The Ormus Saga: Victorious in Spirit (with Final Rating)

I come across Lord Marox's castle, Magnar.

The Ormus Saga
Germany

Mike Doran (developer); CP Verlag (publisher) on Golden Disk 64; may have had prior independent distribution
Released either 1991 or 1993. Sources vary.
Date Started: 22 July 2015
Date Ended: 28 July 2015

Total Hours: 13

Reload Count: 12

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5), aside from not being able to win
Final Rating: 21

Ranking at Time of Posting: 50/193 (26%)

Well, after dedicating an absurd amount of time to The Ormus Saga over the last couple of days (time that I've been in New Orleans, I should add, to enhance the absurdity), I have to declare defeat. Despite visiting, re-visiting, and re-re-visiting all of the game's locations, I still can't find the bit of information that gets me to the endgame.

On the positive side, I've effectively neutralized Lord Marox even if I haven't been able to kill him. First, I re-conquered all of the cities that he'd captured, and I used my funds to install garrisons that defeat all his attempts to re-take them. Second, I conquered his city and looted everything except what's behind a locked door I can't open. Third, I killed all his advisors. All that's left is an immortal old wizard grousing about how important he is.

Show, not tell, Marox.

The path to winning The Ormus Saga involves visiting the game's various menu towns, cities, cottages, castles, towers, and dungeons and finding a selection of information and artifact items that trigger subsequent stages in the sub-quests. So a visit to Harper Valley results in some information about the location of a treasure chest. Inside the chest is a book that must be gathered with four other books and given to an NPC to get a golden key. The golden key unlocks a door that has a scroll behind it--one of six scrolls you need to get the Amulet of Fire. And so on to the endgame. Naturally, you'd have to be awfully lucky to visit all the locations in the "right" order at the outset, so you have to backtrack a lot. Nothing in the game tells you the number of towns, towers, etc. (one NPC does tell you the number of dungeons), so if you miss one in your explorations, you're in trouble.

Exchanging one quest item for another.

Here's where I'm stuck: to get into the World of the Dead and smash Marox's Gem of Power, I need three amulets. One of them, the Amulet of Wisdom, is in the possession of King Argon, and he'll only give it to someone who brings back his crown, which Marox stole. The crown, meanwhile, is behind a locked door in Marox's castle, and a single NPC line says that I need the "Staff of Marox" to get through the door. I've received no other information about the staff, and I haven't been able to find it anywhere in the game.

Even then, we have the problem of the Amulet of Death, which is supposedly held by Marox's archdaemon servants. I've been told that I need to kill all three of them to get the Amulet. The problem? Marox only has two archdaemon servants. I've killed both, and nothing happens. I even killed some hapless villager, thinking he might be the third in disguise, to no avail. 

In a game where you can dig for treasure in the middle of the ocean, anything is possible.

Thinking I'd missed something, I revisited all the locations, talked to all the NPCs, and searched everything, but nothing new emerged. Googling, I found this one German site that lists all the location coordinates in the game, but I'd already been to all of them. So I don't know what to do barring a visit from the developer or someone who's won the game.

A few other things discovered since the last time:

• Purchase prices for weapons, armor, troops, and other items are randomized each time you visit the merchant (within a set range, I guess). If you don't like the price, leaving and returning gets you a better deal.

• Better armor seems to reduce damage rather than the likelihood of a hit. This makes sense to me, but almost all RPGs do it the other way.

• Last time, I talked about weapons, armor, and shields breaking as scripted events. It's even worse than I thought. The game doesn't care which item breaks; it only knows that the next combat you fight, against whatever foe, #&*$ you, your weapon is going to break. That means that if you're unhappy that your expensive Death Sword just shattered, you can reload, equip some lesser weapon, fight your combat, and have that break instead.

That 22 gold wasn't worth a suit of magic armor.

• You can "send troops" to any city at any time, and they arrive instantly. A player with low integrity might wait and see what cities Marox attacks, reload, and send troops to the city in anticipation of his arrival.

• Sometimes the locations of chests aren't delivered in plain coordinates. One required me to solve an algebra equation.

• If you attack and kill NPCs, really nothing happens except that you can't talk to them any more. Two towns allow you to purchase resurrection for any slain NPCs. There are a handful of NPCs that start the game dead, and you have to pay for the resurrections (or cast the spell yourself) if you want to talk to them.

• Raising experience levels turned out to be a matter of visiting one of the game's three temples and praying. Leveling up is accompanied by +1 strength, +3 wisdom, and 30 hit points.

Leveling up in a temple.

