Friday, February 17, 2023

Game 485: Vault of Terror (1986) and Some Related BRIEFs

       
Vault of Terror
United States 
Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine
Released 1986 for Commodore 64
Date Started: 11 February 2023
Date Ended: 11 February 2023
Total Hours: 3
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)
    
The game's primary developer, a man living in Australia by the name of Cleveland Mark Blakemore, has a reputation to match the remarkable title he is working on. A legend of the RPG Codex and other CRPG internet-bastions, Cleve has over the years shared many of his exploits. Not only as a developer of RPGs but also as a life-adventuring alpha male of near supernatural powers.

--Zed, RPG Codex Interview, 28 October 2012
     
Cleveland Blakemore is relatively well-known in the RPG community as a  . . . character . . . who in 2017 (five years after the interview linked above) released Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar after 20 years of development. It received mixed but generally negative reviews; I haven't had a chance to take a look at it. For years, Blakemore maintained that he had worked for Sir-Tech in the 1990s, as the lead programmer on a scrapped game called Wizardry: Stones of Arnheim (more on this in my summary of Wizardry VII). His claims were ridiculed online until documents came to light that proved his accounts and more. 
    
One of Blakemore's many problems is a gift for hyperbole. He has--unironically, I think--called himself the greatest RPG developer of all time and Grimoire the greatest RPG of all time. That hyperbole is on fine display here in October 1986, when he offered Vault of Terror as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine, a short-lived (1984-1989) monthly focusing on Commodore computers. "I think you will agree that it is superior to most commercial games of this type, both in speed and quality," he says. "You can play it for weeks before winning it."
         
Starting out in Vault of Terror. Those coffins are just for show.
      
The 490 lines of code in question create a "lite" version of Dungeons of Daggorath (1982). It's not the worst game that I've ever seen in type-in format, but no, it's not better than commercial games being released in 1986. It's not even better than Daggorath from four years prior. It's not faster than anything--at 100% speed, it's excruciatingly slow. And even accounting for its difficulty and the fact I used save states to speed up the process, it's not a game whose time is measured in "weeks." It's also not an RPG, although to be fair, that claim comes from Gamebase64, not Blakemore himself.
      
[Ed. When this draft was initially published, I made some comments to the effect that Blakemore had not credited Dungeons of Daggorath as his clear inspiration. Commenter Busca sent me an email pointing out that I had overlooked a paragraph in the July 1988 Ahoy!, the one where Tomb of Horror was published, in which he does just that. "I'd like to pay tribute to the game Dungeons of Daggorath for the Tandy TRS-80 as the driving force that compelled me to create my own 3-D games for the C-64," he says. "Ever since I saw this game back in the summer of 1985, I've been striving to create a 3-D game as good or better."]
      
The backstory presented in the magazine is that the Kingdom of Sarnoth was invaded by a serpentine race called the Naga'an. They ousted the king from his castle, kept his crown, and slaughtered the other inhabitants. Now a hero is needed to go root them out and recover the crown. With no character creation, attributes, or even a name, you're dropped into the northwest corner of a two-story dungeon. The first thing you have to do, paying homage to the game's Daggorath roots, is light a torch.
        
Can anyone identify this artwork? I doubt they commissioned it for the magazine.
     
Where Daggorath used text inputs, Vault is controlled entirely by the joystick. It takes some practice. Outside the menu, the joystick moves you through a 3D dungeon, with the fire button using the active object. If you hold down the fire button and pull back on the joystick at the same time, you enter an icon menu at the bottom of the screen, with the icons representing, in order, a torch, a sword, a shield, a ring, a rope, a wand, a key, gold, and the crown. You can hold one of each item at a time. If you want to pick one up, you press the joystick forward; if you want to put it down, you move the joystick backward; if you want to use it (and it's already in your inventory), you highlight it and press fire. You can only move right through the icon menu, for some reason.
    
The dungeon consists of only two fixed levels, both 16 x 6, using a "worm tunnel" configuration. There are maybe 70 navigable squares. The floors are connected by multiple ladders and pits, but there are invisible walls and locked doors preventing progress on all but a relatively linear path.
   
To win the game, you have to find the crown and, for some reason, a separate bag of gold. To find these items, you have to find a wand to dispel the invisible walls, a key to open the locked doors, and a rope to climb up and down the ladders (yes, you need a rope to use the ladders). Items are all held by monsters, so you have to kill them. To have any chance of killing them without dying yourself, you need a sword and shield. Everything happens in a linear manner. Enemies near the entrance drop a sword, shield, rope, and ring; enemies on the lower floor drop the key and wand. The crown is behind an invisible wall near the Naga emperor, who you must kill.
     
Not a promising start.
      
There are only one or two of each enemy type, each holding a fixed treasure.
      
  • The brown recluse spider carries a torch
  • The red tarantula carries a sword
  • The blue crypt rat carries a shield
  • The brown carrion rat carries the ring
  • Two purple goblins carry ropes
  • The light blue revenant has a wand.
   
