Game 517: Whale's Voyage (1993)

I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to be the Whale.

      

Whale's Voyage

Austria

Neo Software Producktions (developer); Flair Software Ltd. (European publisher); Pro One Software (U.S. publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Amiga CD32

Re-released in 1994 on same platforms on CD with extra cinematics/dialogue
Date Started: 2 June 2024

       

Whale's Voyage is an odd 3D "blobber" with horrible controls from Neo Software. It is the first game from the developer, which still exists today as Rockstar Vienna. I knew nothing about the game before firing it up, and thus went into this session completely blind.

I believe I am playing the DOS version distributed on floppy disk to the United Kingdom in 1993. I am aware of the CD version released a year later. I had a look at it, and like most CD versions of earlier games in the mid-1990s, it seems to add nothing but unnecessary music and horrible voiced dialogue. The floppy version ran faster and with fewer emulation problems, and I decided to stick with it. Let me know if you're aware of any major differences, though. The manual is pretty awful no matter what version you use. It leaves out obvious questions from the backstory (How many alien races did we meet? What were they like?), character creation (What is that alien doing in there?) and especially combat.

         

From the CD version intro. That looks more like a whale.

        

The game is set in the late 2300s. Humanity has developed interstellar flight capabilities and has met alien races. In 2291, Earth won a war against the Iradian Empire, freeing a slave race called the Sanxons in the process, and was instrumental in the creation of a Cosmic League to regulate interstellar trade. Over time, this League has grown into a de facto interstellar government, headquartered on a planet called Z-1.

Within this universe, you play a party of four characters who recently scraped together enough money to buy an interstellar transport called SS Whale. Unfortunately, Whale is a bit of a lemon. It sucks up all the characters' time and money, until at last they find themselves broke and stranded in orbit around a planet called Castra, unable to even afford the price of fuel to get out of here. According to the manual, Castra used to have a thriving economy, but it collapsed from competition and is now a corrupt, crime-ridden slum.

The game has the weirdest character creation process that I can remember in a CRPG. It begins with a selection of the character's parents, from five male options and five female options. All you get to choose are their portraits; the game doesn't tell you anything about their relative strengths and weaknesses. Moreover, one of the male portraits is clearly alien, like a human-sized Cthulhu. The others look like digitized portraits of actual people. The manual has nothing to say about this selection process.

       

The parental options. At least one of these portraits is going to seem unfortunate a year later.

       

The game selects a sex for the baby at random. You give the baby a name, and then you're shown a baby portrait and his or her relative (eventual, I assume) levels in strength, intelligence, speed, mental energy, skilfulness, and health. A "DNA synthesizer" spins to the right, but it's non-interactive. You get a pool of bonus points ("Mutation Ratio") to allocate to the attributes, but the manual warns that actually using them leaves the character susceptible to genetic diseases.

         

My bounty hunter has no mental energy.

      

Once you accept the character, the game gives you a few lines of a backstory drawn at random from a database. Some of them are very sad ("Even in her first years of life, she changed her foster parents like clothes. She never felt the power of an intact family"), and all assume that the real parents (the ones you selected) died somehow. You then choose his or her primary school from six options: General Primary School, Space Education Camp, Basic Military Training, Streetkid Childhood (not a school at all, but life on the street without school), Cybertech Mental School, and Nagikamura Gakko (a chemistry-focused school). Most of these schools orient a player towards a particular class. Some of them aren't available to certain characters depending on attributes.

     

Choosing the character's education. Note the little story at the top.

        
Finally, you choose your character's secondary education from another six options: Battle Academy, Hoodson Medicine School, Aranian Monastic School, Psi Science Institute, Chemistry University, and Bounty Hunter Society. As you scroll among these options, the image in the upper-left changes to show the institution, which is a cute touch. We were just talking about a lot of effort put into unnecessary graphics in the context of Loremaster.

    

I started to try to analyze the effects of the different matings of men and women, but they weren't always consistent and I ultimately gave up. Relying partly on randomness, I went with the following 

• Ishmael: Fourth guy/first woman. Game tells me that he was rejected by his foster parents and grew up in a monastery, which taught him law, order, and obedience. That put a paladin sort of character in my mind, so I sent him to Basic Military Training and then the Aranian Monastic School. The game tells me he's an Aranian, whatever that is. He has a lot of health, strength, and mental energy, but he's slow and not very skillful.

• Starbuck: Third guy/first woman. Results in a strong, smart, skillful, female character with low health, alas. She had an even sadder childhood: her adoptive parents were just looking for a "kitchen maid." They threw her out when they came into some money. Nonetheless, she went to Space Education Camp and then (because it was the only option available), the Bounty Hunter Society. The game unsurprisingly made her a bounty hunter. Her education made her health a lot better, but she's a bit slow.

