Whale's Voyage: From Hell's Heart I Stab at Thee

This game has simply award-winning NPC interaction.

       

My crew ended the last session rich, fully equipped, and in possession of that damned heart we'd been trying to get rid of since the first mission. We had been instructed by an unknown party to return to Lapis and meet someone at a pair of coordinates.

   

For the first time in about 25 voyages, I was not attacked by pirates on the way to Lapis. Perhaps killing one of them scared the rest of them away. I launched the glider and flew to the indicated coordinates, at which point a button appeared on my toolbar that said "Beam to Mine." I'm curious what happens to your glider when you just beam off it. I guess it returns to the ship automatically. 

     

Skimming across the landscape in my glider.

      

The mine was a small map. Other than our contact, we met only one NPC, a miner named Gryx Gwyn who said he was mining for titanium, but then after barely any prompting let it slip that he was actually looking for gold. 

     

Our contact had the unfortunate name of Jenns Nippel. He was standing next to some sort of computer, which he said was a device that allowed him to bug all of the phones on Lapis. When prompted for other information, he referred us to a paragraph in the game manual. It's in an appendix, and it's the only one, so this won't become a regular thing.

          

I dare you to introduce yourself to Ben Affleck.

        

I guess I won't reprint all the dialogue--it's just a smidge too long--but in summary, Nippel said that he's an agent of a resistance group seeking to overthrow the government. "We live in a democracy," he says, "but in reality it's more like a dictatorship." His evidence for this is, alas, a bit thin. First: "Where else would you find a complete absence of political parties?" Why would anyone think that political parties are necessary to democracy? A democracy with no political parties was George Washington's dream and mine. Dictatorships have one party, not no parties. Second: opinions that differ from the government's are suppressed by the incompetence of a massive bureaucracy. Unfortunate, but not really a sign of a "dictatorship." I'd really like some more evidence. Are there elections? Is there any reason to think they're not fair? Is habeas corpus still around? That kind of thing.

      

See, it's this kind of thing I worry about in a dictatorship.

             

The heart, meanwhile, "is for an important man who has been very active in support of our organization." But the Secret Service has been trying to block the man from getting it. We gave it to Nippel for $100,000, which is pocket change to us now. "I have got another well-paid job for you," he then said. He wanted us to escort a ship to Nedax for $10,000 and some fuel, basically as much as we can make selling a single ton of perfume. But the game doesn't let you say no, so I guess we're in. Down with the bureaucrats and their paperwork in triplicate!

        

Back on the Whale, we got a phone call from Commander Tenz on the ship we were supposed to escort. We set a course for Nedax. Sure enough, on the way, the ship was attacked and Tenz put out a mayday.

        

       

The resulting battle was with six Federation ships, four coming in from the left and two from the right. I'm proud to say I won the battle on my first try, but my hits got down to 2 before I did. The trick was to make them come to me and save most of my movement points for firing. Some of them had longer ranges than I did, though, which was hard to gauge. Ultimately, I destroyed the two on the right and then zipped back and got the four on the left. I assume we're the most wanted people in the galaxy now, having committed multiple terrorist acts for $10,000.

       

Destroying the last three ships.

       

Commander Tenz called to thank us and said to meet someone named Kevin Grove on Nedax. 

    

Nedax is almost entirely covered with water. People live in small settlements built on the sea floor. The default city is called Aqua, another small enough area that there's no point mapping. We found a store and bought an infra-red scanner for no reason than I didn't already have one. The shop also sold what seemed like more advanced weapons, including a "plasmagun" and a flame thrower, but I decided to continue to see how far I could get with my machete.

        

That's not "growing up." That's just "getting bigger."

      

I found Kevin Grove wandering around somewhere, and he said that the pirates wanted to join the revolution. Their leader, Sam van Varn, wanted to meet a resistance agent, and somehow that's going to be us, despite the fact that we just heard about the organization yesterday. He gave us coordinates, which I assumed were on the same planet.

   

We beamed back to the ship, launched the glider, went to the coordinates, and found a city called Necth. We beamed in. Almost immediately, we got attacked by a guy in a spacesuit--a federation soldier. Like all of the game's battles, it was over in about three seconds with all party members dead. Maybe one of the ships on one of the other planets sells armor. Fortunately, the city had one of those places where you can pay for healing, and I had plenty of money, so I just had to keep at least one character alive and rush there after every battle. The planet wouldn't let us beam up until all the enemies were dead.

       

Every combat in this game ends this way the first time.

        

Complicating things, I had Mapple pick up one of the soldier's dropped plasmagun just to check it out. This apparently put him over his encumbrance limit, which the game doesn't bother to tell you. The game's solution to overencumbrance is to have the character start taking damage, with no warning, until he dies. Since I was getting attacked on the planet anyway, I didn't realize that I was also taking damage from another source. I had to resurrect Mapple about eight times.

