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 developmentThe
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.
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 developmentWar 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 activate 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 developmentI 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.
I'll say Shadowfire looks very interesting as a design. I think you're give orders to multiple characters and they act them out in real time. But even aside from the poor interface, the way-too-small map kills its playability.
ReplyDeleteDragon, however, looks like somebody's first attempt at programming. It appears to be a clone of Hunt The Wumpus, but lacking the deduction mechanic which is the whole point of Wumpus. I guess it wasn't hard to get one's game published on the oh-so-many magazines and cassettes back then.
That Dragon looks like the semester long project of a bunch of 8th graders working on a class project.
DeleteReading this entry about two UK games, a German and an Italian one, I found it funny the UK ones prominently feature a baddie (and space station?) called „Zoff“ - this meaning ‚trouble‘ or ‚quarrel‘ in German and being the name of a very famous Italian (football/soccer) goalkeeper.
ReplyDeleteThat's a dragon? I thought it was a caterpillar.
ReplyDeleteSo the ‚Shadowfire‘ character you’re showing is weightless? (JK, I see from the manual it’s for weight of objects you carry and only fills when you pick sth up.)
ReplyDeleteI -think- the six small symbols in the top left are supposed to represent the six team members, but yeah, way too small.
Three of the icons in the lower right of the interface are just different in colour - counterclockwise from top right: red (battle screen), green (movement screen), yellow (objects screen). AKA as a FYC Colour Scheme.
BTW, according to the manual you can alternatively choose keyboard controls, though it looks like it would still only be to move around on the screen instead of shortcuts. And the movement and battle screens have GTFO clusters for steering, so it‘s just as well you did not try further.
Yes, the "keyboard" controls the manual describes are literally just moving the cursor around the screen as if the keyboard is mimicking the joystick.
DeleteWatched the beginning of the Longplay Chet linked and I am in awe of how terrible the game is at communicating information. Why are the four panels represented by screens of different colors? Why do the character icons, which are the only comprehensible things, turn blue for moving and brown for being attacked? Why can't you see more than five pixels around a character when you're supposed to move it? How do you tell what the different inventory items are? WHY ISN'T THERE ANY TEXT ON THE SCREEN?
DeleteWhile the game might be poor at communicating information, the longplay Chet linked is doing worse by constantly stopping to tell you what he's doing. It's watching super high level play of a game you've never heard of before, its only natural for it to be a confusing mess.
Delete"WHY ISN'T THERE ANY TEXT ON THE SCREEN?" The game box BRAGS about this: "THE FIRST ADVENTURE GAME WITHOUT TEXT!" Was anyone demanding that? Not to mention that "icons" is hardly the only alternative to Infocom-style text adventures.
DeleteI can think of only one other adventure game that prided itself on not having text, and that is Curse Of Enchantia.
DeleteAccordingly, at sister blog AdvGamer it has one of the lowest ratings ever for any commercial game, including the blog's only _zero_ for interface design.
https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2019/05/curse-of-enchantia-final-rating.html
Coincidentally, a commenter at Blue Renga (Jason Dyer's All The Adventures project blog) just necro'ed a thread which opened with someone praising Shadowfire and linking a different video. Maybe I will watch that and see if it makes more sense to me.
DeleteI can see how watching without the manual makes it much harder, and how the muscle/heart/uh whatever that is for speed/balance for encumbrance icons make sense, but the four icons in the lower right for opening separate panels just don't seem like they have anything to do with what they do. In theory I can see a way where no text could make it accessible to speakers of different languages, but that part of it just seems like everyone gets the fun of playing in a language they don't speak.
(Which reminds me of Michael Brough's fantastic micro-roguelike Cinco Paus. A lot of the initial stage is about experimenting to discover various mechanics, so while most of the mechanics have in-game explanations. they are in Portuguese, which Brough does not speak particularly well. For Portuguese speakers he added an option to change the text to German.)
I do recall a game development KIT that bragged about how it had no facility for showing text to the player, claiming that if you needed something like, say, subtitles, you should just get better quality audio. It was for making FMV-based adventure games.
DeleteWell, for a lot of people, "reading" is that boring thing they make you do at school. For those people, a complete lack of text would have indeed been a selling point!
DeleteOlder games with no or minimal text, like Tir Na Nog and Knightlore, were already labeled "Action Adventure" games. So in the UK an "Adventure" game didn't nec'ly mean a text Adventure game like Colossal Caver or Zork. I think Lords of Midnight was also called an adventure game. So it was a more broad definition in the UK.