• Mapple: Fourth guy/fourth woman. Resulted in a strong, fast, skillful character who was really dumb. "A working class family cared for the little boy," the game tells me, "who was educated to become a miner since his adoption." I sent him to Basic Military Training and then Battle Academy, and he became a soldier. Still dumb as a box of rocks.

• Rachel: I spent some time engineering this one, as I figured I'd need someone with a good science background. A combination of General Tagge and Captain Janeway did the job. I sent her to General Primary School and Hoodson Medical School, and she became a doctor.

    

I avoided the Cthulhu option in all cases, though I assume it confers some advantages. I would just need to know more about what the alien is, and what the implications are to such inter-breeding.

I kept this group but played around with other combinations. It appears that your class depends exclusively on your secondary schooling, so the only options are soldier, doctor, Aranian, psionician, biochemist, and bounty hunter. If you've played the game and think I'll be crippled for not having a psionician or biochemist, please let me know.

 

I otherwise enjoyed the backstory and character creation process. It seems impossible that it wasn't influenced by the Traveller tabletop RPG or either of the two MegaTraveller CRPGs based on it, although it's a bit simplified. The universe feels quite similar, with the PCs making up a group that's just struggling to get by.

    

The game begins with a planetary menu. The party can buy or sell personal wares, buy equipment for the Whale, fly off to another destination, beam or glide down to the planet, or call someone on a standard nine-key telephone dial. We have no money to buy anything for ourselves or the ship, nothing to sell, no fuel to fly to another planet, and no one to call, so it seems the only option is to visit Castra and see what we can uncover.

    

Options from the ship.

        

Once on the planet, the game switches to a standard three-dimensional, tiled, "blobber" screen. The interface for this screen is odd. It seems to assume the player will be using a joystick, so inputs are minimal. You can use the arrow keys to turn, but to access character information or any of the other icons on the screen, you have to do a weird combination of the SPACE bar and the down arrow, at which point you can arrow around the various buttons and options and hit ENTER to activate them. It's one of the worst systems that I've ever encountered. No other key on the keyboard does anything, not even obvious stuff like 1-4 or F1-F4 to activate the character sheets of the characters. In times like this, I'd normally sigh and use the mouse--but the mouse isn't supported in this game, either. 

       

If there's any way to view a character sheet and the items the characters have equipped, I can't find it. You can see each character's statistics. The game tells me they're all "sleepy" and will become "more awake" with 2,048 experience points. 

      

One of the bottom buttons gives you information about the character.

       

There are no sound options, so you can't turn off the incessant music. Since there don't seem to be any other sound effects, I just turn off sound on my computer entirely. 

 

Within the bottom controls, each character can be assigned a role. There are eight potential roles: the leader, the scout (looks for traps), the closer (closes doors behind the party), the targeter (starts combat with an enemy already targeted), the joker (keeps up crew morale), the merchant (manages money), the weigher (causes each character's carry weight to be displayed), and the user (causes current temperature and oxygen content to be displayed). 

    

That sounds sarcastic.

    

I see an NPC walking around. It takes so long to get into the bottom control panel and choose the option to talk to him that he's a few steps away before I can make it work. He's apparently named "George McMil." We have nothing useful to say anyway. Other wandering NPCs mostly tell me to get lost.

    

As we explore, a small automap keeps track of our progress in the upper-left, although I don't think there's any way to expand this to see the whole area, so I eventually break down and map it manually. Castra occupies a 20 x 20 area, although at least half of it is unexplorable because of locked doors. I annotated them all, but I don't know if there's a way later to open them. I also annotate garbage bins and fire hydrants, though I can find no way to interact with them, and store counters with nobody standing behind them. Despite the planet's rough-and-ready-to-rumble reputation, we don't get attacked or hassled as we wander. There are a few wandering NPCs who have nothing to say. We find two staffed stores. They sell interesting-sounding equipment, like compasses, a "Roomscanner," and different types of traps, but we still have no money. A room in the northeast corner seems to offer free healing from a glowing orb.

    

My map of Castra.

       

On the western side of the map, tucked in an alcove created by a cloverleaf configuration of walls, we find a man named Greg Morgan brandishing a weapon. He says he's hiding from someone chasing and persecuting him, and he wants us to smuggle him off world by shrinking him using a Shrinking Device. Dialogue is with full-sentence options, but I haven't been impressed with the depth of choice so far.

       

Either people talk weirdly in the future or the translation was a little off.

     

We start taking another lap around the area, and to the south of Morgan, in a dead-end alleyway, we find two people accosting George McMil. I try talking to them, and him, but they have nothing to say. One does briefly wander off, but he returns, and they both continue to block my access to George.

      

Talking to these guys does nothing.