I guess this is the revenant.
      
  • The green Naga either has nothing or a redundant wand
  • The Emperor Naga has the sack of gold
    
There's no respawning. For combat, you have to wait until they get in your square and then mash the fire button, ideally while you have the sword selected. As the enemy hits you, the edges of the screen change from black to yellow to red before you die. You can flee combat to heal, watching the colors regress to black as time passes. Again, this is all taken from Daggorath, with colors taking the place of the audible heartbeat in that game.
        
Fighting the Emperor Naga.
      
In Daggorath, you "leveled up" as you killed enemies. Each kill made you stronger, although the specific number wasn't visible to the player. That doesn't seem to be happening here--not that there's enough foes to make a difference. The hardest part of Vault is the beginning, before you've found a sword. I lost about six characters in a row trying to attack with my torch. Once you have the sword, and particularly once you have the shield, the rest of the game gets easier. The light blue revenant steals all your stuff (except your torch) when you face him, but he drops a magic wand, and you can get replacements for everything he stole at the bottom of a ladder on his level.
   
Some other gameplay oddities:
   
  • The torch gets dimmer over time, as in Daggorath. When the torch is bright, the walls are white, but they fade to gray and blue before everything goes black. But all you have to do is drop the torch, move one step away, move back, and pick it up again, and it's like new.
  • Doors occupy full squares. When you're "inside" a door, you see doors in all directions even if you can't actually go through doors in those directions. I don't know if that makes sense.
     
Facing a doorway.
      
  • Blakemore's solution to offering "music" is to have the game play an unending string of random notes atop a constant drone. There is something weirdly effective about it.
  • If you put on the ring, you're invisible to enemies, but the world goes all wonky as you try to navigate. The manual specifically likens the effect to the pros and cons of Bilbo wearing the One Ring. I have to admit, this is kind of cool.
      
I'm not getting attacked, but it's also pretty hard to find my way.
    
  • There are ladders on the first floor that go nowhere. Maybe the original intention was to have a third floor.
  • You can't go up a ladder with both the crown and the gold, so you have to take one up, drop it, and go back down for the other.
       
Finding the crown.
      
You win when you return to the entry point with the gold and crown and use the rope. A winning game takes less than an hour, and since the game allows saving and reloading, I'm not sure my use of save states artificially sped up that process at all. It gets only a 9 on the GIMLET. I should start taking off points when the title makes no sense. There's nothing about a "vault" in the game.
       
You know this is a quality winning screen because of all the color.
           
Vault of Terror is one of 35 games that Blakemore wrote for Ahoy! between 1985 and 1988. Gamebase64 classifies three others as RPGs:
   
  • Crypt of Fear (February 1988)
  • Mines of Merlin (June 1988) 
  • Tomb of Horror (July 1988)
     
In fact, these are all just variants of Vault of Terror using nearly-identical interfaces.
    
The alternate spelling "dunjon" always enhances the gameplay experience.
     
Crypt of Fear
United States 
Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine
Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development
       
Crypt is explicitly a sequel to Vault of Horror, with the king hauling the retired protagonist out of his seaside cottage to free a princess from Demogorgon deep within Shadowthorn Mountain. Again, we have Blakemore's trademark hyperbole: "Although other 3-D dungeon adventures are available commercially, you'll realize that few of them are this much fun."
        
Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Might and Magic were never this much fun.
      
The objects this time are sword, shield, wand, ring, crypt map, princess's brooch, and chalice. There are new enemies and enemy graphics. The only changes to the interface are that you can get an overhead map and your health is now signaled by--you guessed it--a beating heart. There is still no character creation, attributes, or leveling.
 
I guess the robed "revenant" in the original game could also plausibly be "Merlin."
       
Mines of Merlin
United States 
Independently developed; published on disk that came with Ahoy! magazine
Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development
     
Crypt was still type-in code; in the issue, Blakemore brags about how much he tightened it. For Mines of Merlin, the magazine released it only on the accompanying disk. It is given as an "enhanced version of . . . Vault of Terror . . . minus the bug that plagued the original." I didn't experience a bug, so I guess it was fixed in the version I found.
       
Merlin uses the same graphics and interface as Vault.
    
From what I can tell, Mines is the exact same game as Vault except that when you die, there's a bit about your body being recovered and a chance at resurrection. The title makes even less sense than Vault of Terror, but the issue with which Merlin appears doesn't contain the backstory anyway.
      
