Game 258: Gates of Delirium (1987)

      

Gates of Delirium

Canada

Diecom (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for the TRS-80 Color Computer

Date Started:  13 August 2017
Date Ended: 16 August 2017

Total Hours: 8

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting:110/260 (42%)

   
There are "Ultima clones" in the sense that they were clearly inspired by Ultima's mechanics and use an iconographic interface, and there are "Ultima clones" in the sense that they copy practically everything about one of the Ultima games, including the keyboard commands, the combat system, the magic system, what NPCs have to say, and the existence of a continent on the other side of the world with shrines that boost your attributes. Gates of Delirium is one of the latter. TRS-80 Color Computer owners, I realize that the vast majority of RPGs weren't available for your overpriced machine with its silly nickname, but this wasn't the way to go about it. This is just sad. [Ed. from five years later: I said unkind things about the Color Computer and its owners throughout this entry. At the time, I somehow thought it was funny, but there's no joke here. I apologized in the comments, but not everyone reads the comments, so let me apologize here. No one deserves ridicule for something as trivial as his or her choice of a computer during an era in which there were dozens of choices and the comparative strengths and weaknesses were not easy to ascertain.]
      

Compare the geography above to the opening of Ultima III. We're not off to a good start.

     
If Gates of Delirium has anything to do with its namesake on Yes's 1974 album Relayer, I don't see it in the documents or gameplay. Instead, the game is a copy of Ultima III, right down to the geography displayed on the title screen, where you can watch a little vignette of characters and monsters dancing around some very familiar tiles. Commands, too, are drawn directly from the Ultimas, including (K)limb and (Z)stats.

The same, alas, cannot be said of the production values. Aside from the cover, it's simply typewritten in a monospaced font. It does a decent job outlining the races, classes, menu commands, spells, and monsters, but offers no backstory. If you think, "Cool! The story and quest will slowly emerge through gameplay!," let me disabuse you now: no, it won't.
       

The "topside" game world from the documentation. Apparently, the land is called "The Land of Gates."

      

The player begins by choosing a name, sex, and race from human, elf, dwarf, gnome, and orc options. Classes are fighter, thief, magic-user, cleric, paladin, druid, and illusionist--the last character seeming in name only, as there are no illusion-specific spells.
     

Character creation.

     

You can ultimately get other characters to join your party, but much like Ultima IV, the character starts alone, weaponless, with 150 food and 750 gold.

I naturally began by exploring the town near the starting area. A welcome "sign" near the entrance named it "Casa." Little animated NPCs roamed the streets. Yes, we're back to the days of generic one-line NPCs. Guards say, "Be off!" Fighters say, "Ugh!" (but, I must admit, do not add "Me tough!"). Thieves say, "Your money or your life!" Clerics say, "Evil is everywhere!" Jesters say, "Tee hee hee!" Occasionally, someone will offer something valuable. These NPCs are usually fixed in one place. An NPC mage recommended that I "use OTHER commands," referring to an input (H) that allows you to type your own command keyword. An NPC cleric clued me that one of those commands is JOIN.
     

One in a hundred NPCs offers actual information.

Most offer nonsense like this.

     

I bought some ring mail and an axe. Weapons and armor are referred to by letters from A to H. A is hands and skin; B is a dagger and cloth; H is a two-handed sword and plate mail. The Eternal Dagger just let me wear things like Storm Plate +5 with an added "Invisibility" spell, but I don't think that will be possible here.
      

This is Ultima III's list of weapons exactly.

      

Experienced with Delirium's sources, I knew the most important NPCs would be hiding in darkened squares behind buildings and such. Sure enough, in a corner, I found an elf cleric named Gazer who happily joined my party. He brought no food or gold with him. I had to purchase him a hammer and cloth armor. And that was about all the excitement in Casa.

It was time, I reasoned, to head outside and see how the game had implemented combat. Plus, I could tell I was going to need money for food soon. My first battle was with trolls, and it followed the Ultima III model right down to the amusing use of "Conflict!" as the inciting world. You fight on a basic tactical map with no terrain considerations, and you can only attack in columns and rows. My priestly characters don't have anything in the way of offensive spells yet, so all I could do was advance and use melee weapons. As in Ultima III, enemies can attack and move on the diagonal but you can't.
     