Elsewhere, an NPC named Hermes Rue told us about an alien ship seen beyond Inoid. "The ship is visible on every map but nobody realizes it." Later, on the ship, we looked at the map, and indeed, you can move the cursor past Inoid to an object called Grfdfvxlts.

        

We knew there were aliens, right? Otherwise, what are those squid things during character creation?

      

In the northern part of town was a tavern, where the bartender said he ran out of drinks.

         

You know how many Bourbon Street bartenders have tried that ruse on me?

        

He also said that an hour ago, some Federation officers had entered and tried to arrest a man sitting at the table behind us, but he had escaped. The only thing on the table was an ashtray, but it had a number etched into its surface.  

     

If there's a highlight of this game, it's examining objects.

          

Back on the Whale, we called the number. The voice on the other end, Sam van Varn, recapped that he had to flee, but he saw us fighting federation soldiers, so he knew he could trust us. A Mr. Wostoc had told him to go meet Jenns Nippel on Lapis, He said he'd wait for us there.

   

We returned to Lapis to find Nippel's body crumpled in the corner where his  machine had been. Sam van Varn, complete with an eyepatch, was standing nearby with a shotgun. When we demanded answers, he said he thought Nippel was a Secret Service spy. "We have to hush up this murder," he said. "Mr. Wostock will arrive very soon. [He] should think that the Secret Service killed Jenns." I couldn't think of any way to do this. van Varn and I just stood there staring at each other for a while and nothing happened.

     

Why did you think that?

            

Rather than look up a spoiler, I decided to see if I could pick up the next thread through open exploration. I verified that each planet has coordinates between (0,0) and (50,50). They all wrap, of course. The screen is capable of showing about 5 x 10 at a time. Findings for each planet:

     

1. Lapis. The manual describes it as hot, dry, and "extremely inhospitable." This plus a certain distance from the center of the system give it a "wild west" vibe, with lots of associated crime. The main city is Algo. I had already explored it, but I took a tour again. An NPC named G. J. Styx begged for money; Baumann said he was collecting taxes (but didn't ask me for any); John Styx said it was hard working in the mines; Krueger told us about Hypo-Coco disease. The shopkeeper, Ferdinand, said that trade is getting more restricted and controlled. I bought some explosives from him in case we needed them later. On the surface, I found a few things that looked like they could be buildings or settlements, but none of them gave me the option to beam down.

      

This looks like it should be something, but it wasn't.

        

2. Arboris: A large and lush planet, full of vegetation. The main city is called Sando, but exploring the surface led me to find a second city called Dymy. I explored Sando first, as I hadn't already. It was a large, open town with wooden buildings, meant to evoke a frontier town. Three wandering NPCs--Bimpf, Kirm Yuk, and Franz--had nothing useful to tell us, but another, Mrs. Patterson, was looking for a lost key. Julia S. said that more and more people join the revolution. The shopkeeper, Emil Cross, sold wine, an electrical staff, and a translator device (among other things). I bought them all.

    

In Dymy, shopkeeper Samuel Brown had some even more advanced-sounding weapons that I didn't buy. There was a whole locked complex in the southern part of the city that I couldn't access. Otherwise, I found nothing useful here.

       

The aesthetics of Sando.

      

3. Castra: The slum planet, where of course the game had started. From the glider, the map showed a reasonably accurate depiction of urban sprawl. There were some interesting physical features on the planet's surface, but nothing that gave us beam-down options. I took another loop around Penthe, the default city, and found nothing new.

4. Sky Boulevard, the central planet in the system, was originally called Decadence IV. Overpopulation and lax environmental laws caused an ecological collapse, and now the population lives in a huge space station orbiting the planet. Since you can't visit the planet itself, there's no glider option. Instead, you beam directly to the colorful metal corridors of the orbiting space station.

Again, I find virtually nothing. A shopkeeper, Reginald, sells a Sonic Absorber and a better electrical staff. Three guys named Wellsgoff, Spanjersberg, and Mr. Stocker stand behind counters but have nothing to say to me.

         

I'm definitely starting to get on board with the anti-bureaucrat movement.

     

5. Nedax. The water planet, which I just recently visited, has nothing new. I find no cities other than Aqua and Necth. In Necth, I do find a federation soldier that I somehow missed the first time, but he's not hostile anymore. When I try to kill him, a bunch of planetary guards show up and kill me instantly, the same way they do if you attack any innocent NPC.

    

6. Inoid, the frozen planet. The capital city is Glace, and I find no other cities by flying around the surface. While trying to talk to the NPCs, who have a tendency of walking away while you're trying to target them, I remember similar problems with MegaTravller and wonder if the Paragon titles had more influence than I thought.A bunch of ski-mask clad denizens who yell at me to get out of the way. Two wandering NPCs named Ben Zock and Krycencov have nothing to contribute. There's nothing new in the hospital.

    

I already am.