• I never did much with spells in the game, save CURAX ("cure poison"). Most of them simply duplicate items in the game, like maps and torches, and the more powerful ones cost a lot of money.

• A couple of enemies--wizards and demons, at least--can cast spells, which absolutely waste you (like -75% of your hit points) until you find the Mystic Helm, at which point the spells do nothing at all. Annoyingly, enemies who cast a spell still get a physical attack following the spell. It feels like the spell ought to have been their entire turn.

Ha, ha, demon!

In the last post, I had talked about the difficulties associated with methodically exploring a top-down, tile-based game world. This became a lot easier once I bought my first ship. Ships in The Ormus Saga don't work like they do in Ultima, in which you have to remember where you left it. Instead, ships here are just inventory items that you "board" any time you need them and apparently pocket the moment you hit land. Maybe your troops are meant to be portaging them or something. The upside is that once you have a ship, you can explore the map in fixed ribbons, occasionally having to move around a mountain peak.

Boarding a ship near an island temple.

Ships have a damage rating that doesn't have anything to do with actual damage (which doesn't exist; you can't fight ship battles in the game) and seems more like a simple counter of how many times you've boarded them. Every time you board, the condition goes down by 1. Eventually, you have to "repair" them in one of the harbor towns, which costs the same amount whether you're repairing 1 damage or 99 damage.

Let's see how she rates:

• 2 points for the game world, which mostly clones Ultima. It's not hard to see Mondain in Morax or Mondain's Gem of Immortality in Morax's Gem of Power. I did like some of the little allusions in Ormus, such as the deceased hero Lord Thorn or the Dragonwars, but it never came to much. There might have been more in the original documentation.

• 2 points for character creation and development. There are no choices during creation. You have some traditional experienced-based leveling, but I never really felt that the character was getting more powerful from these level-ups.

• 3 points for NPC interaction. Talking with NPCs is a vital part of the game, but also a bit boring since you have no dialogue options and they're all menu-based, so there's no joy of finding that obscure NPC hidden behind a secret door.

Marox's counselor demonstrates a poor understanding of the term "secret plan."

• 1 point for encounters and foes. Enemies in the game vary only by icon and hit points. A couple can cast a single damaging spell.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Both combat systems are just silly and offer no tactics whatsoever. The magic system is...there.

• 3 points for equipment, a decent selection of weapons, armor, and shields of increasing benefit. There are other utility and artifact items that are fun to find.

Some of the special items in my late-game inventory.

• 4 points for economy, a strong point in the game. With the need to constantly replenish troops, broken equipment, and spells, you never feel too rich. Rewards from exploration and combat seem pitched just about right.

• 2 points for a main quest of multiple stages, but no side-quests or role-playing.

• 1 point for graphics, sound, and interface. I can't forgive the joystick-only interface, especially on a game designed for only one platform. The graphics are poor even for an Ultima clone, and there's no sound at all.

• 1 point for gameplay. It gets that bit of credit for non-linearity, but the game is way too long for the experience that it offers.

          
I've declined to subtract points for the crashes and freezes just because I think those are more likely emulator issues than original programming issues. That gives a final score of 21, which seems a bit high to me, but then again, I did play it for 6 hours straight the other night, so it must have some appeal. The more important thing is that it's 13 points lower than the original Ultima from 10 years prior.

Online databases offer contradictory information about the game, and it's unclear where they're getting all of it. For instance, most sources give 1991 as the release date, but the only sure mechanism of publication that I've found is the August 1993 issue of Golden Disk 64. It's possible that the developer released it through independent channels before the diskmag release.

Everyone seems to agree that Mike Doran wrote the game, but some sources give a co-developer as Andrea Metzner. I haven't been able to track down either of them. I don't even know what nationality they are. The more important news from the online databases is that The Ormus Saga is actually a remake: Doran's first game seems to have been Ormus (1990), a more primitive, all-text version of The Ormus Saga. It offers dialogue via keywords, as in Ultima IV, rather than just an information dump. In the same way, Ormus II (1991) seems to be an earlier all-text version of The Ormus Saga II. There are other games, for which I've only seen pictures of the box, called Stories of Beryland I and II; I have no idea what the dates are on these, but they may just be compilations of the Ormus games.

Exploring Remfield in the original Ormus (1990).

