Game 554: Castle of the Winds: Part One - A Question of Vengeance (1992)

I suspect I'm going to choose vengeance.

        

Castle of the Winds: Part One - A Question of Vengeance 

SaadaSoft (developer); Epic MegaGames (publisher, as shareware)

Released 1992 for Windows 3 

Date Started: 7 July 2025

Date Ended: 9 July 2025

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

         

Castle of the Winds was probably a lot of players' entry point into the roguelike (or, more appropriately, "roguelite") world. It isn't the first graphical roguelike, but it's one of the few that had any kind of widespread distribution. Because author Rick Saada worked at Microsoft, he was able to develop the game for Windows 3.1 long before the OS was released. It came out just as the average person started to access the Internet, and thus right as the shareware scene exploded. As such, if you Google the game today, you'll see that it has a lot more recognition than any of the titles that inspired it. Most of its players were probably unaware of those titles or of the larger roguelike genre.

        

Castle's clear origin point is Moria (1983); you see it in the town level, the types of inventory items, the spell list, the automap system, the way the "Return" spell creates a charge in the air around you and then makes you wait a few rounds before you actually teleport. It simplifies many of the mechanics, which I find too bad, and I normally wouldn't countenance such simplification in the name of a tile set and a few icons. But it also offers some significant improvements, including:

    

• A detailed, evolving story. I've never understood why other roguelike titles (as well as games in the Dungeon Master line) are so reluctant to occasionally interrupt the action with some bits of text. Here, you get regular plot updates and they're even somewhat interesting. You can review what you've already learned by choosing "Review Story" on the "File" menu.

• An improved interface. You know me: I like keyboards. How do you "improve" upon a classic roguelike interface like Moria's, where every action is mapped to its own key? The answer is, you keep that, and then you add the option do to certain things with a mouse, such as targeting enemies who aren't in your column or row, or dragging items from your pack to your various inventory slots, or right-clicking on an enemy to see how much damage he's taken. All of that is possible here.

• Excellent documentation. At any point in the game, you can click on the "Help" menu to get a list of commands, monster descriptions, spell descriptions, and weapon values.

       

This is the kind of weapon documentation every game should have.

       

Where the recently-covered Magus (1993) made me wish I could just play Moria instead, Castle is a game I would rather play than Moria. You'd think I could make that statement more often when we're talking about a ten-year gap, but alas. Ask me about The Ormus Saga II and Ultima III, for instance.

     

The PC is presented as an orphan raised by two kindly godparents. He knows nothing about his background except that he was found with an amulet. Around his 18th birthday, while he was away from home, marauders raided, pillaged, and burned his godparents' farm, stealing the amulet, leaving two charred corpses behind. Monstrous footprints led away from the scene towards some northern mountains.

     

Character creation begins that simplification process I talked about. All characters are the same fighter/mage/cleric/thief combo, although the player can set attributes (strength, intelligence, constitution, dexterity) to whatever he likes. He can upload his own icon and set a difficulty level from "easy" to "experts only." His first spell comes from a small list, with options like "Heal Minor Wounds," "Light," and "Magic Arrow."

          

Character creation. Since the author worked at Microsoft, I would have expected the option to label those columns with the actual values.

         

The character starts with around 5-10 hit points, 5-10 mana points, and 1500 copper pieces in a little hamlet south of the burned farmhouse. It has a couple of useless buildings and about half a dozen shops and services:

   

• Olaf's Junk Store, which will buy just about anything, including cursed items and rusted armor.

• Snorri the Sage, who will identify items until you get the "Identify" spell. You want to do this, as uncursing items is prohibitively expensive.

• Bjorn the Blacksmith, who buys and sells weapons. As you level up, the items sold get more advanced.

• Gunnhild's General Store, where you buy and sell cloaks, scrolls, potions, boots, belts, and packs.

• The Temple of Odin, where you can get healed and restored. You can also pay 1,000 copper pieces to get sent back to the lowest level of the dungeon that you've explored, at least until you get the "Rune of Return" spell on your own.

          

Buying my first belt.

      

As you can tell from some of these names, the game leans into a Norse theme, although until the end, it's mostly just names. Still, I suppose I prefer it to the constant regurgitation of Tolkien characters. 

     

North of town is a large screen with nothing to do but visit the burned-out homestead and walk north to the cave system where the monsters came from. This is where the game really "starts." My understanding is that the first level of these caves, and of the game's second dungeon, are fixed. The rest are randomly-generated when you arrive, but unlike Moria, they don't reset when you leave and return. The levels are full of traps, damaging runes, and secret doors, all of which can be found with a S)earch.

