BRIEF: Ring of Elanor (1987)

 

        

Ring of Elanor

United States

Independently developed; published in UpTime disk magazine

Released 1987 for Commodore 64

Did not finish because: Bugs

    

You rarely expect genius in diskmag games; at best, they might have one innovative thing or might do a good job evoking a better RPG without actually replicating it. The best we've seen so far are probably John Carmack and John Romero's Dark Designs trilogy (1990-1991) for Softdisk, evoking elements of both Wizardry and Phantasie. John Mattson's 1991 RPGs for the Commodore 128 had enough innovation to keep things interesting. These games weren't meant to compete with commercial titles, so you have to cut them a little slack.

   

But Ring of Elanor, at least in the only version I can find, is so completely broken that I really can't find anything positive to say about it. It was written by Mike Cooke and published in the Commodore 64 version of UpTime, where John Romero got his start on Apple II games. If it's consciously emulating anything, I don't know what. It feels like games I've played before, but I can't put my finger on a specific title.

      

A bit of the backstory.

     

The backstory is that you're in the land of Elanor, which used to be full of chaos and demons, until Elric the Lawful and the Brothers of Law banished Chaos and its minions from the mortal world. Elric created the Great Ring of Elanor and placed it on his statue in the center of the town of Homeland. The ring generated a magical "lawful" field that kept Chaos at bay. But now the ring has been stolen, and evil is returning to the world.

   

Character creation has the player give a name (in response to the question, "What durst thy name?") and then choose from elf, cleric, and human classes. The game randomly rolls between 1 and 15 for strength, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, hit points, and armor class. You get five chances to reject the statistics before you have to toss the character and start over. Each character starts with a different collection of spells, including "Invisibility," "Healing," "Web," "Create Food," and "Fireball." Finally, each character starts with around 10 food and between 50 and 85 silver.

      

My character sheet at Level 3. I had to cheat to get that much silver.

      

The character begins one step south of the city of Homeland, which is roughly in the center of the 40 x 22 game map. The text interface has a "word map" of the immediate surroundings in the upper right corner. The player is prompted to move any of the four cardinal directions, through fields, forests, swamps, and mountains, encountering random enemies and the occasional fixed encounter or treasure.

      

Get used to this message.

      

The game's first major flaw, though not its most fatal, becomes clear in the opening rounds. Every single movement and action requires 1 unit of food. The moment you hit 0, you starve to death. You never find food in the wild. In town, it costs a whopping 5 silver pieces per unit. So even if the starting player turns around, heads back into town, and spends everything on food (after buying a starting weapon), he'll at best have about 20 units. That's only barely enough to make it to the next-closest town before starving. And if you're thinking "Create Food" will help, it costs 1 unit to cast and only creates 1 unit.

        

If you try to use a spell too often, you get this message. Spelling is not the author's strong suit.

        

In most games, the solution would be to grind against monsters, amass money, and use it to buy more food. But here we have another problem in that random encounters at Level 1 are extremely rare. The only place that you can travel likely to have any random monsters at all is the swamps to the west of Homeland, where you might find a couple of golems. But even then, you'd be lucky to get 100 silver pieces from them, which would get you just enough food to pay for the trek and back.

     

I figured that if I just kept exploring until I died, I'd find some solution—something within the radius of Homeland that would give me enough money to move onward. My characters kept dying of starvation, almost never encountering even one foe, but I kept creating new ones and going off in different directions. Eventually, I had mapped everything within 20 moves of Homeland, and I was still no closer to finding a way to avoid starving to death, let alone attaining any loftier goals.

         

Any battle, let alone a victorious one, is rare in the early game.

            

In addition to food, the town sells all kinds of other items necessary for long-term survival, including armor, better weapons, healing, lanterns and torches to see in caves, and horses, which are necessary to enter mountainous areas. Since horses cost about 350 silver, there is no functional way to get there the way the game is programmed. The best I can figure, the author meant for food to deplete less rapidly, or for food to cost 1 silver for 5 units instead of the other way around.

       

Some of the items sold in Homeland village.

       

Thus, in an effort to see any part of the game beyond 20 moves from Homeland, I edited the character file to give myself enough money to buy plenty of food. With that, I was able to map the rest of the available world.