I admire Doran's dedication to developing his setting, but I can't claim to be overly enamored with the result. I give a pass to independent games for not featuring the same quality of graphics and sound as their commercial counterparts, but there's less of an excuse for such primitive gameplay. The thing I expect most from independent games--from any games, really--is a sense of self-awareness. If you can only program menu towns (hell, menu dungeons), primitive combat, and half a dozen monster icons, fine--but you don't have a 10+ hour game. You have a 4-hour game. Don't give me Ultima I's complexity (less than that, really) and Ultima V's size and length. John Carmack is a good example of a developer who had this self-awareness and designed games (Shadowforge, Wraith, Dark Designs) that were about the right length, difficulty, and complexity given what he was able to program. The developers of Dragon Sword and The Ormus Saga are something of the opposite.

It's clear that The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death (1993) and The Ormus Saga III: The Final Chapter (1994) are more advanced games (they seem to have explorable towns, at least), so in that sense I look forward to seeing how the games progress. In the meantime, perhaps someone will come along and tell me what I missed to win this one.

Time to devote myself entirely to Antares for a while.

The Ormus Saga: Subtitle

Liberating the land one city at a time. This shot shows several types of the game's terrain.

          
Exploring Beryland has made me wonder how we ever mapped effectively in top-down, tile-based games--or, more to the point, how we ensured that we didn't overlook any important locations. The Ultima games came with maps (and perhaps Ormus did, too, in the original publications) that helped. When I replayed Ultima IV, V, and VI for this blog, I already remembered the basic geography of Britannia; I can't remember what it was like to explore the land as a blank slate. Ultima II was based on Earth geography, so it was easy to find your way around. Ultima was perhaps the most confusing of the games, with all of its islands, but before long you could buy an air car and explore the entire world in a search pattern.

Lacking any of these things in The Ormus Saga, I wasn't sure how to approach mapping and exploration, especially since I kept getting turned around by rivers and mountain ranges. I started mapping it in Excel, but I gave up when I realized it would take far longer than the game is worth. I could have done just some rough sketches on paper or something, but my soul resists the imprecision of such an approach.

A tiny portion of the game world.

So I'm making do with half-measures. Once I had enough funds for some "magic maps," I discovered that they provide both coordinates and your rough position in an outline of the overall game world. If I just record the coordinates of cities and dungeons I find, I can use the maps to find my way to most places. All that's left is a mechanism of systematic exploration that ensures you don't overlook any important cities, dungeons, towns, temples, and castles.

Given relative positions, I'm guessing the game is 256 x 256 squares.

The game gets its horizontal coordinates backwards, incidentally. It records all the locations in the game as tile positions "north" and "west." But by "west," it really means "east." If you start at 50N, 100W and move two spaces to the east, you'll be at 50N, 102W. This caused a lot of confusion for a while as I tried to find treasures.

Technologically, playing The Ormus Saga has also been very frustrating. The game freezes about 1 in every 8 times that it has to access the disk, and it has to access the disk a lot--to load new tile blocks, to enter and exit locations, to enter and exit combat, to activate menu items, and so forth. Fortunately, the VICE emulator allows the creation of a save state with just an ALT-S, so I'm in the habit of hitting that key combination every 20-30 seconds, and then ALT-L to reload when the game inevitably freezes. Unfortunately, I was done in by another problem that I don't understand. Maybe one of you who's more proficient with the technology can help me with this. I've been using save states for various emulators for years now, and I often find that while the save state will load without any problems during the same emulation session that created it, if I close the emulator and re-start it, the save state freezes or crashes upon re-loading. Why does this happen? Why doesn't it always happen?

In any event, I had to learn the hard way to use save states during most of the gameplay, but use the game's own save feature before closing out of a session. With that, I've been able to make a little progress.

See that dungeon in the mountains south of me? If I hadn't been mapping every tile, I probably would have overlooked it.

  
To recap, The Ormus Saga is a limited Ultima clone that takes place in Beryland. The kingdom is being threatened by the Ormus Cult, which has already taken over a bunch of cities and can, in the course of gameplay, take over more, including the king's castle, which immediately ends the game. You play a generic warleader who has to both develop his own skills and inventory as in a typical RPG, but also raise armies to re-capture the towns taken by the cult.

This is particularly important because each town has a different selection of shops, and only certain towns sell the items you need to progress in the game.

I can't take advantage of this city's services until I liberate it.

Once I realized that the game starts in the southwest of Beryland, I began exploring the south coast heading east. The first city I discovered, Dillingston, was occupied by the Cult. So was the next, Dalewood. Finally, I found one that wasn't, called Hillstone, followed by a Temple of Mar, and a city called Harper Valley.

All the game's towns are menu towns, and each offers the ability to search a list of doors, chests, bookcases, baskets, and other receptacles that in a more elaborate game you'd find by actually wandering around the town. Many are locked (and it took me a while to find a town that sells keys), but between the opening city and the three unoccupied ones, I found enough treasure to fund an army of around 150 troops. This allowed me to besiege and take over Dillingston and Dalewood.

