Ackroyd's Saga
United Kingdom
Published as type-in code in the January 1988 issue of Your Commodore magazine from Argus Press
Released 1988 for Commodore 64
Rejected for: No RPG elementsTagging this game as an RPG, as GameBase64 does, is absurd, but I thought I'd blog about it anyway, because as I started the game, I thought, "This is the first attempt that I know to fuse educational material with even pseudo-RPG elements." Then, after I got this entry mostly written, I remembered Bugs and Drugs (1978), which was an actual RPG. You're getting this entry anyway, because I wrote a bunch and I don't want to waste the material.
Written by Allen and Margaret Webb and published in the January 1989 edition of Your Commodore (a British magazine), the game takes the player on a journey to defeat the King Ackroyd ("the usual evil king") by finding four parts of a key and taking them to the entrance of Ackroyd's castle.
You begin by setting a difficulty on a scale of 1 ("Easy") to 5 ("Hard"). You then select a primary and secondary weapon from a short list.
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| This is a meaningless choice. |
The game begins with your Goofy Cartoonish Little Man (a rare example of a GCLM in a Western game) in a forest in what turns out to be the upper-left corner of a 9 x 12 game world. That means the game has 108 screens. You might as well get used to that kind of math.
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| Starting out. No matter what you chose, your character icon has an axe. |
As you explore the game world, you encounter 11 monsters in fixed locations: ghost, soldier, blob, snake, zombie, whirlwind, eagle, phoenix, enchanted fire, gnome, and mystic cloud. "Combat" with each of them involves correctly answering either three or five multiplication problems from 0 x 0 to 12 x 12. There are thus 91 potential pairs and 169 potential problems. You have a limited time to type in the answer to each problem, which is the only thing affected by your choice of difficulty level. If you get the majority of the answers correct, the enemy pops out of existence.
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| There is no "answer." Just more questions. |
I know my multiplication tables, but rating this "very easy" isn't some kind of flex. The consequence for getting the majority wrong, or timing out, is getting knocked back a square, from which you can immediately try again.
You may be wondering what roles the chosen weapons play in the game. The answer is that your choice affects what graphics show up in the upper-left corner.
Key parts are scattered across the map, but in fixed locations (everything in the game is fixed except the specific problems you get). I had trouble finding the fourth, so I took the time to make a map of the game.
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| The authors really should have added a few more columns for thematic symmetry. |
Once you find all four key parts, you take them to the entrance to the castle in the southeast. They automatically come together and you get your final score. It's a little disappointing that there isn't a climactic, seven-problem battle with Ackroyd himself.
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| Why wouldn't you make the number of monsters an even 12? |
So Acroyd's Saga is not an RPG and not a terribly enjoyable game, but it does raise some interesting thoughts. The entire action RPG genre is made up of games for which success is a combination of RPG-style probabilities and the player's manual dexterity. Why is there no genre for which success is a combination of RPG-style probabilities and the player's mental dexterity? The problem with Ackroyd's Saga is not that combat includes multiplication tables; it's that it only includes multiplication tables. The way to improve it, and make the game a bit more of an RPG, is to make it so the player's answers improve the probability of combat success instead of making it inevitable. Then make the rest come down to the usual RPG variables.
The counterargument is that RPGs already have a mental component in that the player has to juggle a bunch of different statistics. After all, figuring out if you want a weapon that does 3d6 damage or a weapon that does 2d8 damage requires multiplication. Determining success in a standard D&D battle requires a bit of algebra. But the game does most of the heavy lifting for you in either event.
A good RPG could make the math problems organic. Mixing potions, balancing spell reagents, targeting a trebuchet, crossbow, or sniper rifle, building a tower, and feeding an army all involve loads of math. Are there any games that require it? I'm honestly asking.
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| This piece of the key looks like someone praying in the sand. |
Math isn't the only skill that could be taught in an RPG environment. There are plenty of opportunities to organically involve language, geography, history, literature, psychology, and hard sciences like chemistry, biology, and physics. If I say nothing else, readers will flood the comments section with plenty of examples of games that do seem to require such knowledge; indeed, we had a recent discussion of this topic in the context of having to know a little Latin in Antepenult. We have also seen plenty of examples of things we've all learned as a side-effect from playing RPGs. What I'm talking about is different: an RPG that's designed to explicitly teach a skill as part of the regular mechanics.
MobyGames has cataloged 4,567 games in the "educational" genre, including:
- 396 educational/action combinations
- 480 educational/adventure combinations
- 492 educational/simulation combinations
- 221 educational/strategy combinations
There are only 22 educational/RPG combinations. The oldest is the lost Educational Dungeon (1979). The next is a Japanese-only game called 46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron (1990), which seems to teach natural selection. The next chance I'll have is Dare, Bluff, or Die (1994), which purports to teach the history and culture of various peoples to populate the American West. After that, it's eight years until the next one. (I allow, of course, that MobyGames may have missed or mis-categorized some games.) What is it about RPGs that makes them so underserved as educational hybrids?
