Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back
United States
FTL Games (developer and publisher)
Released 1989 for Atari ST, 1990 for Amiga, FM Towns, PC-98, and Sharp X68000. Ported to Windows in 2001 by Paul R. Stevens
Date Started: 17 January 2013
Chaos Strikes Back is not Dungeon Master II; that game won't come out until 1993 and will be subtitled Skullkeep. It is instead billed as an expansion to the original game, using the same engine and continuing the same characters.
You'll recall that Dungeon Master (which I played in 2010) concerns a godlike wizard called the Grey Lord. One day, while messing around with something called the Power Gem, the Grey Lord managed to split himself into two halves: Lord Order and Lord Chaos, both evil. Chaos, in possession of the Grey Lord's Firestaff, started causing mischief in the depths of the titular dungeon. Lord Order, stuck outside, commissioned a series of adventurers to go get the Firestaff back. The consciousness of Theron, the Grey Lord's apprentice, guided the victorious group of adventurers through the dungeon's depths and recovered the staff--but instead of returning it to Order (which produced a "bad" ending) used it to fuse Order and Chaos together into the Grey Lord once again.
A short introduction, again penned by Nancy Holder, sets up the expansion. Thirteen months have passed since the end of Dungeon Master, and a mystery from the end of the first game is solved: the party's victory has not only joined the two halves of the Grey Lord but has also restored Theron to corporeal form. But now the Grey Lord is sick, being drawn apart by his two halves again, and has called the original adventurers to his castle.
It transpires that Lord Chaos foresaw his defeat and planned for it. He built a secret dungeon, and using the evil Forge of Fulya (or FUL YA, the runic symbols for "fire" and "structure"), mined four large chunks of Corbum ore. (The author is clearly confused about both mining and forges.) Corbum sucks magic from the world, and somehow it's drawing the essence of Lord Chaos out of the Grey Lord again, while simultaneously causing stuff like earthquakes and storms. If the ore finishes the job and Chaos lives again as a separate entity, he will "rule--or misrule--the world and all others." There's no mention about what Order will do in such a scenario.
But in an ironic twist, Chaos doesn't know that after the ore does its work, he needs to destroy it; otherwise, "it will shatter the universe like a fragile looking glass." My mission is to enter the secret dungeon, find the chunks of Corbum within something called the "Death Square," and destroy them. Each chunk is at the end of a long maze converging on the Square, so I'll have to explore four mazes. Each of the mazes is somehow aspected to one of the four classes: warrior, ninja, wizard, and priest.
I imported my party members from Dungeon Master, but like the previous game, there's an option to select adventurers from "life mirrors" on a special dungeon level. Oddly, many of these adventurers--unlike mine and the others in the first game--are bestial, with forms like insects, fairies, toads, birds, and centaurs. As interesting as it would be to play such creatures, I noticed that most of their levels are "adept" and "expert," with hit points and spell points averaging around 200, while my Dungeon Master characters were almost all at expert level in all four classes, with up to 400 hit points or spell points.
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| The game takes a slight retconning liberty by introducing a hawk PC. |
My relatively high-level party doesn't mean the game starts out easy. For no reason that is explained in the introductory story, my party begins in a darkened room with no weapons, armor, or other gear, surrounded by those worm-monsters from the first game. Fortunately, I haven't forgotten the handy spell sequence that lets me launch "Fireball" spells.
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| Fireballing worms in the dark. |
Even with the worms defeated, though, all of my characters are poisoned, and we have no flasks with which to mix up "Cure Poison" spells. There are coins on the floor that, when inserted into slots on the walls, open force fields and allow access to some equipment. We grab some stuff, including some offensive potions (which the game won't let us drink), but no flasks. While I'm trying to figure things out, the worms suddenly respawn. Trying to escape them, we use a key in a lock and rush down a corridor. There are pressure plates and pits, and soon we're lost in a room, surrounded by hovering demons that surround and kill us.
So this game is kind of hard, huh?
I originally had some angst about whether to carry my Dungeon Master spell knowledge forward, but not any more; I need every advantage I can get. In a restart, I determine that the opening area has a lot more equipment than I originally found. There are three force fields that take one coin each and one that takes two. There are only three coins on the level, which means I can't open one or two of the fields. The one that takes two coins has a sword behind it.