         

I fiddle with the controls and finally find a way for one character to attack the targeted person. I can also "Hypnotize" him, which I try first, to no avail. They both die with a few hits from my fist, however. The hardest part is switching the targeted opponent in the middle of battle, as you have to back out of the combat menu to reselect someone. I guess that's where having a "targeter" comes in handy. Several of my characters are wounded in the battle, but their health regenerates afterwards.

   

After the battle, we help George McMil to his feet. He gives us $1,500 and in subsequent dialogue, his phone number. He says he's a trader in "high-tech tools." Unfortunately, the game doesn't give us any way to ask him about a shrink ray right now. I note with some amusement that his number has only nine digits and seems to have a Medford, Massachusetts exchange.

       

I included this screenshot so I didn't have to write down the number elsewhere.

     

We head to one merchant, then the other, looking for a shrinking device. One has high-tech stuff, but nothing that sounds like it shrinks. The other, named Walter Wim, has weapons, but my $1,500 won't go far. The cheapest weapon, a hunting knife, is $201. A 9mm pistol costs $10,500.

       

We need to go save another six guys from mugging, I guess.

      

While talking to him, he happens to mention: "I am so in sorrow. I cannot find my daughter Winnie!" We do another loop around the city and find the girl huddling in an eastern corner. While trying to help her, we accidentally beam up to the Whale, but that's not a bad thing, as you can only save the game on the ship, and as we're about to see, it's good that we saved.

       

That looks like it could be a lost girl.

     

Returning to the surface, we find the girl and pick her up. On the way back to her father, an NPC blocks our way, and I incorrectly assume that he's hostile. We attack him, and moments later, a squad of soldiers shows up and kills us instantly.

       

I guess the planet isn't as lawless as the manual portrays it.

     

Reloading, we pick up Winnie again and return her to Walter Wimm. He thanks us and gives us some weapons. We apparently also gained experience points because the game says we leveled up, and it asks us to choose a skill for each character. (Again, the manual had nothing to say about this.) I do my best. The options vary per character, but some common ones are "Heal Wounds of Member," "Disarm Selected Opponent," "Check Honesty of Selected Opponent," and "Automatic Reload." I quit and reload at this point because it's the only way I can check what skills the characters already have. It turns out the characters already have "Hypnotize Opponent," "Take Up Trail," "Identify Weapon," and "Heal Wounds of Member," in that order. So after I return Winnie again, I pick different options: "Check Honesty of Selected Opponent," "Manipulate Computer," "Search for Traps," and "Identify Essence." Afterwards, all of my characters are wounded--I guess the game doesn't raise current health with maximum health--but they begin slowly healing.

      

What's the worst possible word that could come next?

     

Walter left us a shotgun, a 9mm ceramics pistol, an Apollo grenade, and two generic magazines of "ammunition." I hope they're universal. I give the shotgun and one magazine to my bounty hunter, the pistol and one magazine to my soldier, and the grenade to my Aranian. I figure out how to equip the two guns. 

   

It turns out that the guns came unloaded, as I discover moments later, as I walk outside the shop and am immediately attacked by a mugger. Fortunately, he only brought his fists to a gunfight. Unfortunately, my guns are unloaded, so I have to figure out how to do that while getting punched. Eventually, I have my soldier fumble the magazine into his 9mm and kill the mugger in a couple of shots. "The police scanned us $3000 for killing a thief," the game says. I hope that means that the police gave it to us.

    

This guy looks a little like Hitler.

     

If it's not clear from my description, it appears that only one character can fight at a time. I don't see any way to involve multiple characters in battles, although this interface is such a nightmare that it's possible I'm missing something.

   

It takes me a while to find anything after that. Eventually, I return to the other merchant, Max Flesh, who says that he heard we killed a thief. He offers us a job: take a heart to Lapis, to his contact Jack Nock. He will pay $100,000 for it. That sounds like enough to get us out of hock. 

       

Are we talking about an actual heart here?

     

We go to pick up the item, which indeed looks like a heart. It's called an "instant heart." The moment we have our hands on it, three guys appear and start blasting us, saying "Give us the heart!" I try to return fire, but they blast me to death in seconds. I'm going to have to reload and do everything again from the missing child quest. In the meantime, I'm going to check if the Amiga version does anything better with the interface, because this borders on absolutely unusable.

    

Time so far: 3 hours

Playing out of: Duty, with a little curiosity.

 

Game 516: Mines of Mordor (1979)

I like to imagine the author chuckling to himself as he came up with the title, wondering if anyone would get the reference.