A couple further thoughts on Ackroyd. First, it seems to me that it would have been a trivial matter of programming to allow the player to enter the minimum and maximum values for the digits used in the problems. I've always been annoyed that they stopped us at 12 in grade school. (I didn't know until playing this game that 12 was the standard in the U.K., too.) I worked my way through college as a security guard. This was well before mobile phones, and I wasn't allowed to have a book or any other entertainment at some of my posts. To take the edge off the boredom, I decided to memorize more multiples. I got up to around 20 x 20, and I think squares up to 50 x 50, but never to the same level of instantaneous recall as those first 12. Anyway, such customization would have expanded my enjoyment of the game.
I wish I knew why the authors called it Ackroyd's Saga. I can only imagine they named it after someone they knew. I'm not sure why they wouldn't have chosen a title that better reflects the nature of the gameplay, like Sword of Pythagoras or Medieval Times. In any event, I'm not going to give the game a number or GIMLET even though I won. There really isn't a single RPG element evident in it.
It’s definitively not an RPG, but every time I have gone against my better judgement and played Neptune’s Pride (https://np.ironhelmet.com/), I have ended up making a significant number of spreadsheets in order to calculate my overall strategic war effort situation. One of the delicious things about that game is that -apart from initial player location in the galaxy- there is literally nothing stochastic in the rest of the mechanics, so if you have sufficient intelligence you can calculate pretty much everything. (Note: the warnings against playing that game with your friends are 100% correct. Just don’t do it! At best you will “only” find yourself setting your alarm for every hour through the night to be able to catch surprise attacks and at worse might really start holding grudges against people you care about. It is, however, a supremely well designed strategy game!)
ReplyDeleteI don’t know if you have talked about this specifically for CRPGs or not, but have you ever discussed the difference between games with hidden mechanics, hidden state, and random number generation vs games without those? Are there any CRPGs where all of the mechanics math is in plain view? Would that even be a fun CRPG?
There are plenty of games that tell you the formulas for things like "to hit" and damage done, and an equal number that show what values you've rolled. I don't know any that put it together and show you the full formula in-game. It probably wouldn't be worth the trade-off in loss of immersion, but I wouldn't mind seeing it as an option. There are plenty of games for which I think I must be missing something because my success doesn't seem to fit with the published math.
DeleteThe Pathfinder CRPG's (Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous) allow you to mouse over a result (much easier in turn-based mode over real-time-with-pause) and see the math behind the computation and the result
DeleteIntegrating educational problem-solving into RPG combat mechanics sounds great. Usually, educational games are straight up so, while their other game mechanics are somewhat cosmetic. Solving a math problem to mitigate arguably infamous RNG rolls would be both organic and motivating. Bit of a tangent, but there's a lot to say about RNG vs deterministic combat. I'm not sure how often has this topic been brought up with games on this blog so far.
DeleteJust to touch up on that, for example, if the base hit value in combat is calculated by the typical D roll against stats, the chance for a critical hit bonus could be a math problem. The faster it's solved, the higher the bonus.
DeleteBaldur's Gate 2 had an option to let you see the full calculation applied to your hit roll. I don't remember if it was available through the regular options menu or only via the cheat console.
DeleteVauban, yes, it was a basic feature of the game, at least the original version. I don't recall if it's in the Enhanced release, but I imagine it is.
DeleteDesktop Dungeons exposes all the math and by my reading meets the CRPG definition. It's also a fun game.
DeleteOne could perhaps make an argument for Ultima IV as an RPG that also teaches moral skills, but it's a bit of a stretch.
ReplyDeleteI'm into this, have my vote
DeleteIt's certainly along the same lines.
DeleteFun entry. I feel certain that I've run into other educational RPGs but I struggle to think of any, and probably they're pseudo-RPGs with a very high "pseudo" factor. Maybe there's something on one of the Scholastic disks for Apple IIe, which were around at my school when I was a kid.
ReplyDeleteThe title: possibly riffing on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie -- a pretty famous book -- or it's just a misspelling of Dan Aykroyd's name? Those would be my two lead guesses. Either way, I'd guess in-joke or homage, rather than anything more substantial.
You made me do math! (This is not a complaint. I like math.) When you said there were 91 pairs and 169 problems, I just had to check for myself. The 169 problems is obvious: there are 13 choices for first number, another 13 for the second, and the square of 13 is of course 169. The 91 pairs was a little less obvious. I'm used to combinatorics, so my natural inclination is to say that the number of pairs is "13 choose 2", which works out to 13x12/2 or 78. Unfortunately, that's only the number of non-duplicate pairs. I had to think for a second before I remembered that there are an additional 13 duplicate pairs, which brings the total to 91.
ReplyDeleteYou could, of course, discount all of the 0 x n combinations as a 1 instead of 13 since they are covered by 1 rule - see a 0? answer is 0. This is basically the same concept as binary logic for 'and' and 'or' gates where the first input determines if the second is even relevant.