We must give the developers credit for originality where it's due: they use only one exclamation point after "Conflict," not Ultima III's two.

     

The half-dozen trolls had knocked away about half my hit points before we killed the last of them, earning 3 experience points per troll. (Experience goes to the character who strikes the killing blow.) They left a chest that poisoned us when I opened it. I figured I'd just cast "Cure Poison," but it turns out that's not one of the listed spells in the cleric's book. I didn't find healers in towns until much later, so it was fatal for me this early in the game. I reloaded. I soon discovered that hit points regenerate at a rate of 1 per 10 moves. I tried to accelerate that with "Cure Light Wounds," but I could only cast one before I was out of magic points, and it took me 20 steps to regenerate them.
      

Another screenshot of fighting trolls.

      

The spell system is based on Ultima III. Characters get a certain number of spell points based on a combination of intelligence and wisdom (depending on their class). These spell points therefore do not increase as you level up; to improve them (and to cast any of the higher spells at all), you have to visit the antipodal continent and make offerings to shrines. Not calling said continent "Ambrosia" is another originality point in the game's favor.

Each spell depletes a set number of points. There aren't many spells. Magic users get "Burning Hands," "Light," "Magic Missile," "Continual Light," "Invisibility," and "Lightning Bolt." Clerics get "Turn Undead," "Find Traps," "Cure Light Wounds," "Protection from Evil," "Continual Light," and "Create Food." That's all the manual lists, anyway, covering letters A through G. Letters H, I, and J produce a message that I don't have enough spellpoints, so there are clearly more spells to "find," probably from talking with NPCs. One of them is "Cure Poison," but it requires so many spell points that the average player probably would never get it.
       

Using "Turn Undead" on some skeletons. I am obliged to note that this is also cleric spell "A" in Ultima III.

      

There was a castle mere steps away from Casa. A king and queen--or maybe two kings--reigned side-by-side, but their only advice was to "seek more experience!" Clearly, they perform a level-up service just like Lord British in Ultima III. There was a rations shop and a chapel full of clerics who encouraged me to "use the gates of luna!" Not "moongates," mind you, but "gates of luna."
      

You know how the only way you can kill Lord British in Ultima III is by stealing a ship while inside the castle and shooting him with the cannons? Yep, they even copied that.

        
Continuing around the continent, the city of "Ghost Town" was (appropriately) mostly deserted except for a "healing fountain" that actually poisoned, a couple unmanned shops, and a cleric deep in some woods who told me to "use gems to see all!" I can't remember if there were gems in Ultima III, so maybe the developers lifted this one from Ultima IV. At a pub, in a system going back to Ultima II, the bartender rewarded overpayment with tips, including not drinking the water because "some water is poison."
       

I feel like this would be hard to read from the actual road.

     
Further south, I ran into my first "gate of luna," which took me to the southern continent on the main map, but I didn't last long there because of the sheer number of monsters.

By now, I had resolved not to continue with the game, but I couldn't stop before checking out at least one dungeon. This was currently impossible as neither of my cleric spellcasters had enough magic points for the cleric's "Continual Light," meaning I'd have to find a place selling torches or find a mage NPC. Either way, it meant more town explorations. Unfortunately, I didn't find any other towns on the accessible part of the large northern continent. It turns out there are some accessible by water only and one that requires you to walk across a huge swamp (which doesn't poison your characters but causes damage every step instead). Clearly, I either needed a ship (the manual promised roaming pirates) or to go through the moongate to the monster-infested southern continent.

Before I could do either, I settled in for a period of grinding near the castle. Orcs, trolls, skeletons, and thieves showed up every five minutes or so. That seems like a long time when grinding, but any more often and I wouldn't have been able to replenish hit points between battles.

Treasure chests are a huge pain in the neck. At least 50% of the time, they're trapped with acid or poison. Acid does a couple dozen hit points damage, so because of it, you'd better have more than 50 hit points before you even consider opening a chest. Poison has to be cured by a healer until very late in the game. It costs 100 gold pieces, against an average haul of around 30 per chest. This is less of a consideration than the fact that you'll probably die of the poison before even reaching the healer. Fortunately, there's a "Find Traps" cleric spell that automatically removes the trap and gives you the gold in the chest; unfortunately, it often fails and you have to stand there and wait to replenish spell points.
       