The heroic general loots the city.

Between the visited cities, I'd also collected lore on a number of buried treasures, so I set out to find some. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that buried treasure chests require magic keys to open, and I hadn't yet found a city that sold them.

How disappointing after all that digging.

During these explorations, I was surprised at how few wandering monsters I discovered. In 4 hours of gameplay, I fought maybe 10 total combats. For this reason, I still haven't gotten off Level 1. I don't know how many experience points it takes. You start the game with 210, and I'm up to 492 now, but nothing so far.

Because of the relative scarcity of monsters, I was looking forward to my first dungeon exploration. I saw one in the mountains early in the game, but I needed to wait until I found a city that sells a "climbing tool" to access it. When I found a shop selling the tools in Dalewood, I eagerly returned to the dungeon, prepared to fire up a torch, entered it, and...

This is a "dungeon."

Yep, dungeons in this game are just menus, like cities. Despite "conversation" and "attack enemy" options, neither of the two dungeons I've "explored" have had anyone to talk to or attack. The only purpose to them is to search for the same types of chests and other receptacles that you can find in towns. As in towns, many of them require keys or magic keys.

Last time, I tried to describe combat, but I don't think I made it sound as stupid as it is. Even though you can see your character icon and various enemy icons, it's not a battlefield map like in Ultima IV or V. Neither you nor the enemies ever move from the starting position. When you attack, you aim at a column of enemies, and your attack always goes to the first enemy in that column--basically, it's like selecting your target from a list. Phantasie used the same approach, with graphics that are just for show rather than any kind of tactics.

Note that the "battlefield" with these sea monsters still looks like grass.

The one creative element here is the use of the "Troop Attack" in combat. If you select that, you choose an enemy to target just like a regular attack. But when the enemies retaliate, they attack your troops rather than you. In that sense, troops are like extra hit points in combat.

These demons are too dangerous to fight on my own. I use my troops to whittle them down. Some hero, huh?

If your troops make the kill, you don't get any experience, so I learned that what to do in tough combats is let your troops attack a few times to wear the enemy down, then finish him off with a character attack. It's not always easy to estimate how many hits it's going to take to kill a foe, however.

In city combats, there's no individual attack option. The troops are all you have. You and the enemy exchange blows, slowly whittling down your troops, until only one side is left. There are no tactics, no spells, and the conclusion is foregone from the beginning, but the game still forces you to fire back and forth for 10 minutes instead of just offering a way to reach the inevitable conclusion with a single button.

Despite the inevitability of my victory, I still have to aim, fire, and kill each of the enemy troops one by one. It's even worse than it looks, because the maximum number the game displays at a time is 14 troops, so there might be 4 or 5 "underneath" each icon, and I have to attack it multiple times.

You don't get any treasure or individual experience for winning city battles, and even a winning one can easily cost 70 or 80 troops, which cost around 400 gold pieces to hire in the first place. Thus, your accumulated gold disappears quickly, especially since the enemy keeps re-conquering cities you've already liberated.

The enemy attacks a town in which the garrison is apparently one guy. I haven't figured out what the shields behind the troops mean. You can attack and eliminate them in combat.

Towards the end of this session, I discovered the king's castle, which is just another menu town. Each city, town, and castle has a selection of 4-6 menu NPCs to talk with. Their names are mostly normal ones (e.g., Jonathan, Ben, Dan, Tina)--probably the developer's friends--though occasionally rendered backwards (e.g., Nomis, Ekim). From them, I've discovered a bit of the game world's lore and quests. A summary:

• The Ormus Cult is led by an evil wizard named Lord Marox. He lives on an island called Black Isle.

• Lord Marox created a Gem of Power with the help of the god of the World of the Dead. The Gem makes Marox immortal, and it must be destroyed. This plot point occurs in no other game I know.

• The king's name is Argon. Lord Marox used to be a member of his royal council, and when he defected, he stole the king's crown. Getting the crown back is a step in the game's main quest.

Visiting the king. Not enough games go to the periodic table for their character names.

• The people talk of a historic event called the "dragonwars." During these wars, a city called Ghoul was destroyed. Four ancient books, scattered across the land, hold some secret to do with Ghoul. A priest named Carlos in Monter Bay (I haven't found it yet) is searching for these books.

• A large black dragon has recently returned to the eastern swamps.

• The dwarves in the city of Dillingston are mourning for a wizard named Thorn. NPCs have mentioned him several times as an old friend of King Argon.