DeleteMy first guess for the unpopularity of RPGs as educational games is (the possibility of) grinding. If there's enough of RPG mechanics in the game to make it, well, an RPG, then player will most likely be able to push through a hard problem of the educational variety by farming easier problems for XP - or else the problems will be independent of the player character skills, and we're out of RPG land. And this aspect seems fundamental and quite unique to the genre - player can't just grind to make his F16 better in a flight simulator; he has to learn how to fly it better.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it would need to implement a mixture of mechanisms. E.g. hybrid calculation and attributes for combat (i.e. being able to improve combat performance through solving calculation problems as suggested by Chet), but also needing pure calculation (or other mental dexterity challenges) to get through doors you need to pass or obtain certain special artifacts to advance.
DeleteOr solving some mental exercise could be a necessary ingredient for obtaining required or at least more powerful spells or other abilities or increases of those which would be impossible or quite taxing to achieve through grinding alone.
After all, many (most?) CRPGs do not consist of combat only. There can be navigational and similar challenges (mazes, spinners, teleporters, secret doors etc.), uncovering required lore knowledge through NPCs and books and putting it together, (other) logical puzzles and riddles and/or generally having to manage ressources like spells, potions, torches.
I was thinking about it this morning:
DeleteYou can even make the damage roll the question, e.g. you do 3X4 damage, how much should it damage the enemy? Correct answer applies damage, incorrect answer misses.
Same for enemies, e.g. they do 6X8 damage, correct answer causes them to miss, incorrect answer applies damage to you.
You can then add equipment to make your damage numbers higher, maybe add damage resistance so that certain monsters cannot be defeated without better weapons and thus require you to do harder problems.
Is that a bad thing? If you're good at math (or whatever the game requires), you push on through quickly. If you're not, you grind by doing a larger number of easier problems, which is... precisely the exercise that you need in order to improve.
DeleteMemorized all multiplication pairs up to 20? Well done, sir! I once fancied myself a mathematical chap but never came close to such a feat.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't a great use of time, but my ADHD mind won't let me stand at a post for 8 hours without doing something. I memorized an alphabetical list of all the countries in the world, too, but that one has faded with time and has of course grown out of date.
DeleteI understand that multiplication is just repeated addition, so describing "sums" makes sense. Is saying "sum" instead of "product" for the result of a multiplication problem a UK thing?
ReplyDeleteI think the idea is that up to 12x12 will cover most standard multiplication that you'll have to do in day to day life, while also sett ing you up to somewhat easily solve bigger problems by splitting them up.
ReplyDelete14 x 14 = 7 x 28 = 7 x 2 (x 10) + (7 x 8)
I honestly still can't think through 14 x 14 directly, but the other variants are easy to do
I find it easier to do it this way: 14x14 = 7x7x2x2 = 49x4 = 196. I had to memorize squares up to 15 anyway, but that one is easier to get to than 13^2 = 169 which I just memorized as a pair with 196 with the last two digits reversed.
DeleteI mean, technically you only need to know the single digits; all the larger ones can be calculated.
DeleteNo offense, but I find it bizzarre that you think 7 x 2 (x 10) + (7 x 8) is easier than 14x10 + 10x4 + 4x4
I've found some marginal utility in instantly knowing, say, 17 x 19 without having to parse it as 17 x 10 + 9 x 10 + 9 x 7. But only very marginal.
DeleteActually, there's a neat trick a great math teacher taught me in 5th grade: if you know the squares, then it's very easy to calculate the symmetric pairs around that square, since you only need to subtract the squared difference. So in your example:
Delete18^2 = 324
17*19 = 18^2 - 1^2 = 323
16*20 = 18^2 - 2^2 = 320
15*21 = 18^2 - 3^2 = 315
... and so on
DavidE, with the talk of squares I came here to mention that little tidbit, which might be my favorite math trick. It expands the usefulness of knowing your squares, and occasionally allows for an astonishingly fast calculation. "44 times 56? That's 36 less than 2,500." I don't get the chance to use it much, but it's fun when it comes up.
DeleteI have long wished that game designers made more use of real-world knowledge rather than just making up all of the mechanical details. To some extent fun tends to trump realism, but as you said, RPGs could easily incorporate aspects of real math, geography, botany, metallurgy, or other fields while also offering a fun interactive experience. The best game I ever played along these lines was a non-violent crafting MMORPG called A Tale in the Desert, set in ancient Egypt. I learned several real (albeit mostly useless) things about Egyptian geography, mud-brick construction, pottery, ore smelting, paper-making, plant identification, fishing, genome modification, puzzle design, and project management from playing it. Many trades were gamified with puzzle mechanics, but certain aspects were realistic. It was an RPG because passing certain trials would increase your level, which allowed you to carry more, use more skills, and attempt more trials. Grinding took the form or producing goods, some of which had their own improvable skills and some used real mental skills to solve their puzzle mechanics. Cooperative projects requiring large quantities of goods regionally unlocked more research, which allowed the use of more technology and more efficient tools and structures. I would love to see these sorts of mechanics in other settings or contexts.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's often baffled me why this almost never happens. Players can memorize megabytes of useless information while playing games. They know the names of all the Pokemon, they know all the locations that are good spawns in their MMORPG, they know all the factions and leaders in Civilization. Why couldn't these be changed to actual useful information instead of a bunch of made-up nonsense? Kids would involuntarily memorize every kind of tree and its leaves, all the migratory waterfowl and feather types, and the entire periodic table and atomic numbers. I just don't get why this has never happened.