       

7. Grfdfvxtls. The game treats the so-called alien spaceship as a planet, but it has no trade goods and no ship services. We beam down to alien corridors and, well, actual aliens. They speak gibberish but we have a translation device! With it, we learn that they have become "stuck in a time zone because of an engine trouble." They need a special "essence" for their engine called X-109-E. But they thank us for offering to help and say we can use their cargo bay for storage. 

       

40 aliens on the ship, and I meet the drunk one.

        

The ship is quite large, with many of the aliens, but they all seem to have the same dialogue, and I don't find anything else on the ship. When I leave, I discover I don't have enough fuel to get back to Inoid. Good thing I didn't save out here. I reload from the last place I saved, on Nedax.

        

My readers should know by now that I like to be challenged by games. I like it less when the challenge is purely physical (i.e., controller dexterity) and more when it's intellectual. There are a lot of intellectual challenges in games, from the logic puzzles of Dungeon Master to the observational challenges of adventure games to the statistical challenges inherent in every RPG. But there's also a kind of meta-challenge present when your sanity, patience, and credulity are up against a patently ridiculous game. Even when the game lacks anything else, there's always a bit of a thrill when I force myself through an absurd wreck of a game like Ultima: Escape from Mount Drash (1983), Kayden Garth (1989), or The Rescue of Lorri in Lorrintron (1991) and pull off an unlikely win. But I don't want that type of challenge to be my exclusive experience with RPGs, and boy does it seem like 1993 is serving up a lot of them.

     

In this case, I finally give in and look up spoilers. The solution to falsifying evidence in the death of Nippel is to take a damaged gun and armor we should have looted from the Federation soldiers on Nedax and put them on Nippel's body. I never saw the damaged items--not that I would have thought to take them if I did--because I didn't kill the last soldier. He's wandering around Nedax even now, but I can't kill him because he's not hostile. I thought about swearing a lot at the game at this point, but I think the sentiment I put in the subtitle is more thematically appropriate.

        

Time so far: 10 hours

Die Quelle von Naroth: Gib Mir Geld

 

That's what I want.

        

When I wrapped up the first session of Die Quelle von Naroth, I was struggling to pay for the training that I was due. That problem continued well into this session. For a couple of hours, I was trapped in a cycle of being unable to defeat any monsters until I could level up, but unable to level up until I could afford it.

     

You can persuade or fight the guards to get out of town.

       

I ended up solving the issue by leaving Dandall before finishing the dungeon. What I had regarded as an impassable guard at the city exit was in fact a guard open to persuasion. I successfully talked him into letting me out of the city. This takes the player to a non-interactive map (with background sounds of wind and bird calls) with a menu of six cities to visit: Dandall (the starting city), Kospan, Kloster, Arpolis, Lapolin, and Schloß. I tried a few of them and encountered more difficult creatures in their dungeons than I had fled in Dandall.

        

The "outdoor" map.

     

At some point, I realized that Kloster means "monastery" in German. An NPC in Dandall had told me that Benedictinus at the monastery was seeking someone to clear the basement of hostile creatures. I stopped randomly exploring and headed directly there.

    

The monastery was a walled compound with four towers in the corner. Each had a staircase leading to the underground area. In the middle building, I met Benedictinus, who confirmed the quest and asked us to retrieve the Book of Wisdom from the basement.

        

Exploring my second city.

     

Some of the enemies in the dungeon were easier than those remaining in Dandall; some were not. It was during this session that I came to appreciate how much a difference enemy equipment makes. Just because you can handle four ogres wearing leather and wielding short swords doesn't mean you can handle four ogres wielding broadswords and wearing platemail. "Duh," you might say, but in most games, enemies of a particular type are always at a uniform difficulty. The orcs and goblins in Pool of Radiance always have the same equipment. Naroth thus offers a more nuanced encounter system.

          

16 kobolds don't sound so hard; 16 kobolds with longbows and platemail sound hard.

        

For a while, I bounced back and forth between the Kloster dungeon and the Dandall dungeon. I'd defeat two medusas and two ogres in the former only to get smashed by 10 goblins. Back in Dandall, I'd defeat some soldiers and spiders only to get destroyed by four ogres. None of these encounters were getting me any money, and I had annotated almost a dozen places I couldn't pass at my current level. The dam finally broke when I defeated a couple of soldiers in Kloster and got a longsword and plate armor, my first weapon/armor upgrade since the first couple hours of the game. Around the same time, I found a chest with 1,000 gold pieces that, combined with what I already had and some sale items, got me three levels. 

       

The most welcome sight in the world.

     

The Kloster dungeon went down to a second level, where a long hallway ended at a wall with three recesses, two of them holding gems. I had to find a gem in a chest on the first level, guarded by two druids. After I put the gem in the third recess, the wall opened, leading to an area with a chest with 500 gold and another chest with the Book of Wisdom. I returned the book to Benedictinus for a reward of a magic wand, a two-handed sword, and another suit of platemail. Selling the items that this equipment replaced bought me another couple of levels. 