     

There are no enemies, and not much to do, in the outdoor areas.

       

The core gameplay is about exploring these dungeon levels, killing enemies, and collecting items to make your character stronger. There are multiple types of enemies—animals, humanoids, undead—and they get progressively harder as you go down. Some can attack from a distance—the manticore's barbs are particularly deadly—and some have status effects, like poison and temporary attribute drains. You fight with melee weapons and spells, but not missile weapons.

           

A gelatinous cube chases me through a dungeon room with a rune and a gas trap.

      

In contrast to most roguelikes, I found that I really couldn't survive without offensive spells. Some enemies just grind your hit points down so fast, you don't want to get anywhere near them. I had a lot of trouble with Level 1 characters until I created a new one with "Magic Arrow" as his first spell. Even late in the game, I was avoiding a lot of enemies by blasting them with "Lightning Bolt" and then escaping with "Phase Door" when they got too close.

     

Hit points restore at a pretty good clip as you walk around, but magic points are very slow to recharge. You need to find safe spaces to rest, which can be difficult, especially since enemies continually spawn. The overall challenge is well-balanced. One thing that makes the game a "roguelite" rather than a "roguelike," however, is that death isn't permanent. You can save and reload from anywhere. There's also no food system, which was mostly a waste of time in Moria anyway, and although there's a clock, there's no time limit.

       

Not the problem that this would be in a lot of roguelikes.

       

I like the inventory system a lot. Encumbrance depends on both weight and size of objects, and it slows down your movement speed when you get particularly laden. It's worth paying to have new items identified before trying them on; most of my early-game gold went to this expense. It was a relief when I finally got "Identify" for myself and could save my money for some of the tantalizing items the stores were starting to offer. I found plenty of upgrades in the dungeon itself, of course, and soon my small wooden shield became a medium steel shield and then an enchanted steel shield. There are "enchanted" versions of just about everything. With slots for weapons, armor, necklace, helmet, cape, shield, bracers, gauntlets, belt, boots, pack, purse, and two rings, you're almost always getting some kind of upgrade.

 

I found usable items less useful. Potions, wands, and spell scrolls all take time to use, opening yourself up to a couple of free hits in combat. If you save them for when you're desperate, you can easily get killed trying to use them.

       

The intuitive inventory interface.

      

Leveling is a somewhat lesser part of character development, occurring only about once per game hour (more frequently towards the beginning) and conferring extra health, mana, and one spell per level. You also get spells permanently from spellbooks and temporarily from scrolls. They're all very useful, although I've never understood Moria's system of applying "Light" to the room rather than the character.

        

Learning a new spell upon leveling up.

     

The spellbook can hold as many spells as you want, but you can select 10 to be hotkeyed from the "Spell" menu and to appear on the upper-right icon bar. Again, I usually give the keyboard the prize when it comes to efficiency, but I admit that clicking on a single icon is easier than hitting C)ast, then having to ? the spellbook because I don't remember the order of the spells, then hit the number associated with the spell.  

     

The game offers no sound. The graphics are mostly utilitarian and not terribly evocative. Every once in a while, the author places something like a statue or a fountain in a dungeon room to give it some character. 

       

Oh, that's so cute. Some of the little kobolds are still tucked in their little beds.

        

One such place was Level 4 of the first dungeon (the "mine"), where I found a bunch of kobolds sleeping on straw mats. A scrap of paper on their floor hit the first plot beat. It was signed with an "S." and told the receiver to "return to the fortress north of Bjarnarhaven" once his target was dead.

   

When I left the dungeon after finding this message, I found to my horror that the raiders had returned, this time burning down the entire town. This led my character to realize that he, specifically, was being targeted. "You swear once again to exact vengeance against those responsible."

        

Well, sorry everyone.

      

At this point, the player can travel west from the mines (via a road closed off earlier) to the village of Bjarnarhaven. It has the same services as the opening village, although wearable items and magic items are now split into two shops. There's a bank, and a neat aspect of the game is that deposited money remains available to spend, as if it were still in your pockets. The idea is that you're basically writing checks on your account.

       

I'm sure you folks will be okay, though.

      

There is indeed a fortress north of the city, a small fixed first floor giving way to 10 more lower floors. Gameplay remains the same as before, with the enemies getting harder. Fortunately, by this point I had the "Rune of Return" spell and could go back and forth from town as necessary. 

         

The automap of the fortress's first level. The levels below this one are larger and random.

       

On Level 5 of this fortress, I found a note ordering its recipient to patrol the fortress carefully, as "Hrungnir fears we have missed our quarry," and Hrungnir had already reported to his boss that he had completed the mission.  

