1992/1993

      

It's been over three years since I've done one of these yearly transitions, which you'd think would be proof positive that I'm "losing ground"--unable to cover a year's worth of games in a year's worth of blogging. While this is almost certainly true, I've accidentally confounded the issue by making so much of my playing recursive. In the same three years that I covered 46 games from 1992, I also covered 77 games from earlier than 1992, not even counting the BRIEFs. 

   

As I review 1992, it's worth recalling something I said about the then-forthcoming year at the end of 1991:

   

If 1991 was a disappointing year, 1992 promises to be the absolute opposite. I'm practically giddy at the list before me. Every franchise had a release this year. We get the final D&D Gold Box title (aside from the Unlimited Adventures construction set) with The Dark Queen of Krynn. The Ishar series begins. The Realms of Arkania series begins. We get the second Interplay Lord of the Rings title. We get the third Magic Candle title. We get a Might and Magic, a Wizardry, a Quest for Glory, and two Ultimas! And in between these surefire hits are a ton of titles that I feel like I've heard good things about, among them Amberstar, Black Crypt, Darklands, Four Crystals of Trazere, and Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace. Surely, one of these games is destined to unseat Ultima V at the top of the list.

    

My feelings at the end of the year are more tempered. I found a lot of the titles listed above disappointing. The Dark Queen of Krynn, Quest for Glory III, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, and Ultima VII performed as expected. Only Amberstar and Darklands really exceeded my expectations. In the same entry, I wrote that to start the year:

 

I've chosen Ultima Underworld. It's a groundbreaking game that makes us feel that we've stepped into a new era, but parts of it haven't aged well, and I thus doubt it will be the highest-rated game of a very competitive year.

   

I was wrong: Ultima Underworld ended up with the top rating for the year. So in many ways, 1992 was all downhill, more the last vestige of a previous era than the beginning of a new one. 

     

Ultima Underworld was the first game to make it feel like you were exploring a real place. Unfortunately, it was the only game of the year to do that.

       

And yet we saw the glimmerings of a new future in 1992. Ultima Underworld is the most significant example technologically, with its continuous movement in a truly three-dimensional space. But there were other positive developments, none appearing here for the first time but all appearing more frequently than in previous years. These include:

   

• More freedom. "Open world" was this year's default. Ultima Underworld, Darklands, Crusaders of the Dark Savant, Star Control II, Ultima VII, Ragnarok, Amberstar, The Magic Candle III, Realms of Arkania, Legends of Valor, Challenge of the Five Realms, Ishar, Lords of Time, and Planet's Edge were among the games with open worlds. It's easier to count the ones that constrained movement than those that allowed for freedom.

     

There were things I didn't like about Realms of Arkania, but the open world wasn't one of them.

     

• More interesting encounters and side quests. These days, plentiful side quests are the norm in CRPGs. They've even become the norm in action-adventure games. But before 1992, a lot of franchises didn't really understand the concept. You had a mission, and your only "quest" was to get strong enough to complete that mission. This is the first year in which side-quests became the norm.

           

One of the complex encounters of Darklands.

        

• More interesting endings. For a game to culminate in a simple combat with the evil wizard is by now so 1980s. It was startling to see it again in Clouds of Xeen. 1992 gave us rituals (Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, The Magic Candle III), epic encounters that change the rules (Darklands, Realms of Arkania, Ragnarok), and other non-traditional choices. Again, not for the first time, but for the first time usually.

• More plot complexity. This is the first year that the average game made us pay attention to what was going on. Even Dungeon Master derivatives like Black Crypt and Abandoned Places introduced a certain level of plot complexity not found in predecessors. 

        

Black Crypt tried to provide an actual story with its Dungeon Master gameplay.

      

The year did have the highest average GIMLET rating, at 36. This means that for the first time, the average game crossed my "recommended" threshold. That's nice to finally see. The question is, which one deserves the reward?

     

Game of the Year: Ultima Underworld

   

Yeah, sorry about the lack of suspense, but there's no way to even pretend on this one. Ultima Underworld changed all the rules. From the moment it appeared, every developer working with tiles and static views knew that it would have to shape up or ship out. (I'm not suggesting that tiles are always hopelessly obsolete, or that good games can't be made with them. They represent one technique, and you can still make excellent games with that technique the same way you can still make excellent black and white films. It will just never be the norm again.) But as I noted in my entry, the game doesn't just win because of its technological innovations. Although it could have rested on those laurels, instead the developers offered a fantastic experience on multiple fronts, including a realistic dungeon ecosystem, memorable NPCs and NPC dialogue, interesting quest stages and puzzles, and strong system for combat, magic, and inventory. And yes, I will defend what I just said about combat; anyone who describes it as "simple hack and slash" is not thinking hard enough about all the possibilities inherent in a game that uses the same mechanics and interface for combat as it does for exploration.

