Game 99: Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure (1980)

Look familiar? More on that below.

      

Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure

United States
Synergistic Software (developer and publisher)
Released 1980 for Apple II
Date Started: 8 May 2013

Date Ended: 9 May 2013

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 21
Ranking at Game #404: 142/404 (35%)

     

Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure is the third "campaign" game from Robert Clardy and Synergistic Software. I covered Dungeon Campaign (1978) in January and Wilderness Campaign (1979) in March. The evolution of the series in these two short years is a amazing: a testament to Clardy's rapidly developing skills as a programmer, to the possibilities allowed by rapidly-expanding computer memory (Dungeon Campaign required 16K; Odysssey required 48K), and to the overall evolution of the CRPG, strategy, and adventure game genres during this period. Dungeon Campaign is barely playable today, but I found Wilderness Campaign fun, and Odyssey...well, it has its moments.

Like Stuart Smith, who I just blogged about, Clardy was introducing twists on conventional CRPGs that never quite made their way into the mainstream. The primary driving mechanism of the three "campaign" titles is the control of an army rather than a single character or party. There are no "characters" in the Clardy games; there are "men," and the loss of men in nearly every battle is expected and unavoidable. This description might make some wonder whether we can really call these games "CRPGs," but the men share a collective series of attributes and a collective pool of equipment that mimic the experience of playing a single character. As such, the men become analogous to hit points in a conventional RPG.

Wandering bands of men join the quest.

"Attributes" in this game apply to the entire party of 20 men, not just a main PC.

 
We see a very similar mechanic, minus the equipment, in games like Pirates! and various strategy games, but Clardy's games are the only ones I know that use armies as the central unit of an otherwise conventional RPG experience.

Like Lord of the Rings, Odyssey presumes to be set in an ancient time on Earth called the "Hyborian Age" (a term invented by Robert Howard for his Conan books; this is notable because Clardy would later go on to develop an action game called Conan: The Cimmerian). A mighty wizard/warrior known as "The High One," seeing that the nascent race of men was threatened by the elder races and monsters of the world, used magic to seal off an archipelago in the "Sargalo Sea" from the rest of the world. The High One thought that if he could eliminate threats to man within this contained area, mankind could grow powerful and be in a better place to dominate the world when the barriers came down again. Unfortunately, while he was mid-way through his plan, the enemies of man sacked his fortress, stole his magic orb, and killed him in combat. A usurper named the Caliph of Lapour now sits on the High One's former throne. The mission of the PC army is to recover the orb, return it to the fortress, defeat the Caliph, and continue the High One's work.
 
I respect the innovations obvious in Odyssey, but as a whole the game doesn't work very well. It proceeds in three or four major sections. The first, the longest, is almost identical to Wilderness Campaign in its basic design. The party of 10 warriors begins on an island map with three visible towns. Unlike the previous game, other structures (ancient temples, tombs, castles) are not visible from the outset and must be found via walking around, although they are fixed at the same location from game to game. [Later edit: Per Robert Clardy's comments below, I'm wrong about this. Something about the Apple II emulator I'm using isn't designating the random seed properly. There were multiple wilderness maps.]

 
There are also a host of random encounters in the wilderness. Successfully navigating the random encounters and the dungeons involves employing a variety of items that you purchase at the towns or from wandering caravans. Where in Wilderness Campaign the solution was automatic depending on whether you had the right piece of equipment (e.g., a plank to cross a chasm), in Odyssey you have to spend a little time figuring out what item works best and (U)sing it appropriately. Examples include:

• Lockpicks to open the bronze doors on an ancient temple
• A small boat to cross a dangerous bog
• A net to rescue men stuck in quicksand 
• A machete to hack up a rotten tree trapping two men
• Lamps and torches to enter dark dungeons
• Crowbars to pry doors with no latches or locks
• Shovels to dig out men buried by avalanches
• Ropes to rappel down sheer cliffs

This is where you want to have a machete.

Some problems have multiple solutions: tomb doors may be pried with crowbars or shovels, and either a rope or net can get men out of pit traps.

