Sandor II: A Midsummer Night's RPG

 

My party stays up all night in a forest.

                

Since I was teenager, I've tried to adhere to the tradition of staying up all night on the Summer Solstice, which isn't at all that hard given my natural circadian rhythm. I'd like to say that I'm usually doing something interesting during that time—gamboling in a forest outside Athens, for instance—but I suppose most of those 35 years have been spent on a computer or in front of a television set. This year, I spent it playing Sandor II. There was a time I wouldn't want to admit that, but I'm old now and have no one left to impress.

       

It became clear this session that the game is a lot larger than I thought. What I took for the entire game world in the automap was just the portion that I was able to see based on my current "Cartography" skill. When I pumped that skill up to 100% and saw the entire thing, I realized it's more than a dozen times as large as the small, walled-in starting area in the northwest.

      

The full world map. In this session, I didn't go further east than Column D or further south than Row 4. The opening area is basically A1:A4.

           

A second revelation was that there was more to the interface than I realized. Thanks to Buck for cluing me in. Right-clicking while in dungeons brings up some options, including the ability to see the current time and to wait. I tried it in the dungeon with the three fountains, and the same NPC who I had met outside came along. He told me of the importance of two words. "One word opens the fortress, but the other you must tell the gatekeeper! Now listen carefully. Whoever forgets the 7th letter of my first name gets one. Whoever swaps the first 4 gets the other. Well, farewell to you."

   

The NPC is named FLORIAN, so one of the passwords is FLORIA and the other . . . well, "swaps the other four" could mean several things, and I would have saved myself 44 guesses if I had realized that it meant "put them in reverse order." Instead, I interpreted it as "changed the order" and I listed all 23 possibilities—but really 46 because I didn't know whether I should keep the IAN or not. When FLORIA didn't work on the guard at the gate surrounding the starting area, I tried FLRO, FLROIAN, FORL, FORLIAN, and so forth, before getting it at the end of the list with ROLF.

       

Waiting until midnight in the dungeon.

           

Unfortunately, while ROLF let me through the gate, it didn't work when trying to get back. I left some undone stuff in the starting area. That was particularly unfortunate because I had a third revelation in the first dungeon I found on the other side of the gate: Dungeon doors haven't been locked. What I took for "locked" doors could be opened with an "open" command on the same screen as the clock. Some of them require forcing the door or picking the lock, and you have multiple tries to do so. I still think there is some door that's going to require stones (as per one of the tavern tips), but I haven't found it yet.

       

Exploring the island kingdom.

      

I didn't explore this first dungeon very far. Instead, I hopped a ferry across a channel to another walled-in area. Eventually, I came to a house with a woman who offered to ferry me across yet another river. There was no river nearby. I said yes anyway and found myself on a couple of islands connected by a bridge, with no way back. I wandered to the southern island and met a mage who said I was in the Island Kingdom of Bramos and that I had to pass a test; specifically, this riddle:

      

German	English
Ein Glanzmetall steht hier am Anfang. Ihm folgt in tiefem Schwarz ein Anhang. Ein Mensch mit einem Angebot. Man wählt. Er schleppt herbei, was Not. Wir aber sehen bei der Verschmelzung der beiden schließlich nur noch Rot.	A shiny metal stands at the beginning here. It is followed by an appendage in deep black. A person with an offer. One chooses. He brings what is needed. But when the two merge, we ultimately see only red.

     

I couldn't get anywhere with it; fortunately, commenters matt w and Michl figured it out: ZINNOBER, or CINNABAR in English. The shiny metal is meant to make you think of tin (zinn) and the person with an offer is meant to make you think of a waiter (ober). "When the two merge, we ultimately see only red" refers to the vermilion color of cinnabar. I'm not sure what the "appendage in deep black" is about.

    

As a consequence of answering the riddle successfully, teleporters bounced my party around several islands before we met the "representative of the King of Bramos," a cyclops, who gave us Kotalan's Ring. I assume that becomes vital later. (Kotalan is the evil wizard who has kidnapped the three princesses.) A ferry took us back to where we came from.

       

That is one ugly cyclops.

         

Other findings in this new area were cities called Lunosa and Terosa; schools offering to train "Cartography"; "Hunting"; "Negotiation"; and "Trap Removal"; and a spell school. At this latter location, my spellcasters learned "Strength 1," "Ninja 1," and "Flame Jet 1." "Flame Jet" turns out to be awesome, damaging every enemy on the screen.

     

As I continued to explore, I kept getting trounced by the enemies in the wilderness, so I returned to the dungeon near the entrance to this area. Amidst a few battles, I met an NPC who told me that I'd left the "Old Land," and that to get back, I would need a different password. He gave me instructions to go to a grove of trees to the southwest and wait, which I did. A voice gave the password as GORF.