    

My only complaint about Ultima Underworld is that it's an Ultima game. It has no business being set on Britannia or involving the Avatar, and if there's one thing that I can't stand about ORIGIN, it's how they've come to insist that the Avatar is involved in everything. ORIGIN should have had the confidence to let their motto--"We Create Worlds"--stand on its own without implicitly adding "and then shoehorn the Avatar into them."

   

I am not insensitive to the fact that four of fourteen "Games of the Year" are Ultima games, and I looked for any reason to make it not so, but there's no helping it. If it's any consolation, Ultima Underworld isn't really an Ultima game. It wasn't developed by ORIGIN and the setting on Britannia is so obviously a late edition that the Ultima part is just so much marketing.

    

Game of the Year: Second Place

     

Considering "Game of the Year" for 1992 is like trying to name the greatest American composer. Of course it's Duke Ellington. But ask me to name the second greatest composer, and I'm lost. There are at least 30 names that seem equally worthy--Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Richard Rodgers, John Philip Sousa, Scott Joplin, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, John Williams, Danny Elfman, and John Cage are those that spring to mind without my even having to really think about it--for different reasons. 

    

1992 is similarly full of worthy runners up that would make it an extremely difficult contest if not for Underworld. Not all of them got high ratings, but remember that "Game of the Year" is about more than ratings; it's about the trends that the game helped establish or solidify. With that criteria in mind, here are a bunch of titles that I find almost equally worthy:

   

• Amberstar: Probably the best example of the "Disassembulet of Yendor" approach that we've seen. By modern standards, the game didn't do anything great, but it's rare in not having done anything bad. Together with Challenge of the Five Realms, it also pioneers the "create-a-main-character-and-enlist-NPCs" approach that we need a better name for.

• Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia: Although the lowest-rated of the nominees, Challenge established a template in the way it handled exploration, sub-quests and side-quests, and NPC interaction (and enlistment) that anticipates later, better titles.  

     

Challenge of the Five Realms had 10 NPC slots.

        

• Darklands: A fantastic blend of Pirates-like simulation, random encounters, and real-time-with-pause combat in an RPG setting. 

• Legends of Valour: Unlike Underworld, it didn't give sufficient attention to core RPG elements. Otherwise, it has many of the strengths of Underworld and some of its own. The way it treats survival, factions, and the exploration of a living city will become open-world standards.

Valour's world needed a little work, but the concept was good.

          

• Ragnarok: For me, the apex of the roguelike sub-genre, at least so far. It shows that a roguelike game can be a good commercial game. I guess I can't claim that it had a lot of influence, though.

• Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters: The game needed to work on its RPG elements, but the title is notable as one of the earliest series to start as something other than an RPG and then become one, something we'll later see in everything from Assassin's Creed to Grand Theft Auto. It also has one of the best game worlds of the era.

            

Star Control II: tactical ship-to-ship combat in an RPG world.

      

• Ultima VII: The Black Gate: Even if Ultima Underworld didn't exist, the series would be a strong contender for GOTY with this entry, although I didn't love it as much as some people do.

• Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. If Ultima Underworld was the herald of a new era, Crusaders is the zenith of an old one. Its approach to character development, combat, and magic have never been better in the first-person, tile-based genre.

      

A few potentially-worthy titles, including The Dark Queen of Krynn, Quest for Glory III: Wages of War (I still think about how inviting that inn/tavern looked), and Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen are off the list simply because I already gave the prize to predecessors that were better games. But they all rank high in objective quality.

 

I suppose that in the end, I'm mostly torn between Darklands and Legends of Valour simply for the originality of their approaches, but I could honestly be persuaded on almost all of these. What interests me more is the sheer number of titles that I felt at least some urge to put on the list--not because they had any honest chance of winning but because they did something interesting enough that I know I'm going to be thinking about them for a long time. These include Defender of Boston: The Rock Island Mystery (I think that game may have honestly messed me up a little), Spellcraft: Aspects of Valor (despite my failure to finish), The Legacy, UnReal World, and even SpellJammer: Pirates of Realmspace.