              

Mines of Mordor

United States

Independently developed; published by Electronic Imaginations Unlimited

Released 1979 for TRS-80 in at least two versions (6.1 and 6.3)

Released either before or after as Dungeons and Dragons

Date Started: 30 May 2024

Date Ended: 1 June 2024

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

      

Mines of Mordor is yet another dark ages game recently brought to light by El Explorador de RPG. It's about as dark as it gets. If it weren't for its existence in various TRS-80 archive sites, I don't think we'd know about it. I can't find a single advertisement or listing for it in magazines of the period. My commenters are often better at that than I am, but El Explorador is one of those commenters, and he didn't turn up anything for his own entry, either. Even the publisher, Phoenix-based Electronic Imaginations Unlimited, is attested only by this game and one announcement in the May 1983 Color Computer News about some forthcoming educational titles. Of the author, Scott Cunningham, there are several potential candidates.

      

I tried three versions of the game: 6.1, 6.3, and an unnumbered version titled Dungeons and Dragons. Most of this account will cover 6.3, the one that I played the longest and won, but I'll discuss the differences in a bit.

      

Character creation consists only of specifying the number of players (1 or 2) and giving yourselves names, within a limit of 8 characters. The game randomly creates a 6-level dungeon of 25 squares each (5 x 5) and starts you in a room on the first level with stairs going up to the exit. Your goal (not stated explicitly, unless it was in the documentation) is to escape the dungeon with every last bit of treasure collected. 

      

Characters begin with a sword, a knife, a rope, 4 units of food, and 6 hit points. The dungeon layout, and your specific position, is not shown until you go to M)ove, at which point the game draws you an ASCII map, with a double-asterisk (**) representing the player, letters I representing doors (or, if strung together, walls), and pluses (+) representing rooms with treasure in them.

        

Moving around Level 2. There are two rooms with treasure remaining.

      

All rooms that have treasure also have monsters that you have to defeat before you can collect the treasure. Level 1's enemies start off as goblins, orcs, mad men, and at least one troll. Amusingly, the game insists on giving every foe a randomly-generated personal name, like Zeeanm, Reurm, Hesto, Damard, Accama, and Heista.

        

If you surprise them, you get a round in which you can sneak away or make a surprise attack. Otherwise, you enter combat immediately. Round after round, you specify what weapon you want to use. The game rolls some dice and determines who won the round and how much damage they did, along with the qualitative descriptions "hit," "struck," and "clobbered." You occasionally lose your weapon during an attack and have to switch to a different one or, as a matter of last desperation, H)ands. Sometimes you get knocked down in combat, which I guess reduces your effectiveness in the next round.

    

Exchanging blows with an enemy.

    

If you defeat the enemy, you can L)ook for the treasure (which also returns lost weapons). Finding all of it sometimes takes several rounds, and if you leave the room before finding all of it, a new enemy will be generated to guard the remainder.

 

I believe hit points represent strength as well as health, so as you lose them, you also become less effective in combat. Although you start with 6, you can achieve up to 9 regularly and 10 with a potion. Eating food rations restores health. When you choose the E)at command, you can specify how many of your rations you eat as a fraction, from 0.1 to the maximum you hold. Your chance of gaining hit points increases with the total amount you consume.

   

Some rooms have stairways or holes going to the next and previous levels. You can use the holes as long as you have a rope. Sometimes, you fall through the holes, which causes you to take damage and lose one of your items in the room you fell from.

   

As long as you have at least 50 silver pieces, which the game takes as a lodging fee, you can exit the dungeon at any time by moving up from the room you came from. You want to do this occasionally because as you gather treasure, you reach a threshold at which you're carrying so much weight that you start to take damage.

       

The shop at the top of the dungeon lets you buy things and tells you how much treasure you still have to claim.

    

Moving upward takes you to a store where you can buy a variety of items. Most of them don't show up in your inventory when you re-enter the dungeon, so you have to take it on faith that they actually do something. I think that most of them "stack," meaning you can gain benefits from buying them multiple times. But you never see the statistics, so I'm basing that just on a general feeling of effectiveness against various monsters between visits to the shop. It's worth a quick rundown of what everything does:

    

• Gauntlets of Strength, Potion of Strength, Scroll of Experience. Not sure. They make you more effective in combat in some ways, and I think the effectiveness might stack with multiple purchases.

• Sword. A regular weapon. You can hold multiple copies, which helps when you lose one in combat.

• Transport Ring. After you buy it, it appears as a command. If you use it outside of combat, you can specify what level to teleport to, making it a quick way to get from the bottom of the dungeon to the top and back again (but since enemies don't respawn, all it saves is time). In combat, it lets you escape if things aren't going your way. There's a chance that you'll teleport into solid rock and die instantly, making the item mostly not worth it.

    

With permadeath, this isn't worth the risk.

     

• Fire Ball. An additional weapon option that does significant damage. Each purchase can be cast about four or five times before it disappears. Absolutely essential for the last couple of levels.