      

I guess technically I wasn't supposed to wait after sundown, but it didn't seem to have any negative effect.

       

I had picked up a fifth party member, Iain, in one of the towns. In the dungeon, two more offered to join the party. I only had room for one, and I took the one (Bridget) who had better spellcasting statistics. That gives me three fighter characters and three mage characters.

         

The last character.

         

Now that I had the password back to the starting area, a full party, and a better sense of how the game worked, I felt better equipped to explore things comprehensively. I broke the world map into quadrants and began exploring them starting in quadrant A1. Most of these places, I'd already been, but here we go anyway:

 

• City of Kolono (A1). Trainer. Tavern tip is about the king's daughters.

• Cartography School (A1). I pumped Sirus up to 100%.

• City of Malonga (A1). Has a guild (where you level up). Tavern tip is also about the king.

• King's Castle (A1). Already been here, got the quest to rescue the princesses from Kotalan.

• Cave that's looking for a 4-symbol combination on the door (A1). No clues yet, but see below.

• Dungeon (A1). Wolfsstein Ruins. I thought it had a locked door when I entered before, but it didn't. I find no enemy parties in here, just a lot of adventurers who offer to join my already-full party.

      

If Sirus had entered this dungeon first, he could have completed his party all at once.

       

• Dungeon with the Three Wells (A2), as described above.

• Cartography School (A2).

• Locksmith School (A3). I trained Iain up to 50%. 

• Ferries (A3/A4).

• Cave with the Mosaic (A3). I can't get in until I figure out the pattern. I later found a mosaic picture in the B4 dungeon, but it doesn't seem to be the one that this cave is looking for.

• City of Paradiso (A4). Guild. Training. Tavern tale is about putting stones in a gate to make it open.

• City of Kassada (A4). Red and platinum gems for sale. Tavern tale is about creatures whose charms are irresistible to men but not to women.

• Magic School (A4).

• Dungeon (B4). This is the one with all the traps. A spiral hallway ended in a door that wanted 3 symbols out of 5. That's only 10 possible combinations, and I got it on the first try (the first 3 buttons). Beyond was a message and a picture of a mosaic, but not the one for the cave in A3.

      

Actually, I may be wrong. The top image shows the mosaic in the dungeon; the bottom my (nearly complete) attempt to replicate it in the cave. I just realized that I had the top bar in the second glyph wrong. I'll try again before the next entry.

       

The message in that last dungeon was:

      

There is a gate and a secret mechanism that opens it, there in the temple of the deceased. Whoever solves the riddle will receive his legacy as a reward and my help in the fight against the hordes of the Kotalan. He who can see, let him SEE.

       

After this, I got thinking: assuming no buttons are pressed twice, and the order doesn't matter, how many possible combinations can there be of 4 buttons out of 8? (I didn't know for sure that no button was pressed twice and the order didn't matter, but my experience in the last dungeon made me suspect it.) The answer is 70. I decided that was just on this side of "too many," returned to the cave in A1, and got to work. The door opened after a couple of dozen guesses.

      

I still wonder how I was supposed to do this "for real."

          

The dungeon beyond the door was the largest in the game so far, with numerous combats and messages:

      

• In many great vaults there is nothing but nothing.
• We've already been there and took everything! Signed, Olaf the Red.
• You have a choice: Take the short road or the long road. Both will lead you to the Realm of Madness. It's not worth turning back!
• You have chosen the long road. You will starve.

      

The only other encounter I found was with a guy who demanded all my food. I gave it to him and he laughed about how much of an idiot I was and disappeared. I reloaded and said no, and nothing else came of the encounter. I don't know whether I missed something, but I found nothing else in the dungeon; perhaps those first two messages were meant to be taken literally.

         

Note from the automap the size of the dungeon level.

          

Except when I got ahead of myself and started meeting Level 6-7 enemies, combat has been relatively simple so far, but that's partly because I learned an early trick. The party always goes first. All characters get 5 movement points. Moving a space costs 1; attacking costs 2 unless you have only 1 point left, in which case you can attack for 1; spells cost 2. Characters can move and attack in the same round, but it doesn't appear that enemies can. Thus, you're safe from melee enemies as long as you don't end a round next to them. Spellcasters and missile enemies can hit you from wherever, though, and some spellcasters have the equivalent of "Flame Jet." Other than "Flame Jet 1," "Firebolt 1," and "Healing 1," I haven't experienced much with spells myself.

       

Conleth blasts the enemies with "Flame Jet 1." The game cycles through each enemy and gives the damage done.

