Game 502: Scepter of Kzirgla (1982) and Two BRIEFs: Arena (1988), and Explore (1980)

Sometimes it feels like the Color Computer wasn't a platform so much as a cult.

        

Scepter of Kzirgla

United States

Independently developed

Released 1982 for TRS-80 Color Computer by Rainbow Connection Software; 1983 for TI-99 by Kuhl Software

Date Started: 9 February 2024

Date Ended: 9 February 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: User-definable from 1-9; difficulty of 5 is easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 12

Ranking at time of posting: 57/508 (11%)

    

This is a pretty bad game, even by the standards of 1982, even by the standards of Color Computer owners. "At last," the manual boasts, "a real-time graphics adventure game with arcade sound!" The thought of any player firing up this game, looking at the blocky, low-resolution graphics, listening to a few dits and bloops, and saying "at last!" is too depressing to contemplate.

   

The Kingdom of Kzigla used to be ruled in peace by kings who drove away evil with a magic scepter. But the usual Evil Wizard used stealth to steal the scepter and usurp the throne. The scepter wouldn't obey him, so he tossed it into the bottom level of a 13-level dungeon, and it's up to you to retrieve it.

   

Character creation has you choose from wizard or warrior classes. The game then randomly divides 30 points between hit points and strength, which you can accept or reject. You then set a difficulty level from 1 to 9. With no other choices (even a name), the game begins.

       

"Character creation."

     

Each level is 9 x 30, the walls and treasure locations randomly generated, with the entrance on the left and the exit on the right. Squares that could either contain traps or treasures are annotated in light blue or maybe purple. Your character is a dark blue upside-down "L" while enemies are red backwards "Ls." Your job is to cross from left to right, fighting or avoiding enemies and gathering treasure if you feel like it. 

   

Enemies don't show up until you're next to them. I don't think the game seeds them; there's just a random chance with every action for an enemy appearing in an adjacent square. Sometimes they appear behind you. Sometimes two or more appear at once on opposite sides. There are 10 enemy types: zubus, ildors, gremlins, elves, dwarfs, lizard-men, berzerkers [sic], zombies, skeletons, and kcash-oidars (an anagram for "Radio Shack"). I only typed those all out because there's so little to say about the game. The enemies aren't even any different. They all hit for the same amount on their respective levels; they all die in one hit; they all provide you with the same boost in hit points when you kill them.

     

Fighting against a dwarf or something.

     

Combat has you just attack, choose a direction, and choose a weapon from sword, axe, mace, dagger, club, magic pendant, or bare hands. You start the game with a few of these and find others in treasure chests or on enemy corpses. A single treasure chest might give three or four weapons. There's a chance that they'll break when you use them, but you generally have plenty. Wizards can't use anything but magic pendants and daggers; warriors can't use the pendants. If you use a pendant, you get the choice of two spells, one of which blasts everything around you and the other of which blasts everything in a straight line.

       

The wizard gets to choose from a couple of spells but is physically weak.

       

You can try to bribe enemies to go away--the only use for treasure--but it  never worked for me. I didn't try it often.

   

Maybe I'm just cheap.

     

As you move down the levels, you gain both hit points and strength, but even with plenty of both, you can die in a couple of hits from monsters. There's a strong case to be made for just avoiding all treasures (since they carry a 40-50% chance of being a trap), running away from all monsters, and just heading for the doors. You can find flying carpets that speed up this process, allowing you to travel across open areas without triggering encounters or traps in one move (you stop at walls). For traps, I only ever found poison gas (reduces strength) and trap doors, which dump you to the next level. In fact, my winning fighter transitioned levels through trap doors far more often than by making it to the actual exit. I found that wizards seem to take damage faster and often die from trap doors.

      

Getting a free ride to Level 10.

     

As you go down, there are increased chances that the exit will be blocked by one or more walls, and you have to attack the walls to get through. It's an annoying addition to the game since it takes a few hits to destroy a wall and you can "miss" while attempting it. 

       

Beating at the wall with a mace.

     

I died twice at low difficulty levels while I figured out how the game worked. After that, I managed to win with a fighter on difficulty Level 5 in about 25 minutes. You win as soon as you go down the stairs from Level 12 to Level 13. "You did it!" the game congratulates, then shows a picture of a scepter, which I didn't manage to capture. "You have recovered the powerful scepter and taken the kingdom back from the evil magician! All hail the king!" The game then shows you final statistics but doesn't try to aggregate them into any kind of master score, beating which would be the only reason to play another game.

