The Standing Stones: Won!* (with Final Rating)

           

The Standing Stones

Independently developed; published by Electronic Arts.

Released 1983 for Apple II, 1984 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 13 December 2015
Date Ended: 26 December 2015

Total Hours: 9

Reload Count: 18

Difficulty: Hard-Very Hard (4.5/5) in its intended difficulty, moderate (3/5) with save states
Final Rating: 15

Ranking at Time of Posting: 21/203 (10%)

The Standing Stones had some weird surprises before the end.

The main part of the dungeon was, as I said last time, 15 levels up and down. I found that if I took the time to walk on my way down and was careful about my magic expenditures, I could usually use "Jump Plane" to climb the levels one-by-one to the surface. Monsters naturally got harder on the way down, but the rewards were greater. Armor +2 gave way to +3 and +4; I found rings of various types and agonized over which to keep (you can only have two at any given time); and a helm +5 rounded out my protection.

On Level 13, I found Excalibur, and on Level 14, I found the mithril armor. I was cheating pretty heavily by this point, not only using Andrew Schultz's maps but also using multiple casting of "Etherealize" to fully explore each level, noting treasure locations, and then reloading to get the treasures for real.

     

Finding Excalibur.

           

I realized belatedly that carrying gold makes you a target. The more you carry, the more enemies swarm you. Thus, I began dropping it as soon as the game gave it to me. The extra experience points were not worth having to slog through 30 battles per level. I probably wouldn't have even survived it.

I still don't know what underlying mathematics govern success or failure in combat, but something weird is going on. I found that as long as I had perfect health (99 at my maximum; I'm not sure if this is the game maximum), I would easily defeat most enemies without losing any hit points. But the moment I lost 1 or 2 hit points in combat, in the next combat, I was far more likely to lose 5 or 6. Once I'd been knocked down by 10 or 15 points, I routinely lost that many. By the time my hit points reached half their original level, combats would often become fatal or near-fatal. Essentially, the game seems to regard hit points as a kind of "strength" meter and the more you lose, the more you lose.

A similar thing happened with spells. When I was perfectly hale, they would succeed almost all the time, but when I needed them most, enemies would be most likely to laugh them off. Losing health in the game thus becomes a swift downward spiral.

       

This never happens when my hits are higher.

             

Level 15, as I suspected, was a navigational nightmare with a slew of one-way doors and walls continually funneling me into dead ends that required a "Passwall" spell to escape. Fortunately, I had Schultz's maps and I was able to reach the center square with just a couple of quick teleports.

          

The endgame begins.

           

Upon reaching the Chamber of the Grail, the game got very weird. It prompted me to insert the second disk, and when I did, I found myself in an adventure game interface:

        

       

This could have been interesting, but it was short and most of the commands were obvious. An old man stood at the entrance to an ancient temple. I said HELLO. He asked me to sit down and I typed SIT. He asked me my name and quest, and I typed CHESTER and GRAIL respectively.

Then, in the first of what would be several unfair questions, he asked my current experience total "give or take ten thousand." If you get it wrong, he kicks you out of the chamber. I had to reload a save state, check it out, and then re-enter the chamber.
      

Weird language, breaking the fourth wall, an idiotic puzzle, and a contradiction of the game's own back story all on the same screen.

        

It continued to get more bizarre. He handed me a test booklet and said I'd have to pass in order to enter the chamber. The game asked me a series of five multiple-choice questions that were both unrelated to the game and astonishingly unfair to a contemporary player without save states and Internet access. Some relied on arcane game details; some required technological knowledge external to the game; and a few were just random trivia. And it was timed! The player has to answer each question in about 10 seconds, so back in the day, you couldn't quickly shuffle through documentation to find the right solutions.

Here are the questions I got:

• Which spell is most effective against a spectre on Level 2? (SLEEP, DISPELL, LIGHT CANDLE, or PRAY). Well, all right, "Light Candle" is the most effective cleric spell against undead on any level, so that one wasn't too bad.