        

There are two tedious parts of playing the game. The first has to do with equipment. Trying to identify everything after combat (you often get 8-10 items), figuring out what's more powerful than what I already have, then testing to see which characters have the strength to equip it, takes so long that I know I've been overlooking potential upgrades. The second tedious part of the game is having to click on everything. I would pay good money for the numberpad to control movement. 

     

Like most Motelsoft games, though, there's something charming about it overall. Character development is palpably rewarding, and there's a minor thrill that comes with overcoming each puzzle and challenge and opening up a new area, perhaps heightened for me because I also have to struggle with the language. Something will probably block me permanently before the end, but I'll do my best to get there.

   

Time so far: 14 hours 

    

BOSS: Beyond Moria: Summary and Rating

The most generous that this game ever was with the economy.

        

BOSS: Beyond Moria

United States

Independently developed and published
Released 1990 for VMS, 1993 for Macintosh, 2000 for Linux, 2010 for Windows

Date Started: 30 May 2025   

Date Ended: 16 June 2025

Total Hours: 8 (not won)

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

        

Your comments on my first BOSS entry were useful. First, I figured out the backup issue, thanks primarily to Kalieum's thread. I was stupid when I was first playing. It turns out that I actually have two "System" disks attached to Basilisk, one with System 7.0 and one with System 7.5. It was booting from the 7.5 version but still showing the 7.0 version in the interface, and of course that one was where I had been hunting for the preferences file.

   

Backing up both the character and the file worked—usually. It wasn't a good long-term solution. I kept messing it up, either by forgetting to create a new copy when restoring or deleting the wrong file. There were times I didn't think I did anything wrong and the game still saw through my ruse, refusing to reload the slain player. Nonetheless, I got a few reloads out of each character and thus got farther in the game than I would have gotten if I'd been forced to play it a lot safer.

         

Creating a new ninja character.

       

I also adopted P-Tux7's suggestion of using an alien character, agreeing that the improved statistics were worth the longer time between level-ups. I continued to roll random numbers for the class. I burned through a warrior, thief, wrestler, and scientist before having my best luck with a ninja. Ninjas don't learn any magic, so I assume that they lose potency later in the game, but they're great starting characters. For one thing, they have one of the few actual weapons (a katana) at start; most characters begin with hairbrushes or walking sticks or tennis rackets. They also come with 8 scrolls—sorry, disks—of identification. 

    

Some other things I noted as I played:

   

• All stairways in the game take you a random number of levels. You can get to the bottom level with just a couple of stairways if you're lucky (or unlucky). 

• I feel like a lot more things cause attribute drains in this game; for instance, insect swarms somehow reduce charisma. 

• The economy feels a lot tighter. There were times I spent hours trying to save up enough money for a single potion to restore an attribute. Buying higher-level weapons and armor during the first few hours never crossed my mind.

• "Beam-Me-Up" disks do indeed act as Scrolls of Recall. But the computer eats the disk so often that you need to adventure with three or four of them to ensure you can actually get back to town.

         

One shop's armor list.

        

• And "Research Points" are indeed akin to magic points.

• About half of the monsters in the game poison the character. I get why spiders and snakes do, but pygmies? Stairways? A lot of stuff blinds you and splashes acid on you, too.

• Money doesn't just come in the form of arcade tokens, as I reported last time. You can find it in the form of nickels, dimes, trinkets, blank disks, postage stamps, and coupons.

• Speaking of coupons, you can find coupons that give you discounts at the various stores on the town level, but they have to be identified first.

   

And because I have little else to report, here's an exhaustive list of creatures slain by my ninja character. See how many references you can get: Action Jackson, automated steamroller, berzerk construction drone, Blip gang member, blue Jarwangian mold, confused psionicist, crazed ferret, creeping pennies, Crud gang member, crude dude, drooling trekker, excuse for birth control, floating orb, giant green frog,  greedy little guy, green walking fungus, grey ectoplasm, grinch, Jarwangian bully, kamikaze attack droid, large grey snake, large white snake, major insect swarm, mechanized Dust-Buster, Milli, minor insect swarm, mumbling scientist, mutant cookie monster, mutant Keebler elf, pit bull, remote laser camera, Scorpion gang member, scruffy hermit, secret agent, seeker orb, short pygmy, shrieker slime, sleazy thief, slurged mutant, small spider, snapping turtle, stairway, studly hacker, Tigger the tiger, Vanilli, Vogon scout, Walter the Wrestler, wasp swarm, white walking fungus, wasp swarm, yellow ectoplasm, yellow Jarwangian mold, Zippy the zapping pinhead. I remember reading "Zippy the Pinhead" strips in the Boston Globe back in the 1990s. I could never understand them.

