Game 462: The Magic Tower (1978)

I start the game, create a new universe, and get a random quest.

              

The Magic Tower

United States

Bedrosian Games (developer and publisher)

Released 1978 for North Star DOS

Date Started: 29 June 2022

Date Ended: 30 June 2022

Total Hours: 7

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 13

Ranking at Time of Posting: 57/483 (12%)

     

If you haven't had a chance to check out my Spanish-language colleague, El Explorador de RPG, I really urge you to give it a try, even if you have to use something like Google Translate. (Except for translating PLATO as "DISH" and Moria as "would die," both technically correct, it seems to work pretty well for me.) Whereas I assembled my master list from existing databases, El Explorador created his by painstakingly going through era magazines and newsletters. As such, he has found several games that completely escaped most catalogs, including this one. This review isn't going to add much to the understanding of the game that El Explorador has already offered, but I include it for comprehensiveness and to add a few of my own comments.

    

I often wonder about games that we've lost because they were released for unpopular platforms. Such is the case with North Star Computers (1976-1984), a Berkeley-California based company with its own line of microcomputers. They offered some advantages but ultimately failed to attain a significant market share. They hosted a small number of RPGs written for North Star's proprietary OS, NSDOS, including ports of what would become the Maces and Magic series. But it was popular enough for a California fan named John C. Dvorak to create a regular newsletter called John C. Dvorak's Software Review, and it was in the September 1978 issue that El Explorador found mention of The Magic Tower. He somehow found a copy of the game in an archive of multiple Bedrosian Games. If it weren't for El Explorador's detailed descriptions of how to get an NSDOS emulator working within a DOS emulator, plus his instructions on how to emulate this game specifically, I wouldn't have even gotten a title screen.

   

The Magic Tower is an all-text game that puts you in charge of a party of adventurers seeking an artifact in the titular tower. They must contend with various beasts to get hold of it. Before you play the game, you're meant to run a program called UNIVERSE that sets up a new instance of the game. You can specify how many characters you want to control and the level of "randomization" within the world, but the rest the game creates for you, including the races of your characters, their attributes, and the specific item that you're meant to quest for. This latter element shows up later in the Warrior of Ras series, but I otherwise don't see any connections. 

          

"Character creation." The game picks everything but the name.

        

Once the universe is written, you run the VENTURE program to play the game. It begins by having you name your characters while it tells you something about them, including their classes. Characters can be sprites, zealots, magi, heroes, wizards, men, dwarves, and elves, among (presumably) other options. Each comes with attributes set for combat, morale, sorcery ability, endurance, and fatigue, all ranked on an ordinal scale:

• Incapable or None (combat, sorcery, and fatigue only)
• Very low
• Low
• Moderately Low
• Moderate
• Moderately High
• High
• Very High
• Extremely High

   

Except for fatigue, higher is better.

   

The game is controlled with 10 numeric commands, with options to check the status of your characters or items, change the order of the formation, carry a magic item, put a magic item into the party's pack, head towards a tower level, return to the home base, search for magic items, rest, and rename a character.

        

An in-game list of commands.

        

You spend most of the core game marching from the basecamp to a specific tower level, searching for magic items, fighting combats that come along as you travel or search, and heading back to camp when you're feeling weak. I didn't inspect the code, but it seems to me that there's roughly a 50% chance of a combat to or from Level 1 of the tower, and roughly an additional 15% chance of combat for every tower level you try to ascend. So if you start from the basecamp and say you want to head for tower Level 10, chances are you're going to fight at least two or three combats along the way.

     

Combat is with a huge variety of standard CRPG monster types, including various types of evil humans, goblins, trolls, griffons, werewolves, sirens, witches, gremlins, rakshasas, manticores, ogres, and ghouls. The only major differences among foes are how much damage they can take, how hard they hit, and whether they have spells.

If the player has any spellcasting characters, combat begins with a spellcasting round in which you're asked to specify your "sorcery aggressiveness" on a scale of 0 to 1. Making the player enter decimals on a scale of 0 to 1 instead of, say, 1 to 10, is a very programmer thing to do. Entering 0 means you hold all your spell power in reserve for defense, which only makes sense if you're facing spellcasting enemies. A value of 1 means you're putting 100% into offense. If you specify anything higher than 0, you indicate which enemies will receive your spells and how many to each enemy. Enemies may have their own magic defenses.

     

At the beginning of a battle with some goblins, I nail one with four spells and kill him.

       

After the magic round, physical combat begins. In an open area like the wilderness or a dungeon room, each character lines up against one enemy in order of formation. Thus, if you have 4 characters and there are 4 enemies, everyone is evenly paired off. If there are only 3 enemies, the last character in the formation twiddles his thumbs while his compatriots fight. If there are more enemies than characters, the excess enemies will happily wait until their comrades are cut down before they join the battle. It's all very dignified.

During combat, each character specifies a "physical aggressiveness" on a scale of, you guessed it, 0 to 1. (Characters who are "incapable" in combat don't get to pick anything; I assume the game just gives them a 0.) This indicates how much strength the character reserves for parrying and how much he puts into offense. I usually went with 0.5. Lower numbers keep the party safe but at the expense of your own time. The game gets a bit tedious as the messages go by and it constantly pauses to run some calculations, and you're tempted to just enter a series of 1s to end things faster.

         

0.5 was the right setting for this combat. I managed to hit the hydra a few times and didn't take any wounds myself.

