Game 511: The Red Crystal (1993)

    

The Red Crystal

United States

Wild Card Software (developer); Quantum Quality Productions (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 11 April 2024

     

I like to start every new game as unbiased as possible, so I try to avoid learning anything about it from external sources. There have been times that my reactions to universally-adored games have been negative, and there have been times that the opposite has occurred. I feel that either scenario is more likely to happen if I go into the game with a blank slate.

    

I did that with The Red Crystal, but a few hours into it, when I allowed myself to look at the game's Wikipedia summary and saw that Computer Gaming World had rated it the 22nd worst game ever made, I thought, "Yep, that tracks." CGW has been monstrously wrong before--that same list includes Disciples of Steel!--but when I saw that Crystal's chief designer had come from Paragon Software--which never really understood RPGs--and had previously been a lead programmer for MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990), it was all the explanation I needed.

     

You know this guy is evil because he wears a skull on his belt.

     

That designer is Charles Griffith. In addition to MegaTraveller, he programmed some of Paragon's Marvel titles, such as The Punisher (1990) and X-Men II (1991). He was briefly at MicroProse, which bought Paragon, but then seems to have staked out on his own. I suspect that Wild Card Software was his own label. (The company's name comes up briefly in the title screen sequence but is not found on any of the game's documentation.) His publisher, QQP, was a well-known maker of wargames, and according to CGW, they should have stuck to that category. Griffith's LinkedIn profile proudly mentions his time at Paragon/MicroProse and his later work for Acclaim and Stargate Interactive, but it skips over Wild Card and Crystal, which is probably another bad sign.

           

He must be a Targaryen.

       

The game takes place in the empire of Blackmoore, which consists of seven kingdoms which peacefully coexisted for 3000 years. Then some troublemaker named Lexor came out of nowhere, raised an army of the dead, and conquered the empire. He gave each of the seven kingdom's castles to one of his chief lieutenants ("the seven worst tyrants the world has ever known") and tasked them with guarding the Seven Secrets of Life. (Most sites give The Seven Secrets of Life as a subtitle. It appears on the box cover but not anywhere in the manual or title screen, and my policy is always two out of three.) Your goal is, of course, to retrieve them and use them somehow to destroy Lexor. Involved in some nebulous way are red crystals, which have weird magical properties, including foresight and telepathy.

    

Character creation begins by choosing a portrait from a number of cartoonish options that would look perfect in a comic book game, although they don't seem to have been adapted from X-Men II. I am grateful that they offered some helmeted options in case you just want to imagine your own character under the helmet. You can also choose a crest from among six options: a chalice, an eye, a mouth with a wagging tongue that looks a little disgusting, a skull, a fist, and a lightning bolt.

     

Some of the character portraits. The two women look like the same woman from different angles.

        

You then enter a name and choose from five classes: barbarian, knight, lord, sorcerer, and thief. Barbarians are supposed to be all physical offense, knights slightly less so. Lords are supposed to be wealthy, so they can bribe their way out of more combats, but I wonder how well this really works in reality (see below). Same goes for the supposed stealth and trap-defying abilities of thieves. Sorcerers are masters of magic, so they start weak but get stronger as they master their powers.

   

The game's attributes are strength, intelligence (for spells), ability (to disarm traps and such), armor, damage, resistance (to spells), stamina (hit points), and zetos (money). The manual tells you nothing about what the maximums are, so you have to reroll a lot to feel it out for each potential character. I tried a lot of rolls and came up with the following chart:

        

     

"Armor" and "Damage" are odd because they have initial values, but these are changed by the weapons and armor you later equip. Most games make innate damage a function of strength and innate armor as a function of dexterity or what this game calls "ability."

   

This was a pretty solid set of statistics given the maximums above.

     

The game begins on an outdoor map that seems to depict a desert environment. A smaller-scale map to the right (by default, unless you have a companion) shows the entire kingdom, including the seven castles and various towns. The character icon is represented by a sword. NPCs move around the map at the same time, but I find they never have anything interesting to say. Merchants never offer to sell anything and bounty hunters are never looking for you, so they don't engage in combat. It's really a wasted mechanic.

       

I'm so glad we had this encounter.

      

In most RPGs, you head for the town to buy some equipment before you start seriously adventuring, but here that's not possible because you begin with so little cash. (I'm not sure if I can bring myself to use the word "zetos.") So you might as well go right to one of the seven castles. However, for later reference, towns have weapon and armor shops, oracles who provide crystals and healing, wizards who sell spells and potions, wandering NPCs as useless as the ones in the outdoor map, NPCs in houses who sometimes give side quests, and courthouses where you can literally buy the town and I guess start collecting its tax revenue. 

