Game 468: Tygus Horx (1990)

No title screen for this game; it just launches right into the story.

       

Tygus Horx

Germany

Independently developed; Markt & Technik Verlag (publisher, via 64'er magazine)

Released in 1990 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 19 August 2022

    

Tygus Horx sounds like the scientific name for cat puke, but it is in fact a near-exact Bard's Tale clone written by one Rainer Sulzbach while he was getting his computer science degree at the Giessen-Friedberg University of Applied Sciences in Germany. It was published via a disk attached to a 1990 issue of 64'er magazine. I haven't had a lot of luck with German diskmag games; they almost always seem to include some kind of game-breaking bug (e.g., the two Dungeons of Avalon games). Unless I'm missing something, so does this one.

   

The author chose to write his game in English, often amusingly imperfect. Tygus Horx is a city that used to be peaceful, but it was unfortunately the landing spot of Malu-Krii, "the darkest creature that the universum has ever seen." The inhabitants tried to oppose him, but they lost, "and they are now close friends of him." He has amassed a "big legion" with the ultimate goal of ruling the whole galaxy. A resistance organization has formed.

       

Setting out to save the "whole universum."

     

Gameplay begins in the "hostel," taking the place of The Bard's Tale's guild. Here, you create characters for your party, only there's no "delete" command, so I guess once the disk gets full, you just throw it away. Races are human, dwarf, elf, hobbit, half-elf, half-orc, and gnome. Classes are paladin, warrior, rogue, magician, conjuror, and wizard--the last class has to be earned by advancing in one of the other spellcasting classes. (There is no hunter, monk, or bard.) There are some race restrictions on class. There are no sexes. Attributes are strength, IQ, dexterity, constitution, and luck.

      

What's the point of a half-orc with a strength of 8?

    

You'd better remember your character names as you create them because you have to type them to add them to the party, and there's no way to inspect the roster of existing characters to remember what names to type.

   

Once you leave the hostel, you're on the streets of Tygus Horx. The streets are filled with doors, most of them leading to empty buildings. Unlike The Bard's Tale, Horx does not have enemies attack you while you're in the buildings, only on the streets. The city is an unnecessarily large 25 x 25. Only seven doors have anything behind them, and six of them are all identifiable because they're 1-square buildings (with doors on all sides) surrounded by streets.

        

The city of Tygus Horx. The "review board" is in the central building.

      

The notable buildings are mostly the same as The Bard's Tale: a shop, a temple for healing, a place to pay to recharge spell points, a "hall" where you level up and get new spells, an entrance to a maze, and a place that shows the game credits. The shop curiously sells no items but does buy any excess items that you've acquired.

        

What kind of a shop only buys things?

     

There are three inaccessible areas when you start the game. One building, titled "Vlandar's," says "you need the key" when you enter. In the southwest and southeast of town, there are two ornate doors that don't respond to the usual kicks. 

    

There are two of these special doors that won't open.

     

Movement is with the IJKL cluster, and the rest of the commands are easily accessible with the keyboard, like C)ast, U)se, and hitting number keys to check character stats and inventory. One thing I appreciate is that you can save anywhere, not just in the hostel. The author also made one interface improvement by putting both current and maximum spell points on the screen, while The Bard's Tale only had the former.

      

I believe this is known as a "trash mob."

      

Combats come along quite frequently, with stock enemies like skeletons, orcs, goblins, magicians, gnomes, dwarves, bladesmen, and mercenaries. There are no monster graphics. Even though you start with no weapons and armor, survival in the early game is far easier than in The Bard's Tale, which is good because the encounter frequency is heavy. Escaping combat works about 95% of the time, so you can select your battles. The enemies themselves are just easier. Finally, your party always acts first in combat, always in reverse order of the roster. As in classic Interplay-style combat, you specify an action for each character and watch as the actions execute in a slow scroll.

       

Watching the combat messages scroll by.

       

There are six spell levels per spellcasting class. There are fewer total spells than in The Bard's Tale, but they have similar effects and similar four-letter abbreviations. COFL ("Conjuror's Flame") and BOFI ("Bolan's Fire") are first-level conjuror spells, while the first-level mage gets TEPL ("Tell Place," a locate spell), HEPO ("Help Power"), and ORHL ("Orla's Healing Power"). There is no equivalent of "Trap Zap" because the game has no traps, making the rogue a weird inclusion. There are no summoning spells.

   

At the end of combat, you find gold and occasionally items. Slowly, you build experience and an inventory of weapons and armor. There are some oddities here. Mages can wear leather armor (at least) and helms, and for some reason a paladin can't equip a dagger, though he has no problem with other bladed weapons. 

      

One of my warrior's inventories at the time I quit.

    

Once I had reached Level 2 (you get +1 to a random attribute on leveling up), I entered the maze from a building in the far northeast corner. The first level turned out to be 15 x 15 squares, arranged like a maze. Encounters were with the same sorts of enemies as in the town, but with more of them. As I entered the maze, a message read: "YOU ARE IN A MAZE WITH ITS COMMON WAYS. THEY SEEM ENDLESS, BUT THERE IS ALWAYS A TARGET."

    

There were three other squares in the maze that offered messages:

   

• IT IS HOT.
• IT IS RED AND YELLOW.
• DON'T FEAR THE FEARLESS.

    

I don't know if these were clues to the same riddle or separate riddles. I never found any riddles. 

        

It's going to hit above 90 in Maine this very week.

      

I spent some time earning enough experience points for Level 3 while mapping maze Level 1. At length, I decided to head down to Level 2. That's when I encountered a problem. Once I went "down," I found myself on a level with the exact layout as the first one, including the same messages. There were no "up" stairs at the location where I had descended, just another set of stairs asking if I wanted to go down. No matter how many times I hit the "Y" key in response, I always ended up on an identical level. The monsters, however, were noticeably harder the more times I hit "Y." The "up" stairs remained in the same place as they were when I first entered the dungeon on Level 1, and when they asked if I wanted to go back up, I had to hit "Y" as many times as I'd hit it to go down.

      

I originally captioned this "Level 1," but it turns out to be every level.

    

Is this a bug? A consequence of limited space and programming time? Is the first message I encountered a sign that there's something to find on one of these many duplicate levels? I don't know, but I explored down to Level 5 and didn't find anything different on any of the levels. That's all I'm willing to do on faith. [Ed. It was a bug. A later version that I tried did not have the problem, and I was able to map further dungeon levels.]

I suppose if I were poor and couldn't afford another major commercial release for a while, this might have passed the time, but it really serves to illustrate what happens when you take a game and drain it of its blood. Things like street names, monster portraits, bard tunes, trapped treasure chests, and navigational obstacles in dungeons might seem superfluous when you have them, but their presence is what makes Skara Brae come to life and fire the imagination. Tygux Horx feels more like a bunch of numbers and a framing story. We'll see if it improves.

   

Time so far: 4 hours