     

The recess in the wall.

      

Back in Dandall, I pushed through a previously-unwinnable battle with 4 well-equipped ogres to find the golden key that Aurelius asked us to find. Rather than give it to him, I used it to open a locked door in the same dungeon and loot the same treasure chest that he was going for. It had a magic (two-handed) sword, a suit of magic armor, and 3,500 gold pieces. The key was consumed when I opened the door, so when I returned to Aurelius, he had nothing new to say.

      

My first magic weapon.

      

With that, I was finally able to catch up with my earned training. In fact, after selling excess stuff, I was over 3,000 gold pieces ahead. Everyone reached Level 5. My cleric has four spells: "Healing I," "Healing II," "Healing III," and "Group Healing." My mage has "Magic Missile," "Magic Cloud," "Fainting Spell," "Escape," and "Panic." "Escape" would seem to be a way out of combat if you're losing. I haven't had much luck with "Fainting Spell" or "Panic" so far, and I mostly just use the mage for the first two damage spells.

     

Ilende checks out her healing options in battle with some ogres.

       

With my new levels, I tried to clear out the Kloster dungeon for good, but there are a couple of parties--principally, a group of 4 trolls and a group of 16 kobolds with longbows and platemail--that I can't defeat. I also still can't defeat the two stupid trolls in the Dandall dungeon. I'll just have to save them all for later.

     

Before moving on to another city, I should mention that at some point, I noticed there was a yellowed piece of paper in my inventory. I don't remember where I got it. When I looked at it, it read:

      

The piece of paper contains three drawings, the contours of which are, however, quite faded and the motifs are no longer recognizable. There is a text under the drawings: "We have acquired the items pictured above and used their magic to destroy the source. Afterwards, as ordered, we hid the items in safe places. I am sending you a messenger with this message, while my men and I are already carrying out a new errand. Sincerely, Gonzales."

     

I'm guessing this refers to the game's backstory, in which the magical Well of Naroth ("the source") was destroyed through unknown means. [Ed. As stepped pyramids points out below, the translation should be "used their magic to destroy the well," rather than "source," making the connection explicit.]  I don't think I found any artifact that the note refers to.

   

We moved on to Kospan, which has the same types of shops and services as Dandall, if not as many. I was greeted in one house by a man named Langsan. He assumed that someone from Arpolis had sent me to retrieve a book of poetry, which Langsan will only trade for the Book of Time and the Book of Life. When I checked at the inn, "Langsan" was not an option to ask about but "Gonzales" was. The innkeeper didn't have anything to say about him, unfortunately. I'll have to mention that name in Dandall's two inns.

         

This new dungeon has a lot of doors and pressure plates.

      

One door led to a dungeon, where I just barely survived six goblins with broadswords. The opening area had a lot of locked doors, some opened by pressure plates, some by keys in nearby chests. I was beginning to wonder why I was even here when I opened a chest and found the Book of Time. I guess I'm after that Book of Poetry.

    

Short entry, but I'm just getting back from a vacation (saw Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Arches, Canyonlands, Mesa Verde) which, I'm proud to say, resulted in no delays on The CRPG Addict thanks to pre-scheduling entries.

   

Time so far: 7 hours

Whale's Voyage: Money in My Purse

 

I switched to a new version during this session, which replaces the image of the titular ship with an image of a CD-ROM.

       

This session started with trying to re-do everything I'd accomplished since arriving on Lapis: beaming down, visiting Jack Nock, giving him the heart and CD, killing Greg Morgan, waiting around until I found Jack Nock dead, and looting his body for the piece of paper with a phone number. Doing this took almost two hours and about seven reloads. Complications included:

     

• Getting away from Morgan (after he was de-digitized from the disk) before he killed everyone, then managing to make my way back and kill him, which is hard enough without . . .

• The game kept freezing after I successfully killed Morgan.

        

I still got a kick out of this. Poor Jack Nock.

      

• My credits kept disappearing again. It seemed to happen reliably every time I read the note on his body, so eventually I just wrote down the number, reloaded, and refused to read it again.

• The game kept deciding that something was blocking from beaming back to the ship, thus preventing me from leaving the planet or saving what I had accomplished.

      

Eventually, by beaming up and saving after every tiny success, I was able to get through the process. Back on the ship, I called the number on the piece of paper. This was the conversation:

YOU: "Jack Nock gave us this number. He is dead. The heart has been stolen."

VOICE: "Damned! The only place the heart can be is Inoid! You have to fetch it and then call again."

          

I don't have to do anything but pay taxes and die.

      

Inoid is the furthest planet in the system--so cold, the game says, that people live in special domed cities. It requires more fuel to get there than the Whale is capable of carrying, so I realized I'd have to stop somewhere on the way. After noting the value of trade goods on Lapis, I set course for some intermediate planet in the system.

   

I was attacked by pirates on the way. This time, I tried moving right and was instantly destroyed.