DeleteCould it be a tying a new form of copy protection where you absolutely need the manual to play the game even if its cracked?
Deletewas it not a thing at the time to show of graphics because you could and the old lame computers couldnt
Deleteso less text was a sign that it was a modern game for the time
Sure, but there's a difference between "using more graphics" and "no text at all".
DeleteI'd say this is all less a conscious design choice, and more a novice programmer experimenting with original ideas. That's a pretty good approach, it just doesn't always work out.
They shouldn't have been novice programmers (or designers). Denton was formed out of the ashes of Imagine Software, which I guess was more famous for their hype and spectacular downfall than for their games, but the employees would've been experienced.
DeleteAnd I guess Shadowfire was well-respected on the Spectrum scene. As someone who's familiar with a country in the grip of madness, and also as someone who's spent fifteen minutes trying to play one of those Dizzy games that Speccy enthusiasts seem to love, I think Thatcher-era Britons must just have been willing to put up with choices in games that offend our modern sensibilities. It does seem to have led to a lot of games that were, well, different.
OK, elsewhere in the comments on this post fireball makes a good point, which is that you really are supposed to be getting a lot of information from the manual. The manual explicitly spells out one of the most confusing parts of the video, which is the sequence of commands that you need to give Manto at the beginning to establish a transporter link, and that the thing that looks like a kettle of hot soup with pauldrons is one of the transporters. Also I guess that limitations of the machine may have made it difficult to include more explanatory text, and the boast about the icon-only interface may have been making a virtue of necessity.
DeleteOn the other hand a lot of these icons are just terrible. The different colored screens for the movement/objects/battle panels could've been replaced by M/O/B for a lot of extra clarity. The manual shows what the icons on the object panel are supposed to look represent (e.g., finger on button for "activate"), but they all wound up as a hash of pixels. The attack/defend/retreat icons are clearly distinguished but why are they left arrow/double arrow/right arrow?
In any case I stand by my claim that lover for the Dizzy games is a sign of some deep trauma in the UK gaming scene. Zero tolerance for Dizzy.
Having icons over text is probably a good idea, if you can use icons that are visually distinct at a glance, being quicker to recognize than text in a hurry. The RTS genre uses this to great effect. But that said, while the manual surely explains a lot, back in those days manuals did a poor job of depicting color, I.E., what's separating some of the icons from one another. What you really want in a game like this is something like Zombi. The original not the Amiga version. Icons were usually distinct, though it lost any speed it gained by virtue of having a dozen icons and requiring you to scroll through them.
Delete@Matt, what exactly is so wrong with Dizzy that you had to randomly bring it up twice in quick succession apropos of nothing? And I say this as an American who only played the NES game about halfway and found nothing offensive about it at all.
I'm mostly kidding around about Dizzy. Jimmy Maher, The Digital Antiquarian, had a series about British action-adventure games and they sounded neat--exploration! experimentation!--and he described Dizzy as the comfort food of the genre. So I tried one and it was E X C R U C I A T I N G. The biggest sin in what I tried being requiring pixel-perfect platforming with terribly imprecise controls. Your avatar is an egg that jumps in a weird end over end tumbling motion, and there's one bit where you have to jump onto an alligator's mouth at the moment its jaws snap shut to tie them shut (if you've figured out that that's how you use the rope), and eventually I realized that I was not enjoying myself at all. I can easily imagine that this particular issue was solved in the NES game (though Wikipedia suggests that in order to win you needed to find 100 or 250 stars, which I'd bet would get tedious).
DeleteThen in 2021 someone tweeted "Every British person between the ages of 35 and 48 has unreasonably intense nostalgia for borderline unplayable ZX Spectrum games called like Lorry Boshers and Tiddly’s Quest" and a whole bunch of the replies mentioned Dizzy, so for me it's always been the exemplary borderline unplayable ZX Spectrum game.
That said, this (and an extreme desire to find something innocuous to think about) sent me looking at histories of the old Denton Designs/Imagine/Psygnosis nexus and I found myself reading about the Frankie Goes To Hollywood game which one source rated the best C64 game ever and I was like "ooh sounds intriguing" and then I had to remind myself that I would probably not enjoy it.
While the RTS genre does use a lot of icons, it's also very consistent about naming each icon when you hover the mouse over it, as well as giving them hotkeys.