DeleteI learned more than I would admit playing Europa Universalis, called by my S.O. "Encyclopedia Universalis" :)
DeleteAs for educational "walks like a RPG, quacks like a RPG but not RPG", there is the French Thomson Mo-6 Graal in 1986.
The pitch is "In this Ultima-like, become a knight by increasing various stats from "Strength" to "Courtoisy" by slaying bandits, playing Morgane memory mini-games, putting the stained glasses of the Chartres cathedral in correct order and answering tricky questions asked by dungeon-jesters like "From which port did William of Normandy embark for his invasion of England in 1066""
Game can be found here :
http://dcmoto.free.fr/programmes/graal/index.html
I think civilization is a surprising example to single out for ‘useless information’. That’s probably my example for ‘game which I learned the most from’.
DeleteAs TWS mentions, kids these days growing up with Paradox’s grand strategy titles will learn a lot about the middle ages, age of discovery, industrial revolution or WW2.
From what I remember of educational games we played back in the elementary school computer lab in the 80's, I think this one would have went over well. It's cute, doesn't wear out it's welcome, and would have been a fair challenge to kids learning their multiplication tables.
ReplyDelete> educational games we played back in the elementary school computer lab in the 80's
DeleteYes -- after this one, we're all on tenterhooks for the CRPGAddict's take on Number Munchers. (j/k)
He could give Frog Fractions a try.
DeleteWhat about Oregon Trail?
DeleteAlso not CRPGs, but obligatory mention of the Dr. Brain games, the first of which was created by Corey Cole (btw, seems a while since he commented here, hope everything is OK).
DeleteJimmy Maher ('The Digital Antiquarian') has an article on it, as well as on e.g. Edu-Ware, Carmen SanDiego and, of course, The Oregon Trail (that last one is covered in five parts which were among the first blog posts). All can be found on his blog (linked in the sidebar) through those respective keywords.
"I've always been annoyed that they stopped us at 12 in grade school. (I didn't know until playing this game that 12 was the standard in the U.K., too.)"
ReplyDeleteIs there any logic to that limit? Something to do with Imperial measurements per chance? From a metric perspective, it seems arbitrary af - you either stop at 10x10 (arguably, the only ones really necessary to memorise) or go to 20x20.
Probably it's a combination of a few things: (1) a "gross" is a unit of 12x12 = 144, i.e. a dozen dozens; (2) 12 is all over the place in Western systems -- months, hours, inches, musical notes and keys in the even-tempered chromatic scale (enharmonics aside); (3) 12 has a bunch of factors and its multiples come up constantly whenever you're dealing with symmetrical groups, whereas 13 is a prime and doesn't show up much.
DeleteBasically, calculations with 12 are constantly useful in daily life, calculations with 13 are seldom relevant.
"calculations with 13 are seldom relevant" - though weeks in a year and letters in the alphabet are two obvious counterexamples. On the other hand, 13 is also "unlucky".
DeleteBTW I think I remember seeing a 13x13 table at some point in my schooling. Certainly I remember learning that 13x13=169, but then again I don't remember learning any of its multiples and have to stop and calculate for anything between 13x8 and 13x12, inclusive.
DeleteAlso my post duplicates some of Aperama's but such is life.
In Australia, by the 80's at least we only learnt up to 10x10. My theory on 12x12 is that it was tied to money with 12 pennies in a pound and spread from there.
Delete12 is all over the place in Western systems -- months, hours, inches, musical notes and keys in the even-tempered chromatic scale (enharmonics aside) - I can't imagine a situation where instantly multiplying any of those (but only by up to 12) could be useful.
DeleteI mean, you're learning the results in the decimal base anyway, you'd still have to convert them to the duodecimal base for these larget quantities (pound, foot, gross).
DeleteIt's more that, if you're going to define an arbitrary stopping point for some set of small positive integers, 12 has more resonance than any number that comes afterward (since we do a lot of things in groups of 12), so it's probably going to "feel right" to a lot of people (though not programmers!). That's all I was saying.
DeleteBTW plenty of people measuring things in the imperial system multiply relatively small numbers by 12 all the time. Feet to inches is one obvious example.
12 is a more round number than 10. It divides evenly into more numbers and isn't based on the number of fingers we have.
DeleteFight me, metric weenies.
the Babylonians used base 12 math, and it's from that legacy that we get a bunch of the underlying stuff for trigonometry.
DeleteThere is Japanese Dungeon and maybe more in the same vein on Android/ios. It involves no map movement or any other firm of interaction if I remember correctly so not sure if something like this still counts. You basically attack enemy after enemy by choosing the right transcription for the displayed Japanese syllable and earn exp and money with each defeated enemy.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to write form of interaction but my tablet chose to auto correct to firm...