This party didn't last long after this.

      
Still, it's a better option than saving and reloading. You can save anywhere in the game, but reloading means killing the game and rebooting, which is almost as much a pain on the MAME emulator (more below) as it must have been on the original machine. 

Speaking of saving, Delirium does offer one major difference from its source: the world state is saved permanently to disk. When you start a new game, you create a play disk that has all the town and dungeon information on it. If you kill an NPC or open a chest in a town, the act is written to the disk when you save. Thus, you can't kill the same NPC multiple times for experience and gold, or loot the same group of treasure chests simply by leaving town and re-entering. In this, it shares characteristics with Deathlord from the same year.
      

As in Ultima III, you can loot groups of chests in shops. But unlike Ultima III, those chests don't respawn when you leave and return.

      
I did do plenty of reloading during this session. The game has no compunction about sending large groups of giants or other high-level creatures at you even at Level 1. Because your only "heal" spell only cures about 5 hit points at a time, and it takes 10 steps to regenerate 1 hit point, you're almost chronically under health.
      

Owning a ship greatly improves the combat terrain in the player's favor.

     
But even at my maximum, I couldn't survive the swarm of enemies waiting for me on the other side of the moongate, so I was thrilled when I saw a pirate ship on the horizon. As with the early Ultimas, acquisition of a ship is a major deal in this game, allowing you to fully explore the land and, if you don't feel like fighting enemies, blast them with the ship's cannons. (You get no experience or gold from that, but it's an easy way to clear out tougher enemies.) Perhaps most important, it gives you a way to fight regular battles in which enemies can only approach you one at a time.
     

I think I'll weed out the fighters, giants, and thieves and just fight the skeletons and orcs.

     
With the ship, I was able to pick my battles better and amass the 200 or 250 experience points that I finally needed to level up.
      

Despite his proclamation, he increased my hit points, not my wisdom.

     
More important, the ship took me to a previously-inaccessible part of the starting continent, a town called Tirary, where a shop sold torches, keys, gems, and magic horns that stop time briefly. I bought mostly torches. A magic user in the northwest corner offered to join my party. He was Level 1 and named Merlin.
        

You wouldn't think torches would be such rare commodities.

     
Without preparing much, I entered my first dungeon, near the starting area. Dungeons in this game are not 3D like Ultima III but rather large and top-down mazes. There are enough chests to suggest that dungeon-delving is probably the key to wealth.
      

Arriving in a dungeon.

     
Encounters are sparse in dungeons but lean towards the difficult side, and my party was soon killed. If I was going to continue with the game, I'd do some topside grinding first, get to Level 3 or 4, buy some better gear, and make sure I was fully healed before going to the dungeons again. But I'm not going to do that because the game is boring and derivative, and if I'm going to spend dozens of hours across multiple posts on a 1987 game, it's going to be one that has some original ideas, like Deathlord.
          

This dungeon shows a ladder, a couple of chests, and some lava next to pathways to my south.

         
Plus, you don't need me to document this one. That was already accomplished by frequent commenter Stu, blogging as "yakumo9275" on Armchair Arcade back in 2007 (coverage starts here, but skip to here for things that I didn't already cover). To summarize his findings, each of the game's 10 dungeons is enormous, with dozens of large levels, at least one spilling the player on the other side of the world. Those that don't require fairly tedious backtracking once you've finished exploring down to the bottom level.

The antipodal continent has a few towns and four shrines where you can pay 100 gold pieces for 1-point statistic upgrades. This is the only way to get more magic points.
       

Stu finds one of the seven gate keys.

      
More important, a southern island in the other world holds the titular Gates of Delirium. Entry is barred by seven doors for which you need to find keys--six of them in dungeons and one of them in a hidden town (you find clues that tell you how to get there).
     

Stu approaches the Gates of Delirium.

       
Unlocking all the doors and walking up to the gates brings you to the endgame screen, which simply says that you solved the game and gives you four "secret messages." Back when the game was new, you wrote those messages on a card and sent it to Diecom to be entered into a contest, one prize of which was a brand new Color Computer so you could play more games like this. Anyway, Stu doesn't offer a summary of his experience, but the tone of his posts is largely negative and he had to resort to cheating to force himself to finish.
       