        

You won't find this one in the D&D monster manual.

         

My ninja eventually made it to dungeon Level 10. While still randomized, it's a bit different than the others in that it feels a bit more hand-crafted. It is a large rectangle, outlined in straight walls, with numerous buildings in the interior. For a while, I kept getting killed on the level, or had to flee back to the town level because I was about to. Eventually, I was attacked by the Seattle Mob Boss. I defeated him in a couple of blows and got a message that I could take the bus to the next city from the hotel. Shortly thereafter, the character was killed by a swarm of remote laser cameras while trying to find a stairway.

           

About to win the first dungeon.

       

I was about ready to wrap this one up, but I hated the idea of yet another Moria variant with a "No" in the "Won?" column. Instead, I fired up the most recent edition (3.2) of the Windows version by Richard ("PlunderBunny") Drysdall. I played an alien soldier and managed to get to the same place I got with the Mac version: killing the boss of Seattle. I even returned to the city and boarded a bus for the next city on the list: Boise.

         

I wonder if any of the cities have ever been mentioned in an RPG before.

      

Drysdall's version is recognizably the same game, but it has a host of minor tweaks. Some of the ones I noticed:

     

• The random city layouts are more imaginative, with buildings of different sizes and sometimes multiple shops in the same large building. There's even the possibility of water along one edge.

       

If we imagine that left is northwest, the "F" is in the perfect spot for Pike's Place.

      

• Other more imaginative screen layouts (see the death and character screens below), often with the use of color. Color is used for functional purposes, too; for instance, the PC character changes to something (green?) when he's poisoned and something else (red?) when he's low on hit points.

        

Of course, there's a new title screen. This version isn't "beyond" anything.

     

• Slightly different keyboard commands.

• Potions are now pills, which are E)aten instead of q)uaffed.

• Reloading gives you a recap of what happened in the previous session.

       

California slang makes a comeback in Seattle in the future, apparently.

         

• There's a time limit of 99 days, which the author promises is generous. It took me almost 2 days to defeat the first boss and get to Boise.

• There's a clock on the screen and stores close at night. Given how slowly time passes and how often you need stores, these closures pose a major strategic challenge that the player has to prepare for. 

• Doors open automatically when you move into them.

• A lot more of the game map fits on the screen.

         

Here, I can see nearly a third of the level.

       

• The dungeon has semi-permanence. I didn't experiment enough to figure it all out, but I think maybe the game remembers the levels until you return to town. When you go down a flight of stairs, a set of stairs remains on the new level to take you back up. The game is otherwise less generous with stairs as you explore. 

• There are a lot of new enemies. I think at least half the bestiary is different. The enemies in this version are significantly harder than in the Mac version I played. I also didn't note any self-replicating swarms of enemies in the Mac version, and this version was rife with them. (I spent over an hour trying to get through a swarm of kamikaze droids before concluding that it just wasn't possible.) The enemies seem to have a greater variety of special attacks and defenses, which I'm guessing is intended to force the character to make more thorough use of inventory options. 

 

!Zarg is a new enemy who shoots you from afar.

        

• Most importantly, the Windows BOSS does not delete your character when you die. 

        

The greater enemy difficulty meant that it took me longer to complete the first dungeon. My character was Level 13 when I killed Seattle's boss. But if the game had featured permadeath, I think it would have taken me until at least Level 20.

    

If I were going to continue with any version, it would be the Windows version, but of course that's a 2025 game and not a 1993 game. I don't dislike either version, but just as with Moria and Angband, I don't have the time for them. BOSS might be a quicker version of Moria (and the gods know, it needed one), but it's still not quicker than Rogue or NetHack.

   

BOSS earns 39 on the GIMLET, and I was surprised to see it rating a few points higher than Angband (36) and even one point higher than Moria (38), both of which I liked better, except for the length. I gave BOSS 1 point for the game world, even though its post-apocalyptic, futuristic "setting" is deeply unconvincing, and I significantly prefer the implicit fantasy worlds of the previous two games. This is one of those times in which my GIMLET fails to account for the fact that the absence of a variable is sometimes preferable to a bad version of it.

       

They could have at least told us what "Jarwangians" are.

         

Where this branch of roguelikes does very well is in "equipment" and "economy"; in these entries, I barely touched upon the huge variety of weapons, armor, disks, potions, wearable items, usable items, regular guns, ray guns, and so forth, allowing the player a lot of tactical and strategic options. Returning to the surface with a pack full of loot to identify, distribute, and sell never gets old, and I often ache for the simplicity of Moria's system when I'm playing NetHack and individually dropping items to analyze their sale prices while getting attacked by mimics.