            
Tomb of Horror
United States 
Independently developed; published as type-in code in Ahoy! magazine
Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG attributes or character development
      
They were back to type-in code (although you could apparently also buy it on disk) the next month for Tomb of Horror: "The ultimate 3-D adventure for the C-64." Here, Blakemore has moved even closer to replicating Daggorath, with items specifically held in the left and right hands and options to "Incant" items and "Quaff" potions. The screen even fuzzes as you die. But he also admittedly includes a number of elements not present in that earlier game, including the ability to "Hail" creatures (I didn't play long enough to learn why) and "Search" for traps. The awkward bottom icon menu is gone, replaced by a more standard menu that pops up in the middle of the screen. Graphics are updated and the dungeon looks lighter. Alas, the game still lacks any RPG-style attributes or development.
       
The new menu for Tomb of Horror has some familiar options.
     
Blakemore wrote over 30 more games for Ahoy!, none of which even Gamebase64, which is liberal with the use of the category, classifies as an RPG. Some of them have RPG-sounding names, like Minotaur Maze (1986), Catacombs (1987), Dark Fortress (1987), and Chainmail (1987). In between his work for Ahoy! and his employment with Sir-Tech, he wrote Melee (1989) for Softdisk (published in an issue of Loadstar). I originally intended to BRIEF it here, particularly since it has a horrid joystick-as-mouse control scheme, but I have to concede that it has enough RPG elements that it deserves its own entry.
        
I don't know much about programming, but Blakemore's games do seem relatively sophisticated for titles that the user was meant to type in. It's possible Blakemore was unusually skilled in this area. In the introduction to Vault, he says: "This game is the result of an argument I had with a teacher at the college where I study in Texas." (Aside: I know Blakemore lives in Australia now. I don't know if he's an American expatriate or if he's an Australian who just happened to go to college in Texas.) The teacher didn't believe Blakemore could do what he described in the space he had available. One would be tempted to regard that as more Blakemore self-aggrandizement, but the notes to Crypt indicate that Blakemore's editor required him to cut the time it would take the reader to type in the program. He managed to get it to 356 lines (from Vault's 490) while still adding features to the game. An old UseNet post from a Paul Panks praised Blakemore's coding efficiency while exemplifying the hyperbole that discussions involving Blakemore tend to engender: "Blakemore isn't just a programmer. He's a miracle programmer."

72 comments:

  1. I tried Grimoire as a retro-Wizardry like. I didn't find much to recommend it. I could see serious grognards (Chet if he ever gets that far) finding something to love there, but without the nostalgia older titles weplayed in our youth have, there wasn't much there for me

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    1. I agree. I never liked Grimoire (demo). And I have replayed Wizardry 7 a dozen times.

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    2. It's an ugly, tedious game with monstrous UI. But the RPG Codex crowd loves his "politics" and ability to drone on and on about dildos and gay people, so they pretend it's a top 10 RPG.

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  2. Paul Panks! He was part of the Interactive Fiction world (i.e. amateur text adventures) through the late nineties and aughts; he had some mental health issues and challenges with social interaction, I think, that made him a somewhat abrasive figure. I played a couple of his games that were more or less calculated trolling, but he had some others that I've heard were more successful. He passed away in 2009, way too young.

    There's a more detailed writeup on him here:

    https://intfiction.org/t/author-highlights-paul-allen-panks/46062

    Just strange to come across the name out of context like this (he was a C64 enthusiast active on Usenet, so I'm sure it's the same person)

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    1. I should have looked him up. Your comment sent me Googling and I came across this article on Jason Scott's blog:

      http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2063

      The comments section is a real roller coaster. He definitely seems like a Blakemore-esque figure. It makes sense that he'd admire him.

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    2. Blakemore-esque in terms of self-promotion and being a somewhat divisive figure, maybe, though from what I've heard of Blakemore, he added a lot of arrogance and right-wing toxicity to the mix which I don't think was part of Panks's character. Emily Short's take in that thread, unsurprisingly, seems like the best summary to me (she's one of, if not the, most well-respected IF authors of the amateur era).

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    3. I don't know anything about Emily Short, but I was struck by how good her use of language was in that comment. I imagine anything she's written for publication must be similarly high-quality.

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    4. Oh wow, I was trying to think why that name seemed familiar. I ran into several of his games in IFComps I judged back in the day and they were invariably among the very worst of the games I tried in their comps. But he sure stuck with it.

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    5. Oh man, she's a big deal! Her stuff is great, as you say because her writing is very strong, and also because she's got incredible game design chops and likes playing with different gameplay structures. Her first major IF game was largely about exploring a deep conversation with a single NPC (an animated statue, since it was a riff on the myth Galatea), and she wrote what's now the highest-rated IF game of all time, Counterfeit Monkey, which is all about solving puzzles by manipulating *words* rather than objects.

      She's largely moved beyond IF now, though -- she's currently Creative Director at Failbetter (the Fallen London/Sunless Seas folks; I also think she's leading up the visual novel project they have development).

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    6. Thank you for mentioning that! I hadn't heard of her before and am checking out Counterfeit Monkey right now!