The end of the game, from yakumo9275's LP.

      
I give Gates of Delirium a 25 in the GIMLET. It does best (4s) in the area of NPCs--who can both join the party and impart key information--and economy, which never stops being relevant. It does worst (1) for the game world, which offers not a hint of history, lore, or purpose for the quest. It suffers for its length; the size of the dungeons is simply inexcusable. I did not subtract points for essentially plagiarizing Ultima II-IV, but its appropriations make me think worse of it than the score suggests.
      

They didn't even change the amounts you have to tip a bartender for clues.

      
I try not to be too insulting in these reviews--the developers are real people, and were probably young at the time--but it's hard to argue with the label that Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice affixed to Delirium in their book Vintage Games: a "shameless and insipid clone." You know who I feel bad for? Charles Dougherty. He goes and creates an original game (Questron) that owes little to Ultima except the use of top-down tiles, and he can't publish it without eating crow and giving a cut to Richard Garriott. Meanwhile, Rings of Darkness, Deathlord, Wrath of Denethenor, and Gates of Delirium do this with impunity.
        

I forgot to show you what a dungeon entrance looks like. These can be hard to spot.

      
Back in the mid-2000s, a group of nostalgiacs named Andrew Ayers, Michael Crawford, and Tim Lindner, whose parents hadn't loved them enough to buy computers capable of playing Ultima III, got together and created the "Gates of Delirium archive," a web site with links to the game files, documents, maps, notes, and technical information. My snarky comment aside, it really was well done. It would be a model fan page except that it disappeared some time after 2008.

Fortunately, CRPG Commenter Adamantyr (who has his own summary of the game) preserved the entire site offline and sent it to me several years ago, when I was mixed up and thought the game was a 1984 title. I held on to the files.
     

The manual cover is at least original. [Edit: as commenters pointed out, no it's not. It's a copy of the image of a ghoul in the first edition D&D monster manual.]

      
Actually getting the game to play took most of a day. For technical reasons I don't understand, it doesn't work with the Color Computer emulators I already had. (By now, the number of emulators I've downloaded for the Color Computer easily exceeds the number of RPGs available for it.) Notes from the archive identified a couple of emulators that it did work with, but neither of them work with Windows 10. Finally, I downloaded the latest copy of MAME (which incorporates the multi-system emulator formerly known as MESS). MAME is a tremendously impressive and valuable project, capable of emulating dozens of systems and arcade games, but damn was it hard to set up. It's interface is far more cumbersome than single-game emulators, and it took me forever to figure out how to bring up the configuration menu (allowing me to switch disks, among other things) during the game itself. I suppose it was a good exercise, though, as MAME is bound to come in handy in the future.

(In case anyone finds their way here via Googling keywords and has the same problem, the issue is that the default key for the configuration menu, TAB, isn't enabled unless you first activate "UI Mode." The key to do that is mapped to the "Scroll Lock" key by default, which many laptops don't have. You have to use the configuration menu in the master emulator re-map that function.)
      

An advertisement for the game makes it a minor title among Diecom's catalogue.

       
Gates of Delirium was designed by Canadian developers Roland Knight, Dave Dies, and Dave Shewchun and published by Diecom, an Ontario-based developer whose best-known title seems to be an adventure game called Caladuril: Flame of Light (1987). All three developers have several other titles from Diecom during the same period, including an adventure game called Lansford Mansion (there's a good review of the game on the "Gaming After 40" blog), an action knockoff of Gauntlet called Gantelet, and an action knockoff of Boulder Dash called Bouncing Boulders, and an original action game called Bugs. Dies and Knight have later programming credits involving translations of arcade games for the Camputers Lynx.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, and certainly we'd be nowhere in the RPG genre if developers didn't copy and adapt each other's best ideas. But it's just creepy when your game seems to have no original ideas, owes too much to a single predecessor, and doesn't even offer an homage in your materials. This one, which doesn't even have the excuse of being shareware, borders on shameful.

Speaking of which, the next game on my 1987 list, Hera for the Apple II, is yet another Ultima clone. What was the deal with 1987? It seems to be an independent game, so I may exercise my new Rule #4 with this one.

*****

For further reading: My review of Ultima III starts here. If you like hearing about Ultima clones, The Ring of Darkness is another particularly shameless one.