DeleteI'd rate that game as difficult because I suck at math. Without a calculator it's gonna take me half a minute to figure out 8x8.
ReplyDeleteI never expected to hear "this is not a flex" for primary/elementary school math being known, but I guess it technically could work.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that going up to 13 would make sense myself - it's one prime number further in, where 14s are refundant to skipping every second 7 etc. My hunch is that 12 is an important number in another medium taught at a similar age (time) not to mention imperial measurements (12 inches to a foot). There again it could just be the more practical reasoning of "creating a table with an even number fits better on a poster" in line with "said poster needs to be legible from afar".
It's foreshadowing of the actual flex: memorizing all the multiples up to 20x20.
DeleteAt least the ~1990 "3.0" version of "Mastery Arithmetic Games" contains the "Mathland" game, which why not an RPG (the only statistics are gold and food), is visually an Ultima clone, which amused me to no end when I tracked it down from childhood memories a few years ago. https://www.mobygames.com/game/163462/mastery-arithmetic-games/screenshots/apple2/1053886/
ReplyDelete"Medieval Times" had me rolling. That's a good one!
ReplyDeleteIt's a marvellous pun
DeleteThat and the dry comment about the effect of the different weapons make this entry one of the most hilarious in the last months.
Delete(a rare example of a Goofy Cartoonish Little Man in a Western game)
ReplyDeleteI feel like this is a statement as silly as if you said 2+2=19.
As to the whole no RPG educational games, I think it's hard to design such a game in a way that would combine those two elements well. In the case of the developer explicitly trying to create an educational RPG. For instance, there are a lot of RPGs around where you attempt to learn the kana, which basically just means matching what the symbols are. What advantage does it have over, say, something that just has you match the two? Nothing, you haven't really made learning better, you've made games worse.
As basically no group of professionals is ever going to touch this sort of thing, you can instead expect it from the indie sphere, and I think it's a very rare talent that could pull it off. Education and video game design seem to me to be two tracks where people think they know a lot more than they really do the most. And you'd kind of be asking that rare talent to do this for basically no reward, because adult game learning seems to be a niche thing. Most people don't even know what Anki is, which is one of the most useful tools when it comes to learning...
Of course, there's also the games where the learning is sort of incidental to the actual game, like Pirates and Darklands. Especially given how much media can color people's perceptions of a given period in time. Or something like Diablo, where you have to figure out if the 8-16 damage sword with 116% fire damage is better than the 6-14 damage sword with 144% fire damage. And of course, playing games created in other languages helps with acquisition of language, just ask how many people learned the language thanks to Baldur's Gate or something.
There are learning tools like duolingo that use RPG-like reward systems for something like learning new languages. But they can hardly be called games, certainly not RPGs in the sense of this blog, and as far as I know there's no scientific consensus for how effective these tools really are.
DeleteAll it is is putting real-world information in games instead of the made-up stuff. Not an explicit educational game "the troll asks, what is this character!" but more of a game where the real information is there and players must pick it up to progress in the game. One example, a game world that isn't a made-up map, but a map of some real world location. Then, if you go there, you already know the place. Or one of your quests is to return one of every kind of feather to the king, and in doing so you learn all of the birds on your continent. That kind of thing.
DeleteAs for Anki, don't get me started. It's not spaced repetition software, it's more of a DIY web development kit that helps you do rote memorization. If you want to study anything, you're just expected to spend a couple of weeks learning how Anki works so you can design your own cards.
My son plays an educational game online call "Prodigy Math"
DeleteThis is kind of an MMORPG with sort of final-fantasy style fights. You want to pick attacks that are going to be successful against an enemy like using a fire attack against an ice enemy. But to _do_ the attack you have to answer a math problem. The problems go up in difficulty as you solve them (and as a parent I can see which problems gave issue)
The current problems for instance often say something like:
"You have a rectangle made up of 2 squares, each of which has a perimeter of 52. What's the area of the rectangle?"
Eventually these become rote, but he had a lot of learning about remembering which was perimeter and which was area and how to break it up.
(you get 3 chances to answer each problem, and you can get help to remember how to work the problem, so usually I don't have to explain how to best solve them - the square/rectangle one stands out because I printed out practice sheets for him so he'd get used to them)
Of course, this is a long way in the future from 1988.
This is mostly just stuff I've picked up from people who use it, but I've never heard of anyone really learning a language from Duolingo, at least that alone. But it seems like more of an observation that people who use it alone aren't very dedicated towards picking up another language.
Delete(don't have anything to say about the thoughts on making games more educational or the educational game, sounds like a great idea)
I can't say I've noticed that problem with Anki, but by the time I was making my own cards I already had pre-designed cards I could just crib from anyway.
Regarding Chet's observation of action RPGs requiring manual dexterity: this is why I still feel like Diablo and its ilk are arcade games in RPG trappings. Most of my deaths are not a result of poor decision making but my inability to hit the "drink potion" hotkey fast enough.