The poison eventually wears off, and in any event, doesn't damage my party members faster than their natural regeneration restores the lost hit points, so finding flasks isn't quite the priority that I thought. I make it out of the first area with a dagger, some torches, a chest full of clothing items, a rope, some worm meat, some fire bombs, and a couple of magic boxes. No decent weapons, so I'll be relying on my ninja skills for now. I'm glad I took the time to train everyone.
Mapping proves difficult. I'm not sure which of the four mazes I'm in--or if I'm just in an introductory area--but every four or five steps, the game likes to throw a teleporter, a pressure plate, a force field, or a pit at me.
In short, this game is clearly (at least, so far) about navigation-based puzzles and surviving with limited resources. What I'm not sure about is whether the rhetoric from the Grey Lord about needing to hurry really means anything--that is, if there's a time limit.
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| Leyla's inventory after a short time playing. |
Chaos Strikes Back was never released officially for the PC, only for the Amiga, the Atari ST, and various Japanese PCs. At the recommendation of trudodyr and others, I'm playing a Windows port created in 2001 by fans, based on the Atari ST version. The port lacks a utility that allowed players to edit their character portraits, and it lacks a long game intro that shows Chaos mining the Corbum and creating a coin to taunt the Grey Lord (you can watch it on YouTube), but otherwise it's reportedly faithful to the original.
It's interesting to be back in this interface again after two years.
It's interesting to be back in this interface again after two years.
I´ll bet that PetrusOctavianus will have a lot to comment on this game here :-)
ReplyDeleteI won't bet against you. :-)
DeleteBTW, aren't you going to play it and blog about it yourself?
This is definitely my all time favourite real time blobber, and I'm almost envious of Chet who gets to play without the Magic Map, which should make the mapping challange even harder.
Some comments to Chet's post:
I think you made the right decision in using imported characters. Choosing heroes from the menagerie of the Hall of Heroes would have eventually given you superior characters, especially if you reincarnate them, but imported characters means a more consistent challenge. There is a rather fun challenge in the Hall of Heroes to get one of the "secret" super heroes, though.
Empty flasks are very rare is CBS, so hoard all you can find.
Food can also be scarce, so be on the lookout for a place where edible monsters respawn.
Check for illusionary walls _everywhere_. You could have found a nice beginner's set of armour adjacent to the room you started in.
Just out of curiosity, what makes those characters selected from the Hall of Heroes "eventually superior"? (Aside from the secret ones.)
DeleteUnless you import super characters from DM, Reincarnated characters from the Hall of Heroes will have superior stats.
DeleteFrom the Dungeon Master Encyclopaedia: Resurrecting a champion keeps all its skills and statistics. Reincarnating a champion slightly improves statistics and removes all skill levels.
DeleteSo, since skill levels will eventually be regained, you'll soon have characters at the same skill levels, but with improved stats. The problem is surviving long enough to get there.
With remakes hope they gave the female heroes a different voice, while obviously to conserve memory etc though am sure they could have fitted an extra voice sample it wasn't great all heroes in the game had male grunts etc... Don't want to imagine Syra, Sonja etc with male voices!
DeleteAnd if you remember the first game's manual in the story when the Grey Lord (Or Librasalus as he decided to call himself the snob....) told Theron he can resurrect four champions or even reincarnate them, Theron's reply was 'but isn't that blasphemous?' Hehe (And btw the Grey Lord sent hundreds of champions at least, some survived but failed the task of course, Chaos decided to keep those 24 as trophies and a warning. Can't say I'd killed Syra if she looked as she did in the game cover hehe)
DeleteI never knew there was an expansion to Dungeon Master
ReplyDeleteI've already served my purpose.
DeleteI never have understoood the concepts of law and chaos as ethical entities.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to thank M. Moorcock (and perhaps the neo-platoists?) for that. There must be an intermediate literary reference between a pulp fantasy writer and ancient philosophers, though. Perhaps another reader will illuminate this dim cave for us.
DeleteAs I understand it Order and Chaos is not "good" and "evil" in themselves, but taken to the extreme both lead to "evil". Extreme order leads to stagnation and oppression, while chaos leads to anarchy and "might is right". So balance is "good", even if it means Erekose had to first genocide one race and then nearly another one after that in his Eternal quest for the Balance.