   

Combat comes along randomly, with enemies determined by the environment. You meet golems and swamp rats in swamps, werewolves and black bears in forests, goats and mountain cobras in mountains, and giant gophers and rattlesnakes in fields. In combat, you specify each round what weapon you'll use and then whether to attack the enemy's head, torso, or "rear." The annoying thing is that you have to type the full name of the weapon that you're using, no abbreviations. You wouldn't think it would be that hard to accurately type BROADSWORD, but I get it wrong at least half the time.

       

The sword isn't a great weapon, but at least it has fewer letters.

      

But even more enraging than that, there doesn't appear to be any way to attack with some of the magic items that you can find—silver dagger, +1 sword, +2 mace—because the game won't let you type a space in the name of the weapon. I tried just DAGGER and +1SWORD and other combinations, but it wants that space that it won't let you type. This is particularly infuriating because you're always breaking regular weapons.

  

There are two fixed battles on the part of the map that I could explore, one with a brown dragon and one with a blue dragon. They offer additional body parts to attack. It didn't matter, because even at Level 10, I couldn't kill either of them without breaking all of my regular weapons and thus having nothing to attack with.

       

Sure would be nice to use one of my better weapons here.

      

Random battles come faster as the levels get higher, and the food issue stops being so much of a problem, though it never completely goes away. You gain a level every 1,000 experience, earning extra maximum hit points and (I think) greater attack accuracy. I never found a way to get spells that the character doesn't start with. "Fireball" came in handy for me often, and I imagine "Healing" does the same.

   

I explored as much of the map as I could. In addition to the fixed battles, there are two fixed treasure chests, one with a +2 mace and one with poison gas. There are two other towns: Outpost Village to the southwest and Northerly Village in the northeast. They sell exactly the same things as Homeland. I can't figure out how to get across the river to the northwest quadrant, but I suspect a pass becomes available after you defeat the blue dragon, which I wasn't able to do. 

       

As much as I could explore of the game world.

       

As you explore, the game saps your hit points by having random disasters befall you: falling trees in forests, quicksand in swamps, landslides on mountains, and ditches in fields. The accumulation of these misfortunes can be deadly.

        

The game says you're a "bold fighter" no matter what.

      

The final blow to the game's playability comes in the form of a large area of "foggy fields" to the northeast. Entering any of the foggy squares causes the game to crash with an error. I suspect it has something to do with checking to make sure the character has a lantern. 

      

My mother warned me about crashing in the fog.

      

On the plus side, the auto map works pretty well. X's indicate fixed encounters.

        

A small part of the game.

              

Finally, each town features a "town crier" who will offer a hint for half his money, but one of the hints is that town criers sometimes lie. An inspection of the file indicates that the hints are:

   

• "Werewolves are harmed by arrows." I know from experience this is a lie.
• "Werewolves are harmed by silver." Probably, but since SILVER DAGGER has a space in it, who knows?
• "One water passage is in the north."
• "One water passage is in the southwest." One of these might be true. Maybe you have to try every water square to see if the game will let you swim across in that location.
• "Mountains require horses." True.
• "Swamps require horses." False.
• "Ropes will save you in the swamp." True.
• "Ropes are needed in the caverns." False.
• "Evil hides in the northwest." Probably. I couldn't get there.
• "Evil hides in Homeland Village." That would be a cool twist, but where? In the menu? 

           

A little bit of information costs as much as 11 meals.

      

The same text file indicates that when you arrive back in Homeland with the ring, the end message is:

    

As you enter the village, a shout goes out and a group of people gather around you. They are amazed you returned so soon with the ring and are astonished by your battle scars and increased power. They lead you over to the statue of Elric, where the ring once rested and protected men, and where you must replace it. As the ring slips onto the statue, a smile slowly replaces the sad frown that has adorned its face since the loss of the ring. The journey is ended, and you are now the king of the world of mortal men and the keeper of the ring. 

 

Author Mike Cooke seems to have written at least two other games for UpTime: Battleship 64! and Memorizer 64! It doesn't appear that he wrote any other RPGs or that UpTime published any more RPGs. It's possible that the errors in this one are in the surviving copies and not the original.