     

After a lot more fighting, leveling, and so forth, I found the next plot point in a room on Level 11. Hrungnir turned out to be a Jotun (giant). He confirmed that I was his target. "My lord need never know of my initial failure." He attacked me with a squad of ogres and was capable of hurling boulders from a distance. I only won the battle using hit and run tactics (via "Phase Door").

       

Shooting a lightning bolt at the Jotun.

       

When Hrungnir falls dead, the character has a moment of satisfaction but is then racked by questions: "Who sent this Hrungnir? To whom or what did he report? Why were you selected to receive his malign attentions?" The character recovers his birthright amulet from the giant's body. This shows up in the inventory as the "Enchanted Amulet of Kings." 

   

I wasn't sure what to do at this point, and I spent some time bumbling about the dungeon and town before I realized I could use the amulet from the "activate" menu. The text related that it enveloped me in a warm glow and showed me a vision of my father. He introduced himself as "Prince Arvi," and said that the amulet's power let us meet somewhere between the nether realm and Midgard. He said that 18 years ago, the royal family got "enmeshed in a great conflict between the Aesir Thor and the trickster Loki." As a part of this conflict, the fire giant Surtur has come to Midgard, which wasn't supposed to happen until Ragnarok. Surtur is Hrungnir's master. My destiny, my father said, is to "thwart Surtur's designs on Midgard" and "reclaim our fallen Castle of the Winds!" I appreciate that because I was wondering what the title was about.  

      

My heritage becomes clear.

        

Finally, Arvi said that if I used the amulet again, it would teleport me to a town near the castle. At the castle, I will be able to confer with the ghost of my grandfather, King Lifthransir. I suspect he's going to tell me about the bane, as the subtitle of Castle of the Winds: Part Two is Lifthransir's Bane—although at one point, it must have been The Fall of Surtur.

         

No Y2K problems in this game.

        

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

        

• 5 points for the game world. I enjoyed the plot and the use of Norse themes.

 

Some well-written text describes my meeting with Hrungnir.

        

• 2 points for character creation and development. There isn't enough personalization of the character, alas, and I would have liked more variety in character classes.

          

My mid-game character sheet.

        

• 0 points for no NPC interaction. The author missed an opportunity to really flesh out the world.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The foes are pretty standard, but with a decent variety of special attacks. I give a point here for the detailed descriptions in the manual. There are no non-combat encounters or puzzles except for the contextual encounter before the last battle.

      

I admittedly already had a pretty good handle on what "goblin" was, but I still love reading paragraphs like this.

        

• 4 points for magic and combat. It has a well-balanced magic system and encourages you not to ignore it. I wouldn't have minded some missile weapon options.

• 6 points for equipment. There are a lot of equipment slots and a decent variety of things to put in them. More important, it's always clear when you have an upgrade.

      

My endgame equipment.

      

• 6 points for the economy. Not terribly complex, but rewarding, especially at the beginning of the game. 

• 2 points for a main quest. There are, alas, no side-quests or choices.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are nothing special, but they don't interfere. As I reported, the interface works well, although I think it could have been a bit easier to use an item (you have to drag it to a belt slot or your free hand, then click "Activate," then choose the item).

• 5 points for gameplay. It's linear and not very replayable, but I found the difficulty and length both pitched exactly right.

   

That's a final score of 36. That's very close to the 38 I gave Moria, and if you look at the scores, you can see how the simplifications that Castle makes just about equal out its innovations. But as I said, I'd rather play another round of Castle than Moria (although not overwhelmingly so), so go figure. 

      

I'd like to get vengeance on this cover artist.

       

Computer Gaming World introduced a column on shareware gaming, written by Chuck Miller, in its December 1992 issue. This was just in time for Miller to review Castle of the Winds in 1993. Reading his column, I'm surprised to see him recognize its Moria roots, and even more surprised that he drops Moria's name with no explanation, as if the average reader could be expected to know what it was. I somehow didn't think that freeware roguelikes were as prominent in the average reader's vocabulary in 1993. Anyway, he liked the game, praised the interface, but criticized the lack of sound effects.

      

Author Rick Saada was a Cleveland native and Princeton University graduate who spent eight years at Microsoft during the company's formative years. He would have been in his late 20s when he put the finishing touches on Castle. Later in the 1990s, he moved to Flying Lab software and worked on Rails Across America (2001) and the MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea (2008). He ran his own company called Holospark from 2015-2019; its primary output was an action game called Earthfall (2017). Since 2019, Saada has served as the CEO for Earthfall's publisher, Nimble.

         

I like Lifthransir's Bane better. The Fall of Surtur feels like a spoiler.