    

So we'll leave BOSS to the Roguelike Addict and move on. It has been a long time since I felt in such an utter slump, and I really need to push past it. 

Sandor II: Already Stuck

 

An unknown encounter looms in a dungeon.

       

Well, that was unfortunate. I'd avoided having to take a break since the beginning of the year. I really hoped this year would be the first one that I never broke stride. Alas, something always happens.

   

I'm blogging about Sandor II because I promised I'd be back today, but I can't seem to get anywhere with it. I gather that it's going to offer the same type of experience as the later Magic Tower I: Dark Stone Ritual (1992), where a somewhat open world contrasts with very linear movement within that world. The player can find multiple dungeons at the outset of the game, but he needs a key from Dungeon 1 to open Dungeon 2, and so on. I spent most of this entry trying to figure out how to get started.

       

An NPC raises more questions than he answers.

      

Only a few steps after the game began, I had a random encounter in the wilderness. An old man appeared, identified himself as Florian, and asked for a "small donation." When I said yes, the game took me to my inventory screen: Florian wanted an item rather than gold or food. Fortunately, I had an extra axe that I had bought for McCann but wasn't strong enough to equip. In response, Florian said: "I'll give you a hint. To get into Roce Fortress, you need a password. If you want to find out, first go to the ruins near Wolfsstein. Go to the middle well. Wait there until midnight. Tell whoever shows up my name. I hope you still remember it. We'll see each other again. Hahahaha."

   

I hadn't found anything specifically called the Roce Fortress or Wolfsstein, but then again, the game doesn't tell you dungeon names. Eventually, I returned to the dungeon completely surrounded by mountains that has a top-down interface rather than a first-person interface. An early message says: "The jug goes to the well until it breaks." Later on, there are three patches of water, which I figure are Florian's three wells. There's an obvious "middle" one, even.

          

What am I meant to do here?

      

The problem is waiting until midnight. There is no indication of time on the dungeon screen, or on any screen that I can access from the dungeon screen. Neither is there a way to tell time on the outdoor screen. The only screen that mentions time at all is the town screen. So I don't know how to wait until midnight. I tried just sitting there for a while, then sitting there for a while with the emulator on "fast forward," but nothing happened. If the "jug" message is supposed to be telling me something, I can't figure it out.

    

On the rest of the map:

   

• I kept returning to the Cartography School to give Sirus a few points in the skill. It took about 20 points before I could finally map a dungeon.

• I thought to make money from trade goods, but in the starting area, towns only sell tobacco and buy tea. 

• A dungeon south of a lake has a locked door only a few steps from the entrance.

• I related last time that when I tried to leave the first town, a guy appeared and asked for help with someone chasing him, but I was unable to win the battle. I encountered the guy outside of a town and, because I had more characters and better equipment, agreed to help him. The game then went directly to him thanking me and giving me a 500-gold-piece reward. 

This guy asked for help, and then didn't really need it.

• I still don't know what to do at the location that wants me to input a sequence of buttons.

• Or the one that wants me to make a mosaic out of various tiles. 

• A dungeon at the bottom of the map has a trap every few steps. 

          

Taking trap damage.

         

As I explored the map, I fought a random combat every once in a while. It would be hard to "grind" in this game since combats are comparatively rare. None of them have been hard. I noticed that the combats didn't get more difficult or more numerous as I added more characters, either.

       

Four characters take on three enemies in battle.

     

The monetary rewards from combat would have been just enough to keep up with my food usage. Fortunately, you sometimes find equipment in addition to gold. This equipment sometimes sells for quite a bit of money. Also, I found that food prices are extremely volatile. You might visit the pub and find that they're selling 15 provisions for 45 gold pieces, exit, return, and get an offer of 45 provisions for 15 gold pieces.

   

I spent quite a while logging every piece of equipment that I'd found on enemies and that I found for sale in towns or traders' wagons. The game gives you an associated weapon and armor class for each item, but it's such a nuisance to equip, assess, unequip, and trade that I've been assuming (I'm sure incorrectly) that the most expensive items are the better ones. My characters don't have the strength to wield most stuff anyway. 

          

Some of the game's equipment.

       

The game likes to put nonsense words in some of its equipment; for instance, I've found Gorf Sandalen, Toco-Platte (Eisen), Kotalan Stab, and Uta Schild. German speakers, tell me if I'm missing anything, but I don't think the words Gorf, Toco, Kotalan, and Uta actually translate to anything. My understanding of German is that they're not possessive, either; that would be Gorfs Sandalen, Utas Schild, and so forth. There's nothing wrong here, of course—Toco and Uta are maybe the game's equivalent of "Mithril" or "Daedric"—but it does add some complexity to figuring things out.