• Armor. I think it makes it less likely you'll take damage if hit, and I think it stacks.

• Boots of Agility, Cloak of Quietness, Potion of Alertness. Some combination of these three things make it more likely that you'll surprise enemies and less likely that you'll fall down holes. Again, they may stack.

• Bag of Holding. Stops you from taking damage from the amount that you carry. There's no point in buying more than one.

• Knife. A regular weapon. Again, it's useful to have a couple as backups.

• Bow. A regular weapon. Using it increases your odds of hitting an enemy, but it consumes arrows.

• Rope. Allows you to climb up and down holes. You can also throw it in combat to tie up your foe and increase the likelihood that you can escape on your next move.

• Arrows. Fuel for the bow.

• Potion of Health. Restores you to 10 hit points when you buy it. You consume it right away; you can't carry it around the dungeon.

• Food Supplies. Restores health when you eat it, up to 9 hit points.

         

No matter how much you buy, only a few items show up in your inventory.

      

Level 1 delivers so little gold that you can barely afford anything, but by the time you reach Level 3, you're hauling dozens of gold pieces back to the surface and you can buy multiple things at once, which is one of the reasons that I had trouble analyzing what items did. When you purchase five or six things per trip, it's hard to tell what had an effect when you return to battle. You do want to spend all of your loot, too, as the game takes whatever remains when you descend back into the dungeon.

      

You find a lot of gold on the lower levels.

     

Level 2 adds ogres, ghouls, and gnolls to the enemy list. Level 3 adds wights and wraiths. Chimeras and gorgons start to appear on Level 4, rocs and centaurs join the fray on Level 5, and Level 6 concludes with griffons and a single balrog. I found that I needed at least one casting of "Fire Ball" to defeat anything above a roc.

     

My final opponent is a balrog named Naeahe.

     

I don't have a TRS-80 emulator with save states, so I had to win this legitimately, which took a reasonable amount of time under the rules of permadeath. I found the best strategy, even though it took a while, was to return to the surface every time I had enough money to buy any sort of upgrade and to spend it all on each trip. I ran away from rocs, griffons, and the balrog until I'd defeated every other enemy and recovered all their treasure. The last two levels, I fought almost exclusively with "Fire Ball," turning to my sword only if an enemy was down to one or two hit points.

    

Unfortunately, you don't get any victory screen when you finally collect all the treasure. The shop screen keeps track of how much treasure remains, and you have to just take satisfaction in seeing it roll down to 0. If you try to re-enter the dungeon at that point, the game asks if you want to generate a new one. You get to keep all your stuff, but it's possible that you lose the behind-the-scenes bonuses that your various purchases conveyed. Whatever the case, the enemies seemed harder in the new dungeon even though they were named the same things and appeared on the same levels. I didn't play the second dungeon for long.

      

"0 kilos remaining" is how you know you've won.

     

Overall, for a 1979 game, Mines of Mordor is reasonably complex in its variables and strategy. It's not going to take "Game of the Year" away from Dunjonquest, which had a much greater sense of story and atmosphere, but it's got some charm and it gets a 16 on the GIMLET. 

      

Your "reward."

     

As I mentioned, you can play with two characters, although I think it would be torturous to do so. You and the other player trade turns, so you'd constantly have to be swapping the keyboard; a more sensible approach would have been to have each character move for 5 or 10 turns before switching. I can only imagine it must be harder, since neither the amount of treasure in the dungeon nor the number of monsters is doubled, nor are the costs of goods halved. Two-character play is entirely competitive. You can't swap items, but you can fight the other player if you occupy the same square. If one character dies, the game proceeds as a single-player game.

      

The title screen for the earlier version.

       

As far as I can tell, Version 6.1 (the earlier one) is identical except:

 

• The title screen credits the author (which is the only way we know the author's name) instead of Electronic Imaginations Unlimited.

• The dungeon levels are a little more complicated. Areas of isolation can be created, requiring you to go up and then down to access them.

• Enemies' random names all begin with a lowercase letter. I feel like this is an emulation issue that came up in our discussion of another game, but I couldn't find it.

• If you want to move up or down through a hole, you choose the R)ope instead of M)ove and then U)p or D)own.

         

The version labeled Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, is different enough that you might even consider it a different game. El Explorador thought it must have come after Mordor because it has some elements of greater complexity. I see his point, but there are also signs of a more rudimentary game. In favor of it being an earlier version of the game:

    

• The title screen just lists the game name with no attribution or version number.

• Dungeons and Dragons would be an awfully generic name to revert to after at least two releases of Mines of Mordor.

• Commands are more limited and are made by entering numbers instead of more organically by specifying the first letter of what you want to do. For instance, (2) searches a room and (4) moves to another room.

        

The Dungeons and Dragons interface.