         

All they have to do is look at me.

     

After reloading, my priorities changed. I decided I needed to equip the Whale with arms and armor. But the cheapest items cost hundreds of thousands of credits, way more than I had at the time. Clearly, the solution is to trade. With data from only two planets, that was still enough to identify some lucrative possibilities. Some experimentation showed that planets buy items for between 87% and 88% of what they sell them for. Taking that into consideration, I determined that I could make 3,770 credits for every ton of "opticals" bought on Castra and sold on Lapis and $3,270 on every ton of bauxite bought on Lapis and solid on Castra. With my starting dollar value of around $140,000, I could make a profit of over $60,000 on my first trip, accounting for fuel, a number that would increase as I made more money. As we'll see, I should have spent less time calculating trade profits and more time worrying about other things.

     

I bought as much bauxite as I could afford, saved, and then blasted off for Castra. Naturally, I was attacked by pirates. This time, I tried going forward and was instantly killed. I reloaded and tried again. I was attacked and destroyed again. A third time. A fourth time. A fifth. I tried other planets to no avail--I got attacked every time.

Surrendering does nothing for us.

         

Pretty soon, it became clear that the game had decided that I was going to be attacked by pirates on my next trip, and nothing I could do would stop it. I tried surrendering and they stole all my cargo. Since you can't really "grind" for money in this game, I figured that was an irrecoverable situation. I tried selling all my cargo on Lapis (at a loss), and the pirates just stole all my credits. I sold all my cargo, beamed down to Lapis, bought a bunch of random stuff at the stores (personal items, not cargo), beamed back up, and tried again. This time, since I had no cargo and no money, the pirates stole nothing. I made it to Castra, beamed down, and sold the items at a $40,000 loss. But if it broke the cycle, I knew I'd be able to make it up again in trade goods. I loaded up the cargo hold with opticals, blasted off for Castra--and got attacked by pirates again. For whatever reason, the game had decided that I was going to get pirated on every single trip.

       

That's just cruel for cruelty's sake.

       

Instead of quitting the whole thing and doing something more sensible with my life, I installed the CD version of the game. I figured I'd see if it would accept the save game from the floppy version and, if so, whether it would make any difference. The answer to both questions was yes. I reloaded from Lapis and tried to go to Castra again, and I was predictably attacked by pirates again. But this time, the game indicated that the Whale had 8 hit points instead of the 0 that it had before. Apparently, the floppy version of the game had started the ship with no hit points, and thus it was deciding that I was dead every time I moved.

       

8 hits make all the difference.

       

With 8 hits available, I was able to reach the edge of the map and escape before the enemy ship got me. I made it to Castra, sold my trade goods, and began to amass my fortune.

   

The manual, incidentally, has nothing to say about ship's hit points or how they are restored. There is no obvious selection or place to do it in the ship menu, no way to pay for repairs in port to the ship as a whole (just individual pieces of equipment).

           

Let's talk a little more about the CD version of the game versus the floppy version. Most of the difference is with sound, and a lot of that is with music, which as my regular readers know, I don't prize as much as most players. I have to say, though, they put some serious effort to this soundtrack. As the game begins, a slight spoken prologue (a guy in a German accent counting down) precedes the main techno theme which features both original lyrics ("Get wave / for a voyage / get a wave for the trip to the stars") as well as a lot of dialogue and sound effect mixing; I particularly enjoyed the two voices doing a call-and-response of "You'd better cut out the sonic absorber for docking" (or something like that) and "shut up." You can listen to it here. The soundtrack was apparently released separately as a regular CD.

    

The title sequence also has a quick recap of the backstory showing two people who look like Dolph Lundgren and Rachel Ticotin (and nothing like any of the characters in the game) deciding to buy their own spaceship, taking a look at a board titled "Ships for Sale," and seeing that the SS Whale is a real bargain.

       

Surely, we could come up with a better name than "cybor-brick-board."

         

In-game, there are a couple of new features. Most welcome is the ability to save among eight save slots instead of just one. Less necessary are voice clips that say things like "Have a look at my wares" and "What can we do for you?" when you select the various planetary menu options. The authors astonishingly did absolutely nothing about the horrid interface, which must have been the subject of numerous complaints in the intervening year. 

     

Now that I could reliably get away from pirate attacks--which continued to happen every time I traveled--I focused on making money at trading. Because I'm basically just insane at this point, I took the time to make a grid of the entire solar system and the costs of goods on every planet, which required me to take goods to the planets that didn't sell them just to find out what they'd pay for them. I also had to buy a refrigerated compartment because some of the goods spoil in transit if you don't have one.

         

My complete waste-of-time trading matrix.