• Marox is trying to enter the World of the Dead. This requires a holy word of 7 letters (NPCs have already given me three) plus an artifact called a Trigonom, which is a combination of three amulets forged by the gods. Marox already has the Amulet of Death. The Amulet of Wisdom is locked up in Argon's castle. The elves in Elvenstone may know the hiding place of the third.

From the NPC discussions, it's become clear that solving a number of side-quests, or sub-quests, is going to be about finding the right artifacts and quest items in miscellaneous dungeon treasure chests. For instance, I found some kind of magic gemstone in a dungeon near the king's castle. Some will undoubtedly come from buried treasure chests.

Towards the end of this session, I conquered the city of Coldwater and finally found a shop selling magic keys. With one in my possession, I dug up one of the fabled treasure chests and found a pretty good haul. Now that I can afford both keys and magic keys, I need to re-explore all the cities and dungeons I've already passed to collect their treasures.

At last! I only have about a dozen more to find, now.

Some other notes:

• Hit points regenerate very slowly, like 1 in every 30 or 40 moves. Resting in towns is the only viable way to get healed on a regular basis.

• Food depletes so slowly you barely notice it. I have to buy a few more rations maybe once every hour of gameplay.

• When you find treasures, you often find gold nuggets and jewels. These sell for 17 gold pieces and 25 gold pieces, respectively, in any city. Annoyingly, you have to sell them individually by re-selecting "sell nuggets" and "sell jewels" multiple times in the "sell" menu and saying "yes" to the buyer's offer. Similarly, you have to buy troops 6 at a time instead of just plugging in the number you want.

Repeat 10 times to get another 60.

• Just as in Ultima IV and onward, walking through swamp carries a risk of poisoning the character, requiring a "CURAX" spell or a trip to a healer.

• There are multiple levels of weapons, armor, and shields, but each town might only sell 2 or 3 types. You have to study costs to know which is "better," since there's no visible armor class on the screen.

Above dragon shields, found in other towns, are black shields and magic shields.

• Weapons and armor occasionally break in combat. This doesn't actually happen in combat, but you're told about it in the post-combat screen. These seem to be scripted and timed events. If a sword breaks in one combat, you can reload, explore for a while, fight a different combat, and see the sword break there. It will break even if you don't use it during the combat (i.e., if you have the troops do all the fighting).

• Escaping combat doesn't make an enemy go away, but it might make the game recalculate his numbers. If you get attacked by an enemy and don't like the odds, you can escape and re-engage, and you might find yourself facing a smaller number.

This combat seems a little unfair at my level, but if I exit and return, I might face only 1 or 2.

 

• I still haven't found any reason to attack NPCs in the towns.

• Spells are actually inventory items, like in Ultima I. That's why they kept failing when I tried to cast them. I've only found them sold in one town (and even then, only a couple of them), and received them as treasure from one chest.

• With all the dungeons as menus, there seems to be no reason for torches except to illuminate a larger area when night falls.

• There are no keyboard commands in the game--everything is by joystick--but the names and order of the commands (attack enemy, board ship, cast spell, dig, enter, etc.) suggest that the developer intended to map them to the keyboard and never got around to it.

I think I've experienced most of what the game has to offer at this point. It's not torture to play it or anything, but it's a bit boring even in its innovations, and a lot of its mechanics seem to be geared towards making it artificially long. Ultima was a better and more exciting game 10 years prior. I'll probably keep playing to avoid bailing on two games in a row, but not if I experience any more technical glitches.

Time so far: 6 hours
Reload count: 7 (not counting after freezes)

Antares: Übersetzungen

Translating one of the dungeon's many messages.

All right, we're trucking now. Some truly excellent readers managed to translate all the text in the game in a single day, making it go a lot faster, and also making it possible for me to play the game when I'm not online. As we're going to see, several things are still a bit lost in translation, but in general, I don't dread playing the game as much.

I also figured out how the in-game translation system works and used it to translate Kevin McFly's phrase into TOTE LACHEN NICHT ("the dead laugh not"?) and get the key to the game's first dungeon: Eriankeller. He also said something I don't quite understand about "the Krull" (the translation offered is: "And if you do not want to look after your adventure like this, than be on guard before the Krull..."), but it kind of became clear later.

This image is entirely out of context here, but I wonder where "tsirata" comes from.

But let me back up a bit. Having better translations of all the NPCs filled in a few of the holes. As you may recall from the back story, my characters' ship, Auriga, was shot down "by an unknown space station" while tracing a distress call from Hope, humanity's first interstellar ship. The planet we're marooned on is called Kyrion and the specific area (the first map) is called Lauree. The trenches I've been exploring were specifically built by the survivors of Hope, and they populate all the houses and shops. I guess there were quite a lot of them--enough to make a new society. 