Buying at least one of everything the shops have to offer is a key to winning the game.

There are several random encounters in the wilderness, including wandering bands of fighters who join the group, wandering merchants, wizards who alternately help by providing a magic item or get annoyed and attack, bandits posing as friendly warriors, and a variety of monsters. As in Wilderness Campaign, "exploring" dungeons is all text-based from the main screen, and they usually contain some variety of traps, monsters, and either gold or a magic item at the end. Once you find the dungeon's treasure, it kicks you out, the door seals, and you cannot return.

The primary purpose of the island section is to build and equip the party, gather the items needed for puzzle-solving later in the game, and increase attributes with magic lamps and potions. The section ends when the player purchases a ship from the far northwest town and heads out into open sea.

The party builds its ascension kit.

The opening section is rendered difficult by a few regrettable programming choices. Combat, while sticking to the basic mechanic of Wilderness Campaign, actually provides less feedback. Enemies "level" with the party in lockstep, so you can never really get a major advantage over them. If the party size increases from 10 to 20, the enemies increase from around 10 to around 20. As the party builds experience, the enemies get tougher. As the party buys better equipment, the enemies are better equipped. There's a random number roll that affects combat, but it's worth so little compared to the equipment and experience score that every battle is essentially a foregone conclusion from the outset.

The game's combat screens lack the complexity and detail of the previous Wilderness Campaign, and the game mechanics ensure that you're almost always evenly matched, or even at a slight disadvantage.

If you're not careful about money, you can wind up in a situation where it's very hard to purchase the $2,500 ship. Random encounters eventually wind down, and after you've explored each dungeon, there are few gold hauls to be had. I had to resort to attacking friendly parties just so I could get enough gold to continue. This put me into negative alignments.

The party flees just ahead of the law.

Once you purchase the boat, you're launched into the second phase of the game: sea navigation and combat. The interface changes dramatically, with commands for setting sails, dropping anchor, landing on various islands, firing the cannon, and hailing ships.

A rare calm moment at sea.

Special problems and encounters during this section include sea monsters, pirates, merchant ships, ships full of mercenaries who will join you, hapless men adrift on rafts who are alternately truly helpless and members of a pirate gang pulling a ruse, whirlpools, scurvy (you need to have stocked up on fruit), fog, and various calamities that damage your sails and require you to have brought replacement sails.

Most of the time, they turn out to be liars.

"Combat" at sea is mostly a matter of repetitively hitting the (F)ire key, after which you can sometimes loot the enemy ships for goods like sails and fruit.

It turned out these items had no purpose.

It's not hyperbole to say that navigation in this section is the most annoying interface I have ever experienced in a CRPG. The wind changes constantly, screwing up the direction you're trying to go, and often propelling you into reefs or off the edge of the world. In most places, the water is too deep to drop anchor and wait until the wind turns to a favored direction. The game constantly adjusts the direction you've painstakingly set your sails. And it's almost impossible to find the "sweet spot" between "too far from land to disembark" and "so close to land that you run aground."

Alas, the crew does not end up in Ambrosia.

You can't really "explore" the islands here; you just get some text when you land on one that you found fruit. On a couple, there was a special encounter with a wizard I was unable to get past.

The manual is upfront that the purpose of this section is to find a magic Orb, which is either in a dungeon or at the bottom of the sea. In some games, you have to explore a small dungeon on one of the islands with graphics and gameplay similar to Dungeon Campaign; in other games, a god appears and if you sacrifice a magic item overboard, he'll give you coordinates for the orb at the bottom of the sea.

Firing cannons is a bad idea at this point.

If you can get to the coordinates, you can (d)ive for it, but you can imagine how hard it is to hit the right pair of coordinates when you can't stop the ship and the wind is constantly changing. In my game, I got the bottom-of-the-sea option, so it took me over an hour of screwing around and reloading before I could get to the coordinates, dive, and get the Orb.