       

It turns out that the most lucrative gig is buying gold on Inoid (1,078,210) and selling it on Nedax (1,373,456), I didn't have enough money at this point for even a single load of that. Plus, Inoid is way out there and requires a lot of fuel. The second most lucrative was buying heavy weapons on Sky Boulevard (168,753) and selling them on Lapis (256,485). In both cases, the profit was so high that the amount of fuel consumed wasn't a factor. With every successful trade, I could buy more for the next trade, never coming close to filling the 5,000 tons that the Whale could hold.

         

This planet has more of the game's 30 commodities for sale than most.

     

After I made about $8 million this way, I splurged on items for the Whale. From the various planets, I got a flexibility (adds more movement), a front shield, a back shield, something that identifies enemies, a planet glider, a glider locator, a mining device, a top gun, a bottom gun, extra firepower, a war calculator (no idea), a fuel optimizer, an extra engine, an extra tank, a cargo bay, a mineral scanner. I still had over $5 million when I finished. I may have overdone the trading. I was listening to a Dennis Lehane novel while I was doing it, and the plot was getting interesting.

    

Something I bought--I'm not entirely sure what--shows me the buying and selling price of every commodity on every planet. I could have saved myself a lot of travel.

This would have been useful a few hours ago, but then I wouldn't know how Prayers for Rain ended.

       

As you might imagine, all the guns and shields did wonders for my odds in combat. Space combat takes place on a 13 x 27 tactical grid. The Whale always starts in the center, while the enemy might be anywhere (but usually at one of the edges). Moons and planets and stars are in the background but are only decorations.

   

Scanning the enemy ship.

     

The ship has a certain number of movement points, determined by equipment, and every action takes a certain number: move forward (2), turn left or right (1), fire guns (2), and activate shields (3). Identifying an enemy or surrendering doesn't take any. Obviously, some of these options weren't available until I bought the necessary equipment. After you finish your movement, you hit the "end turn" button and the enemy goes. 

   

With my top and bottom guns, enemies pretty much died in a single blast. As far as I can tell, you get absolutely nothing from a successful combat--no experience, no money, no equipment. You just get to continue to your destination, the same as if you hadn't spent three hours trading to buy a bunch of fancy equipment and had just fled every battle instead.

       

Shields active, preparing to fire.

      

Once you've purchased the "glider," every time you choose the option to "use glider or beam down," the game assumes you want to do the former. You appear over the surface of the planet in your glider. If you really just wanted to beam to the city, you then have to choose that option from the glider menu. The glider otherwise offers the ability to scan and mine for metals, which is a waste of time given the trading system, which itself is a waste of time.   

       

The glider interface. I'm sure this will become important later.

        

I went down to the surface of Inoid to try to find the next stage of the quest. The frosted city was small enough that I didn't bother to map it. None of the NPCs had anything interesting to say. Aside from a store, the only place of interest that the city had was a hospital. Of the dialogue options available, the only one that got us anywhere was to say that "We are infected with the Hypo-Coco disease!," whatever that is. 

         

The city has dead snowmen. Cute.

       

The receptionist freaked out and called "Dr. Steinhag," who appeared and escorted us to an adjacent room, where he said we'd be scanned for the disease. "Please wait here until I am back," he said, then left. The 2 x 2 room had two locked doors, a couple of cosmetic trays with scalpels and such, and nothing that I could find to do. Steinhag didn't return. It took me a long time, messing around, before I discovered that I could use my toolkit to open the northern door (but not the southern one). 

         

This is the first time that dialogue has been delivered outside the dialogue interface.

       

A table in the northern room had the heart we were seeking. Everyone leveled up when I grabbed it. (They had leveled up earlier, too, but I forgot to mention it.) I gave my doctor "Resurrect Member" and everyone else "Automatic Reload."

     

In a world where "resurrection" is a skill, why do we need heart transplants?

     

The game wouldn't let us beam up from the hospital, but after we had the heart, Dr. Steinhag returned to tell us that none of us had Hypo-Coco disease and that we could leave. Once outside the hospital, we were able to beam away.

    

Back on the ship, we called the phone number again. The voice told us to fly to Lapis and search for a mine using our glider, at coordinates 33/18. We'll pick up from there next time. 

         

Why are we still working for this guy? We're already rich.

        

Switching to the CD version has at least made the game a bit more stable, but it's still uncomfortably weird and poorly balanced. I'm hoping that the relatively small solar system is a sign of a short plot.

      

Time so far: 10 hours

Game 519: Dungeon of Doom (1980)

 

         

Dungeon of Doom

United States

Argon Games (developer and publisher)

Released 1980 for Apple II

Date Started: 7 June 2024

Date Ended: 16 June 2024

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Completely user-definable, so I guess moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)   

    

Both El Explorador de RPG and I had this game as "missing" for a couple of years (he had found an ad for it but couldn't find the game) before it was rescued from oblivion by a commenter named John Brown, who found it in a "random local Apple II lot he purchased." He sent El Explorador images of the box and manual but not the game itself. However, Mr. Brown did ultimately provide a disk copy to YouTuber "DefaultGen" who subsequently made a video about it and uploaded it to the Internet Archive, which commenter Busca brought to my attention. It's a good video, at least as informative as anything you're going to read here.