DeleteThe Moorcock books that dealt with this in the most coherent manner are the Corum books I find.
DeleteI agree. The Corum books are IMO the his best work in the Eternal Champion series, and all six books are of good quality, and they have an internal coherence.
DeleteElric is very variable, while Hawkmoon is low quality pulp that took Moorcock less time to write than it took for me to read.
I always thought that Moorcock loaned the ideas from Taoism, but some time ago read from his forum that Zoroastrianism was more of a source and one influence for Elric being Kullervo from Kalevala mythos.
DeletePetrus: Did you ever try Count Brass?
DeleteYes, but I don't remember much of them. So I guess they were better than Hawkmoon, but not as good as Erekose, Elric and Corum.
DeleteI think the last Count Brass book was also the end of The Eternal Champion series and all loose ends were tied up?
I'd put them as worse then Hawkmoon, as I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent guy and I couldn't make heads or tales of that ending. I seriously have no idea what happened after reading most of the series.
DeleteI have only read his original Elric novel.
DeleteAlthough it has been years since I read any of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, I think I'd agree with the sentiments expressed above as to the quality of the different series.
DeleteI also want to mention the "Saga of Recluce" series of fantasy novels as another example of Order/Chaos, particularly since the author (L.E. Modesitt) starts off with Order seeming to be the "good", but over the course of many novels it does become rigid. Grey wizards are introduced as well. I strongly recommend the first dozen or so books in the series to anyone who enjoys these Order/Chaos archetypes...the details are quite well done and each book is (mostly) standalone.
Oops - that author is L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
DeleteI think law and chaos makes a lot more sense as ethical entities than "good" and "evil." Few people in the real world deliberately set out to be evil. Ethical dilemmas revolve more around how to be good. The extent to which we follow direction and authority versus our own consciousnesses is a key part of those dilemmas.
DeleteI've been taking notes for a longer posting on virtue and alignment, but I thought I'd wait until I get into games in which alignments feature more substantially.
One could also see Order and Chaos as Safety/Security and Freedom.
DeleteMassive surveillance, oppression of free speech ("we can't risk offending anyone") and a society where you are more likely to be violated by the government than by some random stranger, is when Order is too extreme and becomes "evil" (IMO, at least).
While too much Freedom to do as you please is not good either.
Today's society is definitely moving towards Order. Too much, IMO.
PetrusOctavianus: Yeah, the comic Dominic Deegan went into the whole Order: Safety, security, restraint, subjection, and stagnation vs Chaos as creativity, inspiration, anarchy, violence, madness, etc.
DeleteI would like you to keep in mind that your 'too much order' scares the PANTS off the rest of the world.
"So this game is kind of hard, huh?"
ReplyDeleteI remember first time I played CSB and everytime I got close to a certain pit one or two of those annoying little imps would fly up. They are easily killed by a lvl 1 Fireball, so my party jumped into the pit, bent on genocide. They only managed to say "My God, it's full of..." before they were nibbled to death by wall to wall imps.
Good timed! :-)
You were right, Chet... You did get here :D
ReplyDeleteFirst comment ever
And rizla was my first commenter. I had completely forgotten about this. Thanks for the memory!
Deletewhew, has it been two years already?
ReplyDeleteanyways, enjoy this... thoroughly malevolent game. (or so i perceived it back when i was 13 and didn't know Dark Souls.)
Man, I thought you were dead or something.
DeleteThis game throws you in at the deep end hehehe
ReplyDeleteepic start to your quest
Good luck.
ReplyDeleteI never had the wit and patience to even find an exit for the first level.
But I'm not a reference for dedication as I didnt get past level 8 or 9 in Dungeon Master (but with Master I or II character in almost every aspect: I kicked a lot of door).
I feel the awful difficulty of this game will either cure your addiction or let you forever hungry for more.