• Which processor does this machine use? (6510, 8080, 6800, or 6502). Seriously? I'm not sure I would have known that even when I owned a C64. I had to abuse save states to enter the correct answer: 6510.

• What is RAM an acronym for? (READ AND MODIFY, REACTANCE ACTIVE MODULE, RESISTOR ARRAY MEMORY, or RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY.) Naturally I know this, but enough with the questions that have nothing to do with the game. 

• Who is the leader of the gang that's made for you and me? (DONALD DUCK, RONALD REAGAN, MICKEY MOUSE, or MENACHEM BEGIN.) First of all, it's the club or band, not "gang." Second, there are two acceptable answers in the list depending on who's doing the singing. Third, I think the developers just screwed any reader born after 1980 or outside the U.S.

• How tall is the average elf? (THREE TO FOUR FEET, FIVE TO SIX FEET, SEVEN TO EIGHT FEET, or UNDER THREE FEET.) This sounds like manual arcana, but in fact I don't see it in there anywhere. The answer is the first one, which naturally hoses anyone who's thinking of the Tolkien elf.

        

"M-E-N-A, C-H-E-M, B-E-G-I-N. Oy vey!"

          

These questions had been drawn randomly from a larger pool. Schultz's walkthrough offers the rest of them; many of them require a knowledge of completely unrelated trivia, and some are just unsolvable except by guessing:

     

• How many knights does it take to change a lightbulb? (The answer is apparently ONE.)

• What is the Turing Test? (Would the average gamer of the 1980s have known this?)

• How many bytes of RAM can the Apple's processor access directly? (I assume this was replaced by a similar one for the C64.)

• How many home runs did the Sultan of Swat hit? (Pretty unfair even for U.S. players, many of whom, like non-U.S. readers, are likely to be unaware that the "Sultan of Swat" is Babe Ruth and that the answer is 714.)

• What is Durin's Bane? (You'd have to read Lord of the Rings to know that the answer is BALROG.)

• Who killed Arthur? (At least this one comes from the game's setting, but you'd have to have external knowledge to know that it's MORDRED.)

• What is First Officer Spock's father's name? (The game incorrectly spells it as SARAK.)

• How many crew members were on the U.S.S. Enterprise? (I mean, the show had been off the air for 14 years by this time, and you'd have to be the biggest Trek geek to know that the answer is 430.)

       

Anyway, if you get this ridiculous test correct, you get to ENTER the Chamber of the Grail, which is guarded by the dragon Drungankham. I'll save you a trip to your nearest Arthurian dictionary to tell you that neither this name nor the old man's, Kormath, appears in Arthurian literature.

       

The game compounds its blasphemy.

          

I missed out on the final dragon fight. This is how Schultz describes it:

        

You will see the dragon as a dot. You are in a 20x20 room. You face east. You can go 2W before setting off an alarm, or 9N or 9S. Items show up at random. You can probably go 1N then back west and east until you get the potion of fire resistance, or the smoke bomb or hand grenade or missile launcher.

If you go outside the boundaries, there will be an alarm. All you need to do is go one north (you are facing east) then east past the dragon. You can loop around him if you want. Just don't run into him. Attack him from behind--you should have picked up a few items. It should not be too bad since he takes two turns to move and face you. With very good armor protecting you, you should find he does very little damage.

            

It sounds like an interesting little mini-game. This is what I got instead:

        

         

I suspect the reason my "battle" was so anticlimactic is that one of the rings in my possession was called a Ring of Dragon Control. Apparently, I willed the creature to kill itself rather than fighting it traditionally.

The game isn't done screwing with you at this point. You find yourself in a room with the Grail, where a colorful series of letters asks, "What wilst thou be if thou doth not succeed in thy holy quest?" A square box held a prompt for the answer.

      

        

The game's own death screen, which I encountered many, many times, gives the nonsensical answer:

        

         

Whatever the hell that means.