     

• The map is a simple grid of rooms, 3 x 5, rather than a more realistic configuration drawn with ASCII characters. When you move, you specify which adjacent cell you want to move to rather than a direction. Rooms with treasure are not annotated.

• The game supports only one player.

• There's no bow.

• There are fewer items to buy in the shop.

    

Items for sale in Dungeons and Dragons.

    

• Enemies are not given personal names.

• Dungeons and Dragons is 173 lines of code with 10,415 characters, while Mordor 6.1 is 252 lines and 13,639 characters and 6.3 is 379 lines and 15,174 characters. I realize that fewer lines and characters can mean a more advanced game since it might be an indication of a more efficient programmer, but clearly the game gained program length between 6.1 and 6.3, so on a linear trendline, Dungeons would be earlier.

     

On the side for it being a later game are a few elements of greater complexity:

     

• There's a small "story" at the beginning of the game about an evil wizard who died, leaving a vast amount of treasure in his fortress. The game also tells you explicitly that you're meant to collect it all.

• There are in-game instructions.

        

Dungeons and Dragons lets you select from four classes and has a little story.

     

• During character creation, the player can specify a number of levels from 5 to 15 and can choose from hobbit, wizard, elf, and dwarf characters. I'm not sure what difference this choice makes, if any. 

• Combat occurs in real-time, with enemies continually attacking regardless of whether you type in anything or not. In addition to weapon options, you have a shield.

 

Combat in the Dungeons and Dragons version.

 

• There are traps in some of the rooms.

    

And a few things that are just different:

   

• Your hit points are represented as a decimal number with 6 decimal places. (I think this is true of the other versions, too, but you only see the integer.)

• Treasure and enemies are separated. You can have rooms with treasure but no foe.

• Items in the shop aren't just fewer but are entirely different. I'm not sure what some of them do.

• The currency is in "drachmas" and "doubloons" instead of gold and silver.

     

Barring some discovery of advertisements in magazines or newsletters or word from the author himself, I'm not sure if we can solve this one. I did reach out to some potential candidates or family members of potential candidates who had passed away, so we'll see if that bears fruit. I'm equally interested in knowing if the author had any CRPG influences. I could see him being exposed to either C. William Engel's The Devil's Dungeon (1978) or Daniel Lawrence's Dungeons and Dragons (c. 1976-1977), but his game is different enough that it's more than possible he wasn't exposed to either.

   

Again, my thanks to El Explorador for his diligence in finding these uncatalogued titles that I overlooked.

Centauri Alliance: The Perils of Precociousness

This game has been full of one-way trips.

      

To combat an insurrection or invasion, the agents of the Centauri Alliance have assembled the remnants of an ancient weapon called the Fractyr Fist (thus keeping it out of enemy hands), plus a suit of armor and a helmet. Ancient ruins on the moon of Veladron II gave us access to a teleporter which took us to the forbidden planet of Keppa Var. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do there for the time being, so we took a ship (you can book passage from Keppa Var, but not to it) back to the Lunabase to level up. There, we were alerted to an invasion at Epsilon Indi.

    

As this session began, we hopped a ship for Epsilon Indi as ordered. We didn't make it. On the way, a pirate dreadnought attacked our transport and pulled it into its own hull. "You will be boarded in moments," the game warned. The party decided to escape out the cargo hatch.

    

Over the next few hours, we had to navigate four levels of the pirate dreadnought, each of them a little smaller than the standard 16 x 16 because they were in the shape of a ship and thus tapered to a "nose." Early in our explorations of the first level, we found an elevator that offered to take us to the other three levels plus a "Control Room" that we never found a way to access. I'm not sure there was one.

        

And there's no way to get clearance, apparently.

         

Based on my notes, I think we had to go to Level 4 to find the information needed to use the escape pod on Level 3. But in between, we found a guy on Level 3 who said he'd recharge an item for us. I gave him a gravity belt and he recharged it for 1 charge, which my technic is already capable of doing just fine on his own. The guy disappeared after that, and I couldn't believe that he existed just to recharge a single random item, so I went through my inventory and noticed that the "Mattermit Pass" that I had received in the alien ruins, allowing me to access the teleportation platform, had no charges. When I gave him the pass, he said, "I'm going to need a chunk of plenadium to recharge that one."

     

I had no idea where to get plenadium. I had found plenocarbon earlier on Level 3, but that was it. Eventually the only place I hadn't explored on the four levels was the irradiated section of the engine room on Level 2. I poked around there, healing myself constantly and resting for long spells to recharge psi power. Eventually, I'd explored the entire thing and still found nothing. But later, I happened to notice that my chunk of plenocarbon had turned to plenadium, probably because of the radiation.

      

The graphics artist and the librettist needed to collaborate better on this one.