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    7. I'm perplexed by the constant praise towards Galatea, because when I played it, all I got was a shallow take on Greek mythology with some pretentious dialog thrown in. Not saying her other work can't have improved, but Galatea is only interesting as a programming exercise.
      Penks is an interesting figure, but information on him seems to be contradictory. I remember reading that his more game-y, classic takes on text adventures were not appreciated in the '00s but the links I see here paint him more as someone who came too soon, focusing on gameworlds. Can't tell you which one is true, because the only game of his I played was his Jesus game, an obvious troll title.

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    8. I'm not a fan of Short's more experimental work, but I love Counterfeit Monkey. The core gameplay element of having a word changer turn things into other things is amazing and fits perfectly into the medium of text adventures. I don't think it would work as well in any other genre.

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    9. @Radiant - of course, hope you enjoy CM! ...I've actually never played it myself, but I know lots of people who love it.

      @MorpheusKitami - Galatea isn't my favorite of her games either, but I think the praise is easy to understand. Even leaving aside the subject matter (though I don't think "a shallow take on Greek mythology" is an apt characterization -- IMO it's more about the production and criticism of art, with the mythology a gloss making the ideas more accessible) the conversation system is incredibly deep, tracking the NPCs mood, knowledge, and the state of previous conversation, using a text parser rather than a constrained set of nested dialog trees. That'd be super impressive now, much less in 2000 when it came out!

      I only played Panks's shorter games too, but yeah, Westfront, the big one, is apparently his most impressive (though flawed) piece, a weird mix of old-school text adventure and RPG-style simulation. It directly inspired Adam Cadre's Endless, Nameless, actually!

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    10. Failbetter ought to do a game about parasites that expelled their host.

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    11. I arrived on the IF scene too late to ever interact with Paul Panks personally. Nor did I ever try to play one of his games (partly due to not having the right kind of computer). But I playtested a game that was made as a memorial to him, and found it moving given what I knew about him:
      https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=1njc6utpnirm9i1s
      Ninja's Fate by Hannes Schueller

      It is very quirky, as a tribute to Panks ought to be, but more playable than his own games seem to have been.

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    12. I remember Panks' IFComp pieces always seeming like trollish junk, so it was very hard to take him seriously and I always wondered why he bothered. I didn't know he had mental health issues, nor did I even hear that he'd passed away. I suppose I should have tried to be a bit kinder in my comp review comments, although I don't know how many he might have seen...

      On the other hand, I highly admire Emily Short's work. Counterfeit Monkey is great fun. Galatea is technically interesting and a wonderful showcase of IF programming skill but not really much of a game. Other good pieces are City of Secrets, Bronze, Savoir-Faire, etc. She also wrote most of the examples for the Inform 7 documentation, many of which were, amusingly, based on an Alice Through the Looking Glass scenario.

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    13. @MorpheusKitami I think the way it works is that once something gets a little attention, it gets many 5 star ratings by people who like it, while people who don't like it don't stick around to see how much more text games can be. All the good stuff on ifdb sits with 2-4 stars, forgotten.

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    14. Paul Allen Panks, man, I recognise the name but it's been twenty years and I can't actually remember any interactions or any games specifically. Sad that all I can say is "I remember he was... somebody."

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    15. The main interaction I remember with Paul was one time he had been asking on a newsgroup for help coding something - he wanted to special-case a snarky player-insulting response to an incorrect action. It was a stupid thing to do and a lot of people insisted it couldn't be done. I wrote up the code to do the exact literal thing he had asked for, explained why it was a terrible idea, and documented the code in a way that illustrated why it was a bad idea. He thanked me profusely, said my code worked perfectly, and incorporated it into his game.

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  3. Compared to the type-in games in german C64 magazines I remember I have to say this is quite remarkable. Whatever you can say about Blakemore every time he comes up it's never going to be boring.

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  4. "Can anyone identify this artwork? I doubt they commissioned it for the magazine."

    They didn't. It was a very old picture even in 1986, one variant of a theme; this particular one has two little girls and a dog, but many others exist. It's not difficult to find copies of these on the net (see http://johnrozum.blogspot.com/2011/10/31-days-of-halloween-day-10.html for one example) but much harder to find actual attributions to the original works.

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    1. I recognise the skull image from the aerosmith greatest hits album but it was originally from 1890 and called "Children with pup" by "Duncan" (according to my limited Google search skills)

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    2. All I can find is "Russian postcard, dated 1820." https://mag.metamythic.com/metamorphic-skull-illusions/

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    3. I had no idea how common it was to create deceptive images out of skulls.

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    4. Skulls are an extremely common feature in memento mori art, and this is no exception. It is no coincidence that many of the examples have the non-skull portion depicting youth - it is a way of capturing the fleetingness of life and the inevitability of death.

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    5. Getty Images attributes the original art to an M. Gallieni: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/optical-illusion-two-children-and-dog-form-a-royalty-free-illustration/1298406887

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    6. Here it is in what seems to be a more contemporary source from 1885: https://www.google.com/books/edition/La_Nature/pRnfs56wl5EC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22le+cholera+morbus%22+%22gallieni%22&pg=PA64&printsec=frontcover

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  5. Cleve recently posed some pictures of the result of his lifting. He didn't answer when I asked him "what do you do with all those muscles?".

