Phalsberg: Summary and Rating

 

 

Phalsberg

France
ERE Informatique (developer and publisher)

Released 1986 for Commodore 64 and DOS

Date Started: 29 January 2022

Date Ended: 23 February 2022

Total Hours: 8 (abandoned)

Difficulty: Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5) for combat; hard (4.0/5) in interface and figuring out what you're supposed to do. I suppose moderate (3/5) on average

Final Rating: 16

Ranking at Time of Posting: 93/460 (20%)

   

I played for another couple of hours, but I couldn't figure out anything new. There's a note that the sorceress Astrud wants herbs, and I thought if I gave her my magic balsam, she might give me the love potion that I need for the Amazons. While she happily took the balsam, she offered nothing in return.

   

I feel like I get what kind of game Phalsberg is trying to be. It wants to be an adventure game with an RPG interface. It wants you to follow clues from place to place and use the right item in the right way at the right location (or with the right NPC) to get the next item or clue. The RPG elements are mostly an afterthought, at least as far as I was able to get. Maybe later combats become challenging and character development becomes essential, but I doubt it. 

   

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that game style, but the problems here are twofold:

   

1. There is no indication whatsoever what you're supposed to do in any of the locations. Good adventure games offer descriptions that call attention to puzzles and interactable items.

 

2. The interface is a crime against humanity, requiring you to select among verbs and nouns with nothing more than a joystick.  

      

The result of searching for something.

       

I stripped the text out of the program file looking for clues and surprisingly didn't find many. The game is so sparse with information, and so much of it plucked from data lists, that it's impossible to find any help. Imagine, for instance, that an Infocom text adventure went something like this:

    

You move east into the cavern. In the tight chamber, a hungry-looking goblin has erected a small structure of bone and fur near a miserable little puddle. He looks at you weakly but defiantly.

 

There is a goblin here.

>GIVE FISH

The hungry goblin gratefully takes the fish from your outstretched hands and devours it. In gratitude, he rummages through his meager belongings and emerges triumphantly with a dagger, which he places on a rock and gestures for you to take it.

There is a goblin here.

There is a dagger here.

      

If you were stuck in such  game, you could study the text for the key phrase ("the hungry goblin gratefully takes the fish") and figure out what to do. But in an identical scenario, Phalsberg's narrative would be:

    

You are in a [disk drive runs for 30 seconds] cave.

You notice a [disk drive runs for 30 seconds] goblin.

>GIVE FISH

[Disk drive runs for two minutes.]

You notice a [disk drive runs for 30 seconds] dagger.

    

In other words, the cause and effect don't have any flavor text around them to help you figure out the right move. I couldn't even find any end game text; if it's possible to win, it must be depicted solely by graphics.

   

The manual suggests numerous ambitions well beyond the game's capabilities to deliver. There are numerous RPG-like tables depicting things like penalties suffered in various types of terrain, weapon bonuses, and languages and the minimum intelligence required to learn them, none of which play any significant role in the game because combat comes down to hitting KILL once or twice and moving on.

      

I don't understand. Why would someone this cool be involved in video games?

      

As Abacos pointed out, the French manual ends with a glowing biography of designer Michel Valentin, depicting him as a polymath who turned to video games after a successful career as an actor, comedian, painter, stage designer, director, and producer. ("Endowed with a fantastic imagination and a genius for production, Michel Valentin has touched upon all the arts before turning to video games.") You'd think with such a résumé, he'd be easy to find online, but good luck. The bio credits him with the earlier Série Noire, an odd multiplayer detective game in which players are asked "Who do you want to kill?," "Who do you want to rob?," and "Who do you want to kiss?" during character creation.

         

Author Michel Valentin's earlier video game effort.

     

I have no idea what to give Phalsberg on the GIMLET. My best guess is 17. It gets 2s and 1s in everything, in particular not doing the RPG elements very well. And if I ever again face a game in which I have to select among several dozen abbreviated keywords with a joystick, I'm just going to refuse to play it, no matter what my rules say.