Game 290: Talisman (1988)

The game has no title screen, so the closest we get is the "version" command.

           

Talisman

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1988 for Atari 800

Date Started: 28 May 2018

Date Ended: 29 May 2018 

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 21

Ranking at time of posting: 86/294 (29%)

               

Talisman, credited to K. Newman or perhaps Ken Newman, is nothing more or less than Rogue ported to the Atari 800. As far as I can tell, it adds nothing to the original except some icons in the place of ASCII characters. Rogue received a port to the Atari 8-bit family from Mastertronic the same year, but it's ugly as sin, so perhaps Mr. Newman's port was an alternative for players who preferred a more classic look. (A 1987 game called AtariRogue is, confusingly, a variant of the DND line rather than a direct Rogue adaptation.)

Everything from the original is here: a no-name hero whose only attributes are strength, armor class, and hit points; a large and varied selection of equipment; potions of various colors, wands of various metals, and scrolls of various arcane names, with their effects randomized for each new game; monsters that you can fight with missile or melee weapons or with the intelligent use of items; and of course the constant need for food, the inability to backtrack, and permadeath. Even the messages that appear when you use unidentified items are copied from the original.
          

A Potion of Restore Strength--with the same message that Rogue gave you.

        

The only major changes are unwelcome ones. First, each dungeon level requires multiple screens instead of fitting neatly on a single screen. This makes it more difficult to identify "obvious" secret areas. (This is a limitation of the Atari 800 hardware, I suspect, and not something we should necessarily blame the programmer for.) Second, the color scheme changes randomly with every level, with some of the options a bit dark.

Third, movement requires a keyboard cluster so unintuitive that it ought to win some kind of award. It's so bad that you're going to think I made typos. Here you go:

Y  K  U

H     L

B  J  N

The Atari 800 had no arrow keys nor keypad, so I understand the need to make an uncomfortable choice, but holy moly. It's like he was so set on using various other keys for their original Rogue functions, like (I)nventory and (E)at, that he just fit movement--the most important part of the game--in wherever he could. Even then, he could have used TYU/GHJ/BNM without having to change any other commands.

[Edit: Apparently this particular cluster is a convention going back to the original Unix Rogue. That relieves Mr Newman of culpability for inventing it. It still doesn't make any more sense, however, and as I said, there's no reason that the developer couldn't have chosen a more logical cluster for this particular adaptation.]

Aside from the icons, there are minor graphical improvements. You see arrows fly to their targets, for instance. But sounds are just beeps and are best turned off.
            

In a room occupied by a jackal and a pile of gold, I find a shortcut to the next level.

          

It's been a long time since I played Rogue, and experimenting with Talisman brought back a lot of memories that had been softened by other roguelikes. NetHack is a breeze compared to Rogue. Since enemies reliably drop items in NetHack (but not Rogue), you can farm early levels as long as you want. Food is everywhere. Rogue--and Talisman--are much more unforgiving. Enemies respawn, but they almost never carry anything. You can't eat corpses, and there are no instrinsics. Every action you take burns more calories, and you're constantly praying to find food before the "Hungry" alert shows up in the status bar. Inventory is much more limited, and there are fewer tricks to get out of sticky situations. There's gold--which contributes to the final score--but no shops. There are no fountains, no wishes, no altars, no blessings, and no luck statistic.
            

The most prized item in the game.

           
And yet, overall, I didn't have too difficult a time with the game--certainly nothing like my Rogue experience--and I wonder if Talisman wasn't programmed to be a bit easier. There's nothing obvious, but I suspect food lasts slightly longer, and the numbers are slightly more generous with player attacks and damage. I could be wrong. But while I didn't even try to play with permadeath--I allowed myself to copy the save every 2 levels--I still only had to reload about six times. And I wasn't that careful in my explorations.
              

A rare death, which looks like the original Rogue death screen.

         
The game is pretty easy through about Level 10. If you're lucky, you can trade out your starting mace and ring mail for some of the higher weapons and armor (e.g., two-handed sword and platemail) on an early level. That way, any scrolls of "Armor Enhancement" or "Weapon Enhancement" that you find will stack on the same equipment throughout the game. Also prized are potions of "Gain Strength," which add to your only real attribute. Perhaps the most useful offensive magic item in the game is the Wand of Cancellation, which removes a monster's special abilities.
              