With the key in hand, I returned to the store to purchase a lamp for the dungeon. The item in question is called a stablampe; Google Translate has issues with the "stab" part, but the "lampe" part seemed clear enough. I also bought aluminum-platte for my three lead characters and equipped it. 

Then I spent some time getting my characters fully rested and bought enough food to get the food meter up to about 2/3. At some point, completely without notice or fanfare, my characters leveled up from 1 to 2 and then from 2 to 3. These seem to have been accompanied by 1-point increases in a single attribute per level, and perhaps an associated skill increase. (I don't have any comparison shots from when my characters were at Level 1).

Ready to explore, I headed into the Eriankeller dungeon. I was surprised to find that it had typically fantasy-looking textures, but then again the entire game so far has been a fantasy RPG with a sci-fi framing story. The first level was 20 x 20, no space between walls, all squares used. It featured a dozen wall messages (something the developers picked up from The Bard's Tale), a couple of traps, a couple special encounters, and at least one fixed combat.

The first dungeon level.

It soon became clear that I hadn't brought enough stablampen because each one is only good for about 5 minutes. Rather than immediately return and buy more, I allowed myself the playing-like-a-jackass luxury of exploring and mapping the entire level first--running from every combat and reloading when my lamps died--and then going quickly through the dungeon for "real." I won't do this in subsequent levels, but doing it for the first one helped me establish the game's conventions.

I can't see "Willkommen" without singing the theme song to Cabaret.

 
There were messages everywhere, and most required me to use the game's translation system to render them from "Skrit" to German. This is accomplished by hitting the "translate" button and then typing the name of the origin language (and/or the name of the translation book that I'm carrying for that language). I don't know why the game couldn't just automatically translate if you have the book. Anyway, the messages:

• "Welcome!  You have just gambled your life!" (Near the beginning.)

• "Only perseverance leads to the goal--or to death" (You can just see this one on a motivational poster.)

• "Dead can sometimes be quite useful." (No idea. I guess you can still stick them with inventory.)

• "Someone has stolen my Thallium sword. The finder receives a reward!" (It amuses me that the translation both rhymes and has a near-perfect string of dactyls. I don't know if this is some kind of side-quest, or just a note to be on the lookout for a Thallium Sword.)

Would the reward be...a Thallium sword?

 

• "The cross to quench your hunger." (This seems to have to do with a cross ring (kreuzring) that I found in the level's one fixed combat. I don't know how it works. Perhaps wearing it causes the hunger bar to go down slower. I know you can't cook it.)

• "Do you own what 'nothing' is?" (No idea. Maybe a hint to keep an empty inventory space for some of the fixed encounters on the level.)

• "Containers are not only good for waste." (Okay... I haven't found any containers yet. That would be really handy if the game had some, because my inventory is getting tough to manage.)

• "Athindoar is the Umbekan Goliath." (Probably refers to some boss encounter later.)

• "Reason is the seat of resistance." (Some reference to the friction between the Umbeken and the Vunorers? See below.)

• "Enter at your own risk. In case of accidents, no liability is accepted." (This is at the entrance to the final area.)

• "Attention! You enter the path of no return!" (Further along the path. You can, in fact, return.)

• "This door carries death and destruction." (Just before the one fixed combat of the level.)

This is in contrast to all those games where you can sue someone if your characters get hurt.

There were also two fixed encounters with NPCs. The first was with a homeless-looking Umbeke. The game noted that his clothes were "shabby and torn" and that he "does not fit the description of the Umbeken from Dvorak," so I don't know how I knew he was Umbeken at all. Anyway, when I entered his room, he was ranting:

"...revenge. They shall die, these murderers. Yesss... I will have my revenge on each and every one of these dirty Vunorers! I'll send hordes of Questonants their way. I will order them to suck out the Vunorers' brains! Hehe hehehe... the Vunorers will beg me to leave them in peace. On their knees, they will ask for forgiveness for what they did to my children. And they will restore Lauree to what it used to be... and then they have to make me their ruler. I will have all the power, ALL OF IT! But first, I'll have my terrible revenge... Or I'll draw the Asthanes' attention to this system. They will trample the Vunorers with joy. They will make an example out of the Vunorers--so that no people ever again dares... anyway, this false friendship between us and the Vunorers will be at an end. Hmm, such a transmitter would..."

It's a trap!