Superlatives and other notes:

Games have been getting longer but slightly better.

        

• I covered 46 games for the year, winning 43 (I left Legend, Spellcraft, and Shadowlands unfinished). That's a completion rate of 93%. (One game remains open.) I rejected only 2 games and marked 2 as "not playable." Three others are waiting for a BRIEF that will cover all three. Around 10 games that were originally on the list got deleted (their original sources having repudiated their RPG definitions), merged, or shunted to other years.

• Strategic Simulations, Inc. was the real factory of the era. They published 6 games. MicroProse was second, with three.

• The highest rated games were Ultima Underworld (62), Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (60), Darklands (56), The Dark Queen of Krynn (52), Star Control II (51), Treasures of the Savage Frontier (51), and Ultima VII: The Black Gate (50).

• Crusaders of the Dark Savant took the longest, at 108 hours. Average time to finish was 28 hours.

• On the GIMLET, I didn't give a single 9 or 10, just lots of 8s. Only two games got two 8s: Ragnarok (equipment and gameplay) and Darklands (economy and gameplay).

• The most erratic games (highest standard deviations in GIMLET scores) were Star Control II and Challenge of the Five Realms. Both games did a few things very well and a few things very badly. The most stable games, in contrast, were Sword Quest 1: The Search, and Shape Shifter, which did almost everything uniformly badly. 

• There was no "bad game with a good category" this year. Anything I rated low was low across the board. 

• I didn't rate any game harder than "hard." 

• The average completion time for a completed game was 29 hours, lower than the average of 34 in 1991, although that number is heavily influenced by Fate: Gates of Dawn.

    

Looking Ahead

   

1993 offers 74 games--more than any other year until 2012--on the preliminary list. I have played only a few of them: Ultima Underworld II, Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen, Quest for Glory IV, Ultima VII, Part Two: The Serpent Isle, and Warlords II. I don't remember much about most of the ones I have played. I've heard great things about a lot of the ones that I haven't played, including Angband, Betrayal at Krondor, and Dark Sun: Shattered Lands.

      

1993 not only has the highest number of RPGs (until 2012), but it's also the first year that offers more games I won't play than ones that I will.

        

1993 is also a milestone for offering, for the first time, more games with an "N" on the playlist than those with a "Y." Consoles have a lot to do with it, of course: there are 39 Nintendo exclusives (SNES and NES), 8 Sega exclusives, 12 TurboGrafx exclusives, and 4 handheld exclusives. There continue to be a lot of games for Japanese PCs that never received an English translation. Korea enters the market for the first time with two DOS games that I'm hoping will eventually be translated. Taiwan offered its first title in 1990 and offers three more in 1993. Again, it would be nice to eventually attempt some of these.

   

There are a lot of sequels on the 1993 list, but I can't really say I'm looking forward to many of them. While not remembering much about them, my recollections are that Ultima VII, Part Two and Ultima Underworld II have the great engines of their predecessors but are too long and bloated. Abandoned Places wasn't that great a game to begin with. Neither was Bandor, Ishar, Ormus Saga, Stone Mist, Sword Quest, or Ultizurk. I know the reputations of Eye of the Beholder III and Dungeon Master II.

 

But I still have the next NetHack entry, Ambermoon, and Quest for Glory IV to look forward to. We'll have to see about the rest. In general, I expect my enjoyment of 1993 to be carried more by brand new titles than new entries in venerable series.

 

SSI will offer five RPGs this year. The only other publisher with more than two is Sierra, which unexpectedly comes charging in with four--the biggest RPG year for the company. Germany and the United Kingdom will remain heavily represented among companies, and we'll see our first RPGs from Hungary and Austria.

The elephant in the room is the plan I announced over a year ago, on my tenth anniversary, to allow myself to move forward in the timeline without necessarily completing a year. When the time came to do that, I chickened out. It just felt wrong. Now that I stand on the cusp of a year that seems destined to take me at least three years to cover, I feel conflicted. All things being equal, I'd rather just continue with my original chronological plan. But every year that passes brings a slight probability of my own death or incapacitation, the end of blogging as a medium, the loss of reader interest, and the collapse of civilization.

I guess my inclination is to delay making a decision until I clean up the backlog. I still have 42 pre-1992 games to cover, many of which are destined for a BRIEF or a single entry. When I've caught up on those and have only present and future games to play, I'll assess what kind of progress I'm making and consider allowing some forward movement. This will naturally take a while, but a journey of a thousand games begins with the next entry. On to 1993!