        

Dating Castle of the Winds is difficult, and even now I'm not sure of the precise timeline. I believe the copyright date of 1989 is when Saada began working on it. A couple of sites online have the date as 1992, which seems possible given Computer Gaming World's January 1993 coverage, but I cannot find any mentions of the game in pre-1993 media. In any event, Part One was distributed as freeware. Those who paid the $25 registration fee received Part Two. There's no suggestion that this took a year, so I cannot countenance the opinion of many sites that Part Two is a 1994 game. It is, however, a completely different set of files, so I have to regard it as a unique title. I'll give it a try after an Ormus Saga break.

 

Edit from a day later: Based on this site that Busca linked to, which offers several early version of the game, it appears that the author was circulating versions of the game around his co-workers at Microsoft as early as 1990. It also appears that Epic MegaGames was offering it for sale by mid-1992, so I have changed the date accordingly. 

 

Game 553: The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death

 

      

The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death

Germany

Mike Doran Software (developer); CP Verlag (publisher) 

Released 1993 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 5 July 2025   

     

The Ormus Saga II is a sequel to an Ultima clone I played a decade ago and couldn't win. I remember that it was a bit infuriating because I had visited every location and done everything there was to do. I never found out if my failure to win was something I had done wrong or some error in the programming. The intervening decade has not provided any more clues.

    

The first game was set in the world of Beryland, and the PC was tasked with stopping the Ormus Cult from taking over the world. The second game begins two years later. A mysterious book called the "Ulbore" has surfaced; it's somehow associated with the Brotherhood of the White Rose, who are again taking over cities. The character must complete 9 tasks "provided by the god-servants" within 12 months, or the game is automatically lost.

      

I feel like this story could benefit from a few more introductory sentences.

       

Character creation is nothing more than specifying a name. The character starts with 90 hits, 90 experience points, 160 gold, 8 food, 8 soldiers, and 20 magic points outside a town called Remfield. The game's geography has not changed at all. The shape of the continent is the same, as is the placement of cities and even the specific people in the cities.

   

What has changed is that cities are no longer menu towns but rather fully explorable 32 x 32 areas, sometimes with multiple levels. You have to chase down NPCs, interact with shopkeepers, and search pieces of furniture. The author has also made some cosmetic changes to the screen and has added a day/night cycle, complete with a moon and a sun cycling through the sky, with darkness crowding in around the player at night. Graphically, of course, the game looks like the early Ultima series, and many of these mechanics were adopted from those games.

        

The game begins.

       

Curiously, the author decided to move a bit "backwards" when it comes to combat. Instead of the Ultima III-style tactical combat grid, the game has reverted to more of an Ultima I/II approach where you fight enemies on the main exploration screen, and there's only ever one of them at a time.

     

Fighting a spider. You can't see the cursor blinking on and off.

    

Oh, what else . . . let's see . . . oh, yes. The author does not adopt Ultima's approach of mapping each of the game's many commands to a sensible key. Instead, except for the occasional password, all control is through the joystick. To access a menu command, you hit the joystick button, scroll through the list, and hit it again to select. No big deal.

        

      

Seriously, I don't know how much more of this I can take. Between the all-mouse controls of Sandor II and Magus, my mother's death, and the all-joystick control of Ormus, it's like the universe wants to punish me somehow. I don't mean to suggest that those things all have equal weight. 

     

This is a list of all the commands on that menu:

   

EXIT MENU

ATTACK

BOARD SHIP

CAST SPELL

ENTER

CLIMB

VIEW MAP

OPEN DOOR

UNLOCK DOOR

WEAR RING

EXIT SHIP

     

Scrolling through the long menu.

     

SAVE GAME

LOOK

INVENTORY

TIME DATE

READY ITEM

EQUIPMENT

SEND TROOPS

LIGHT TORCH

ATTACK CITY

SEARCH

TALK

VIEW PLAYER

YELL/PRAY 

     

Even joystick lovers ought to agree that this is an unwieldy list, particularly since TALK and SEARCH, two of the most common commands, are at the bottom. If you're a game author, and your player enters a room full of treasure chests, you want him to cheer, not swear.

        

Damn it.

       

The Ormus games do have something original to add to their Ultima heritage: A city conquering/defense mechanic. Throughout the game, the enemy faction (Ormus in the first game; the Brotherhood of the White Rose here) will launch attacks against friendly cities. If the player can't defend them, he has to successfully conquer them back in order to visit them. Both defense and conquering take place on a screen in which the player's forces face off against the enemy's forces. But there's so little to do on this screen, and the ending is so predetermined based on the number of troops and weapons (i.e., cannons) that each side has, that the contest might as well have been handled automatically. In any event, you can buy soldiers and weapons in most towns, then send them to other towns to help beef up the garrison.