 

Adding to the mystery, there are three gold-krone (gold crowns) I can buy called "Ubu," "Kobu," and "Jacoco," and a gold chain called "Trinak." I have no idea what to make of these. 

     

Lacking any other ideas, I decided to just force my way through the trap-filled dungeon, but then, having pushed past the first three traps, I got destroyed by the first truly difficult enemy party the game has thrown at me. 

    

I didn't even come close.

      

I reloaded, limped back to town, and found that I had earned enough experience points to get my first level-up. Leveling up comes with fairly significant attribute boosts; some of my characters doubled their previous values. I decided to grab two more characters while I was at it, looking in particular for someone with a high trap-disarming ability. I didn't find such a person, but I did add a fifth character (Iain) with strong spellcasting skills.

       

Leveling up. That big boost in kraft means I can equip more items.

        

While looking for more party members, I remembered the option to listen to fellow patrons in taverns. It appears that you only get one "tavern tale" per town. Across all four towns I've discovered:

   

• A hint that the king is looking for some adventurers to "rescue him from a difficult situation." We learned what that situation was last time.

• Amidst a bunch of background chatter, some mentions of the king's daughters being missing. Again, we learned about that directly from the king.

       

A "tavern tale."

        

• A drunk claiming that "I put a few stones in there and whoosh, the gate opened." This might be a clue to getting past a locked dungeon door. I haven't found any stones, though.

• A woman going on about creatures that are "supposed to be so devilishly beautiful that you can't help but look at them," but that women are immune to the enchantment.

       

So either I've overlooked something or the solution to move forward is to keep grinding until I can take on the enemies in that southernmost dungeon. Either way, I definitely need a different game to get some momentum going again. The two on my active list are absolute killers.

     

Time so far: 6 hours

Game 551: BOSS: Beyond Moria (1990)

I wish all authors so clearly documented the historical trail leading to their games.

       

BOSS: Beyond Moria

United States

Independently developed and published
Released 1990 for VMS, 1993 for Macintosh, 2000 for Linux, 2010 for Windows

Date Started: 30 May 2025  

       

There are so many variants of so many roguelikes that it seems arbitrary which ones get catalogued in various game databases. BOSS, as its subtitle suggests, is a variant of Moria (1983), and a fairly rare roguelike ported to the Macintosh but not DOS. It promises an easier, shorter experience, which is music to my ears after my attempts to win Moria and Angband (another Moria variant) refused to yield success after frankly absurd investments of time. The original BOSS was written by Robert Gulledge and Jason Black, two University of Washington students; the Mac version was ported by a University of Linköping (Sweden) student named Mark Vesterbacka. In 2024, Richard Drysdall released a new version for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, but RogueBasin calls it a "major rewrite," and I thought it was thus best to play the 1993 Mac version.

       

The authors changed the theme to a post-apocalyptic, science fiction setting, but in the type of superficial way that means I have to waste a bunch of time learning that "disks" are the same thing as "scrolls," "skills" are the same thing as "spells," and K-Mart has taken over the general store, and despite all of these so-called differences in setting, I still end up fighting with a sword and chugging potions. I suppose if they hadn't made those changes, though, I might find the game too undifferentiated from Moria to play it at all.

    

(If you're new to the blog and unfamiliar with games like Rogue and Moria, "roguelikes" are a sub-genre of CRPGs that go back to 1980's Rogue; Moria was the second. These games feature simple, ASCII graphics; complex inventories; randomly-generated content; a large array of commands that use almost every letter of the keyboard; and permanent death. See my entries on Rogue and Moria for more.)

     

Some of the many commands available in this game.

      

Where Moria has you specify a name, race, sex, and class during character creation, in BOSS, you specify a name, quality, sex, and class. These "qualities" give boosts to certain attributes, the same way that races do in other games. The qualities are: elite, hefty, mad, wise, lucky, healthy, sexy, and alien (major bonuses but need more experience to gain levels). Classes are wrestler, scientist, guru, ninja, soldier, wanderer, con-artist, thief, and journalist. Attributes haven't changed (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma), but some skills have: "Fighting" is now "Melee Fighting," "Bows/Throwing" now "Guns & Grenades," "Magic Device" now "Weird Device." The rest are identical.

       

Assigning points during character creation.

      

The player gets 100 points to seed among the various attributes and skills (each upgrade costing a variable number of points). In a mechanic I don't remember from Moria, one of the character attributes is "experience factor," which is a multiplier against the normal amount of experience the character needs to advance a level. The player can increase this to gain more starting points.