It took me literally nearly a decade to complete Dungeon Master, as a kid was too scared and lacking the willpower to play through it all even with a guidebook, even after beating Resident Evil games still found DM more unsettling with the lack of music and those footsteps... I finished it at 17 when I dedicated myself to it (This was 2001) and my big flaw as a kid was playing it with just the mouse, very cumbersome you really need the mouse and keyboard (I tried the emulator SNES version recently it's so damn cumbersome cba to play it anymore even if it has music)
DeleteCSB is another league for sure did try it as a kid too and never got past the wurms however a couple of years after beating DM I pushed myself to beat it importing my DM champions (I should go back and do it with the new cast) but it is a very good game in its own right. I'd compare it to Ocarina of time vs Majora's mask (The latter I didn't complete) as the sequel is far more disjointed in progression same as CSB and DM (DM was far more linear so less confusion and far easier battles)
Just a little factoid - Writer Nancy Holder who penned the intro is the wife of FTL Games founder Wayne Holder.
ReplyDeleteYes and read a blog about that a day or so ago, someone from Sweden went to the effort of tracking down the artist is very interesting. Summary, Nancy was pregnant at the time ofc Syra in the art doesn't have that bump. Nancy wore a gown to pose for that drawing, Alex was one of the game's staff who happened to have a costume already (RP nut it sounds) and Halk was just some random at a gymn they were directed to by the receptionist lol. Also the artist was friends with the FTL guy and he was promised verbally a cut of the profits, years back he got it I imagine a 40000 copies sold game, biggest for Atari ST as well as the profits from the ports afterwards.... That royalty cheque was substantial! I only played a bit of Elder Scrolls Oblivion but it did take me back to DM albeit you can play it 3rd person
Delete(BTW did anyone take off the halter top/bra of Sonja She Devil or Azizi and w/e females there were in the game and put it on a male? HEHE)
I'm currently playing through CSB as a Let's Play on YouTube:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBAC24BA7E349E344
I hope it's not considered a spoiler to offer a suggestion without saying why: When you get to a crossroads, take the "Ku" way. That is all.
I actually don't feel that Lord Order is evil, or even Lord Chaos for that matter. They are simply either side taken to the extreme, in that they will do anything to further the goals of either order or chaos, respectively. They have no choice to do anything else, just as a wolf must take down a gazelle. I see them in this game as two universal forces in earthly forms. That said, both are very unhealthy for human life as we know it. If anything, the DM games illustrate that a sort of balance between chaos and order is needed.
Have you read much Moorcock, Amy?
DeleteNone at all, actually. :)
Deletedo you want some moorcock?
DeleteGo to your library and take out the Corum books and it will alllll make sense.
DeleteAmy, I've watched the first three of parts of your LP. Seems we have rather different playing styles. I prefer using the keyboard for movement; it's painful to watch you use the mouse to click on the arrow keys...Also, you seem to rely almost exclusively on the Fireball spell; I prefer to vary a bit, and I also find those wands that cast Fireshield quite useful when fighting critters that have fire attacks.
DeleteAnd using lvl 6 Fireballs against the Munchers (which I incorrectly called "Imps" earlier) is overkill. A lvl 1 Fireball is actually enough.
Sorry about the arrow-clicking, Petrus. I'm just used to doing that. I recorded part 11 today, and I used the keyboard a lot more. Yeah, I love the fireballs, heh. I know I could use lower-level fireballs in quite a lot of instances, but I usually have the spells pre-loaded, and I don't know what I'll run into next. Plus, again, force of habit.
DeleteAs a kid I pretty much avoided using the keyboard on my Amiga for various reasons inc its position to the tv but I could not progress well with just the mouse, when I dug the Amiga out many years later I got used to using the mouse and keyboard, it makes a massive change, comparable to playing a shooter like Quake with just a keyboard and no mouse, you are very limited in your shooting prowess then it's largely a 2D game when you limit yourself like that.
DeleteYes I am a variety person too will use all skills I can even the useless ones just for variety this includes fighting games, I hate following the 'meta' it's very uncreative and boring.... Pretty much all guides and nearly all people who have talked about playing DM use fireballs nearly all the time or all the time, does get old. The creators could have countered this more with more fire resistant mobs and it does not help one bit the lightning bolt is harder to learn and takes more mana and it is like 70% weaker on most enemies. The poison ball is a good alternative to fireballs but it doesn't have that nuke the fireball has and is damage over time too though is nifty it fits through gaps in portcullis gates.
Now onto the serious stuff, if you read the stories in the manuals Chaos is without doubt evil! If you read the genocide that befalls the world after his inception, how he mocks the heroes sent to defeat him and it's worse in CSB heck he tries to eat Fulcrum the Grey Lord's raven!