So definitely some friction among the game's alien species. I don't know who the "Asthanes" are--some species from another planet I guess. The game noted that as I left the room, "one of your party remarks, in jest, that affairs here are worse than on Earth. You aren't in the mood for jokes, though." I'm not sure what bothers me more: the game putting words in my character's mouth, or the game telling me how another character felt about it.

Now we know what happened to the shadowlords when they left Britannia.

The second encounter was with a shadowy projection of "a mighty being in a brown tunic." It wished me better luck than "the fools who came before" and gave me something called a tokero (no German translation) which seems to be a weapon, although no one in my party has the skill to use it. It bade me farewell with "may the Tahun never leave you." Another reference to the "Tahun," which sounds like some kind of deity or religious system.

The level culminated in a battle with "Kruul," whom McFly had warned me about, albeit with a different spelling. A little flying impish creature, he destroyed me when I first encountered him, but then I was just screwing about.

My characters are actually refusing to fight because my morale bar is so low.

Later, exploring the dungeon for real, and having leveled up in between, I was able to defeat him. He left me 2000 experience points (the highest before him had been around 600), $600, and a few items including the "cross ring." Beyond him was a passage down.

The spoils of victory.

A few notes on what I've discovered of the game's mechanics:

• When it comes to weapons and armor, characters are limited in what they can wield by their combat skills. When viewing items in the store or in inventory, a little symbol appears next to the item if the character can't use it. So far, my most skilled characters have eisenstangen (iron bars), and my weakest has to make do with a rippenknochen (rib bone). I assume that as I increase levels, these skills will increase.

• The value of the weapon helps determine its damage rating. Current armor class is indicated by the letters "SW" in the character portrait. I don't know what "SB" means. It might have to do with mental defense. Are there any German phrases for which these letters would make sense for physical defense and mental defense, respectively?

• You can have characters analyze items to find out what they do. They don't even have to have the items in their possession. You just click the little magnifying glass, type in the name, and the character comes back with something like, "you can cook that" or "I think that's a weapon." Very neat.

• My inventory is getting very tight. Every character has only six slots, and between weapons, armor, quest items, healing items, and food, they go quickly.

• The various commands to study your enemy before combat give you a decent sense of what attacks to use. You have to have fought the enemy previously, though.

Eva recommends psychological attacks.

• As I mentioned in a previous post, the second bar under each character's portrait is his physical health. The third is his mental health. To heal characters, you have to use one of a variety of items that works on either type of health; for instance, bandages for physical damage and aspirin for mental damage. How much you heal depends on the healing skill of the character using the item.

• You can't save in dungeons. I'm trying to force myself not to use save states to get around this.

• I don't know if there's an absolute mapping system (i.e., if each square has fixed coordinates), but there's a relative one. You can use the "locate" button to set an origin point, and from there the game tells you how far you are from the point.

Checking my position before heading down.

• You can talk to your characters! At any time, you can hit the "mouth" button and either cycle through all the characters or choose a specific one. So far, they haven't said much that was interesting.

Bio-splatter ragout will do that to you.

• Restoring a character's energy by sleeping takes a long time--like almost 20 minutes of just sitting there. The android needs no sleep.

• No food is consumed when resting in the landing craft, which is nice.

• If you run out of food, a character immediately dies. That's pretty harsh. I'm not sure how long it takes to kill off other characters after that.

In short, there are some odd and interesting innovations in the game. In the last session, I finally settled into a comfortable groove, and I'm looking forward to what's next.

I did hear briefly from one of the developers, Kjell Droz. He confirmed that he and his friends ("school boys," but I don't know what age) were primarily influenced by The Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64, and he suggested that Antares includes "many labyrinths and five or six cities," so don't expect a quick end. I wrote back with some more questions, and I hope we can get some more development and background information from him.

Time so far: 9 hours
Reload count: 12

Game 195: The Ormus Saga (1991)

The Ormus Saga is a little Ultima clone, written by a developer named Mike Doran for the Commodore 64, and offered on diskmag by the German publisher CP Verlag. Unlike Antares, in which I am currently also mired, Ormus offers its text in English. I haven't been able to find anything about the author, whose name doesn't sound German. In any event, this game is the first in a trilogy, which continues with The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death (1993) and The Ormus Saga III: The Final Chapter (1994).

If there was any documentation for the game originally, I can't find it, but it isn't very hard. It doesn't even use the keyboard (except to type the character name); all movement is through the joystick. Pushing the button calls up a list of commands that would be executed by keystroke in a better game, including attacking, casting spells, and using items.

I approach a village to the south while an orc party (or something like that) approaches from the north. I've hit the joystick button, so the game is showing me my various outdoor menu options. I'm very low on hit points.