     

Anyway, I got the pass recharged for 5 charges. So I guess that allows me to use the teleportation platform 5 more times. I hoped I didn't need to use it more than once.

 

Elsewhere--I think on Level 4--I ran into a room with 5 mechanoids set into niches in the wall. A control terminal would let me power up one of them and add him to my party. I had the choice of Dragonmech 7, Dreadnot M101, VII Mandrake, Redwraith XL, and Mindscare KIL. I had no idea what the capabilities of any of them were. I don't know why I didn't go with the "Dragonmech" one--that sounds the coolest--but I went with the VII Mandrake instead. I think I figured they were either listed in order from best to worst or worst to best, so by choosing #3, I'd get a decent one either way. He's not as useful in combat as the Fractyr Mech who joined last time, but he occasionally lobs a bomb into an enemy party or blasts someone with a psychic attack, so that's cool.

   

I don't know where my head was. If a game offers you a dragon anything, you take it.

      

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see him in action until much later. On all four levels of the pirate dreadnought, I failed to win a single battle. Every one I fought left the party in tatters and most of the characters dead. Clearly, I was meant to have done a lot more grinding (or perhaps less fleeing) on previous maps. A lot of enemies were capable of summoning "guardians," easily the hardest enemy I've fought so far. They almost always went first and killed my characters in one hit, sometimes killed all my characters in one round. With double the number of hit points, I don't know how I would have defeated them. A lot more shield belts, I guess.

    

The good news is that there were no fixed combats on the entire ship, so when I died, I just had to reload. That's been true of most of the game, frankly. I can only remember three or four fixed combats, most involving holders of the Fractyr First, so my characters were able to move through the game faster than they probably should have.

     

A records room on Level 4 had a printout with the keywords INVASION and ESCAPE POD. I fed the former into a computer on Level 3 and got: "The Daynab invasion of Alliance space continues on schedule. Alliance star base over Epsilon Indi is currently under attack. Our special agent in the Alliance government is very helpful."

      

I look forward to unmasking the enemy agent. But since there aren't any named NPCs in the game, it can't really be a surprise.

   

ESCAPE POD got me off the ship and into Port Minkar. I explored the starport there and found nothing of interest except for the usual services. I hopped a shuttle for Lunabase to level up (I had gained experience from random battles on Minkar), then headed back to Epsilon Indi again. This time, I made it safely. At the Alliance Headquarters, an officer informed me: "Daynab forces have taken Starbase VI, which orbits this world. We can take your group up in a shuttle and sneak you onto the maintenance level."

 

I explored the surface of Epsilon Indi before taking the shuttle, and I'm glad I did, because in one of the rooms in the southeast part of the city is another teleportation platform. That means to get to Keppa Var, I don't need to go through the whole process of crash-landing on Veladron II's moon again, which I don't even know for sure is possible.  

     

This will come in handy.

      

I should have spent some more time grinding, but I took the shuttle instead, hoping that the enemies in the pirate ship had just been unnaturally hard. That was not the case--I was incapable of surviving anything on Starbase VI, too--but again there were no fixed battles, so I could just reload if I died.

 

The starbase consisted of 3 levels, but they were all quite small, most of the 16 x 16 areas unused. The purpose of the area is solely to find a guy at the end of a hallway on Level 3. The party roughs him up a bit, and he tells us that the Alliance traitor is in the dungeon of Keppa Var, and that the password is CASTLE-FIST. 

    

If all our enemies are as tough as this commander, we have nothing to worry about.

     

To get off the starbase, you have to access computers on Levels 1 and 3. Both of them require the same passcode. The passcode is found in a manual of almost 2000 pages in a corner of Level 1. You can feed the game one page at a time, and it will tell you what's on the page, except that most pages have nothing interesting. Only about four of them give you codes to use on the computer.

 

How do you know what pages to reference? The computer on the same level tells you, except that it also asks you to log in. If you don't know the login, you're stuck on the computer forever, as far as I can tell. It regards your attempts to log OFF (the usual command to leave computers) as an attempt to enter a password. So you either have to access the computer, note the pages, reload, and then go find the manual, or you've got to type in all of 1,982 page numbers to find the right parts of the manual. It's a minor problem, since reloading is so quick, but it's still either a bug or bad design.

       

Getting code words from the technical manual.

    

When I was done finding stuff on the base, I launched the shuttle back to the surface. Although I had not in any way stopped the Daynab invasion of Epsilon Indi--I hadn't even won a single battle--the Alliance officer was now telling me, "The next stage of your mission lies on Keppa Var."

 

Fortunately, the world below is an alliance starport.