DeleteThe entire UK gaming scene is not Dizzy. Not even the entire Dizzy series is like that one game.
Delete(I think that's Fantasy World Dizzy from your description, which is one of the more annoying ones.)
Matt's point is both fair and unfair.
DeleteThat tweet made me smile. It's true that there is a lot of nostalgia for the ZX Spectrum, C64 and BBC Micro among the mentioned age group, and that many games on those systems were not especially playable - certainly by modern standards. But then, that's true for all games of the era, everywhere - there was a video games crash in America for a reason, remember? The medium was new and developers were feeling their way forward. And Sturgeon's law applied *on top* of that.
From Zork, Wizardry and Sierra's [Noun] Quest games in America, to various obscurantist British isometric adventures, to all the weird stuff that was coming out of France, to Spelunker in Japan and other 'Nintendo-hard' games designed to be too difficult to beat in a weekend, it was a generally masochistic pastime for much of the decade.
One thing that's certainly true is that people were expected to RTFM. Indeed, it was unthinkable that you wouldn't. Reading the manual on the bus or in the back of the car, in the excitement and anticipation of a newly-bought game, was a cherished ritual.
DeleteI think people tend to be harsher than they normally would be on control systems that don't control exactly like they expect the genre to control. People don't expect games to require a bit of practice to get used to, which is less that those games are bad and more that we have effectively unlimited games. In this regard, Dizzy isn't bad, you just need to get used to it. That said, I never had to do a precision jump on a crocodile, but that level of precision is incredibly common on platformers from that time.
DeleteWell, the main issue with that specific instance (and where matt w has my sympathy!) is that the Dizzy games aren't really platformers, even as we understood the genre in 1989. There is jumping in the games, but it's mostly just a means of getting around and is rarely an obstacle or puzzle.
DeleteWith the crocodile, it's a rare moment of requiring both precision (to land on the crocodile's snout) and reflexes (to cycle through your inventory to drop the rope before the crocodile opens its mouth) in a game that, for the most part, requires neither.
Kelvin has it right, this was Fantasy World Dizzy (IIRC Jimmy Maher specifically recommended that, so blame him) and the problem is that it has spots that require more precision than the control scheme really gives you. I remember there being an annoying timing bit with a bird as well, and also there are parts where if you're not careful you'll jump into a random torch and lose a life. It's not that I dislike precision in platforming--I've won Celeste without assists--but this is a moment where I think that kind of gameplay might require responsiveness from the computer that was more difficult to get with the old hardware, or at least with what the Oliver Twins were doing with the old hardware. (The problem might also partly be with whatever emulators I was using.)
Delete(On the other hand I'm quite sure that the "find 30 coins in random places and you need them all" part was not good game design.)
Back to Shadowfire, "you have to read the manual" is a fair cop, and it does explain some of the icons. As far as Radiant's comment about naming icons when you hover over them (or in this case I guess select them with the joystick), that does seem like something that probably couldn't have been done within hardware limitations, at least not perhaps without taking out another part of the game. And lord knows I've got used to some convoluted control schemes (right now I'm playing Legerdemain in no-numpad mode, which means not only to I have to move with the dreaded vi-keys, but I have things like s for uSe and a for swAp within the inventory). But even after reading the manual I still have no idea what's going in in the map view.
Another reason I keep banging on about Dizzy is so there's something to talk about while Chet is catching up with things! Which reminds me... while reading over Jimmy Maher's coverage of a lot of these old games I saw his slightly dismissive coverage of DMA/Psygnosis's pre-Lemmings game Blood Money so I watched some videos of it and it looks great. Tough but seems like it would be exciting if I were any good at shooters. Anyone out there ever play it?
@asdasd: I am so glad to have it confirmed that I wasn't the only one whose formative experience was "obsessively read the manual on the way home". It feels like most retrogamers push the narrative that "We just threw the manuals away without looking; who would read a manual?" and then complain about the controls being unintuitive.
DeleteRe Dizzy: To be fair, while Jimmy Maher wrote you could do worse than ‚Fantasy World Dizzy‘ when looking for a place to start with the ‚Dizzy‘ series, he added „and possibly to end as well“, which already says something about its appeal from today‘s perspective. I‘m not sure if choosing it referred to supposedly decent gameplay qualities or it just being popular within the series and the last one written by the Oliver twins themselves.
DeleteEspecially since he also reported their games were essentially disposable products, written in a few weeks and intended to provide a weekend’s entertainment for £1.99.