    

The game was created by Stephen G. Walburn and Robert J. McCredie, two old-school wargamers who created several tactical board games, including Shoot-Out: Gunfights in the Spirit of the Old West (1980), Space Warrior (1980), and Husky: Invasion of Sicily (1981). They were also Dungeons & Dragons fans and were, like many such fans, interested in how to bring D&D gameplay to the microcomputer.

        

The game isn't just the first commercial party-based RPG; it allows up to 12 members!

    

Their answer, Dungeon of Doom, technically breaks our previous understanding of a couple of "firsts." It takes the spot previously held by Wizardry (1981) as the first traditional commercial RPG to feature multiple characters in a party. (I have to throw "traditional" in there because technically 1978's The Magic Tower is the first, but it's not really a normal RPG.) Perhaps more important, it robs Tunnels of Doom (1982) of the distinction of the first RPG with multi-character combat on a top-down tactical grid. This is not to say that any later authors were influenced by Dungeon of Doom (though it would be fun to think that Tunnels was, given the name), but as DefaultGen says in his video: "Any CRPG that came before Ultima and Wizardry set a blueprint to follow is by default an interesting game."

    

The game relies a lot on the honesty and external record-keeping of the player. As the game begins, you're invited to create a party of anywhere from 1 to 12 fighters, mages and clerics. That's a pretty broad range. Even crazier, you can create characters of any level, statistics, and gear (within certain maximums) that you want. The game uses D&D attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma, all within the 3-18 range, including the percentile statistic for characters with 18 strength. Nothing stops you from creating a character with all 18s. If there's a character level limit, I never found it; it let me create a Level 9,999 character when I tried. [Ed. The maximum is in fact 32,766.] You define your own hit points, but they're capped at 8 times your level for fighters, 6 times your level for clerics, and 4 times your level for mages--essentially the "hit dice" system from D&D. I can't imagine what charisma does in the game; intelligence and wisdom may affect spell power.

        

Exploring a corridor.

      

You also specify your equipment during character creation. You can choose armor from leather, chain, and plate, and give it an enchantment of up to +5. You can choose to carry a shield, up to +5. You select two weapons from a short list (sword, two-handed sword, mace, dagger, bow, crossbow, sling), all of which can be enchanted up to +5.

    

In all of this flexibility, the game reminds me a bit of Dunjonquest (1979) which similarly allowed players to type in their own characters and expected them to keep track of them between sessions. I think clearly players were supposed to create basic characters and work them up, although a relatively powerful party of five characters (three fighters, a cleric, and a mage), all levels 5-9 with no piece of equipment less than +3, comes on the disk.

    

Available commands as you explore a corridor.

     

When you enter the game proper, you're thrust into a large, 6-level, 3D maze. The levels are all 40 x 40, using a "worm tunnel" configuration (i.e., walls have actual space). The corridors are in a fixed configuration, but the room locations are randomized. The entry is always in the southeast corner, and the exit is always in the northwest corner. I haven't compared the exact lines of code, but the graphics look exactly like Silas Warner's Escape! (1978) for the Apple II.

 

You navigate through the dungeon with the FBLR keys. (The game has a quirk by which you cannot just turn; you can only turn and step forward, which makes navigation a little awkward.) You occasionally find a door that you can E)nter, thus initiating battle with whatever denizens are in there. Random battles can occur in the hallways, too, but you never get any treasure from those, while you do get treasure from the "room" battles.

        

Deciding whether to enter a room to my left.

             

The battles are the heart of the game. They're all with exactly one monster type, drawn from the typical D&D list: gnolls, orcs, trolls, ochre jellies, dragons, and so forth. The manual boasts that there are 141 different types. You may face up to a couple of dozen enemies per battle, so you either want to bring a large party or a strong one.

   

As combat begins, enemies are scattered randomly across a very large battlefield (40 x 40 for rooms, 20 x 40 for corridors), which is also populated with as many "obstacles" as there are monsters. If you entered a room, the party members are clustered off-screen, below the southern doorway, and you have to enter the room one by one. It's sometimes tough to get out of each other's ways. If the battle is a random one in a corridor, the party starts scattered randomly.

      

Combat begins. The party is all off-screen, below the door. There are three enemies and three obstacles on the screen. If I try hard, I can tell which is which because the enemies are a bit darker.

      

The game cycles through the party members in order, first allowing them to move, with the number of movement points defined by dexterity and armor. During this round, you can also switch weapons or pass. After that, there's a combat round in which every character can fire a missile weapon, attack with a melee weapon (if in range), or cast a spell (if a spellcaster). Enemies go in turn after the characters. Despite the large variety of enemies, they never cast spells or hit you with special attacks or conditions. I don't think any of them even have missile weapons.