          

Occasionally, you get attacked in a hallway, in which case only the lead or rear character can fight (depending on whether the enemies attack from the front or rear). This is a real drag when there are a bunch of them. Killing half a dozen enemies with a single character can easily take 15 minutes of going round after round.

   

At the end of each combat round, you can re-order your party, for instance to put a character with higher endurance into the lead slot, and you can try to flee. Fleeing never worked for me once in about 20 tries. I was also confused as to why the "magic round" only recurred every 3 or 4 rounds. The number of spells I had available also seemed extremely variable.

        

In this battle, my characters were too aggressive and took wounds. One of them was killed.

       

If you're too reckless in combat, though, your characters take wounds. Each wound lowers the character's endurance by one level. "Minor" wounds do this temporarily, and the character is healed when you return to camp. "Major" wounds are permanent. Balancing this, a certain number of kills gives you enough experience to raise your endurance by one level. Thus, you spend the game going back and forth between endurance levels as you lose one to a major wound but then gain one by "leveling up."

     

If a character's endurance falls below "very low," he's dead. Assuming the entire party doesn't die, the game will roll a replacement the next time you visit your basecamp. The party becomes an ever-changing Ship of Theseus. Fortunately, any magic items that you find stay with the party.

Combat, morale, and sorcery ability never increase from experience. The only way to increase those is to find a magic item that bestows an ability. I don't know how many magic items there are in the game. Each one is numbered, and the highest number I saw was 83. You find them by searching on tower levels, or sometimes at the ends of combat on tower levels. The higher the level, the greater likelihood that you'll find something, but the harder the foes. Found magic items are kept in an undifferentiated stack until you return to basecamp and try, one by one, to wield each of them. At that point, the game tells you their names and alignments, and you can see the effects on your statistics.

   

I started logging them, although I'm not sure how much is randomized for each new scenario. My list includes:

3. Bow of Pain (good): combat and morale -1

7. Ring of Olas (good): morale +2

9. Helm of Heaven (good): endurance +3

19. Feena's Dagger (good): combat and morale +1

30. Evil Bow (evil): combat and sorcery +1

47. Ring of Truth (good): everything +2

53. Waters of Decay (evil): kills wielder

65. Iron Crown (evil): endurance -2

70. Oranon's Helm (evil): morale +2, endurance -2

83. Thanatops (evil): kills wielder

    

As you can see, each item offers one or a mix of effects, sometimes a mix of good and bad. The interesting thing is that "evil" items aren't uniformly negative (although they tend that way), nor are "good" items uniformly positive. No item that I found bestows any combat skill on someone who's "incapable" nor any sorcery skill on someone who has "none."

         

Part of the list of magic items I'd found.

         

I logged six items that killed the wielder instantly, although some of them might have just lowered endurance, and the wielder happened to already have a low endurance. Since there's no way to discover these effects until you wield them, you can't prevent those deaths. You just have to sigh and roll a new character.

  

Once I had about a dozen magic items, I had enough good ones that all four of my characters were heading out with almost all of their attributes at "very high" or "extremely high." I settled into a pattern of visiting the tower levels around 8 to 10, searching and fighting until I had about five new magic items, then returning to camp to test them. After I lost the character in slot #1 to an instant-kill item, I just kept using that same character slot rather than risking the characters who had built high endurance through combat. The 38th item that I logged was the one I'd been sent to find: Virata's Battle Axe. I suppose some players get lucky and find their magic item on the first try, and others have to identify 82 of them before the quest item shows up.

   

The game doesn't rate very high--nothing in 1978 could possibly rate very high--but I thought this was a pretty decent game for its age. There's a real tension as you head for the next level of the tower or wait for the "search" process to finish, and there are some decent tactics in combat as you try to figure out the underlying math. As El Explorador pointed out, this is likely the first microcomputer RPG to give the player control of a party of individually-named characters.

           

The not-very-exciting victory screen. The game just notes that the artifact "was safely recovered" and then takes you back to the universe-creation program.

         

My biggest problem was with the interface, but I'm sure that was due to emulation. The BACKSPACE key doesn't work in the emulator-within-the-emulator, so every time I made a typo, I had to hit ENTER and get an error message and try again. The most common typo was going to hit a physical aggression value like 0.5 and having the emulator not register the decimal. In those cases (when the value I entered was over 1), the game didn't throw an error as expected but rather seemed to read the input as 0. Beyond that, the game is just slow as hell and cranking up the emulator cycles only helped a little. Part of the problem is you have to keep hitting ENTER to acknowledge messages, most of which you don't need. I could have done without the game going through every character's status after every round of combat, for instance.

   

But those are minor quibbles about a well-programmed game. The authors are Gary Bedrosian, Richard Christie, and Lee Elmendorf. Bedrosian ran his own game company, Bedrosian Games, later Microcomputer Games, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His other titles include North Atlantic Convoy Raider (1978), Nukewar (1978), Lords of Karma (1981), and Empire of the Over-Mind (1981), the latter published by Avalon Hill. He likely gave up game programming because his real job, involving research into electromagnetic pulses and aerospace systems (Bedrosian has a Ph.D. from CalTech) took up too much of his time. I'm guessing he's about 70-72 now. I tried e-mailing him through his website but didn't get a response; it was a long shot, as the site hadn't been updated since 2003. I wasn't able to find anything about Christie or Elmendorf.

   

Thanks again to El Explorador for unearthing this one. He's found a few others that I still need to investigate. We owe him a lot for making the "Dark Age" of CRPGs a little brighter.