In this context I understood his statement that the ‚Dizzy‘ games „turned into a sort of comfort food for many“ to be more of a reflection of knowing what you were getting with each new game rather than a quality seal. But yeah, that jumping thing sounds awful. Guess people had more tolerance for that kind of ‚challenge’ due to more time, less money, few(er) games to choose from.
Regarding the other games mentioned here, I don‘t recall ever playing ‚Blood Money‘, but I tried the FGTH game on the C64 and did not get it at all. For most games back then it was either clear to me what they were about and how to play them or you figured it out quickly between instructions and just fiddling around, but that one… .
I really wouldn't be surprised if Maher steered someone wrong again. If it's the last one they made, they might have got in expecting to make something harder; Here's the culmination of all the skills you've built up over the series, oh, whoops, it's your first one. In this regard it is like Celeste, except that Celeste plays like most platformers, so you've already gotten good at it before you even started it. Dizzy only really plays like Dizzy, outside of a few games sort of like it. There are no other games you can build up skill in. (emulator problems can be a safe bet, but lag is something you won't notice if you never used it, and it can be difficult to figure out if something funny is going on with the joystick you're using to play isn't quite working as expected, there's been a world of difference since then)
DeleteHaving a look at the Frankie Goes to Hollywod manual as advised...
DeleteThere are keyboard controls as well as joystick! Hooray!
The keyboard controls are: number keys to fire
qwertyuiop for up
sdfghjkl for down
xvn, for left
zcbm. for right
and "left" means walk right while "right" means walk left.
I guess there's a reason I read about these games instead of playing them.
@Matt w, you have to push joystick in the opposite direction in that game as well, so it is consistent with the intent of game design.
DeleteI owned Blood Money, back when, and I remember almost nothing about it except the intro music. (I remember that vividly, though.) It was no Xenon.
DeleteSeeing those Denton screenshots immediately made me recall the interface from Frankie Goes to Hollywood on c64. I could never figure out the interface or what I was supposed to be doing. I just wandered around playing random obtuse minigames until I died. Once I found a dead body and I thought finally, some sort of plot! But then nothing much else happened and I kept wandering around until I gave up again.
DeleteI can't remember it well, but you had to find the murderer. Winning the minigames would give you clues.
DeleteWell, at least the first game features Du Hast prominently
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the text of the winning screen message is screwed up with some listing wording (I assume the first line is supposed to correctly say: „Du hast es geschafft -“) matches the game‘s overall level of dedication and excellency.
DeleteWhat, like the Rammstein song?
DeleteWhen I saw the picture of the dragon, my first thought was that it looks like it has a big smiling face with a thumbs up next to it, then I realized it's actual face was below that.
ReplyDeleteMy baseless assumption for why joystick only controls are relatively common with UK games is that joysticks were a much more standard part of owning a computer, at least for the people buying cassette games. You end up with developers making games under the assumption that joysticks are the main control method, and so they end up making games exclusively for it. As a side note, I also think this mentality eventually turned into mouse only games, because if you've conditioned yourself out of seeing a keyboard as a way of playing games, you're going to try to use the new standard peripheral instead.
The dragon looks more like a slug. But who would buy a game called 'Slug'?
ReplyDeleteShadowfire looks interesting, in a way. But joysticks are terrible. I think the C64 came with one, and games ported from it (there were not so many, it was the Spectrum that inspired the indie coders in that era) sometimes had it as an interface.
"Metal Slug" was a popular game though :)
DeleteYeah I'd be much more likely to play a game called "Slug" than one called "Dragon." Suggests the designers are thinking outside the box a little bit.
DeleteI don't know about Dungeons and Slugs, but Slug Age, Slug Ball Z, Slug Slayer, even Bob's Slug Hunt... these sound intriguing.
I guess my joke about Bob's Slug Hunt doesn't really work since the developers themselves reskinned it as Antkill.
DeleteAll of the major computers of the 80s had joystick support - even the IBM PC had an optional board for one at launch, and a joystick was bundled with the PC Jr and the popular Tandy 1000 clone.
DeleteNot sure what basis you have for claiming that "not so many" games were developed for the C64 and ported from that platform. It is true that the Apple ][ line was by far the most common origin system of the first wave of home PC gaming, but the C64 was close behind it with the ZX Spectrum essentially nonexistent outside of that platform's native UK.
I remember, from the time of the ZX Spectrum, those keyboards were terrible. Extremely cheap and easy to break if they were abused.