        
The game is set in 1227 in the land of Beryland. The Ormus Cult has taken over the realm, and the PC has decided to do something about it. Character creation is just a name, at which point the PC starts on "the southwest shores of Beryland," next to a city called Remfield. He's got 60 hit points, 210 experience, 300 gold, 12 food, 9 strength, and wisdom.

The back story from the game's introductory screens.

          
Cities are just menus, where you can engage in conversation with a fixed number of menu NPCs; attack the same NPCs (haven't figured out why you'd want to do that yet); sleep at the inn to recover hit points; check your inventory; search the city for treasures (again, a fixed number); hire soldiers (more on that in a bit); buy and sell items; and visit the healer.

Conversation with NPCs is about as verbose as an Ultima game, although you don't get any dialogue options. NPCs tell you things about the world and give you clues about things to check in other cities. At least one NPC in each city offers the location of a treasure, measured in squares north/south or east/west from the current city. I haven't found any of these treasures yet, as all of the locations have had water in between.

Conversation with "a woman" gives me some intelligence on a "holy word."

There's not much to do in the outdoor areas except travel between towns, fight wandering monsters (as in Ultima, they show up on the world map and chase you around), and dig for treasure. If there are dungeons, I haven't found them, but then again, I haven't gotten a sense of the size of the game world yet. Progress is hampered by ocean, rivers, and mountains. There are probably multiple islands, since there's an option to buy a ship.

Combat occurs on a separate screen, but not in any way that makes sense. Enemies start some distance from you, but you don't close the gap. Nobody moves on the combat screen. Instead, you aim your weapon with a cursor, and if the cursor is in the same column as your foe, you hit him. Basically, it's as if every weapon is a missile weapon that fires in right angles.

Fighting two snakes. If I want to hit the "closest" one, I need to move the cursor one square to the right. Two squares will hit the "farthest" one.

There are 10 combat spells and 3 non-combat spells. They have arcane names (e.g., "EMPAR," "DEASPI," "VEROS"), so I don't know what all of them do. From experimentation, "ESCOB" allows you to disappear and escape combat and "CURAX" cures poison. The others generally fail; I don't know if it's because I'm using them in the wrong circumstances or because I need to achieve a higher level first.

Let's talk about the game's one major innovation: in addition to running around the land as a typical RPG character, you can hire troops and equip them. Troops are alternatives to regular combat--you can send them to fight wandering orcs and snakes and such--but they're mandatory for combats in which you try to seize or defend a city. Occasionally, as you explore, you come across a city that's "++OCCUPIED++" by the Ormus Cult, and to get in and take advantage of its services, you need to take the city. Army-based combat is pretty blunt--you exchange blows that kill a couple of soldiers at a time--and it mostly boils down to which side has more numbers.

My pathetically outnumbered troops attack the City of Dillingston.

Occasionally, Ormus Cult forces attack a friendly city, and for some reason, you control the defenders. To assist with this, you can garrison troops in each friendly city. During my first attempt at the game, I was no more than 30 minutes into it when the Ormus Cult attacked the king's castle and wiped out the defenders with superior forces. This caused me to lose the game. I thought this was horribly unfair, but I guess it was just a random occurrence, because it didn't happen in subsequent games.

Well, hell.

At odd intervals, the game will suddenly announce that you've reached an "End of Period" and will give you taxes collected from all the friendly cities.

  
Unfortunately, the game is either horribly bugged or the VICE emulator just doesn't treat it well. It freezes constantly, usually when transitioning areas. This coupled with a lot of disk-swapping and the overall primitive nature makes me want to cut this one short; the only thing that stops me is a reluctance to bail on two games in a row.
 
Other observations:

• There is no sound in the game.

• There's a day/night cycle in which night reduces visibility as in the last few Ultimas.

• Resting for a night at the inn restores all hit points. It's considerably cheaper than the healer, so I don't know who would choose the latter option.

• Each town sells an extremely limited selection of weapons and armor. Developing in equipment is more about finding new towns than amassing more money.

In short, The Ormus Saga looks like a low-budget Ultima but plays more like a low-budget Sword of Aragon. I'm finding it hard to develop a strategy. I don't know if the best way to play is to hire troops immediately and take as many cities as possible or if I should try to build up my own character first. I suspect that I'm going to have to map, which is always a pain in the neck in a top-down tile-based game. Either way, it's clearly going to take a few postings. This looks to be one of the larger indie games that we've seen so far, so let's give it the full treatment.

Time so far: 3 hours
Reload count: 4