    As for Grimoire I haven't played it (yet), but I suspect it's gotten negative reviews because it was written by Cleveland Blakemore, just like the Beach Boys song Kokomo is considered a bad song because it was written by Mike Love.

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    1. Re Grimoire reviews: Maybe. After a quick glance at some of them, it could also be because the game apparently (still) was buggy and partly imbalanced when first released - something not unheard of also from other games, but I guess people are more demanding now. Especially when it has been in development and announced for so long, even if it's largely a one-man show. It also came without a manual (that only arrived a year and a half later).

      In any case, it probably depends on the target audience. Since this seems to cater to a rather small specific niche even among CRPG players, I don't find it too surprising the reactions in a broader public are mixed (I also haven't played it so far).

      Nevertheless, Blakemore's personality likely didn't help to reach more people. See e.g. his exchange with a reviewer (GJW) on Steam in the comment thread to that review.

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    2. Yeah my memory is that Grimoire got some *positive* reviews because it was written by Blakemore -- the RPG Codex people were predictably over the moon about it, and it's hard to imagine that his persona and various ideological and political axes to grind didn't play a role in that -- but most of the negative reviews I saw seemed to have legit gripes about length/balance and an obscure, player-hating UI. I haven't played it myself and didn't follow things super closely so I could be wrong, but the mixed assessment seemed the right one to me.

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    3. There's definitely some people who gave it negative reviews because of Blakemore. Separation of the art and artist is hard when the artist is someone like Blakemore. Seems biased to attribute the positive reviews that way but not the negative ones.
      That said, having never played the game, unless it didn't even offer so much as a command list somewhere or in the options at launch, those issues seem exaggerated. Only a fool would rush in on a game advertising itself as a hardcore experience without expecting to get knocked down. Checking some reviews, I do note some claiming the game gets laughably easy later on. Which I find an interesting observation.

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    4. Could well be, like I said I didn't follow its release that closely and I've never played it, just know its genesis and reputation. But when I see a bunch of 2-3 star reviews saying there's fun gameplay and a deep world, but there are pacing and balance issues and the interface requires 3 extra clicks to do everything, that seems reasonable to me even if there is some negative bias due to Blakemore's uh, *personality*. On the other hand, when I see that RPG Codex called it the 22nd best RPG of all time, that seems to me completely inexplicable on the game's own merits.

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    5. I think you're underestimating how much some people don't mind an impenetrable beginning and can get past an obtuse interface. I've gotten the impression that people on the Codex genuinely like Wizardry and Wizardry-like games, then if they're praising a Wizardry-like game, that's probably because they like that game. People at other places are more likely to be into those titles because of nostalgia and aren't really going to find anything worth the effort of learning a new game.

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    6. Maybe some people like games -because- of e.g. their impenetrable beginnings and obtuse interfaces. That way they can revel in their own perceived greatness as the only ones 'getting it' and worthy of those games, as opposed to all the 'noobs' and 'clueless idiots' out there.

      If Blakemore's intention was to cater only to those select few other alpha males with near super-natural (gaming) powers, he possibly succeeded. If he intended to get some money back for his 20+ years of development work (he reportedly predicted 360 000 sales and said the 10% release discount on the ~40 USD price tag would be the only one you will ever get), probably not so much. The game is currently being peddled on gog for 0.99 USD.

      To each his own, I guess.

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    7. I don't know anything about Grimoire, but I've hated "Kokomo" since the first time I heard it, and at that time had no idea who Mike Love was and only barely knew who the Beach Boys were.

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    8. Reasons that people might not like Kokomo:

      1) They dont like Mike's personality
      2) They don't like Mike's politics (I'm not sure this was a thing in '88?)
      3) They don't like the way Mike treated the other members of the band
      4) They think its a vapid little bubblegum ditty.

      I like it fine, though!

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    9. @MorpheusKitami: A game that becomes "laughably easy" later on would tend to fit into my definition of "imbalanced".

      Speaking more generally and not limited to this specific title, a difficulty to get into a game and understand its mechanics to me is not (necessarily) the same as a game that is hard to beat or advance far / get a good score in (even if and when you've understood its mechanics). It could be the former, but not the latter, or vice versa.

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  6. He's being consistent with the game title not making an appearance in the game itself.

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  7. I think you have no choice but to agree that this is the greatest BRIEF in the history of computer game reviews.

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    1. Clearly, none of the Might and Magic games contain exactly the same amount of fun as this BRIEF review.

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  8. Busca sent me a link that shows that Blakemore did give a nod to Daggorath in the Ahoy! issue in which Tomb of Horror was published. I appended a paragraph above and removed references to the games being "uncredited."