DeleteI think Clive Sinclair himself once mentioned how teenagers playing games were extremely careless with their keyboards and he used that as justification why his computers kept getting their keyboards broken.
I suppose, that was one of the reasons why they started packing in joysticks and lightguns with those computers, since they were probably designed to sustain more gaming abuse than the cheap keyboards. Then, developers started assuming everyone used joysticks.
I spent a lot of time as a kid playing Enigma Force on C64 and I think it's a quite interesting game, though it's definitely not an RPG.
ReplyDeleteIt has one original mechanic that I wish more games (including RPGs) copied and improved upon.
The game world has NPCs grouped in two factions constantly fighting each other and player characters are caught in the crossfire. The player can join one of the factions and influence the conflict (or not - it's not mandatory for completing the mission). It makes the game world feel alive and believable - the player's actions have an impact on it and at the same time stuff is happening even when the player is not around.
Stuart Smith's games had a similar mechanic. All of the NPCs belong to factions that are programmed to attack or ignore PCs or NPCs from other factions. Once you've figured out these relationships, it becomes easier and more efficient to lure them into rooms where they'll pummel each other than to fight them yourself. (8-year-old me learned this lesson after months of frustration playing Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.)
DeleteI always enjoy these "Briefs" where several are collected into one post. I don't why I like them exactly. It is not as if the games typically have much to offer. Maybe it is just the variety and how unusual they typically are from the norm. And there is usually a little Chet angst involved which is fun to read.
ReplyDeleteI could swear Shadowfire and Enigma Force had already been covered, but maybe they have just been _discussed_ so far.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think you should have played the original Spectrum version, which looked very nice and felt very slick (Denton Design reminds me of the later Westwood Studios), instead of the ugly, murky C64 versions.
I don't recall having had any particular problems with them, and enjoyed them quite a bit as a kid, and completed at last the first game on more than one occasion.
I prefered playing games with the joystick on my C64 way back to the point that navigating menus with it did not seem unnatural. I would say it is mainly due to early keyboards being less ergonomic, but it can just be that we were playing a lot more action games back then. In my memories, pushing just single key was so much more tedious, then performing a combo move with the joystick.
ReplyDelete@Chet: do you have any experience with the original C64 keyboard?
Yes. I originally played Ultima and Questron and probably the Might and Magic games on a C64.
DeleteI never really liked joysticks, but I recognize they have their uses in simple games where the entire point is to just move left, right, forward, back, and fire. I'm sure I enjoyed Space Invaders and Zaxxon with a joystick.
DeleteBut I can't forgive an interface that ONLY uses a joystick for things that are much better accomplished with the keyboard or mouse. And even if players disagree which is better, why not give them the choice?
DeleteWorth noting that several "mice" were available for the C64, including Commodore's own 1540, that were essentially just a digital joystick with a mouse's form factor. "Joystick as mouse" interfaces like this one would be far more usable with such a device.
DeleteI even had a C64 mouse because it was somehow included in the bundle my parents bought and I'm ashamed to admit the thought never occurred to me to use it...at all.
DeleteParents bought computers (with keyboards) for their kids in order for them to learn something of value, but kids wanted them for playing games.
DeleteBack then, arcade machines were the "ideal" that the computer gaming world aspired to. And arcade machines used joysticks and one or two buttons, so naturally most computer games wanted to be controllable by the control method most kids were used to.
As we know, joysticks fell out of flavor as home consoles transitioned to D-pads, and home computers started coming with mice, as well as the arcade business slowly disappeared all over the world.
There was a little more variety of control in early arcade machines. The Defender arcade machine had a two-way joystick and five buttons, and I was absolutely terrible at it because I was used to my Atari 2600 port with an eight-way joystick and one button. Breakout had a rotary controller and one button. Missile Command had a trackball and three fire buttons. Twin-stick shooters like Robotron had, well, two joysticks. But the home console ports like the Atari 2600 did have to boil that down to a common denominator of one joystick and a button, and that probably influenced both new arcade machines and computer games as well.
Delete(I was also going to say Space Invaders had push-button controls but apparently that was only in North America, elsewhere it had a left-right joystick!)
La Foresta Dimenticata dal Tempo is a nice graphics front-end to Monster Combat from Big Computer Games (ed. David H. Ahl).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.atariarchives.org/bigcomputergames/showpage.php?page=34
Which is an interesting variant of the typical Creative Computing grid game, but it's not an RPG.