          

That seems a little unfair.

      

One thing that the game doesn't warn you about is that if the king's palace is conquered, you lose immediately. This happened to me within the first 15 minutes of playing. Accordingly, you want to send some troops to the king's palace as early in the game as possible.

    

Beyond that, winning the game appears to be about assembling clues from NPC dialogue and other sources. NPCs just spill their guts when you talk to them; there are no dialogue options. I started in Remfield and moved east along the coast.

   

Remfield  

• Armor shop, weapon shop, inn, troop shop. 
• Shaw: Just joined the Brotherhood of the White Rose, "probably the only unsullied order in Beryland."
• Nomis: Recognizes me as the knight who put an end to Lord Marox.
• Bulk: The enemy is growing strong again. "Ulbore" has been translated. Lord Falworth knows the location of a treasure.
• Ekim: A terrible secret will be released once "Ulbore" is translated.
• Falworth: There's a treasure at 130N, 141W. I should go to King Argon right away.

        

I left a locked door for which I need a magic key. I didn't find any magic keys until later, and even then the game won't let me open locked doors with them. Either there are regular keys in addition to magic keys, or the game isn't reading my key inventory properly.

     

But I do!

      

Like its predecessor, the game has a system by which you can see both world maps and area maps, and get your current coordinates, if you find magic maps. I found a few in some piece of furniture. The author did not fix the problem from the first Ormus where "west" really means "east." 

       

The map of King Argon's palace.

      

I had to reload and return to Remfield multiple times to buy more troops and weapons to conquer the next two cities. Fortunately, the treasure chests in the city gave me enough money to do that. This isn't the sort of game where you're an Avatar and need to avoid stealing from chests. Indeed, you have to search basically every piece of furniture.

        

Dillingston  

• I had to reconquer the city. 

       

Dillingston was "occupied" when I tried to enter.

     

• Troop shop, pawn shop, healer, ship shop
• Sally: There's a spell called FOREMIS that dissolves force fields. PORDI teleports to safe ground near the king's palace. 
• Festus: Wants to be mayor. Was ordered by Lord Narod to tell me the name of a god-servant: MARCIUM. 
• Velvet: Recently explored a dungeon. At the bottom, found a scroll with coordinates 81N, 156W listed.

      

A later map of the game world, with current coordinates.

       

• Derrick: The Black Dragon (a foe from the first game) is still alive, the most powerful being that has ever walked Beryland. Since Lord Marox and Thorn both perished, the dragon is the "last titan." It used to live in the eastern swamps. 

   

The pawn shop buys nuggets, jewels, silver, copper, and some other items, added to the game to increase the complexity of the economy. Finding 6 nuggets and then having to sell them is more work than just finding 60 gold pieces in the first place, but there's still something I like about it. 

     

You and I have different definitions of "only."

       

Ships cost over 3,000 gold pieces, so I'm a long way from being able to afford one. 

 

Dalewood 

• Also had to reconquer the city. 
• Inn, weapon shop, troop shop, magic shop.
• Farlow: Suggests I find the Mystic Helm but gives no clue where it is.
• Tom: Thinks I may have been referred to him by Martin but wants the password.
• Garder: We can blame all recent troubles on the Brotherhood of the White Rose. 
• Beth: Flirts. I should talk to Eliza, who has a secret.
• Eliza: Search 52N, 73W. 

    

In a barrel in the city, I found something called Lord Skull. I bought all the spells at the magic shop, which were cheap, but I don't know what all of them do. 

      

With night closed in around me, I find a skull.

       

52N, 73W wasn't far from Dalewood, so I headed over there after finishing the city, searched the appropriate square, and found nothing. It's hard not to feel like I'm already walking dead because of some screw-up in the coordinate system.

  

Hillstone

• Also had to reconquer the city. How big a head start did the Brotherhood have? 
• Troop store, healer, armory.
• Manuel: Went to school with Simon, Ralf, and Mike. Mike is serving in the military, helping the king to fight the Ormus troops.
• Tina: Farm girl. Flirts. Suggests I visit her at night. 

      

I then promptly forgot.

       

• Marry: Waitress at the inn. 
• Ralf: In school studying law. Manuel is a banker. "In each city, village, and other place, you can find 8 items! After you discovered them all, you receive a bonus!"
• Left a locked door. 