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  9. That rat graphic looks really familiar... Where have I seen it before?

    From a technical perspective, the type-ins are really impressive. A lot of retro-enthusiasts are going back now to really push the limits of what their computers could do in just BASIC, but Blakemore was already there.

    I wondered about the "...character." but a couple of Google searches about him turned up Reddit threads that answered that question.

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    1. My new favorite Youtube channel shows nothing but type-in games from various magazines and books. For the TI99/4a, MSX, Apple ][ and others. Each video starts with a program listing, so it's fun to read it and try to figure out what the game is going to do. Then the game starts (Best viewed at 2x speed). Some are complete crap but others are pretty good and it's easy to see how you could modify them for your own uses. It's a window to a long-lost world. Frequently updated, and the creator says he types them in himself from the original sources.

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  10. There is (was) even a page with a map and hints for 'Vault of Terror'. Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20121026035153/http://members.shaw.ca/cue64/vault.html.

    Regarding the speed, I was wondering: If you run different games (of a single platform, e.g. C64) with the same emulator and settings, will the resulting speeds compared to each other truthfully mirror how they would compare on their original machine or are there additional factors that (can) come into play? Maybe some tech-savy emulator expert knows.

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    1. While I don't consider myself an expert, any "good" (accurate) emulator would hold the premise you suggest true.

      This is based on the assumption that you don't have performance enhancement settings turned on. Another assumption is that the emulator knows how to relate era accurate CPU/clock cycles to modern hardware. This is part of what makes an emulator "good". But most emulators have quality of life type of enhancements to reduce wait times. (i.e. Warp mode, fast disk access, etc.)

      And there are probably other factors of which I am unaware or failed to consider.

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  11. Ah HA, now I remember where I saw the rat!

    A really good programmer named Quinton Tormanen wrote several games for the TI-99/4a in the late 80's/early 90's. One of them was "The Living Tomb". He told me in an email which I can't locate currently it was based on some Commodore game he saw in a magazine.

    Looks like he definitely ripped off the graphics and style: http://tigameshelf.net/asm.htm (scroll to very bottom)

    However, his version is written in 100% assembly language, so it runs pretty fast.

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    1. Wow, nice sleuthing. Yeah, the screenshots suggest he didn't just rip off the images; he typed in Tomb of Horror, made some changes (perhaps adapted the code to a different platform), and sold it as Living Tomb.

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    2. Oh, he had to re-write it completely, the TI and C64 have way too many differences for a direct port. But it wouldn't surprise me if it plays the same. Where did you get the games from anyway? GameBase64 has no downloadable copies.

      He also used Cleveland's Xevious knock-off which was also published in Ahoy! for a TI game called War Zone.

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  12. Cleve is an American who moved to Australia at some point, but now moved back to America because of the extremely oppressive way the Australian government managed a certain medical event in recent years.

    For all his hyperbole, Grimoire is actually a really good game. It's a genuine homage to Wizardry 7 and chock full of content. Of course it feels archaic in many ways for a 2017 game, because it's essentially a 1997 game released 20 years late. The interface isn't the best and the mechanics are somewhat unpenetrable. Back when it came out we figured out everything on our own over on RPG Codex, I made a dedicated thread for figuring out Grimoire's gameplay systems because it didn't come with a manual. We pretty much had to experiment and take notes!

    The archaic interface and lack of documentation coupled with Cleve's exaggerated claims of greatness were what led to a lot of negative reviews. People found it too impenetrable especially compared to contemporary dungeon crawlers.

    But if you are willing to engage with the game, it offers you a fun time. And since we received a lot more Dungeon Master clones than Wizardry clones in the 2010s, it's a welcome breath of fresh air into the current RPG landscape.

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    1. "the extremely oppressive way the Australian government managed a certain medical event in recent years."

      Hyperbole indeed.

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    2. Australia was one of the most authoritarian countries in that regard though, Cleve was 100% right to leave while he could. Lots and lots of people there lost their jobs for refusing to comply with mandates for taking experimental medicines.

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    3. This is not the place for this sort of discussion, but having lived through the pandemic in Australia, I feel obliged to offer some clarity to any readers who stumble across this:

      1) According to the Covid Stringency Index put out by Oxford, the strictness of Australia's public health response was comparable to that of similarly developed economies.

      2) Compared to the number of Covid job losses in high-contact service industries, job losses due to vaccine refusal were miniscule.

      3) Australians were broadly supportive of Covid control measures, because for the first time they saw governments listening to experts, rather than playing politics, and because the success of those measures was evident in Australia's noteworthy case-fatality ratio.

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    4. It's funny because up-thread people are complaining about politics being inserted into games, completely missing the blatant irony here. I guess as long as those politics agree with one's own, that's the secret to making it OK.

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    5. As political as Cleve is as a person, there are no politics in Grimoire, at least none that I noticed. It's a pure Wiz 7 style dungeon crawler - not much room to insert politics in a game like that anyway!