His only defence would be as you said that's his purpose, chaos. He has no moral compass or at least his one is fixed towards evil. I do not buy there's no such thing as evil, pure evil yes that's far more rare but there's definitely lesser and greater acts and shades of evil.
Chaos is also not a mindless drone that's programmed to cause chaos and destruction (Can argue Skynet in Terminate isn't evil nor is the T1000 (Actually T1000 is I hate him lol)) but Chaos clearly delights in the wicked deeds he has done and that was a big motive of his new dungeon he enjoys this battle with the Grey Lord/Lord Librasalus/Order and has made a twisted hell of a dungeon to make these heroes suffer! Chaos is definitely the image the bible and media portrayals of Satan himself tends to be, you can try to debate he's not fully evil like you're some criminal defence lawyer but fact is Chaos does evil deeds.
Order however isn't very good either with the bad ending in the first game... Those 2 are fanatics but indeed the manual's story itself does make Chaos out to be the evil side of the Greylord.
Anyhow Chaos is guilty as charged for being evil and is sentenced to oblivion, cast him into the Ful Ya pit forever! (He reminds me of the dark wizard in the 13 ghosts of scooby doo lol)
I tried a Java port of this once, years back, and it was crazy-hard, and I didn't get very far.
ReplyDeleteEach class apparently has a rune associated with it- that is used to differentiate the different paths(Amy's comment about the 'Ku' path).
I did peek at some maps, and will warn you this- make sure you check everywhere for illusionary walls, and record what is on each side of each block. Every path loops over and across each other, up and down multiple dungeon levels. Have fun mapping!
Most rooms are basically puzzles you have to figure out how to get across, and most get reused- the first time you may be going from north to south, then later on you have to go from west to east. And yet because of the geography you won't be able to exit to the wrong sides.
It didn't take long for me to confirm exactly what you said.
DeleteMake use of the magic map you find early in the game, which was not in the original Dungeon Master. This makes the game a lot easier using that map and make use of true sight magic. Yes there's a very nasty place with many fake walls I can think of in the game that caused me much grief.
DeleteI wonder how one comes up with such a poor and contrived premise for a game as this one; not that it's the only dungeon crawler with a very shaky "story".
ReplyDeleteWhat's annoying is that the game itself doesn't have any story--no NPCs or world-building and such--so the framing story in the manual is the only chance the developers had to do something original with the setting. They came up with the dumbest premise, and then compounded it by offering no explanation for why my four champions would start the game naked.
DeleteWell, they were all relaxing at a nudist camp when they were summoned, and the summoner didn't think to check if they had their gear on them before hand.
DeleteDon't see what your complaint is about it served its purpose, an excuse to enter a dungeon.
DeleteI remember playing CSB on Amiga way back, unfortunately it was so frustrating I didn't give it more then a couple of hours before I quit. Got me thinking about "crawler" games tho, and I realized that since you have expanded gaming platforms, I highly recommend "Black Crypt". It was an Amiga only title, but apparently the developers later released a couple of levels for the PC, but not the full game. Very much like DM and CSB, but with far superior GFX and sound. Instead of the standard lame dos port, the developer took full advantage of the Amiga's unique chipset. To me it's has remained one of the best crawlers of all time, aside from maybe EOB or the new LOG, In fact I think someone is currently working on a Black Crypt mod for LOG.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Crypt
-Cheers
Totally agree with this. Black Crypt ruled my world for a couple of weeks when I broke my wrist as a teenager. Yes, I still played for hours a day, despite my arm and most of my hand being in plaster. Makes breaking a bone a fondly remembered experience!
DeleteYeah, Black Crypt was great. Funny thing was that I didn't like it much first time I played it (but then I had just played CSB), but when I replayed it last year I really enjoyed it. It's the best DM clone after DM itself and CSB, IMO.
DeleteBut I still think the hyped up spell effect graphics look silly. Unlike the Fireball, Poison and Lightning Bolt spells in DM and CSB, the spells are not physical entities that can move in the game world (and in the case of Fireball even destroy wooden doors); they are just some pretty 2D screen effects.