Adding the dragon as a time-limit and a high score table are pretty good improvements, otherwise you do end up circling an inn and grinding a lot.
Shadowfire and Enigma Force are in my own list (Spectrum Computing classifies them as "Tactical Combat") so maybe they're more games made for people like me :).
ReplyDeleteFrom that video, looks like Shadowfire is a game made for people who like Mu Cartographer (an extremely arty indie game which presents you with a mysterious unlabeled control panel and where the gameplay consists entirely of figuring out how the panels do things). Except I loved Mu Cartographer and you couldn't pay me to play Shadowfire.
DeleteI guess kids were just smarter back in the 1980s. Even with rudimentary English skills and it being one of the first computer games I played, I don't recall any particular problems figuring it out. The problem now would be the real time aspect.
DeleteThe game's manual describes exactly how to play Shadowfire. Cumbersome yes, but not impossibly complex. One quirk is you have to pick up and use items which are only depicted as icons. You absolutely need the manual to understand what's what and for what you need them. For example to even get you squad to the enemy ship you need to take and use the teleporting device whith the team member called Manto, his function being teleporter droid.
DeleteI'm sure I could have figured it out, but once I determined it wasn't an RPG, it was more work than I was willing to put in.
DeleteFeels weird to see Shadowfire and Engima Force here, considering that while they're one of those games that not quite fit into modern genres, they never really seemed like RPGs. I guess sort of like Lords of Midnight where you could say so many things about them, because its quirks technically put it in one category, but you could also legitimately put it in many others.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteWell, coincidentally I've played through Shadowfire half a year ago with the help of a walkthrough. I tried to play the game already as a kid and beside cool graphics and intro music I was absolutely lost about what I was supposed to do. Because of my fond memories and supposed RPG or Adventure credentials on websites like mobygames I bought the game on ebay so now I had the manual, beside the online walkthrough. What I encountered instead of RPG or Adventure to my surprise is what feels to me as an early if not the earliest squad based real-time tactics game, under the limitations of the C64 of course. I would put in firmly in that genre.
DeleteI was looking forward to another rare Italian RPG, good that it turned out at least half-decent.
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised to learn that, as mdhughes pointed out, it seems to be a rip-off from another game. Load'n'Run (actually an Italian magazine, the Spanish version came later) was famous for rebranding premium games and pretending they were original creations. This time it seems that one of their readers decided to copy the technique and send them the end product.
Those who want to know more about this magazine, and know Spanish or don't mind using a translator, should absolutely read “Load'n'Run: piracy dresses to the nines” (https://orgullogamers.com/videojuegos/retro/load-n-run-la-pirateria-se-viste-de/), a great essay starting from the title.
A final note: it was hilarious for me to see that this game, instead of “levitazione” (levitation), writes “lievitazione” (leavening). It is precisely the spelling trap my group of D&D friends used to fall into, and our Dungeon Master was happy to comply, making more than an incautious wizard inflate like raised bread.
Unfortunately “L'isola dei segreti” seems to be just the Italian version of “Island of Secrets” (https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000210/Book/Island_of_Secrets). Moreover, it's probably an adventure game with at most some RPG elements.
DeleteGreat production values, though. I especially like the figures supporting you while you type in the lines: https://ia802300.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/4/items/World_of_Spectrum_June_2017_Mirror/World%20of%20Spectrum%20June%202017%20Mirror.zip&file=World%20of%20Spectrum%20June%202017%20Mirror/sinclair/books/i/IslandOfSecrets.pdf
This is my first exposure to the magazine, so I appreciate the additional context.
DeleteTo try the first real Italian CRPG, search for "Avventura 1", the 1983/1984 BASIC text game for the Commodore 64. MAT64 did a wonderful rendition of it in English language, with an original soundtrack (the original program is silent). See https://www.mat64.org/adventure-1/
DeleteWhile I was waiting for Chet to return, I read through MorpheusKitami's write up of Xenomorph (1990) which is kind of a Dungeon Master RPG but without stats...
ReplyDeletehttps://almostafamine.blogspot.com/2024/07/xenomorph-introduction.html
Dragon (aka Drachen) was originally published as a Listing in the German Magazine CPU (Computer programmiert zur Unterhaltung) 06/1984
ReplyDeleteYou can find it here:
https://archive.org/details/CPU-magazine-1984-06/page/n41/mode/2up
It is 6 pages long including a description of the source code. :-)