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    6. Harland, I think you're broadly right when you say that people are fine with politics in video games (and recreational media generally) as long as its their politics.

      Moreover, people are less primed to notice their own political views reflected in the media they consume - their own political views tend to represent (to them) a natural default.

      Jarl - I consider art inherently political, but I'm using a broad definition of 'political', and don't just mean the hot button issues of the day. Even a game like Pong reveals something of the society which created it - Wizardy VII is a veritable disco ball of cultural reflection!

      I agree that dungeon crawlers wont necessarily allow you to pinpoint where the developers fall on the political axis, but I think there's probably enough material in VII to make some inferences.

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    7. I can see how one could perceive unconcious politics encoded into Wiz 7 but Pong? I would be genuinely curious to know what political positions could be inferred from Pong. I studied art for six years in college and the notion that all art (and therfore rpgs) is inherently political is something I strongly disagree with. Unironically, the people I've met who asserted this position were the people who sought the most power and influence in my school and they usually used psychoanalysis as a weapon.

      Also Grimoire has fantastic music.

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    8. I think there are a few levels happening here. This would make an interesting special topic. Broadly speaking--and I'm just making this up as I go--it seems to me that there are:

      1. Games for which you have to understand the political context of the times to fully appreciate. Think Ultima IV introducing a moralistic plot as a counter to criticism from conservatives worried about the negative influence of video games, for instance.

      2. Games whose content or characters have various political points of view. These may be independent from those of the creators. Think the Fallout series with its clear distrust of corporations and large governments.

      3. Games whose creators have political points of view and somewhat uncomfortably shoehorn them into their games. See the bottom of my discussion of StarQuest for an example:

      https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2021/01/game-393-starquest-rescue-at-rigel-1980.html

      4. Games whose creators have political points of view that aren't readily apparent in their games, but they seem to come up in every discussion about those games anyway.

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    9. @phaedrus

      I'm not claiming one could infer political positions from pong! As I said, my definition of politics is [perhaps too] broad - I'm including concerns that one might consider primarily anthropological. Eg Pong is a minimalist (even considering the technical limitations - cf Magnavox's Tennis) digital representation of a 1-on-1 racquet sport. It emits a disharmonious noise when a point is scored. There aren't a lot of artistic decisions to evaluate, but not all cultures would create a game like Pong, or if they did, create it quite the same way.

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    10. I can definitely see the anthropological insights one could derive from pong. As an artist I just tend to bristle at claims that "all art = x." Apologies if my earlier comment was a bit harshly worded. I hadn't had my morning coffee yet :/

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    11. You can almost hear an alien anthropologist a millennium in the future: "It says something about this society that the first video games it created were both competitive and physical. Even in transitioning to a digital environment, they required physical ability to succeed--and success relied not on the acquisition of knowledge or the solving of intellectual puzzles but rather the accumulation of arbitrary 'points.' The analogue to contemporary politics of the period is, of course, self-evident."

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    12. Yes, my hypothetical aliens would say "contemporary politics of the period." They're fond of tautologies.

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    13. @phaedrus

      You’re all good!

      @chet

      Haha, very Futurama.

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    14. "As political as Cleve is as a person, there are no politics in Grimoire, at least none that I noticed."

      Not much, but it is there when the game describes what the Black Seed does.

      Delete
  13. The skull image you ask about appears at page 741 of VOL. XXIL - July to December, 1886 of the American Magazine, whatever publication it was, without credits.
    https://archive.org/details/americanmagazin30unkngoog

    A better version of the etching here: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1298406887/vector/optical-illusion-two-children-and-dog-form-a-skull-shape-victorian.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=qwb1aDWIg4dz41T-lI-35xD4sNsSxRW1vHB5wcadOn0=

    A *different* version of the same subject, maybe aquatint, here on a leaflet card: https://www.flickr.com/photos/vintagehalloweencollector/507014771

    ...I just like to search for dumb things on search engines...

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  14. A lively comments section, to be sure! I plotzed a little when I caught the endorsement from Paul Panks at the end, because that's... a bit of a poison pill praise. For many years I wanted to document the virtual-machine winners of the annual Interactive Fiction competition on Mobygames, but was stuck documenting only those distributed with platform-specific executables, which invariably were Panks', which invariably placed dead last, year after year. PP just had a different, personal, ideal toward which he was working -- his best games were like vast MUDs, empty and with minimalist mechanics, played singleplayer. They were really going against the current the entire rest of the IF community was going.

    (Speaking of which, you can't appreciate the achievement that Emily Short's Galatea was without taking it in the context of its release, when most homebrew text adventures would still require you to put all the *TREASURES* in the cabinet and type SCORE in order to end the game. The notion that there were other, non-dry goods puzzle, non-combat, non-inventory management ways to design and, indeed, play text parser games was revolutionary, though it's hard to fully grasp how much so nearly a quarter-century down the line.)