            

Not just some of you, now. All.

      

It gets a 12 on the GIMLET. The game was published by Rainbow Connection Software out of Rochester, Minnesota, which sold a number of low budget titles by mail in plastic bags. "Gaming After 40" blogger Dale Dobson identifies the author as Paul Penrose, but I'm not sure how he knows that, as I can't find the name anywhere in the documentation. In his coverage, El Explorador de RPG thought that the author drew inspiration from Robert Clardy's Dungeon Campaign (1978), but I don't see the resemblance except for the low-res graphics. A reviewer in the May 1982 Rainbow thought it was "a good buy" and in particular that "the fighting is the best . . . real-time and pretty authentic." God help us.

      

That guy is about to cut his own hand pretty badly.

      

A 1983 sequel called Conquest of Kzirgla cannot be found and has been added to the Missing and Mysteries page.  It supposedly tells the second half of the story, elided in the endgame text for Scepter, in which the hero uses the artifact to defeat the evil wizard, named "Kolobarr."

The game was reviewed in the April 1983 Rainbow and was sold (along with Scepter) in multiple issues, so it definitely existed. The review mentions that its graphics, in contrast to Scepter, are high-res. The game seems to have consisted of a large maze containing the evil wizard and  his minions, who had weird names like Cellapod, Centapor, Mantoid, Jartrex, Cadaver, and Tantrite. You have to get stronger against the minions before you can take on the wizard. The description makes it sound like it had action-oriented gameplay. It also apparently had no treasure, and the reviewer found it "monotonous."

  

*****

     

           

Arena

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by Cult Games

Released 1988 for Commodore 64

Rejected for: No character development

      

Arena is another misclassification by GB64, which seems to think that any game in which a character is represented by a little icon is an RPG. It is instead a strategy game in which between two and eight wizards--all of which can be human-controlled or computer-controlled--compete in an arena for the dominance of a kingdom. 

During character creation, the players choose names, icons, and colors for the wizards and set a difficulty level. You're then presented with a list of spells to examine or choose. They include summoning spells like "Bat," "Gnome," "Wyvern," and "Crocodile," plus other defensive ("Magic Armour" ), offensive ("Fireball") and terrain or exploration ("Grass," "True Sight") spells. Each spell is aspected to an alignment: neutral, law, or chaos. The spell selection is different for each character; it may have something to do with the icon or color choice.

       

Creating a wizard.

      

The game begins in a large, walled arena. Each wizard takes turns doing several potential things during their rounds, including casting spells, moving units (in addition to any magically-summoned creatures, you start with a few armies). Some summoned allies are capable of casting their own spells. When you cast a spell, the game asks you to pick from "Reality or Fantasy?," and I'm not sure what that means. I had trouble with the control scheme and am thus not sure that I explored every available option.

        

The armies of two wizards near each other and clash.

       

The game continues until one wizard remains. He is the victor. 

      

It was on "easy" mode.

     

Each wizard does seem to have different strengths and weaknesses in different spellcasting powers, and the summoned characters have attributes like attack, defense, ability, and magic--but these are fixed from the beginning of the game. After a winning battle, the winning wizard is discarded. He does not level up and continue on new adventures. 

     

A bat's "attributes."

        

The game strikes me as likely based on Julian Gollop's Chaos (1985), whose 1990 sequel, Lords of Chaos, had more RPG elements. Here, you don't even have a persistent character.

    

This was an odd fantasy outing for Hertfordshire-based Cult Games, whose 1986-1991 titles are almost entirely about football. (We previously saw them with SoccerStar.) None of the individuals in the credits for Arena, including programmer Tony Gould, show up in other Cult titles, so I suspect they just published it rather than developing it.

****

     

       

Explore

Canada

Independently developed; disseminated through the Toronto PET Users Group

Released 1980 for Commodore PET

Rejected for: No character development.

    

El Explorador de RPG already covered this one, and I can tell from his coverage that the game doesn't meet my definitions of an RPG. It's an adventure game in which the player explores a fixed dungeon, collecting treasures, and fighting monsters from a fixed pool of vitality. He does not improve during the short, small, all-text game.