   

The game continues Moria's tradition of giving you a little random backstory:

 

• "You are the rejected child of a Jarwangian scientist. You have made many enemies among the humans. You have orange eyes, straight blue hair, and a plastic complexion" (this for a character with the "alien" quality).

• "You are one of several children of a thief. You are the hero of your town. You have dark brown eyes, wavy brown hair, and an average complexion."

• "You are one of several children of a chimney sweep."

           

I rolled a random class and ended up with a ninja. As the game begins, it depicts the character riding a bus to Seattle, which is the consequent top-level city that he ends up in. The game apparently offers 8 such cities, each with a dungeon beneath. As usual with Moria games, NPCs roam the city and are easy to accidentally bump into and kill. They've made it annoying here in that killing some of them is a crime and may get you attacked and killed by police.

      

Starting out in "Seattle."

      

BOSS is a bit half-assed in its pretensions towards futuristic sci-fi. The weapon shop and temple are completely intact from Moria, the temple selling magic rings, holy books, and amulets as if it were a fantasy game. The general store becomes a K-Mart, selling raincoats, umbrellas, purses, lanterns, and crowbars (among others). The magic shop becomes a computer store and an "alien artifacts" shop, with disks taking the role of scrolls and ray guns taking the role of wands. The alchemist becomes a bar and grill but still sells potions. The armory is now "Leather & Chains." There's a club where the bouncer says I'm too poor to enter, and a guild where you have to bump into the exterior walls to find the door. An inn and a bank round out the city's offerings.

          

Shopping at the computer store. We have technical manuals instead of spell manuals, disks instead of scrolls.

        

The ninja starts with a katana, 2 throwing stars, a bathrobe, a set of leather gloves, 8 floppy disks of Identify, 2 potions of Cure Critical Wounds, 10 k-rations, and 5 flashlights. I figure that will get me through the first level and head down. There are two stairways down, and it turns out that one goes to Level 1 and one goes to Level 2.

    

Just like Moria, the dungeons are huge, sprawling, randomly generated, and impermanent (e.g., when you leave and return, a completely new level is generated). The instructions promise that there are seven cities with 10-level dungeons and a final city with a 25-level dungeon, making for a 95-level game. I don't think you have to explore all the levels. The instructions suggest that you have to "finish" each dungeon before moving on to the next, which includes killing each town's "local mob boss." I don't know what it means to "finish," but if the local boss is always found on the bottom level of the dungeon, I suppose that would make sense.

    

There's a certain variety to the levels that I don't remember from the DOS version of Moria at least. In my first game, Level 1 had proper rooms and corridors, like a game of Rogue:

 

Finding a secret door on Level 1.

       

Level 2 was more cave-like, with completely irregular wall patterns.

         

The less predictable Level 2.

        

Level 3 was completely open. Although unlit (I had to get close to enemies and objects to see them), its wall contours were completely sketched out at the start.

     

Fighting a pygmy on Level 3.

     

And so I began exploring, bashing into sleazy thieves, Scorpion Gang members, short pygmies, white fungi, mechanized Dust Busters, and mutant Keebler elves instead of the usual orcs and kobolds. I guess the game is easier than Moria, as I was up to Level 3 after only two victories (it slows down after that). The game likes to get cute with its attack messages, so in addition to things like "the pygmy rabbit bites you," you get silly messages, often customized to the specific enemy, often making pop culture references:

    

• "The short pygmy moons you." 
• "The Vanilli lip syncs you." 
• "The slobbering pygmy recites poetry at you." 

     

Like Moria, the game makes a distinction between inventory and equipped items; equipment slots include head, hands, body, footwear, rings, an amulet, a computer, and a light source. Obviously, improving your items over the starting gear, by either finding or buying, is a key way to get ahead. There isn't a lot on the early levels, though, and I don't know what to make of some of it (e.g., bloody baseball cards, corpses, a hat rack). Instead of just finding money, for some reason you find "arcade tokens worth $5" or whatever.

      

Skills (spells) seem to be specific to certain character classes. The thief comes with a "Manual of Tricks," for instance, which includes such skills as "Spit Ball," "Evasion," and "Stink Bomb." The journalist's "Beginning Tech Manual" has options like "Find Story," "Interview," and "Flash-Photo." So far, these have all just resolved to mundane counterparts from Moria; for instance, "Find Story" is the same thing as "Detect Monsters." I'm not sure how the game decides how many of these skills you can use, and how often, since there's no equivalent to magic points or spell points.