     

Ralf's comment was a fun bit of intelligence. Knowing each town has exactly 8 items will cut down on the number of scrolling to "Search" that I need to do. It also explains why I got experience after my last search in Dalewood. The references to the NPCs all going to school together seems to be a real-world reference to author Mike Doran and other people who contributed to the game.

 

As I traveled between these cities, I only fought about three battles with wandering enemies. I remember noting this in the first Ormus, too. 

     

Temple Mar

• Prayed in front of an altar. Was told I wasn't ready for a higher level. Good to know that's how you level up. 

         

What does it look like I'm doing?!

         

• Attacked by an archer and a troll. I didn't realize you could get attacked in temples. If I try to talk to them, the game crashes. It occurs to me later that this might be a good place to grind if it loads an enemy every time you visit. 

       

Have some respect, troll.

        

• Left a locked door with a poison field on the other side.
• Couldn't figure out a way to access a large part of the area. Need a way to cross water or go through walls, or there's some secret door mechanic that I can't figure out. 

    

Harper Valley 

• Again, had to liberate it from enemy troops.
• Armory, troop store, weapon store.
• Upgraded to chain armor (from leather) and a dragon shield.
• Andrea: Close friend of Lord Narod. The name of one god-servant is FERMON.
• Gorab: Member of the Ormus cult. They will get their revenge on me.

     

I do not remember, but good to see you anyway.

      

• Martina: I should ask her husband about a treasure. 
• Lothar: His grandfather stole a chest from a dragon and hid it at 132N, 25W.

   

At this point, I figured it was time to visit the Royal Palace. I looked up its location in the first game, and it was in the same place here. I marched right up to King Argon's throne room and spoke to him. He reiterated that I would have to complete 9 tasks for the various god-servants, go to the mystic flames in the Stone Mountains, yell the "holy word," and speak the three "eternal words," but backwards. Somehow, this will save the world.

 

Bar-Yogun, the king's wizard, told me of a treasure at 64N, 217W. He also warned me that when someone gives me coordinates, they may not be exact, and I should search the general area, so perhaps that's the solution to my earlier problem. Princess Sheila told me the name of another god-servant: URUK. 

       

I'm not sure you understand the purpose of "coordinates."

     

As I left the castle, I was wondering where I would meet the god-servants, and it occurred to me that maybe I needed to summon them. I used the YELL command to bellow URUK.

   

Sure enough, the creature appeared. He said that the task I'd need to do for him is to finish a sequence of runes, shown below.

      

Those aren't "secret runes"; they're just letters.

        

I'll be damned if I can make anything out of it. I'm guessing it requires knowledge of something in the game, like maybe those are the first letters of towns or something.

 

I continued with the other two names I had. FERMON wanted three black jewels and MARCIUM wanted to know the "holy word." 

    

As I wrap up this first session, it's 15 January. The game started on 7 January. I don't love the idea of a time limit, but I also don't seem to be in much danger of hitting it. Now that I know the map is the same as the first game, including the locations of towns, I can work out an optimal exploration strategy.

   

This kind of gameplay, involving finding clues and searching towns and talking to NPCs, is one of the things I love about CRPGs. I just wish I could do it with the damned keyboard.

   

Time so far: 4 hours 

Upcoming Games: Castle of the Winds (1993), Magische Steine (1993), Computer Underground (1993), Ishar II (1993), Daemonsgate (1993), Excelsior (1993), Daymare 2 (1993)

Yes, as you can detect, we're not alternating between "new" games and "old" games for a while. It's time to get 1993 done. I'm going to be announcing a change in protocol starting with 1994, and I really just want to get there. As such, I prematurely sent Breach (1987) back to the bench after the DOS version gave me a bit of trouble. 

      

As usual, please do not post spoilers. This discussion is to offer:

     

• Opinions about the game's RPG status. While applying your own definitions to such a discussion is fine, what really helps is if you apply mine. The FAQ (7th question) covers my definition.
• Tips for emulating the game
• Known bugs and pitfalls
• Tips for character creation
• Trivia
• Sources of information about the game from around the web, particularly obscure ones that I might otherwise miss during my pre-game research.

These are the next seven games (after listing six, there was only 1 left for 1993):

 

• Castle of the Winds (1993, SaadaSoft, Windows). A graphical roguelike that I've already started playing. I have no idea if it's in the right year, though. I need to research more about its version history. 

• Magische Steine (1993, Independent, C64). Looks like a standard Ultima clone, but these can sometimes be quite good.  

• Computer Underground (1993, Haxoft, DOS). An interesting-sounding game in which you play a hacker and you try to hack various systems and fight other hackers. It seems to have attributes, levels, and an inventory. 