    

I took the teleportation platform to the planet and used the CASTLE-FIST password to enter its dungeon. Here, I soon got stuck. There are fixed battles with guards in this dungeon, and I'm nowhere near the point where I can even survive the first round with them, let alone defeat them. If I could survive the first round, I'd have a decent chance, since my two robots always go at the end of the round, and they have pretty devastating attacks. But until they go, I'm facing 9 guards, each capable of blasting every member of my party for 20-30 points of damage.

   

The annoying thing is that at the beginning of these battles, one of my characters suggests that we "fan out!" This made me think that I'd been missing something in combat this entire time. It would make perfect sense if you could split your party into multiple groups; for instance, sending melee characters to engage enemies while other characters fired at them. Enemies can certainly do it. It would make more effective use of the hex terrain. But I've been through the manual multiple times and tried every option on the screen, and I can't find a way to make it happen, and I don't think it's possible. If anyone knows otherwise, please speak up. 

    

Daynab guards utterly destroy me in one round.

     

I clearly needed to grind, but finding good grinding spots in this game is harder than it seems. None of them are terribly convenient, partly because you can only level up at Lunabase, which itself has no dungeons. Enemies in any of the starports themselves are too easy, and leveling would take too long. So you have to go find a planet with a dungeon and grind there. Second, a lot of the game's areas are inaccessible after you've explored them. For instance, the last place I was reliably able to beat enemies was the alien ruins on Veladron II, but once you've taken the ship there once, you can't go back.

   

Thus, I've been doing most of my grinding in the medieval dungeon on Kevner's World, which you'll remember I explored quite some time ago, but it reliably delivers 200-300 experience points per battle for minimal risk. I got bored after a while there and moved on to killing rats on the two derelict ships accessible from Veladron II. The combats seem to come faster there. If I get bored there, I might move to the Andrini dungeon.

     

The perfect grinding foe.

     

The final issue with grinding is a weird one, and I'd be interested if anyone can help me parse what is happening. In The Bard's Tale II and III, you could just spin in place and enemies would come to you until you got sick of it. That doesn't work here. It is possible for an enemy party to attack after a turn, but they won't do it inevitably. And if you've just defeated an enemy party, you can spin in circles forever in the same square, and it doesn't seem that you'll ever encounter another enemy party. Nor can you just walk back and forth between the same spaces. It seems like the game enforces a minimum amount of time and distance between battles. Normally, I'd praise such a system--the number of battles in The Bard's Tale series got to be way, way too much--but not when I'm deliberating trying to find enemies to grind against.

    

I'm embarrassed to say that this period of grinding is the first time since the opening hours that I've bothered to check out the powers of my metamorph. I let him take on a Stonewalker form early in the game, found it unimpressive, and never really bothered to visit the other forms even though I continued to level him as a metamorph. It doesn't help that the manual tells you nothing about the forms. From 1 to 10, they are: Stonewalker, Andromedan, Gorn Warrior, Gamma Goblin, Beta Wolf, Zon Dragon, Drak, Far Spectre, Atomic Ant, and Devastator. Mine is capable of only the first five levels right now. But through experimentation, I found that starting at the Gamma Goblin level, the creatures actually start becoming useful, capable of long-range attacks against multiple enemies per round. The problem is that you can't target what the metamorph does. Once morphed, he acts as if he's an NPC. However, whatever he does is generally more effective than if I had just had him fire a Beretta, which is mostly what I've been using him for.

    

The grinding process has also taught me a bit more about how experience points work. It turns out that the number of points you need for the next level is based on what you took on the previous level. If you went from Melee 1 to Melee 2, for instance, you only have to wait a few hundred points before you can level again. Going from Sidearm 8 to Sidearm 9 requires about 20,000 experience points before the next level. Beyond that, I'm not sure of the exact formula because the game apparently does give you credit after your required experience level hits 0, but it hides the actual number that you're earning.

       

My Fractyr Mech is still more valuable than any regular party member.

   

The priority is to grind spell levels. Only towards the end of this session did I finally get Level 8 "Body" and "Mind" spells, which among other things gives me a spell that damages every enemy on the board ("Meta-War"), and one that paralyzes every enemy on the board ("Paral"). That last one alone would get me past the fixed guards on Keppa Var if they didn't always go first. I'm not sure what factors determine initiative. I hope level has something to do with it; otherwise, I don't see how I'm ever going to beat them.

   

There are two entire spell schools ("Matter" and "Energy") that I haven't even had access to. I assumed my psionics would get those options once I reached a certain level in their existing schools. Maybe I have to max out at Level 10 first.

   

I had hoped to finish my grinding and move on in time to write more for this entry, but I started to run up against my deadline for the next entry, so I had to move on to something else. It feels like I could finish this up in one more--Keppa Var, Gamma Base, and Kasdran are the only planets I haven't explored--if I can get strong enough.

 

Time so far: 23 hours

Playing out of: Duty again. This game hasn't really earned the right to require me to grind.