BRIEF: Abraxas Adventure #1: Assault on the Astral Rift (1983)

The less interesting of the two title screens, but it has the full title. Despite the copyright date on the title screen, the game was sold in 1983 magazines.

           

Abraxas Adventure #1: Assault on the Astral Rift

United States

MMG Micro Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1984 for Atari 800

       

Welcome to a new sort of entry for the CRPG Addict, which I'm calling a BRIEF (Bid at Research and Investigation Ended in Failure). This sub-series will be reserved for games that are only partly playable, or for which I play for a little while before determining that they are not really RPGs. They will have a special annotation on the master game list but will not be given official numbers or ratings and will not count towards my games played or other statistics. In the past, I have dealt with such games with a couple of paragraphs and screenshots at the bottoms of main entries, but that approach has never satisfied me. This way, I can link these games from the indices (Games Played by Year and Games Played by Title), they'll be more likely to show up in searches, and I'll get fewer comments asking where they are. If I later get information that allows me to finish the game (and it's not rejected), I will of course play it from the beginning. Finally, when I decide a posting is going to be a BRIEF, I will shorten the time before and after its publication so that the normal schedule of more substantive entries is not interrupted.

         

The more interesting of the title screens.

       

Abraxas Adventure #1 is the first game in an intended series by New Jersey-based MMG Micro Software. I thought the initialism must stand for the last names of three of the four developers credited on Abraxas--Bob Martin, Sharon Martin, and Bob Garguillo--but I later found a magazine article which said that the name came from the first names of the founders, Mike, Mark, and Greg, although it only provided the last name of Greg (Fremer). MMG Micro was a low-rent but reasonably active company that published some action titles like Chomper (1981), Asteroid Miners (1982), Rat Race (1983), and Pyramid Run (1984), plus a couple of pieces of business software. Abraxas is the only title that aspires to RPG status, and it doesn't quite make it.

         

An MMG ad from an era Atari magazine.

         

The typed manual tells the backstory. The titular character is one Professor Abraxas, who has assembled a group of grad students to investigate a rift in the space-time continuum. The rift, discovered when a hiker accidentally stumbled on a unicorn, leads to a dangerous and chaotic world with dragons, sorcerers, and other dark forces. An evil magician named Xamplayn has learned about the "other world" and is using a magic crystal to exploit more rifts so he can invade Earth. Abraxas's goal is to destroy Xamplayn and the crystal and find a way home.

    

The backstory is well-written and it has the feel of an episode of a television show like Fringe or Supernatural. The hiker finding the unicorn is told as a "cold open," and Abraxas is introduced after a section break, but in a way that doesn't really "introduce" him, as if we're already supposed to be familiar with his character. 

        

Character creation.

           

The team he assembles consists of a seer, a linguist, a spell-caster, and a pathfinder. You name them during character creation and assign points to strength, endurance, and ESP ability from a pool of 30. Abraxas bills itself as a "multiplayer" game and actually allows four different players to control the four characters with different joysticks. (There are also keyboard shortcuts like G)et and I)nventory.) If only a single player is playing, he specifies a lead character and the others do their best to move out of his way when he wants to go in a particular direction while otherwise huddling about him. There are lots of issues with obstructions and pathfinding, but this is still the earliest game where the developers attempted the "adaptive pathfinding" we see in games like Ultima VI or VII. 

         

Starting out.

        

The characters are supposed to have their own unique magical senses, represented as futhark runes that flash in the boxes at the bottom of the screen. A translation guide included in the manual helps you make sense of these runes. The seer gets warnings like "danger is near" and "this is a safe place." The linguist's messages include "an intelligence is near" and "you can communicate." The spellcaster gets messages about objects of power, and the pathfinder receives explicit instructions to go various directions. Anyway, that's how it's supposed to work. I never saw a single rune in my couple hours with the game.

            

The rune translations from the manual. I never saw any of these.

           

Play begins at the entrance to Castle Howard, which is unexpectedly on the "Earth" side of the rift. It's a hotel, abandoned when monsters from the rift started invading. On my first try, I got attacked by a dragon and the party died nearly immediately. For fighting combats, the manual only offers that you can use weapons by hitting the "Fire" button. I guess you can't attack without specific weapons because hitting the button never gave me any indication that anything was happening, not even for lesser creatures. 

          

You don't expect dragons so early in the game.

        

On my second try, I skirted the dragon, opened a few doors, and explored some stairways. In a second-floor room, I went for a key but got dropped down a trap door before I reached it. Exploring the dungeon, I reached the end of the hallway, walked through some freaky portal (I assume it was one of the rifts), and found myself inexplicably in a desert environment, where I was eventually killed by a humanoid.

     

As you explore, the game occasionally shows you a full-screen image of an approaching enemy, or some other environmental feature like a tapestry or stairway. You can't fight from or interact with these screens--they're just visuals that disappear after a few seconds. Nonetheless, they're quite advanced for this year and platform. The environmental ones do a great job adding atmosphere to what would otherwise be very banal iconographic maps.

         

A dragon in a cell in iconographic view.

Preceded by the image of the dragon in first-person view.

        

These screens are cool, but not interactive.

Sorry for all the shots in a row, but I thought they were pretty neat.

          

I kept trying other directions but kept running up against enemies with no ability to fight them. I also started running into another problem: crashes during many of the transitions between areas or transitions from the iconographic interface to the first-person views. Finally, in multiple attempts, the commands in the game always seem to eventually collapse into gibberish, such as the nonsense string across the top of the screen below when I try to switch party leaders or get an item. 

          

Maybe it's a code.

        

We found an axe, but it doesn't seem to be usable in combat.

          

These problems might be worth solving for an RPG, but I don't think Abraxas qualifies. There's no indication in the manual or in gameplay that the characters gain experience or develop during their adventures. After character creation, you can't see their statistics and I'm not even sure they have hit points. Inventory items so far have all been of the adventure variety, such as keys, jugs of water, and jars of spices that I'm sure will come into play in some way. Thus, despite some unusual and intriguing gameplay, I'm happy to reject it to the "adventure" category and move on.