Damn it.

            
The worst enemy on early levels is the giant ant, whose venom can remove a point of strength. Later on, you have to worry about rust monsters--although if you're careful and see them a couple squares away, you can doff your armor. Wraiths, which drain levels, start appearing around Level 15.

On lower levels, the toughest regular foes are umber hulks and xorns, both of which pound away dozens of hit points per attack. Vampires also do a lot of damage and can drain your maximum hit points. Once you hit dungeon Level 20 and character Level 10, a smart player treats it more like a stealth game, avoiding combat when possible and taking the stairs the moment he finds them. If he's lucky, he has a Ring of Slow Digestion and a Ring of Stealth by this point.
           

A late-game inventory. The teleportation items are useful to get out of tight situations.

         
The game's version of the Amulet of Yendor is the Talisman of the Ancients, found in a random room on Level 26 (or perhaps starting on Level 26; I didn't go down further). There's no Wizard of Yendor or other special challenge before walking up and taking the Talisman. There's not even any magic in the game.
           

So that's why the game is named Talisman.

          
After you find the Talisman, the stairways reverse and the challenge is to fight your way up. Of course, you take the stairways the moment you find them, and always revel when the next stairway is in the starting room. Unlike NetHack, the game doesn't remember earlier levels and regenerates new ones as you go up. But also unlike NetHack, it preserves the original levels' difficulty levels. So while you can't get too cocky, by the time you get to Level 15 or so, there's not much danger. At that point, the game becomes mostly an annoyance when a trap knocks you back down a level, or when you can't find the stairs because you need to find a secret door first.
           

Heading for the surface.

           
It's a relief when the stairway appears on Level 1 and you ascend for the last time. Talisman offers a better winning screen than Rogue, hinting at a slightly deeper story, but that's about it.
            

At least after all that work, my reward isn't that I get to join a guild.

      
This ought to GIMLET only a couple points lower than Rogue, which I rated over eight years ago. It will be interesting to see how consistent my rating conventions are between the two games. (I'm not going to look at my Rogue rating before attempting this one.)
               

• 1 points for the game world. Lacking an introduction, we only hear about the nature of the quest at the very end. I can only assume the original distribution came with a text file or something that set up the quest, but I have to rate what I experienced.

• 2 points for character creation and development. With no creation, no races, no classes, the only points I can give it are for the strength and level increases, which are rewarding when they happen.

• 0 points for no NPC interaction.

         

One of two primary means of "character development."

         

• 2 points for encounters and foes. While the menagerie is small, it has some nice variances in strengths and weaknesses, and the traps provide an additional challenge.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Like most roguelikes, combat seems pretty basic, but it can be quite tactical when you consider terrain and the use of missile weapons and special objects.

          

Fighting one of the game's more difficult foes.

          

• 5 points for equipment, almost always the strongest category in roguelikes. This little game offers more variety in weapons, armor, rings, potions, wands, and other items than most AAA commercial games of the era, with the need for identification offering an additional puzzle.

• 1 point for economy, which just serves to increase your final score.

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

             

Exit in view!

           

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface for serviceable graphics and very intuitive commands--except for movement.

• 3 points for gameplay, earned for offering the right challenge level (for a roguelike) and a modest play time. I'm somewhat sick of roguelikes that think that if the original's 25 levels was good, 50 must be twice as good.

             

That gives us a final score of 21, which lands where I expected it to in relation to the original Rogue's 24. In the end, we can say that it's a decent piece of programming that faithfully replicates the original Rogue on the Atari 800, but doesn't accomplish more than that.

Talisman is so obscure that Rogue Basin doesn't even have it, and I can barely find any mention of it online. K. Newman is also a pretty obscure figure. His name appears on a handful of Atari 800 games in the late 1980s, none of the rest of them RPGs.

At least that one was quick. We're only two games away from the end of 1988 (again), but one of them is French, so . . . you know . . . it might take a little while.