• Ishar II (1993, Silmarils, DOS). The sequel to a game I covered five years ago, this might be the last "AAA" game of 1993. I enjoyed the predecessor and look forward to the sequel.

• Daemonsgate: Volume One - Donovan's Key (1993, Imagitec, DOS). I have no idea what to expect from this British RPG, but the fact that there's no Volume Two isn't promising.

• Excelsior, Phase One: Lysandia: (1993, 11th Dimension, DOS). Another Ultima-style game, but it does have a 2000 sequel.

• Daymare 2 (1993, Jing Gameware, DOS). A sequel to The Mystic Well (dubbed Daymare for its DOS release), this should be a Dungeon Master-style dungeon crawler.  

 

At this point, we should be done with 1993, and I can lay out plans going forward. 

 

BRIEF: Ring of Elanor (1987)

 

        

Ring of Elanor

United States

Independently developed; published in UpTime disk magazine

Released 1987 for Commodore 64

Did not finish because: Bugs

    

You rarely expect genius in diskmag games; at best, they might have one innovative thing or might do a good job evoking a better RPG without actually replicating it. The best we've seen so far are probably John Carmack and John Romero's Dark Designs trilogy (1990-1991) for Softdisk, evoking elements of both Wizardry and Phantasie. John Mattson's 1991 RPGs for the Commodore 128 had enough innovation to keep things interesting. These games weren't meant to compete with commercial titles, so you have to cut them a little slack.

   

But Ring of Elanor, at least in the only version I can find, is so completely broken that I really can't find anything positive to say about it. It was written by Mike Cooke and published in the Commodore 64 version of UpTime, where John Romero got his start on Apple II games. If it's consciously emulating anything, I don't know what. It feels like games I've played before, but I can't put my finger on a specific title.

      

A bit of the backstory.

     

The backstory is that you're in the land of Elanor, which used to be full of chaos and demons, until Elric the Lawful and the Brothers of Law banished Chaos and its minions from the mortal world. Elric created the Great Ring of Elanor and placed it on his statue in the center of the town of Homeland. The ring generated a magical "lawful" field that kept Chaos at bay. But now the ring has been stolen, and evil is returning to the world.

   

Character creation has the player give a name (in response to the question, "What durst thy name?") and then choose from elf, cleric, and human classes. The game randomly rolls between 1 and 15 for strength, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, hit points, and armor class. You get five chances to reject the statistics before you have to toss the character and start over. Each character starts with a different collection of spells, including "Invisibility," "Healing," "Web," "Create Food," and "Fireball." Finally, each character starts with around 10 food and between 50 and 85 silver.

      

My character sheet at Level 3. I had to cheat to get that much silver.

      

The character begins one step south of the city of Homeland, which is roughly in the center of the 40 x 22 game map. The text interface has a "word map" of the immediate surroundings in the upper right corner. The player is prompted to move any of the four cardinal directions, through fields, forests, swamps, and mountains, encountering random enemies and the occasional fixed encounter or treasure.

      

Get used to this message.

      

The game's first major flaw, though not its most fatal, becomes clear in the opening rounds. Every single movement and action requires 1 unit of food. The moment you hit 0, you starve to death. You never find food in the wild. In town, it costs a whopping 5 silver pieces per unit. So even if the starting player turns around, heads back into town, and spends everything on food (after buying a starting weapon), he'll at best have about 20 units. That's only barely enough to make it to the next-closest town before starving. And if you're thinking "Create Food" will help, it costs 1 unit to cast and only creates 1 unit.

        

If you try to use a spell too often, you get this message. Spelling is not the author's strong suit.

        

In most games, the solution would be to grind against monsters, amass money, and use it to buy more food. But here we have another problem in that random encounters at Level 1 are extremely rare. The only place that you can travel likely to have any random monsters at all is the swamps to the west of Homeland, where you might find a couple of golems. But even then, you'd be lucky to get 100 silver pieces from them, which would get you just enough food to pay for the trek and back.

     

I figured that if I just kept exploring until I died, I'd find some solution—something within the radius of Homeland that would give me enough money to move onward. My characters kept dying of starvation, almost never encountering even one foe, but I kept creating new ones and going off in different directions. Eventually, I had mapped everything within 20 moves of Homeland, and I was still no closer to finding a way to avoid starving to death, let alone attaining any loftier goals.

         

Any battle, let alone a victorious one, is rare in the early game.

            

In addition to food, the town sells all kinds of other items necessary for long-term survival, including armor, better weapons, healing, lanterns and torches to see in caves, and horses, which are necessary to enter mountainous areas. Since horses cost about 350 silver, there is no functional way to get there the way the game is programmed. The best I can figure, the author meant for food to deplete less rapidly, or for food to cost 1 silver for 5 units instead of the other way around.