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    1. "Speaking of which, you can't appreciate the achievement that Emily Short's Galatea was without taking it in the context of its release, when most homebrew text adventures would still require you to put all the *TREASURES* in the cabinet and type SCORE in order to end the game."

      I agree with the first part of this sentence, but I'm not sure about the second -- I mean, you have A Change in the Weather in 1995, Tapestry in 96, Sunset Over Savannah and She's Got a Thing for Spring in '97, Photopia and Aisle in 1998... IF that wasn't very "text adventure"-y maybe wasn't numerically dominant by 2000 but it was pretty clearly a major strand of what the community valued. All of those games are relatively linear and scripted, though, unlike the simulationist approach to NPC interaction that Short implemented in Galatea, which is IMO what's most distinctive about the game.

      By the way, I assume you're the Rowan Lipkovits who wrote the Master Bedroom in Cragne Manor? I just played that a few months ago (wrote it up as a Let's Play, actually -- link below if any are interested) and enjoyed that bit!

      https://intfiction.org/t/lets-play-cragne-manor/56472

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    2. I can't say I've ever seen any evidence that people were focusing on treasure hunts in the '90s let alone 2000. I'm sure there were some, but people were definitely trying something more than that at that time.

      I'm also not sure that saying it was a game of its time, there aren't tons of games with conversation systems like it. Off the top of my head, there's also Facade, which has its own problems. The impressiveness of its technical achievement doesn't really have anything to do with my opinion that people are wowed by the technical achievement and assume the writing itself is much better than it really is.

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    3. Aw heck, I didn't anticipate the huge contingent of old RAIF lurkers present to hold me accountable to my hyperbole. There were still lots of "Adventureland was the pinnacle of text adventuring" games coming out at the turn of the century (indeed, there are still some of them being made now!), but they didn't see much love in the compo (you would usually see them near the bottom of the vote count) or much discussion in the newsgroup because the traditional formula had been pretty well exhausted (without fun new angles like Captain Verdeterre's Plunder) and the IF community had by and large agreed that the way forward for the next decade or so would be more in the vein of the recent experimental formal innovations and developments introduced and/or refined by the Shorts, Plotkins and Cadres.

      At the time it felt like Galatea was an announcement made through a megaphone out on the street: ATTENTION EVERYONE -- THINGS ARE GOING TO BE DONE DIFFERENTLY FROM NOW ON. Granted, I got the same announcement when I played Hunter In Darkness, or Mercy, or Aisle, or heck PUTPBAD. They were all just very dramatically different flavours of different approaches to difference itself. It felt like a Cambrian explosion moment. Galatea wasn't the sole flagbearer of the explosion, but it was absolutely one of its marshalls.

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    4. PS, tetrapod, by some chance I did stumble upon your Let's Play a week or so ago. I was indeed the Rowan Lipkovits in question (it's not a firstname lastname combination that leaves much ambiguity on the table) and I'm just glad I didn't embarrass myself too badly there... I'm no programmer and once in a while my enthusiasm for a project makes me forget that, and I very quickly get in so far over my head I can't find a way out. I initially aspired to write my section as a gamebook, perversely going against the feel of the rest of the game, but I wasn't clever enough to figure out a way of implementing that without the use of extensions, and wound up reducing my scope until I figured out one solitary interaction I could somehow manage to make trigger reliably. You're just lucky I never acquired the knack for code, otherwise I might well have become the Paul Panks of overwrought prose. (That reminds me, I ought to update 50 Shades of Jilting.)

      Delete
  15. yeah, TREASURE/SCORE definitely was gone by then

    you could still have it a little bit around '91 as a throwback (Unnkulian Adventure, Multi-Dimensional Thief) but certainly by '95 it was rare, and the Unnkulian series had gone on to The Legend Lives which was a very different thing

    I have a chart here

    https://bluerenga.blog/2021/12/20/all-the-adventures-up-to-1981-in-review/

    showing the prevalence of games with the Treasure Hunt concept going up to 1981, even by then the percentage was dropping (even if the absolute number was going up)

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    1. I think the reason you don't see too many in the Nemesis category is because adventures don't generally have much in the way of simulated combat. Sometimes the purpose of a treasure hunt could be to acquire a set of magical items that can exorcise the demon or whatever.

      In RPGs, 'Kill Foozle' is probably the most common plot, because you can use the combat skills you spent the game developing in a big boss battle.

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  16. FWIW, Grimoire IS a good game, despite what one might think about its creator and his claims. It's beautiful, funny and also quite challenging, it just takes a bit of an effort to get used to the clunky UI and the constant dying before your characters improve a bit.

    True, it's not the most balanced game there is, and in my experience the latter half became more like an adventure game as nothing could really touch my group of veteran chars, but I wasn't bothered by it. I had fun solving the various maps anyway.

    With Grimoire, Cleve has every right to be proud of what he's achieved.

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