time ones.