Game 405: Lord of the Balrogs (1983)

A lot of hyperbole at the beginning of the game.

        

Lord of the Balrogs

United Kingdom

Supersoft (developer and publisher)

Released in 1983 for Commodore 64

Previously published as Lord of the Dragons (1980) for the Commodore PET

Date Started: 7 March 2021
Date Ended: 7 March 2021

Total Hours: 2
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 12
Ranking at Time of Posting: 36/412 (9%)

      

Lord of the Balrogs plays exactly how you might expect when you hear that it was an early 1980s game, from a UK developer, released only on cassette, and not catalogued on MobyGames until 2015. Only if it had been released exclusively for the ZX Spectrum would we hit "shlock RPG" bingo. 

    

A bit of backstory at the game's beginning.

     

I grant you that the beginning is kind of fun. "It's not too late to flee from the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS" the opening screen offers, before going into the backstory and then the instructions. Each opening screen asks you to "press SPACE if ye dare go on," at which point you get another bit of text about the LORD OF THE BALROGS before the next screen of instructions.

    

• Ye are very foolish to go up against the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS
• Ye should heed the warnings of the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS
• Ye will rue the day ye met the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS
• Fool! Will ye not listen to the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS
• Run! Run! Before ye anger the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS
• Ye are indeed brave to challenge the . . . LORD OF THE BALROGS

   

The final screen is at the top. Ever since I met a traveler who said she prefers the middle seat on airplanes, I've decided that there's at least one of every type of person out there. I thus like to think there was at least one player who was planning to play the game, but balked in the face of all these warnings and chose to turn it off.

      

"Thank God it's not too late!" Colin cried, before turning off the game, repackaging it, and returning it to the store.

     

The back story is that a warrior, amazon, hobbit, cleric, and sorcerer have come together to explore the Fortress of Zorg and slay the titular balrog. He is found on the sixth floor of a six-floor dungeon, and you'll want to collect as many magic relics as possible before you encounter him. The magic relics are the Armour of Eternity, the Book of Dragons (it's given as "Book of Balrogs" in instructions, but it's "dragons" when you find it), the Cloak of Virtue, the Dagger of Fire, the Eye of Smaug, and the Flag of Purity.

      

Late in the game, I have 5 out of 6.

       

After naming your five characters, you start in the northwest corner of Level 1 of a randomly-generated dungeon. The dungeon levels are all 12 x 6, although none of the perimeter rooms ever have anything, so functionally they're 10 x 4. Each junction of row and column might have:

   

• Nothing.
• A stairway.
• A room with a monster, which may or may not have a relic or treasure once you kill it.
• A room with a chest, which may contain healing food, poison, or a spell.
  

        

This one had a spell.

        

This approach, using grids of discrete rooms, makes the game functionally similar to The Wizard's Castle (1980) of a few years prior.

    

Each character has a "power" statistic that starts between 130 and 162. It serves as both a strength attribute and a health meter. Your power goes up as you kill enemies (although sometimes not as much as the wounds you take during the same encounter), as you find healing food, and if you use one of the treasures called a Wand of Power. It goes down from taking wounds in combat or eating poison.

       

My characters at their apex.

      

Enemies are drawn from the Dungeons and Dragons bestiary, sometimes with slight alterations. Examples include giant ants, shambling mounds, bloodbears, thought-eaters, gobblers, pit fiends, titans, and purple oozes. Their difficulty is based more on the level where you encounter them than the type of enemy. In combat, you have only two options. The first is to B)attle, after which you specify which character. If he dies, you can have another one resume the fight. The second is to use M)agic, but you have to have found a spell first. You also have to write down or remember which spells you've found, because the game doesn't keep track. Examples are "Cone of Cold," "Sleep," and "Fear." Using magic is odd. Sometimes the spell kills the enemy right away. If it doesn't, the sorcerer has to engage in melee combat until one of the two is dead. If the sorcerer is already dead, the cleric becomes the default spellcaster.

       

This would be an epic scene in Tolkien.

       

The food mechanic is annoying because the results are completely random. You get a description of the food that you find in each chest, but there's no correlation between the description and what it does. A "disgusting black custard" could heal you and a "luscious bowl of cherries" could cause poison or weakness. I would advise players to eat everything on Level 1 (restarting if there's a net loss) and nothing after that.

   

Aside from the six relics, monsters can have treasures, some of them useful. The Wand of Power will increase everyone's strength a few times, and the Chalice of Life will resurrect a slain companion. The Lamp of Daybright or the Orb of Light will maintain a map of where you've been in the dungeon; otherwise, you only ever see your current room. 

          

Chester runs into trouble on the last level.

         

That's about it. I found that Levels 1-4 were pretty easy, but things got a lot harder on Level 5. Every monster on Level 6 is some kind of balrog--glass, platinum, red, silver, copper, bone, and so forth--plus the one Lord of the Balrogs. When you encounter him, you get taken to a special screen in which he taunts you, and then you have a chance to "use" one of the relics you've found. I think what happens next is random. Either he laughs and says "I have no fear of" whatever relic you've used, then both destroys the relic and kills the first player, or the relic kills him instantly. There seems to be a roughly 20% chance of the latter, so if you have all 6 relics, odds are good that one of them will slay him before you run out. Whether that happens before you've run out of characters depends upon your luck up to that point.

      

To be fair, I wouldn't expect him to "fear" armor.

This is a fun callback to the text at the beginning.

     

Win or lose, each game takes no longer than 30 minutes, which is good because there's no way to save.

       

Were commas too much to ask?

       

I should probably get out of the habit of just stating the GIMLET total rather than adding it up for you, so here goes:

    

• 1 point for the game world and its bare-bones backstory.

• 1 point for extremely limited character creation and development.

• 0 points for no NPCS.

• 1 point for interchangeable encounters and foes.

• 1 point for very basic magic and combat.

     

My Amazon isn't as graceful as her namesake.

      

• 1 point for a few useful pieces of equipment.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 2 points for a main quest. There's even an alternate way to "win," or at least exit the game; just take your treasure back to the entrance on Level 1.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets these primarily for the all-keyboard interface, which uses individual keys effectively, like a roguelike. The sound effects are painful.

• 3 points for gameplay. It's the right difficulty and short.

     

That gives us a total of 12. 

       

It looks like we got him out of bed.

    

I listed Supersoft as the "developer and publisher" on this one because they're the only name on the packaging, but Supersoft's modus operandi seems to have been publishing games from independent developers. I played their Halls of Death (1981) back in 2014, but unlike that game, this one offers no indication who the authors are. The game box does feature an odd conception of a "balrog," however. Supersoft published mostly simple text adventures and action games before they closed up in 1984 or 1985. We shouldn't see them again, but gods know we'll see quite a few more games of this ilk.

[Ed. As ExploradorRPG discovered on his own blog, Lord of the Balrogs was previously published as Lord of the Dragons (1980) for the Commodore PET. The author is Bob Chappell, who designed several adventure games in the early 1980s.]