         

My journalist's "skills." from one book.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• As I noted, the disks take the place of scrolls, but you have to equip a computer to run them. I could only afford a Commodore VIC-20, and it ate about 40% of the disks I tried to run on it. When you find unidentified disks, instead of nonsense words like in Moria, they're titled with nonsense phrases like "Puzzles to Repair Trapped Eyes" and "Reasons to Maim Your Traps."

• The game offers a potion-mixing mechanic that I haven't explored yet.

• It adds the ability to get diseased. I had a pit bull give me a "social disease," which I had to have cured in town.

• I was poisoned a couple of times but it wore off in a few rounds. 

• I checked the stores several times but never found anything like a "Scroll of Recall," so I suspect there's no way to fast-travel back to town. 

• I got attacked by stairways a couple of times. I imagine they were mimics but the game didn't specify. I've seen mimics take the forms of treasure chests and doors in RPGs, but not stairways. 

       

I didn't trip! The stairway hit me!

      

• Current hit points—the most important statistic in the game—is buried among the overall list of statistics and hard (for me, at least) to find when I need it. Moria had a break afterwards to make it easier.

• The game has an explicit "Speed" statistic that was hidden in the early versions of Moria. 

• In addition to selling things, some of the stores offer "special training" to increase attributes and skills. 

           

Some of the options in the thieves' guild.

        

My ninja got to Level 6 before I pushed down too far too fast and got swarmed by pygmies. I created a journalist character called Nellie, but she didn't get very far before she accidentally killed a vendor on the town level (they just walk right into your path) and got shot and killed by the police in retaliation. 

     

The authors really had it out for pygmies.

     

Next character: A thief named Renaud. As he starts, the game says he can gain a skill, and he has a skill book, but for some reason, the key doesn't work. He also comes with 5 throwing knives, 10 K-rations, 2 points of Restore Charisma (which hasn't really been a problem so far), a bath robe, a set of black leather gloves, a towel, and 5 disposable flashlights. The towel is supposed to be his weapon. No sooner do I have him equipped with some better stuff than I accidentally slaughter a street beggar and get killed by police again. Aaargh. 

      

Next: A lucky female wanderer named Zigwena. Wanderers apparently have access to prayers rather than skills, and they really are indistinguishable from a fantasy version: "Detect Evil," "Cure Light Wounds," "Bless," and so forth. She comes with 5 frisbees (missile weapons), 10 K-rations, 2 potions of Restore Wisdom, a bath robe, a pair of Nikes, a walking stick (melee weapon), and 5 disposable flashlights. The Nikes appear to be Nikes of Slow Descent. But before I even get out of the town, I manage to wield a cursed hairbrush (another melee weapon) and can't find anything in town that will remove it for me. To compensate, I sell my potions of Restore Wisdom and splurge on riot armor.

      

Zigwena's inventory after a short time.

       

She makes it to Level 5 before I repeat my mistake of going down too far and getting swarmed. Oh, and she also kills someone by accident on the town level—I swear, it is way too easy—but I manage to get to a stairway before it happens, which resets the level and kills the APB. 

         

That's about as far as I've gotten for now. I'm not really in the mood for this game, as should be obvious by the fact that I keep getting characters killed when it's not that hard to stay alive. I'd punt it down the pike for a later time, but I never want to get into the habit of doing that, as I'll just end up with a huge pile of unwanted games at some inevitable point. But if I can't at least beat the first couple of bosses for the next session, I'll probably put it on simmer and move forward with something else.

   

Here's a mystery to occupy us until next time: It's too early to be cheating, but my mind started thinking about how I could cheat if I got to the point that it was more important to show the endgame than adhere to permadeath. My first thought was, of course, backing up the character save file, but the game is on to that trick. It must write the character names to some other file and record that they've been killed. I don't see that file, but I don't know anything about how Macs store anything. In any event, if I try to restore the save file for a slain character, the game just gives a message that "this game file seems to be invalid."

        

How does it know!?

       

Thus, my next thought: Back up the entire emulated hard drive. I store all my Mac games on a 500MB file called Game.dsk. While Zigwena was still active, I made a copy of that disk. When she died, I deleted the original drive and renamed the backup to the original's name. I launched it again, fired up BOSS—and it still somehow knew that I was cheaating. "This game file seems to be invalid," it said. Just for fun, I tried again with a new character (Jake). I saved him right after creation, then closed the emulator and duplicated the hard disk. I fired up the original. Jake loaded just fine. I saved and quit. I loaded the backup. Jake loaded fine. Saved and quit. Returned to the original, got Jake killed. Deleted the original, loaded the backup. The game somehow knew that Jake was dead. So there's no confusion, the game itself and all its directories are on the hard disk being backed up. I am truly baffled. Any ideas?

   

Time so far: 3 hours