ReplyDeleteDiablo's DPS reveal also took a lot of the fun out of the game for me. Instead of trying to think how much 12-33 + 8 electric damage gives you you simply equip, check your DPS, and try the next one. I enjoyed kingmaker a lot more, it clearly showed you how much damage you do as well as how it is calculated. I see some-one mentioned I can see the result of all rolls and am definitely trying that over the weekend.
DeleteThe list of the 11 monsters doesn't match the monsters shown on the map: "blob" and "enchanted fire" are on the list but not on the map while "wizard" is on the map but not on the list, and I suspect there should be a monster guarding the fourth key piece at the right edge of the map.
ReplyDeleteLooks too icky for me. I'd rather be stuck in a huge first level role play dungeon, first out of 99,000 than waste time on a game failure like this title.
ReplyDeleteI'm British and of about the right age to be the target audience for this, and I don't recognise any particular significance to the name Ackroyd. It's a fairly common British name, but no connections to kings or maths spring to mind.
ReplyDelete*Maybe* it's a reference to the historical novelist Peter Ackroyd, who would have been popular at the time, but that's a very wild guess.
The BBC Model B was a popular computer in British schools and had lots of educational games. I vaguely recall at least one rpg-like text adventure, but I don't remember the name or what exactly it was trying to teach, alas.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, my point is that if you're looking for educational RPGs, then perhaps the BBC B catalogue is a good place to look.
There is a little-known indie RPG from 2009 called Dark Disciple 2, which contains quite a lot of puzzles that require math to solve. Indeed, puzzles are its only strength, because everything else is pretty linear and boring. But I definitely remember trying to use Gauss method to solve a system of linear equations for one of its puzzles.
ReplyDeleteOther than that, I think the problem with including more educational elements in an RPG is that most of real-life skills are harder to teach and require more time to learn than e.g. a combat system, even a relatively complex one like D&D or Divinity: Original Sin. If the game required you to do more-or-less realistic chemistry, it would have to spend hours explaining and having the player memorizing various reactions. It's the problem of alchemy vs. real chemistry: alchemy, like most magic, works on more-or-less intuitive ideas on how the world should work. Admittedly, a lot of those ideas later became stretched waaaaay too far to explain real-life phenomen, but it kind of makes sense even to a child. Real chemistry, though? Even non-organic part takes tons of memorization just to be able to do basic stuff, and my school course completely lost me at organic (the only thing I remember is "decan propil butan", which in Russian works both as names of organic molecules AND a phrase that says "the dean drank away the butane").
It is possible, I think, to make a game that teaches e.g. chemistry, but it's hard to make it an RPG: the player will have to spend too much time on chemistry problems, and so will have little time for everything else, like exploration, combat (if any) or dialogs.
46 Okunen Monogatari: The Shinkaron was actually released on the SNES console in America as EVO: The Search for Eden. The computer version is more complex, but I'm not sure that it is translated.
ReplyDeleteThe game has you start as a lowly fish during an early prep dinosaur period of Earth's history, and you fight other creatures to survive and level up (and evolve) various parts of your body. It's implied that an Earth spirit or Gaia or similar ilk is influencing your magical evolution and mutation. Along the way, you meet friendly creatures as well that teach you educational facts. Eventually, you evolve legs and become a land beast.
The mechanics, at least in the console version, are simplistic to the point of banality, but it is made up for in atmosphere and pleasant graphics. I kind of love the game, even if it is a bit shallow as a game. It's a unique experience, and amusing to try different evolutionary directions.
The console version, at least, was produced by Enix, later of Square Enix fame. Even at the time, the reviews were like "this is weird and kind of slow, but I like it!"
Oops, typo: I meant "pre-dinosaur."
DeleteSorry to nitpick, but I have to laugh at "Enix, later of Square Enix fame" as if the creators of Dragon Quest were some little company nobody had heard of until the giant Square picked them up.
DeleteGnoman 🤣 100 percent, I agree with you. I was a huge fan of Enix growing up, everything from Dragon Quest to Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, etc.
DeleteThe truth is, though, that in America, Enix wasn't much of a presence commercially before the merger. I mean, the 16-bit Dragon Quest games never even officially made it to the SNES, and the Quintet trilogy weren't exactly best sellers stateside. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I guess I was kind of downplaying them a bit with my wording. I'm used to people not realizing that Enix was actually a separate company at one point. These people do exist, sadly.
It's like your real self is the character and your math skills are being improved instead of character stats.
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good way to put it!
DeleteThe X-Men Legends games had a mini-game within them that would give you xp and upgrade points based on how many correct answers you gave within a trivia contest. This was expanded on in the semi-sequel Marvel Ultimate Alliance to a boss fight against M.O.D.O.K. where you had to answer trivia questions to win. Obviously this was testing knowledge without too serious real world applications but I could see the mechanic traveling over to a more serious game
ReplyDeleteThe subtitle the authors included in their presentation of the game is a bit misleading, though - it seems to suggest it's a program to relieve you of the need to do the math yourself: "Let your computer take the strain of learning tables".