I am playing Black Crypt right now, and I am loving it so far. It makes me recall how jealous I was of the few friends that had an Amiga in the late eighties, early nineties.
DeleteAmiga = awesome graphics and sound.
My PC back then = CGA graphics, internal beeper.
Early 1992:
DeleteBlack Crypt on the Amiga. Ultima Underworld on the PC.
Ultima Underworld beat the last remains of Amiga fanboyism out of me and showed me the future.
I loved the original Dungeonmaster - It was one of my "genre-defining games". So I was excited when CSB came out.
ReplyDeleteThen I tried to play it. I found a secret area with superior characters to hire. That was pretty interesting.
Other than that, I died over and over by not jumping fast enough, etc. After a few hours of that, I gave up and never finished the game. I might have completed one area of the first level.
I felt that FTL made CSB "hard for hard's sake", and lost the great game balance and progressive challenge that characterized DM. Alas.
I was worried that it would be too hard when I replayed it about a year ago, but to my delight I thought the difficulty was just right (I thought Dungoen Master was a bit too easy). But then I _love_ the mapping challenge of CSB. What makes it unique to me is the extremely intricately designed dungoen, where all is interconnected, and you never know where you end up next. It's like it was designed by a Diabolical Demon Director...
DeleteOther real time blobbers lack the intricate dungeon design and each level is mostly self contained. I'm currently playing Lands of Lore, and while it's fun enough, it lacks the mapping challenge and puzzles of CBS and DM, and is mostly hack&slash and take item A to place B puzzles.
"I felt that FTL made CSB "hard for hard's sake", and lost the great game balance and progressive challenge that characterized DM."
DeleteIt's not hard for the sake of hard, but hard for the sake of challenging players (and characters) who have already beaten DM. The challenge level in CSB thus starts where it ended in DM.
It resembles Wizardry 4 in that way a lot in my mind, in that both games marked the point where the creators stopped pulling their punches and just did everything they could to murder you. CSB isn't quite as outrageous in its cruelty as W4, but it's much more difficult than normal games of the genre and purposefully so.
In my first few hours, I agreed enough with Corey that I stole his characterization for my next title.
DeleteThis just isn't my kind of game. I like stories and NPCs more than featureless corridors and mapping puzzles.
i am so tempted to tell you something about the makeup of this game that will help you immensely in your mapping of it. but i dont want to spoil it for you. i know a friend and i spent HOURS trying to figure out the layout of this game. printing out level maps, and trying to figure out where you are at any one time consumed a LOT of our playtime. so....do you guys think it would hurt or help if chet knew where he starts this game at? would that be considered a spoiler??i mean this game is hard as hell making your way thru it and its the most confusing game ever made as far as trying to find the pathway that you want. this game isnt like the first, a linear romp thru a dungeon and it could take him a LONG time to finish this one if he's gonnna map every level. maybe im out of line even talking about this, but i remember when i first played i would have loved to have known at the start what i knew when i finished. comments? thoughts?
ReplyDeleteKnowing the coordinates of where you start will help somewhat, espacially if you map by hand. But it will still take a long time to "connect all the dots", especially without the Magic Map.
Deletewell i was kinda meaning more inyay ethay iddlemay ofyay ethay ungoenday insteadyay ofyay atyay evellyay oneyay. you know what i eanmay ;)lol, sorry, i cant be serious about anything
DeleteROT13 is your friend, Ken!
Deletei dont know how to do rot13 or id GLADLY use it!!! im sorry!
DeleteKenneth: You get some paper and write down the alphabet, then write out the alphabet again, starting with the 13th letter after A, then translate between the two. Here, I'll do the hard part for you.
DeleteABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZ
NOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIKLM
Ok, joking; http://rot13.com/ or use the 1337key extension for Firefox.
CSB is viciously hard, but I don't think it is really unbalanced. With careful mapping you will eventually join the dots and have some control over where you are going.
ReplyDeleteI remember playing this with my Dungeon Master party. I hadn't actually taught my front two fighters (warrior priests) any ninja skills, so I shot up loads of ninja levels in the worm room. Still quite do-able, though.
I wish I'd taken the time to do a little grinding in the worm room. I didn't realize the enemies I'd be soon facing were much, much harder.
