BRIEFs: Dragon (1984), Shadowfire (1985), Enigma Force (1985), La Foresta Dimenticata dal Tempo (1987)

 

      

Dragon

Germany

AWO Software (developer); Roeske Verlag (publisher)

Released on cassette for Commodore 64

Rejected for: No character development

       

There isn't exactly a high bar for cassette games for the C64, but Dragon manages to absolutely bottom out any expectations. It is almost baffling in its moronic simplicity. Your "character"--and I use that very loosely--wants to join the Dragon Knights of the Round Table, which requires him to enter a labyrinth and kill a dragon.

     

Moving through the map. I'm wasting time because I know where the dragon is.

       

The "labyrinth" is a relatively small map of interconnected rooms in which adjacent traps (instantly-fatal pits) are marked with a blue dot and the dragon's presence in an adjacent room is marked with a red dot. You move through it with the joystick, losing a little strength with every move. The dragon is randomly placed; he might appear (as he did twice for me) immediately in an adjacent room when the game begins. You enter the dragon's chamber and hold down the FIRE button to expend your remaining strength trying to kill him. If you fail, you get a "game over" screen; if you succeed, you get a "congratulations" screen and can enter your name as a new Dragon Knight.

       

There's the dragon.

 

And there's the "won" message.

        

That's it. Win or lose, the game takes about 1-3 minutes. Who possibly had any fun with this?

       

******

        

Shadowfire

United Kingdom

Denton Designs (developer); Beyond (publisher)

Released 1985 for Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, 1986 for Amstrad CPC

Rejected for: No character development

      

The purpose of a BRIEF is for me to document RPG-adjacent games long enough to at least get a sense of them before rejecting them. Sometimes, I end up liking the game well enough to play it to the end, which is why there are so many "Es" (for "exception") in my master game list with a "won" annotation. Other times, I can't bring myself to do much more than confirm it's not an RPG. This is one of those times. I don't think I'd play it even if it was an RPG.

   

The game is set some time in the future where ships can jump between star systems using hyperdrives. Someone has drawn up plans for a ship called Shadowfire that can jump directly to a planet's orbit, which apparently has significant military implications. Someone named Ambassador Kryxix had the plans surgically embedded into his spine, but he's been kidnapped by the evil general Zoff and is being held on Zoff V. It won't be long before the plans are discovered. An elite team of six humans, cyborgs, insectoids, and robots is dispatched to rescue the ambassador, capture Zoff, and destroy Zoff V. The manual says you can do these things in any order, but it seems to me that logically that can't be the case. Anyway, you have 100 minutes.

         

One of the characters. Two of the icons in the lower right look the same to me. None of the ones in the upper left look like they mean anything.

      

Each character on the team has values (or, more specifically, a status bar) representing strength, agility, stamina, and weight. You accept them as they are; you don't get to create or name them. The values don't develop or change during the game, which makes it a non-RPG by my definitions. Even the game's manual calls it a strategy game.

   

And that's about all I can tell you. The game commits too many interface transgressions for me to see it any further. A lack of keyboard commands for a PC game is bad enough, but its worst sin is treating the joystick as a mouse. You control things by joysticking around to the various icons on the screen and then hitting "fire" to activate them. That is a solid dealbreaker. Why wouldn't you just have the inventory pop up with an "I" or the combat menu with a "C"?

      

But my problems with the game aren't just ideological. Even if I could bring myself to control Shadowfire the way it's meant to be controlled, I'm not sure I could ever get to the point where I understand what's happening or what to do about it. I find the graphics utterly baffling. Many of the icons look identical to me. Others don't look like anything to me except for blobs. The tiny game map is individualized for each character, so you have no sense of the overall game space. Even watching this video, I couldn't figure it out.

      

*****

      

The title and opening screen.

       

Enigma Force

United Kingdom

Denton Designs (developer); Beyond (publisher)

Released 1985 for ZX Spectrum, 1986 for Commodore 64

Rejected for: No character development

      

War has broken out between the empire and the forces of General Zoff. The Enigma Force is escorting Zoff to the emperor when he uses his psionic powers to crash the ship on an unknown planet. Four of the team members survive and set out to find Zoff.

    

The developers dealt with some of my objections in this sequel. It has a proper adventure screen--using a "studio view" (from the side)--rather than individualized maps for each character. All of the icons are arranged on the main screen instead of nestled in sub menus. But you still move them by using the joystick to move a cursor around the screen and click on arrows. That's like driving a car by attaching robotic arms to the steering wheel and controlling them with a xylophone.

      

No.