       

Some of the items sold in Homeland village.

       

Thus, in an effort to see any part of the game beyond 20 moves from Homeland, I edited the character file to give myself enough money to buy plenty of food. With that, I was able to map the rest of the available world.

   

Combat comes along randomly, with enemies determined by the environment. You meet golems and swamp rats in swamps, werewolves and black bears in forests, goats and mountain cobras in mountains, and giant gophers and rattlesnakes in fields. In combat, you specify each round what weapon you'll use and then whether to attack the enemy's head, torso, or "rear." The annoying thing is that you have to type the full name of the weapon that you're using, no abbreviations. You wouldn't think it would be that hard to accurately type BROADSWORD, but I get it wrong at least half the time.

       

The sword isn't a great weapon, but at least it has fewer letters.

      

But even more enraging than that, there doesn't appear to be any way to attack with some of the magic items that you can find—silver dagger, +1 sword, +2 mace—because the game won't let you type a space in the name of the weapon. I tried just DAGGER and +1SWORD and other combinations, but it wants that space that it won't let you type. This is particularly infuriating because you're always breaking regular weapons. [Ed. The space thing was my stupid mistake. I'd mapped the SPACE bar to the joystick button in some previous game. The other bugs, alas, remain unconquerable.]

  

There are two fixed battles on the part of the map that I could explore, one with a brown dragon and one with a blue dragon. They offer additional body parts to attack. It didn't matter, because even at Level 10, I couldn't kill either of them without breaking all of my regular weapons and thus having nothing to attack with.

       

Sure would be nice to use one of my better weapons here.

      

Random battles come faster as the levels get higher, and the food issue stops being so much of a problem, though it never completely goes away. You gain a level every 1,000 experience, earning extra maximum hit points and (I think) greater attack accuracy. I never found a way to get spells that the character doesn't start with. "Fireball" came in handy for me often, and I imagine "Healing" does the same.

   

I explored as much of the map as I could. In addition to the fixed battles, there are two fixed treasure chests, one with a +2 mace and one with poison gas. There are two other towns: Outpost Village to the southwest and Northerly Village in the northeast. They sell exactly the same things as Homeland. I can't figure out how to get across the river to the northwest quadrant, but I suspect a pass becomes available after you defeat the blue dragon, which I wasn't able to do. 

       

As much as I could explore of the game world.

       

As you explore, the game saps your hit points by having random disasters befall you: falling trees in forests, quicksand in swamps, landslides on mountains, and ditches in fields. The accumulation of these misfortunes can be deadly.

        

The game says you're a "bold fighter" no matter what.

      

The final blow to the game's playability comes in the form of a large area of "foggy fields" to the northeast. Entering any of the foggy squares causes the game to crash with an error. I suspect it has something to do with checking to make sure the character has a lantern. 

      

My mother warned me about crashing in the fog.

      

On the plus side, the auto map works pretty well. X's indicate fixed encounters.

        

A small part of the game.

              

Finally, each town features a "town crier" who will offer a hint for half his money, but one of the hints is that town criers sometimes lie. An inspection of the file indicates that the hints are:

   

• "Werewolves are harmed by arrows." I know from experience this is a lie.
• "Werewolves are harmed by silver." Probably, but since SILVER DAGGER has a space in it, who knows?
• "One water passage is in the north."
• "One water passage is in the southwest." One of these might be true. Maybe you have to try every water square to see if the game will let you swim across in that location.
• "Mountains require horses." True.
• "Swamps require horses." False.
• "Ropes will save you in the swamp." True.
• "Ropes are needed in the caverns." False.
• "Evil hides in the northwest." Probably. I couldn't get there.
• "Evil hides in Homeland Village." That would be a cool twist, but where? In the menu? 

           

A little bit of information costs as much as 11 meals.

      

The same text file indicates that when you arrive back in Homeland with the ring, the end message is:

    

As you enter the village, a shout goes out and a group of people gather around you. They are amazed you returned so soon with the ring and are astonished by your battle scars and increased power. They lead you over to the statue of Elric, where the ring once rested and protected men, and where you must replace it. As the ring slips onto the statue, a smile slowly replaces the sad frown that has adorned its face since the loss of the ring. The journey is ended, and you are now the king of the world of mortal men and the keeper of the ring. 

 

Author Mike Cooke seems to have written at least two other games for UpTime: Battleship 64! and Memorizer 64! It doesn't appear that he wrote any other RPGs or that UpTime published any more RPGs. It's possible that the errors in this one are in the surviving copies and not the original.