DeleteNah, you're kind of overleveled for the early game actually, believe it or not. Everyone in your party is stronger than the hidden "super" characters in the prison.
DeleteThe harder part of the game would be the puzzles and finding your way than the battles themselves, you usually have an escape route at least in battles so can grind them out though of course if you are too weak you'll die within a few hits and not be able to run. The worst fighting for me would be the section with a lot of fake walls and pits all over, with lots of dragons. Already they shoot nasty fireballs and a big bite up close but they have the cover of fake walls AND pits so they can kite you?! Definitely the place I made use of the save feature most.
DeleteCSB was one of my favorite games.. I played it on the Atari ST. Both Dungeonmaster games were incredible for the time.. especially on the Atari.. the PC port looks a little uglier from what I remember.. but that was common back then.
ReplyDeleteLooks like fan community has been busy creating loads of custom dungeons also for DM/CSB.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.dungeon-master.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=23916
Wow, didn't realize there was _that_ many of them.
DeleteI'm looking forward to try them eventually.
Something I came across while doing a bit of research on this one...
ReplyDeleteFrom Paul R. Stevens:
"This program is a very exact translation of the original Atari ST program, "Chaos Strikes Back". This game, and its predecessor, "Dungeon Master" were remarkable games. They fit on a single floppy disk (before 'high density' was invented) and could be played very nicely on a machine with only 512K bytes of memory. The monsters, setting, and puzzles made it one of the best games of its type. Ever. Games like "Eye of the Beholder" attempted to duplicate the effort but came up short, in my opinion.
I played CSB on the Atari 520ST until it died. Then I was out of luck. I wanted to know how the game worked internally. I wanted to play the game to its conclusion. But I had no computer on which I could do these things.
Finally, after many years, I got my hands on the binary executable for the game. I wrote a disassembler to turn it into human-readable op-codes and proceeded to translate it to C++ using the Microsoft Version 6.0 C++ compiler. Eight hours a day for six months. About 120,000 lines of pseudo-assembly language. Crazy thing to do. But it works.
The game and the source code are free to do with as you please."
That is amazing to me. What a labor of love.
Also it's amazing that it was SO SMALL! A single floppy?
That's some great coding.
I have only HEARD about how difficult this game is. I've never been into pure dungeon crawlers. I have to have cities and plenty of NPC's etc. I'm guessing this is pretty stunning as well: Apparently the guy who coded this has had a standing contest with that community to see who could beat the game in the least amount of time. They started with times of 12 hours or so and ended up in the single digit minutes.
It must have quite a bit going for it with this kind of enthusiasm. ...Perhaps I'll try my 1st DCrawler tonight.
Obviously there are some people who love Chaos Strikes Back more than I do. ;-)
DeleteI probably don't give enough attention in my reviews to programming economy and elegance. Unfortunately, I don't really speak the language.
DeleteCRPG Addict: That is really hard to tell from the outside most of the time. You can have a program that works perfectly that is terribly written under the hood. Also you will very, very soon reach games where the media (pictures, cutscenes, audio) take up more space then the game itself.
DeleteI still wonder how Elite II - Frontier fit on a single disk. One has to know that the game world of that game consisted of the whole Milky Way.
DeleteAlexander: Elite I fit on a disk by using a non-random seed that then grabbed text strings and formed them into names.
DeleteSee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29#Technical_innovations
This means that while each planet is unique and will be the same each time, you don't have to store any of them, just the algorithm used to create them and the non-random seed. I suspect a similar system was used in Elite II.
I'd love to see the code written for that, and while it is assembly, it is in assembly, and thus I'd have to know that specific flavour of assembly, and spend hours tracking each operation to have any idea what is going on. Someone has done this, but damn, that would be hard.
Which is why Reverse-Engineers earn millions.
DeleteI know it's years late for this discussion, but Canageek, there is a source code available for that portion of Elite.
DeleteOne of the creators, Ian Bell, has ported the trading part of Elite to C, including the world generation algorithm.
Check out www.elitehomepage.org and look under 'Text Elite'.
This is off topic, but I'm not sure where to post it.
ReplyDeleteNow that Chet is playing some non-PC games, I'd welcome an article on the various emulators for playing old non-PC games on a Windows 7 (or so) machine. I've been put off by the tasks of selecting one.
banshee, are you referring to platforms such as Commodore, Amiga or Macintosh; or to consoles such as the NES, Genesis/Megadrive, and Super NES?