    

Anyway, again the classification is MobyGames's fault. The manual calls it an action-adventure, which seems more appropriate. The individual team members have strengths and weaknesses, so you have to hustle them around to solve the puzzles that only they can solve. I guess the whole thing can be won in about six minutes, but I still don't have the patience to try.

    

This is my third encounter with Denton Designs. They produced the bugged Sonderon's Shadow the same year. I shouldn't see them again; they were around until the mid-1990s, but MobyGames classifies everything else they made as action or sports.

*****

       

I'm guessing these objects are not to scale.

      

La Foresta Dimenticata dal Tempo

Italy

"The Forest that Time Forgot"

Independently developed; published with Load 'n' Run magazine #43 (November 1987) 

Released on cassette for ZX Spectrum

Rejected for: No character development

      

I was rooting for this one, as the earliest Italian RPG that we currently know about is Time Horn (1991) from a few years later. Alas, I can't call it an RPG. It's instead a Wizard's Castle variant with fewer mechanics than even the original game. I was prepared to win it anyway, but there's something about it that I can't figure out.

 

La Foresta appeared in BASIC on the cassette tape that accompanied Load 'n' Run issue 43, a Spanish magazine that had Portuguese and Italian releases. It was published from 1984 to 1989. The game is credited to Stefano Reksten, who I confirmed is Italian. I couldn't find any other games attached to him, but he did contribute a couple of utility programs in other issues.

       

Lost in the forest, I face two centaurs with a jewel as my reward.

        

The game throws you in the middle of a forest--I'm going to go out on a limb and say that time forgot it--guarded by a dragon. The dragon has demanded that you collect a certain number of treasures of various types and then return to the castle. Most of the treasures are guarded by monsters, and against them you have only a limited pool of forza (strength) and several spells.

       

My mission.

        

You get several options during setup, including the mission number, whether to use large or small tiles, whether the map adjusts to keep you at the center, and the overall difficulty from "difficult," "a little more difficult," and "almost impossible." Finally, you choose from three characters: Kloin the Elf, Korleth the Dwarf, and Ankus the Giant. Kloin starts with less strength and more spells, Ankus the opposite.

     

Choosing a character during creation.

    

The game generates a random forest map and starts you in a square, usually with an initial encounter. As you enter each square, you generally find a random treasure (jewels, coins, crowns, shields, treasure chests) guarded by one or more monsters (centaurs, harpies, specters, minotaurs, chimeras, skeletons). You have to decide how to beat the monster from three options: physical combat, spells, and bribing them with the accumulated points you've gained from defeating other monsters. Success or failure is resolved instantly; a wrong move kills you.

       

Options when fighting a couple of harpies.

       

Combat asks you to wager a certain number of points of strength against the enemies' strength; I found that at the "difficult" level, you have to wager about 150% of their strength to ensure beating them. Spells are "Sleep," "Levitation," and "Invisibility." All of them, if successful, work as if you'd simply defeated the creature. I didn't get all the nuances, but I can tell you that "Sleep" and "Invisibility" don't work on specters. 

     

Both strength and spells go fast. Strength also depletes by 10 for every move that you make, and even Kloin only starts with 4 of each spell. The map is seeded with inns that can restore strength and temples where you have a chance of finding a chest that restores spells.

     

The dragon just sometimes ups and kills you for no reason.

      

The rest of the map is an illusion. I determined with save states that the game figures out what treasure and creature you're going to encounter next, and you get that encounter no matter what direction or distance you move.

     

Once you figure out the basic rules, the game isn't so hard except that there doesn't seem to be enough time. There are three missions. Mission 1 is "Forest Surrounded by a Wall." You have 30 days to find all the treasures in a forest that you couldn't leave if you wanted to, because it has hard borders. Mission 2 gives you 40 days, and it occurs in a larger forest that wraps. Mission 3 is titled "Save the Realm," and I didn't explore it long enough to figure out the parameters.

      

Here, I ran out of time.

      

Anyway, Mission 1 typically asks you to find around 30 treasures, and you only ever find one treasure per square. You could thus only beat the mission if you found one in every square (and you don't) and if you never entered a temple or inn. I don't know what I'm missing. 

    

But I still got on the leaderboard!

      

Anyway, if you die or if time runs out, the dragon appears to kill you, and you get to enter your name on a leaderboard based on the total points you accumulated. After this happened a few times, I decided that continuing with the game and figuring out its mysteries wouldn't be a great use of time. There are still two Italian games for me to check out--Buio! (1984) and L'Isola dei Segreti (1985)--so we'll see if either of them are RPGs.