Game 296: Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989)

            

Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep

Canada

Postcraft International (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Macintosh

Date Started: 1 July 2018

When I started playing Quarterstaff a few months ago, I thought the way Mac-native games incorporated the Mac interface was intriguing. It took exactly three games for my opinion to morph from "intriguing" to "f@%&* gorked." Who the hell wants the title screen to come up with a bunch of other stuff in the background? It's like breaking out the Monopoly board and laying it down on the coffee table without clearing it off first. You're trying to play while the board is balancing on the remote control, the Xbox controller, and two coasters, while a couple discarded newspaper sections, a few pieces of mail, and the TV Guide stick out from under it.

I'm being generous in calling the screen at the top of this entry the "title screen." That's actually what appears when you choose "About Citadel" from the Apple menu. When you simply start the game, the title and some introductory text comes scrolling on up atop your mess of windows and icons, as if you're watching a movie by projecting it against a wall that already has a bunch of things hanging on it. Frankly, I've been generous to the Mac games since I started playing them a few months ago, cropping my screenshots so only the game window was in view. But if you really want the Mac experience, I should be showing you the entire desktop every time.

          

The seas majestically sweep across my hard drive icon.

       

What is supposed to be the advantage here? "You can arrange things the way you want!" Screw you. You're the developer--arrange things in the way that the game is best played. Does Martin Scorsese leave the aspect ratio up to the viewers? And don't get me started with the game's love for the mouse. Here's an idea for the next Avengers movie: Thanos's plan is to wipe out half of humanity by selecting the 20% who would prefer to click on arrows rather than use a keypad and the 30% who go to a real creamery and order "soft serve" ice cream. The Avengers clap him on the back and welcome him to the team. [Edit: See this excellent comment for why my scorn is partly unjustified.]

Like all Mac games, this one has a bunch of cutesy nonsense to make you think maybe it'll be clever and original. Character creation, for instance, has you slowly fill out a little birth certificate. The "menu town" screen has you click on little rustic signs. Oh, I suppose these sorts of thing have their charm if you're in the right mood, but if you're in the wrong mood, you want to grab the developer by his lapels and say, "Just because I like computer games doesn't mean I'm a damned child. I was toggling between Boltac's Trading Post and Gilgamesh's tavern with the 'B' and 'G' keys before you knew enough to type 10 PRINT 'HELLO' 20 GOTO 10. Now stop screwing around and give me some orcs to kill."
         

Well, isn't this just freaking adorable.

           

Thus, anyway, were my first impressions of Citadel, one of a pair of Apple games that gets my 1989 sweep-up off to a rocky start. Other than fluff, there is little to distinguish it from Wizardry. It's a multi-level dungeon crawler with six characters and a menu town on top.

In this case, the dungeon is the titular Citadel, once above-ground, high in the mountains, ruled by a sorceress named Lady Synd. One day, a stranger appeared in the town below and asked directions to the Citadel, and before long the land was enshrouded in blackness, with sounds of combat coming from the direction of the Citadel. A mighty earthquake signaled the end of the conflict, and when it was over, the entire Citadel had been subsumed into the ground, with only the top of its highest watchtower sticking above the surface. Since then, many adventurers have entered, and few have exited. Those few tell of Lady Synd entombed in a shimmering crystal.

Cue character creation, where you choose from five races (human, dwarf, hobbit, elf, and gnome) and eight classes: fighter, thief, wizard, cleric, knight, ninja, shaman, and magus, which basically equate to Wizardry's four core classes and four prestige classes. (Knights sub for lords, shamans for bishops, maguses for samurais.) In another impressive display of the developer's ability to use a thesaurus, attributes are strength, health, intelligence, knowledge, mien, and coordination. There are the usual minimum attributes per class.

I admit the game is a little creative in how you build the character. First you choose the occupations of both father and mother, from selections like "Farmer," "Beggar," "Noble," "Gypsy," "Milkmaid," "Tramp," and "Wench," the latter two hardly seeming exclusive of the others. Race, sex, and alignment (good, none, evil) follow. Sex is somewhat original in providing a "neuter" option, whose lack of inguinal distractions makes the character better at magic. As you choose all of these things, a little birth certificate fills in its blanks.
           

Setting my father's occupation.