The correct answer finds the Grail in your possession. You then have to make your way back up 14 levels to the exit. I still had enough spell points to "Jump Plane" all the way there, but in addition to occasionally randomly sending you down instead of up, casting the spell occasionally causes you to drop the Grail, meaning you have to return to Level 15 to get it again--that is, if you're not abusing save states.

Reaching the exit produces the message "You have completed your holy quest" and the image at the top of this post. The titular standing stones literally jump up and down in the image, until one of them topples over.

      

       

In a GIMLET, I give it:

• 2 points for the game world. I feel that's even a bit generous. The Arthurian nonsense is a framing story, not in any way integral to the gameplay, and the developers didn't make any attempt to stick to Arthurian themes or characters.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There isn't much to creation, and the one hit point per level plus a couple of spell slots are only mildly rewarding, but at least you level rapidly.

• 0 points for no NPCs to interact with.

         

Preparing to blast a vampire.

        

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The weird gallery of monsters is indistinguishable from any D&D-derived game except when it has you fighting TRS-80s, silver spoons, and cereal bowls. A couple of friendly monster types don't add much to the game. There are no "encounters" other than monsters except for the end-game quiz, and you're not going to see me awarding points for that.

• 1 point for magic and combat. There's only one tactic: fight or cast a spell.

• 2 points for equipment. Scattered scrolls and potions plus some magic armor and weapons as you get lower in the dungeon.

         

My late game character sheet.

       

• 2 points for the economy. Except for paying for healing and un-cursing items in oases, money is just for conversion to experience.

          

One of the few uses of money in the game.

            

• 2 points for a main quest with no options or side-quests.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all going to the interface, which is easy enough to master.

• 1 points for gameplay. Highly linear, unreplayable, and way too large and difficult. I was able to beat it with maps and save states, but with permadeath this game would be spectacularly unfair.

The final score of 17 is relatively low, but I'm going to lower it to 15 by subtracting 2 points for that absurd end-game quiz. If I had fought my way down 15 levels legitimately only to lose the game because I didn't know Babe Ruth's home run total or my computer's processor number, I would have been marching on EA with torches and pitchforks.

        

This isn't a video game box. This is a Yanni album cover.

        

As I noted in my first posting, I played this game a year late. I had originally tagged it as a 1984 release, but it really came out in 1983. In my post about this early era, I talked about some of the themes The Standing Stones exemplifies, including roots in the PLATO games (in mechanics, The Standing Stones is a fusion of The Game of Dungeons and Oubliette), innovative dead-ends, and sparse in-game content. The Standing Stones feels very much like a 1983 game. It adopted some good elements from its PLATO parents, but clumsily, and where it departed from the PLATO titles, it did so in ways that did not deserve to endure.

Kicked back to where it belongs in the timeline, it appears that The Standing Stones was the first RPG published by Electronic Arts. The company had only been founded the year before, and its first titles didn't see publication until 1983. Eager to grow its catalog, EA must have been willing to take a chance on a game that wouldn't meet its later standards. It's next RPG was Interplay's The Bard's Tale.

I exchanged a few e-mails with author Peter Schmuckal last week, although I need to talk to him again to get some explanation for the bizarre endgame. The youth of the authors is clearly part of the issue: Schmuckal said he was 16 when he started working on the game after his brother, a student at the University of Illinois, introduced him to the PLATO titles. It took Schmuckal and co-author Dan Sommers 5 years to write the game in between high school and college classes; lacking their own personal computers, they wrote most of it on display PCs at a Langrange, Illinois computer store called Byte Shop. Schmuckal admits that neither he nor Sommers were "big gamers" and had little exposure to RPGs other than the PLATO titles. He admits they spent "little effort trying to create a cohesive universe." Neither of the authors went into gaming after The Standing Stones.

We're still not quite finished with the early era. After thinking I was all done with 1979-1983, I belatedly found out about Doom Cavern (1981), Dungeons of Death (1983), and Wizard's Tower (1983), which we'll have to deal with before we can finally wrap up 1984. In the meantime, I'm really trying to make some progress in Disciples of Steel (1991), which should be the subject of my next post.