      

Exploring the wasteland, I come upon a castle and its town.

       

The seven castles are all near towns. When you enter, you get a qualitative assessment of how tough the enemies are going to be in the castle compared to your current level. 

       

I guess this one shouldn't be too hard.

     

As you explore the castles, you run into enemies--bestial, undead, humanoid, and other. There are only 15 monsters in the game, but they can exist at different power levels depending on what castle they're in. I think their color has something to do with it. You can try to avoid them, but they tend to swarm you, and it's better to just deal with them even though they (somewhat slowly) respawn.

       

The death screen. I don't understand: how did Lexor's guards fail in my mission?

        

Combat is the game's big failing. Aspects of it probably sounded good to someone. You're taken to a separate "arena" screen for each combat. You and the enemy can run around the screen or stand still and swing at each other. There are theoretically nine types of attacks that you can choose from: three low, three medium, three high. Each enemy is particularly susceptible to one of the nine types of attacks, so you have to experiment a bit to figure out which one applies to that enemy. When you land on it, the difference is obvious. Your attacks go from 1-2 damage per hit to 5-10 or more. Then you have to annotate or remember the best setting for each enemy.

       

Fighting an "orb," which is a beholder with hair. I clearly need to adjust my attack.

        

This all sounds okay, but two more important principles govern combat:

    

• Even if you have your attacks set to the idea setting, you can't just stand next to an enemy swinging away. You'll die after a couple of combats, if not the first.
• Your reach is always greater than the enemy's. (This might not be true with daggers, which I haven't tried.) None of the enemies have missile weapons. Even spellcasters have to get up close to you.

   

In practice, these factors create a combat system in which you wait for the enemy to approach, swing a couple of times as he gets close, then run away before he can hit you. Then you find a new position and do it again. It's tedious and exhausting. One level was enough for me, and I've got dozens of them. Some enemies have over 100 hit points and only take 3 or 4 per hit at best.

  

With a little practice, it's not hard to avoid all enemy attacks. Since you can't afford to stand still and get hit by any enemy, there's functionally no difference between the easy ones and the hard ones except how long combat will take.  

       

That's more like it.

       

Every encounter with an enemy gives you a chance to bribe before you fight. The manual suggests that this is the lord's primary way of dealing with enemies. I don't know how this works. Maybe you get experience for successful bribes. I'm not sure how you get the money to bribe in the first place if you don't fight, but maybe there's a way to do it by running around, collecting treasures from chests until you have enough to buy a town, then bribing off that town's income. Or multiple towns. It would be a unique approach to gameplay if it were possible, but I can't think it would be all that exciting.

   

I leveled up a couple of times as I killed enemies. The experience point statistic is hidden, but it clearly exists. Levels increase maximum stamina and, according to the manual, accuracy.

        

Only in CRPGs does getting struck by lightning leave you stronger. Maybe the armor acts like a Faraday Cage.

        

As I explored the castles, I found additional items to use and wear, including armor, gauntlets, boots, potions, and food. Potions are color-coded, and the manual has nothing to say about them. Food restores stamina. Some slain enemies deliver money. I also found a couple of things that sound like quest items, including "Hunwell's Skull" and a "Lost Crown."

    

Finding a chest in the dungeon. Chests are often empty.

       

Castles have multiple levels with lots of stairways up and down and hidden doors. I had hoped to find the first Secret of Life for this entry, but I started over once (when I realized I'd rolled lousy statistics for the first character) and the castles are large. They have multiple levels, and the game doesn't remember the map once you've left a level, so it's very hard to systematically explore without going in loops. Then, it turns out that some encounters on higher levels are with multiple enemies at once, which makes the entire game less like a CRPG and more like a game of Pac-Man where you spend the entire thing running around trying to avoid getting touched by your foes.

        

It would be nice if they'd given me a bigger screen.

       

The game does have one innovation I haven't covered and probably can't: cooperative multiplayer. Supposedly, you could get a friend to dial in via modem and join the quest, with the second player taking up the spaces on the right hand side of the screen. I haven't been able to figure out how to replicate that--and I couldn't do much with it even if I did--but it is something that few other games of the era were offering. If only it was offered in the service of a game with better combat mechanics.

     

Time so far: 3 hours

 

****

     

I've made an update to the last entry for Tygus Horx based on some information I got from the author. I still couldn't finish the game, but from his notes, we know what the ending should have looked like.