The endgame occurs on the far northwest island, but you can't maneuver freely around it like on the first island. There's really only one navigation command: (A)pproach the castle. The game gives you three random item-based encounters, and you have to dig through your pack to find, say, a mirror to defeat a medusa, a machete to chop through poisonous brambles, or a monkey--yes, a monkey--to unlock a door.

When I finally got through the special encounters and reached the castle, I found the ending anticlimactic.With the orb in my possession, the caliph's men simply surrendered, and I became the new High One. I was expecting a big final battle or something. Maybe that happens if you go to the castle without finding the orb first.

I was really looking forward to, you know, killing the evil wizard.

As I say, I can respect the innovations. The programming that went into dynamically adjusting monster levels based on PC levels, the random encounters, the inventory-based puzzles, and even the sea navigation are like nothing else in CRPGs in 1980. But innovative doesn't mean good, and I found the gameplay frustrating and ultimately not fun--really a step backwards from Wilderness Campaign. In a GIMLET, I'll give it:

• 3 points for game world. It has a decent story and a persistent world.
• 2 points for character development, which features both attributes and total number in your army.
• 0 for NPCs
• 4 points for encounters. We have to give the game due credit here. There's not much else like it in the era, with random merchants and bands of warriors showing up, and the player's disposition towards them tied to an "alignment" meter.

Encounters in the game offer real, if limited, role-playing and tactical choices.

 

• 1 point for magic and combat. While the complexity of the statistics is innovative, there isn't a single tactic, and the dynamically-adjusting difficulty level makes it impossible to get a leg up on the enemy.
• 3 points for equipment, both weapons and armor and special items needed to solve puzzles.
• 3 points for economy; gold sure is precious, and finding it feels like a real reward.

 

• 2 points for having a main quest.
• 1 point for graphics, sound, and interface. I found the sea interface truly horrible, and just about everywhere it's cumbersome.
• 2 points for gameplay, and these are based on its replayability. I'm slightly tempted to try again and see if I get the dungeon option this time, because I wanted to check it out. But overall, it's too linear and frustrating to be truly enjoyable.

The final rating of 21 isn't horrible for a 1980 game and it reflects Odyssey's complexity, but it's several points lower than what I gave Wilderness Campaign; I had more fun with the predecessor.

The game gave me a rating, too.

As I blog about these older games, I am increasingly indebted to the efforts of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History to collect, photograph, and scan images of disks, boxes, and manuals from this era. They have a full scan of the Odyssey manual, the front page of which has an amusing image that makes little sense in the context of the game.

This is precisely why I don't SCUBA dive.

While we're talking about images, the dragon picture that opens Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure is nearly identical to the one that appears on the welcome screen of Eamon:

Killias2 clued me in to this in the comments to my Eamon posting. It seems to have been created by a University of Michigan professor named Richard L. Phillips, who specialized in Apple II graphics. Blogger Jimmy Maher tried to solve the mystery during his Eamon postings last year and one of his commenters managed to track down Mr. Phillips, who understandably didn't really remember anything after 32 years. Eamon seems most likely to have been published first, but then again, Robert Clardy had included well-drawn dragons on his main screens since Dungeon Campaign, which unquestionably pre-dates Eamon.

We should note that they aren't the same image. There are stark differences in both the tail and the right wing, as well as some minor differences in the pattern of spines on the dragon's neck, and of course one is in color and the other is in white lines. These differences may seem trivial in the post-PhotoShop era, but I'm not sure that they are for 1980. Neither is clearly a hack job of the other. We can't discount the possibility that the artist himself created more than one version from the same template. Either way, the evidence seems to be that he posted the image or images in a public forum for anyone to use.

I had enjoyed Wilderness Campaign enough that I was hoping for a clear upgrade in this one, so I'm a little disappointed, but we're not quite done with this series yet: Apventure to Atlantis came out in 1982. It picks up the plot from Odyssey and seems to offer many of the same gameplay elements while also introducing some features typical to adventure games.

The game starts on the island you conquer at the end of Odyssey.

I look forward to giving it a try later this year; for now, let's see if I can finish up Knights of Legend.