           

After setting these definitions, you hit the "birth" button and then a button that says "age" a couple of times, watching the character grow from 0 to 18, with random numbers assigned to the attributes. Then you get to determine what proportions of the character's childhood was spent on labor, study, prayer, and play, with consequent effects on the expected statistics, although "mien" seems to be all random. Finally, you pick from the available classes, with the option to choose "serf" if the character can't meet any of them. The penultimate option is to spend some of your inherited gold (pity the player who chooses a beggar father and a tramp mother) on training of between 1 to 4 years, which adds to the class's prime requisite.
        

Establishing a strong, active, but kind of dumb atheist.

         

When you're all done, you can password-protect the character (again, like Wizardry), choose an icon, and even make edits to the icon. Lacking any artistic skills, I left the icons alone.
        

I literally would have no idea what do do here. Even out her smile, maybe.

            
The menu town has a store, temple, hotel, bank, and tavern in addition to the "nursery" where you create new characters. After creation, characters show up in the tavern and can be dragged into the party. Outfitting the characters with basic weapons and armor in the "shoppe" took most of my gold and depleted most of the shopkeeper's inventory. He pretty much has only one of every item, and when you've bought it, its icon is replaced with an "on order" message until some time later.
          

Adding characters from the tavern.

     

Purchasing equipment.

            
On to the dungeon. On the way in, at least the first time, you have to answer a copyright message using the game's codewheel, which it either adapted from Pool of Radiance or an unknown (by me) source for both games. I have an image of the codewheel but no way to manipulate it; fortunately, the game doesn't seem to have a problem with unlimited exits and returns until you get it right; I just kept guessing "A" and got it right on my fourth visit.
            

            
Exploration starts in a small dungeon level lit with torch sconces. Light dims as you move down corridors, and it took me forever to figure out that the way to light my own torches was to hold them up to one of the lit sconces. (But who keeps them lit?!?!) I got started mapping, but the first level (at least, the opening part) consisted of no more than 15 squares with a locked gate and a down staircase. All the levels I've explored so far have been small, making me think the game's levels are likely to be a bunch of small sections with multiple up and down options.
            

The dungeon view.

          
Combat is going to take me a long time to get used to. I really don't understand what's happening, and the manual is a bit obtuse in some areas. The best I can figure, when you enter combat (I've only faced skeletons so far), characters fight automatically but need you to move them into position. You do this by dragging their icons from wherever they start to melee range of the monsters. After a few rounds, someone dies. That's about all I can report so far. I haven't explored the spell system, nor more specific combat tactics like backstabbing. Saving issues (and lack of save states with this emulator) discourage a lot of experimentation.
             

I don't quite get what's happening here.

           
On the second level, I found an elevator that seems to transition multiple levels. It brought me back up to the first, but the gate was still locked.
               

Using the elevator. Midway between levels.

           
It also brought me to one level above the first (which I guess means the first is the second, or lower), which consisted of just a short corridor ending in a skull. The skull asked me a riddle--"How long does it take to fall ten feet?"--for which I didn't know the answer. It certainly wasn't the obscenity I offered in reply. My party fell through the floor and took some damage.
            

Anyone have a guess?

            
I wanted to reload and try some other options, but I guess I need to invest some time figuring out how the save system works. I get the impression from the manual that the game saves your progress in the default data files as you go, but if you want to take a backup at any point, you can use "save as" and then double-click on that file to restart. All I know is that when I tried to reload a "backup" I'd taken before the fall, my characters were mysteriously back in town again, with the inventories I'd had like a hour ago. After I saved that game and quit, upon reloading there wasn't even anyone in my party.

If the game has any promise, I suppose it's in the controls that I detest. If you're going to require your character to click around all day with the mouse, then the environment ought to have some things that require the mouse's precision. Dragging a torch up to another torch to light it is an example of this, as is hitting the right buttons on the elevator controls. There is something vaguely satisfying about dragging a bag of gold from the floor to the character's inventory that isn't quite matched by just seeing the spoils of combat in a text window. The game also does a decent job offering keyboard backups for the most common commands, so it's mostly my own fault when I accidentally click on the desktop and end up in the Finder. I just need to learn them.
         

I'm not sure that the developer knows the difference between a hotel, a hostel, and another place that features the letters OTHEL.

            
Apropos of both this and the last entry, I should mention that while you'd only want air conditioning in Maine about one week a year, this is that week, and I don't have it. When you can't type for more than 30 seconds at a time because contact sweat develops between your wrist and the laptop, it's hard not to be cranky about anything that keeps me at the computer. Maybe I'll like both Citadel and 2088 better when I'm more comfortable. If not, this is going to be a long month.

Time so far: 3 hours