ReplyDeleteThey appear to have been regular contributors to British C64 magazines, dealing with educational (she) and technical aspects (he). In the previous year they already released an 'educational adventure' called Nursery Rhyme Land through the same magazine's February and March issues as type-in listing as well (it's also on GB64).
There are some general thoughts about teaching skills or facts through games / programs in that article and for the specific one they present, the text says:
"There is no direct factual learning with this adventure, but it does test a number of skills, including reading practice, nursery rhymes, mapping and using the cardinal points of the compass, problem solving and communication skills."
Aren't all RPGs educative? Then where does all this random knowledge of medieval weapons, herbs, gemstones, mythological creatures and religious concepts come from? I learned it all from RPGs! (I'm jesting but I think a well-designed RPG will teach or at least introduce to something you didn't know)
ReplyDeleteYeah, but that knowledge is useless. Who cares if I can tell a bec-de-corbin from a lucern hammer?
DeleteI mean, I can't speak for others but much of what I learned about medieval arms and armor was wrong.
DeleteRPGs like to imply the existence of neat little equipment silos like Short Sword, Broadsword, Longsword, Bastard Sword, etc. when in real life these objects tended to overlap and didn't exist on a neat continuum of quality and effectiveness.
The mythological/technical/educational knowledge base covered in RPGs is probably best seen as a gateway and motivator for later study, in which much learned in RPGs will need to be unlearned.
And they should be seen as a source of fun, of course. That's really the whole pont.
Well, true, I forgot to mention the side research it involves.
DeleteIt's from a long-bygone age of roleplaying when players were simply interested in medieval history. Try asking any player today what a ballista or portcullis or bailey is and receive a shrug. It's not that they don't know, it's that nobody cares about medieval history. If you for some bizarre reason are into that stuff, then you watch Youtube channels. Playing RPGs is not how you scratch that itch.
DeleteUnless you've studied medieval history, a safe assumption is that what you think you know about it is wrong. That's especially true if you learned it from an RPG.
DeleteWhat games rarely can do: teach you something serious about medieval life, mysticism, etcetera. What games CAN do: awaken your own interest for you to then start researching by yourself. Ultima IV did not teach me any true mantras, any buddhism or Hinduism ideas, it did not even teach me what an "avatara" of a Hindu god is. But it surely awakened my own curiosity towards all this stuff. Somewhat of the same with Norse religions and Valkyrie Profile, although there was this roguelike "Ragnarok" before that. Awakening your own curiosity - this is what games CAN do. And, maybe, teach you a kind of simplistic version of real stuff, sometimes.
DeleteFor me (the original poster) it's more like "oh this thing is interesting (then spend 3 days going into wikigoogle rabbit holes and getting the actual knowledge)" but at times all you need is to know a thing exists.
DeleteLike "oh a golem is a stone man or something" and then "ah it's a Jewish folklore concept popularized in its current form by D&D and...".
In retrospective, I should have worded the initial comment better, but I wanted it to be comedic in tone and here we are!
I'm actually very curious about anything that catches my attention, though, so technically the comment is not untrue.
@Harland Gary Gygax cares. A lot, apparently.
Delete@Buck
DeleteIt would likely be more accurate to replace "unless" with "even if" in that sentence. There's a lot of garbage (blame the Victorians) in even serious academic texts that went unquestioned for far too long. I'm not talking about absolute nonsense like "A World Lit Only By Fire" (which is almost worthwhile as a work of comedy), but genuine academic research.
Anonymous - I learned what a golem is from a book written by the aforementioned (by thekelvingreen) Peter Ackroyd: Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. Spooky.
DeleteIt's a great book, highly recommended.
I wouldn't even call this educational. It doesn't teach you anything; it just expects you to know what the answer is. And if you get a question wrong, it won't tell you how to obtain the correct result. I have "Math Blaster" for the Super Nintendo, and it suffers from the same problem.
ReplyDeleteIt's charming that this mediocre-at-best game has generated more discussion than the latest Ultima or Ambermoon posts. Everyone has an opinion on math and education...
ReplyDeleteYou make me remember series of games I played on Steam - "Learn Hiragana to survive", "Learn Katakana to survive", "Learn Kanji to survive". All three are built on RPG Maker engine. All three have something like basic RPG mechanics with a twist: all the enemies in the Fantasy Kingdom we're in are some kinds of demons summoned by a Japanese Sorceror, and japanese syllables or words are kinda their "names", and you cannot defeat a demon without first NAMING them. So you have to learn to read in Japanese to call out their names and make them defeatable. Granted, it works better with hieroglyphic language like Japanese.
ReplyDeleteA type-in game! Wow, those are pretty rare on this blog.