DeleteI have a lot of experience with emulators for various console games, but almost none with emulators for non-PC computers.
Just a personal comment on this topic:
DeleteI've had good luck with STEEM (for Atari ST), both both WinUAE and FSUAE (for Amiga), and WinVICE (for C64).
This goes for DOSBOX as well: I can't say any have been without a learning curve, but eventually they've all been satisfactory.
Hey everyone!
ReplyDeleteI wasn't following regularly this last month or two, as I was sucked into Legend of Grimrock modding. (I'm Diarmuid over the forums there, in case anyone else is also on that track...)
I'm hovewer SOOOOOOOO excited at reading your CSB coverage, can't wait.
I agree with everything PetrusOctavianus said about unique intricate level design, ie not self-contained levels. And on mapping, I replayed this two years ago, and, while I knew the general principles of the dungeon layout for having played it a few times before, I completely mapped it out from scratch and "connected the dots" between all little sections, one at a time, so it's definitely doable, but hard. (Then again, I'm a mapping addict...)
Good luck!
Everything you two write about this game makes me want to avoid it. Sounds like an exercise in frustration.
DeleteI loved every minute of Chaos Strikes Back, both times I played it. But then I love mapping complex dungeons.
DeleteI can see how some can find CSB frustrating, though. Personally I find the endlessly respawning enemies in a game like Lands of Lore more frustrating.
LoL really only got bad in the last couple areas, when Westwood clearly ran out of ideas and/or time and just threw in overly large maps filled with unnecessarily durable enemies. Other than that, the meanest thing in that game is that it is possible to save yourself into a "dead man walking" situation during the final battle, potentially having to restart the entire game only a few seconds from the end.
DeleteI only tried CSB briefly and my reaction was "holy god where the hell am I". The dungeon sprawling freely in multiple directions and being filled with teleporters, some of them with randomly chosen destinations, was a major cold shower after DM and its mostly linear "level 6 follows level 5 which follows level 4" structure.
I seem to remember hearing that the Amiga version of CSB had some kind of an automap function. Can anyone confirm/deny?
I'm playing through the Amiga CSB now, and no, there is no automap.
DeleteAnon is probably thinking of the Magic Map. It's not an automap, but shows the immediate area around the party. It's only in the Amiga version, and therefore makes the Amiga version somewhat easier. You still need to map the game by hand, but the Magic Map makes it easier.
DeleteI hate multiple teleporters with a passion. They show an inability to create true puzzles, and instead are mere obfuscation.
DeleteBanshee, I agree. The Dark Heart of Uukrul is a good example of a game that had real puzzles amidst its corridors and not just a bunch of navigation obstacles.
DeleteOn the other hand, I do have a weakness for mapping gridded areas, and it is a little fun, as Georges says, to connect the dots. I'm just nowhere near being able to connect them in this game.
I always wanted to play that back in the day, but judging from the videos and your posts, I wouldnt be able to deal for 5 minutes with an interface like that.
ReplyDeleteThat's weird. I've always thought the Dungeon Master interface, with point-and-click everything and paperdoll inventories, is the best possible one for a game of this sort. Even the latter games like EoB, LoL and Grimrock only made minor tweaks to it (using items with a right click).
DeleteDo you have some specific gripes in your mind?
"The port lacks a utility that allowed players to edit their character portraits, and it lacks a long game intro that shows Chaos mining the Corbum and creating a coin to taunt the Grey Lord (you can watch it on YouTube), but otherwise it's reportedly faithful to the original."
ReplyDeleteDoes it have the hint function? The original had a thing where you could allow the "oracle" to analyze your save and give you hints if you were stuck.
Yes, there appears to be a "hint" function. I'll talk about that the next time I post.
DeleteI remember playing this at a friend's house ages ago. I remember how immensly cool I thought being able to modify the portraits were. Then my lovingly pixelated characters procedeed to die. Swiftly and brutally. Never went back to CSB. Still love Dungeon Master, though and I re-installed Legend of Grimrock yesterday. I really have to see what mods are offered, as well.
ReplyDeleteI get a "Return of Werdna" vibe from this one.
ReplyDelete