     

A couple of rounds later, I've established "ranks" to the left and right of the door. One of the enemies has reached my left rank; two more are approaching my right.

            

There are no individual spells in the game. In combat, spellcasters just cast a generic offensive spell. You specify the "force" level (limited by character level) from 1-5. Clerics can cast these offensive spells, too, but are better off saving their spell power for healing outside of combat.

  

Every round, there's a 10% chance you'll be offered an opportunity to withdraw, which if taken gives the enemies one free whack at the party members on their way out the door.

     

This combat system sounds good on paper--it's the ancestor of every tactical, grid-based combat system we've ever seen. In practice, a few things make it a bit excruciating. One of the elements is relatively unique to me as a colorblind player: the only way party members, obstacles, and enemies are distinguished using the low-resolution graphics is by color. I had trouble distinguishing enemies (which I believe are orange) from obstacles (yellow) and certain party members that had close colors.

   

Make what you can of this image. Looking at it now, I don't know where Erk is, nor the monster he hit.

        

Second, movement is with this key arrangement . . .

   

1 2 3

4    6

7 8 9

    

. . . which looks like it ought to be easy to master, but I had to have an image as a constant reference.

   

Third, the battlefield is just too big. It takes multiple rounds even to get close to monsters, especially if you're all coming through the south door. You might think that you could alleviate this problem by using missile weapons and spells exclusively, which gets us into the most serious problem: When you want to use a missile weapon, the game cycles through all of the enemies on the screen, telling you their numbers, so that you can specify which enemy number you want to shoot. There's no "random" or "closest" option. The cycle lingers on each enemy for about 1 second, so if you're fighting a party of 12 gnolls, you have to sit there for 12 seconds as the game shows you and numbers each one. If the next character wants to fire his missile weapon, you have to wait those 12 seconds again. 

    

The game cycles through the available targets.

     

Naturally, you can speed things up with an emulator, but even with CPU speed cranked, large battles can easily take 20-30 minutes.

       

The size of the battlefield also makes the "obstacle" system a bit irrelevant, since even with large enemy parties, there aren't enough obstacles to create walls, channels, or other configurations that might be exploited by either you or your foes.

        

If you manage to clear out the enemies, the party gets a number of experience points. If the enemies are in a room, you also get treasure, which can be represented as copper, silver, gold, gems, or jewels. The game breaks from D&D by making copper worth 1/100 of a gold piece (I believe it was 1/50 in OD&D and 1/200 in AD&D1). Gems are worth a fixed 233 gold pieces and jewels are worth a fixed 1,419 gold pieces.

         

You're also limited by how much you can carry.

        

There are 78 rooms per dungeon level, and the game keeps track of which ones you've cleared. When the party is spent, you can exit the dungeon by returning to the original staircase. At this point, you want to note your accumulated experience points and treasure. Because when you re-enter the dungeon, you'll be expected to make manual adjustments to your characters based on the experience and equipment tables offered in the game manual. Once you edit your characters, you can re-enter the dungeon.

       

You manually "buy" upgrades by subtracting their costs from your treasure pool.

     

While making your way through the hallways, you can check your progress with the M)ap command, which draws an automap column by column. When I set the emulator to "Use Authentic Machine Speed," the map took 92 seconds to draw. That must have been fun as an original player. I guess it stops you from abusing the map.

       

The map of the first level.

     

The game offers a couple other navigation tricks tied to a spellcaster's power. High enough casters can cast "Change Level" to move to a different level or "Teleportation" to move to a specific point on the same level. Lower levels theoretically mean harder monsters, although I didn't notice much of a correlation. The game also leaves a couple of troubleshooting codes for the player to use, and the manual explicitly tells you the password to use them. You can restock a level with CTRL-R, move to a new level (without spending spell points) with CTRL-N, and check your current coordinates with CTRL-P.

   

There's no plot to the game, no story, no winning condition. It's not a huge feat to make it to the final square (the doorway to the non-existent seventh level) when you can teleport yourself there. I suppose it would be a huge feat to clear all 468 rooms, but you'd have to be mental. 

    

As far as you can go.

       

Overall, Dungeon of Doom needed a little work to be truly enjoyable. But it did a couple of things for the first time and thus deserves to be remembered for those achievements alone.

I tried to track down the authors to no avail. Both had a number of board game credits in the early 1980s and then kind of disappeared. Argon Games seems to have existed for this one title. Oddly, what is still around is the Triangle Simulation Society, credited with play-testing. This North Carolina-based group is into board games and wargames, and it's easy to imagine that Walburn and McCredie were probably members. [Ed. I later got some information that Mr. Walburn died of a heart attack in 1986 and Mr. McCredie left the Raleigh area a few years ago, after the death of his wife, Marcia, who is credited with "editing" on Dungeons of Doom.]

      

The box art is credited to a Craig Lindholm.

       

El Explorador de RPG also released an entry on the game today, so make sure you check out his coverage for things I may have missed, or for a more analytical view overall.