ReplyDeleteI remember back in the day type-in games were so mysterious. You could try to guess what they would do by reading the code, but that was always a crapshoot. You'd always get lost about halfway through and only have a rough idea for what the game would ever do if it was run. Oh, actually type it in and find out? Assuming you even had the computer - what if it's for C-64 and all you have is a VIC-20? Well, good luck completing it all with no errors. Program-halting errors popped out of the woodwork and a kid with a type-in game isn't going to be able to debug that.
There's a youtube channel where all he does is type in games, show the listing, and play them. Every video is a couple of minutes and some even show which magazine or book they came from. It's interesting trying to puzzle out what the game will do from the program listing. The games range all the way from "meh" to "a good base for making a better game" to "this is actually pretty good for being a type-in game." TheAirshark is the name of the channel (needs more subs!) and a good representative of the genre is Zone Defender which is pretty simple but does it well with good graphics. Another is Gobbler, an interesting take on Pac-Man. No maze walls, instead there are empty spaces, and you must eat as many dots as possible while staying on the trails of dots.
Yeah, it was when I first learned my lesson that BASIC! = BASIC because each micro basically (sorry) has its own variant and my knowledge as a kid wasn't good enough to say adapt from CPM to C64 Basic. Although I tried.
DeleteDitto. I remember trying to enter a type-in BASIC program for some early Apple machine into our PC and becoming quite confused (not to say frustrated) that the program wouldn't run.
DeleteI tried a type-in program exactly once. I think it was supposed to be a 'Christmas Tree Construction Kit,' and it was 6 pages (12 columns) of dense code. I got about halfway through it, realized that I had been typing out the C64 code instead of the Apple II, and decided to just go read a book.
DeleteAnd this is why I grew up to be an English professor instead of a programmer.
There's a nominally educational christian console rpg from the early 90s. It is not very good.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_Warfare_(video_game)
The "market it as something else" educational software paradigm applies. _Speedway Math_ by MECC on the Apple II is full of (greatish, for the time) graphics of cars and parts and tooling - and the way it works is racing (or rather pretending to race) by answering arithmetic problems. Some of the other MECC games actually had good minigames as rewards to for doing the drill stuff- built in. All had neat educational goals - one involved "thinking outside the box". (I remember a capture the thief game that required you to realize you had to risk your player to capture the thief - you couldn't do it by playing safe.) Then there are the outright hybrids, like the "Munchers" series. So yes, why not more RPG-educational titles? I think it was simply that RPGs then were pretty niche, though I am unsure.
ReplyDeleteEpistory and Nanotale are CRPGs based on typing skill. Bookworm Adventures is one based forming words from jumbles of letters, kinda like Scrabble. If anyone else has more examples, please share them! I like this subgenre of CRPGs.
ReplyDeleteI've got one for you! Word Realms, by Asymmetric, the folks behind West of Loathing and other Loathing games. You fight by making words out of scrabble tiles. Equipment boosts letters or combinations. Potions give you extra letters.
DeleteThanks for the recommendation! I'll take a look at it.
DeleteI'm sick also :( It started on Friday
ReplyDeleteChat, hope you are doing fine! I think it's a good idea if you prefer to stay away from the blog to preserve your energies, I just wanted to wish you a full recovery!
ReplyDeleteI got over the flu, but only just in time for the last week of classes. I did get some Ambermoon playing done last night, but it might be a little while longer for the next entry. The good news is that my summer break starts soon, and I can hopefully make up some of the volume then.
DeleteGlad to hear you're on the mend. Just one last push until the summer... almost there!
DeleteGood you´re improving Chet.
ReplyDeleteI have been working remotely since the first lockdowns in March 2020, and since then have gotten sick exactly once - came down with COVID on a trip to DC. But now my employer has required us to come back in to the office three days a week and I have a feeling my healthy streak is coming to an end.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the next gaming entry going to be?
ReplyDeleteHoly crap an eight-day flu? That's not COVID? What's going around on the east coast that I need to watch out for?
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I told she-who-is-now-my-wife that I'd had a cold that lasted a week, you know, a normal cold length. No, not the flu, I told her when she boggled, just a cold.
DeleteThen I moved to the suburbs of Florida, where she lives, and since then I've had a few colds and they were all so wimpy compared to the ones I was used to.
One of those things people don't mention varying by state and--primarily, I suspect--by whether you live in a city.
I spentmy entire childhood thinking being sick all the time was normal until I moved to a state where my allergies didn't affect me
DeleteI think we're also socially pressured to minimize how long we're "actually sick". You might be having symptoms for 7+ days but the first few you're "fighting something off", "feeling under the weather". Then you're sick enough to justify taking time off from work. Then after a day or two your boss is wondering when you'll be back and you convince yourself you're "not 100% but probably not contagious, right?"
DeleteAnd I think that results in a self-reinforcing belief that the "normal" length of a respiratory illness is 1-2 days, and that anything longer is remarkable.
This is one way in which it's great to work for a university. They want me to stay home from the first sniffle.
DeleteTake however many days are needed until your max HP recovers!
ReplyDeleteCaverns of Xaskazern II
ReplyDeleteIt's also a good occasion to rediscover old posts. Many hidden pearls lie there!
ReplyDelete