Game 556: Magische Steine (1993)

 

       

Magische Steine

"Magic Stones" 

Germany 

Independently developed; published in the September 1993 issue of 64'er disk magazine for the Commodore 64

Date Started: 23 July 2025

Date Ended: 25 July 2025

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) once you figure it out
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

         

Magische Steine is the kind of game that makes you appreciate the complexities of other games. If I just described it in broad terms, taking only a single paragraph, you would think that it sounded like any other RPG. It's going to take a lot more paragraphs, and a deeper analysis, to understand why this game is so desperately unfun even compared to other titles at its technology level. 

   

But let's start with the simple paragraph: Magische Steine is a single-character, iconographic RPG in which the player is trying to save the land of Aldora from an evil wizard named Tenomy. Tenomy lives in a magic tower, and the player has to find nine magic stones scattered throughout the world in order to enter the tower. There are enemies like kobolds, werewolves, and dragons standing in the way. Towns serve as sources of weapons, armor, and healing.

         

The game begins, enemies everywhere. Fortunately, they stay where they are.

          

With no character creation process except for a name, the player is tossed into the middle of an 88 x 40 outdoor map swarming with enemies. At Level 1, he has 100 life points, 1,000 gold, 150 rations, and no weapons or armor. All input is with the joystick, but there aren't any complex commands, so I don't mind it as much as with The Ormus Saga II.

     

As I said, it sounds like a lot of RPGs. It looks like a lot of RPGs. And before I start tearing into it, I should note that the author, Ralf Prescher, was only 15 when he offered it to 64'er for publication. It's an impressive effort for such a young author, competently programmed, not in any way juvenile. The icons and tiles, though reminiscent of Ultima and other iconographic games, are different enough that I appreciate their novelty. But the game is simply dead on arrival, and it's worth taking some time to understand why.

   

A double-spread on the game with the author's photo.

       

The first element that differentiates Steine from similar titles is that the enemies are a) unrandomized, b) don't move, and c) with one exception, don't respawn. Every player begins the game with a stack of kobolds to his east, a stack of gnomes to his west, a stack of lions to his north, and a stack of soldiers to his southeast. When he enters the easternmost dungeon for the first time, he will always find a stack of undead warriors in the entry room followed by two stacks of goblins.

     

(There's a footnote to the above paragraph in that I found two versions of the game online. I'll talk more about that later, but the two versions did have different starting positions. It doesn't really matter in the longer analysis.) 

     

Essaying a party of lions. If I leave and come back, there might be 3, 5, or 9 lions.

       

Combat with enemies is not quite as deterministic as their placement, but neither is it as probabilistic as most RPGs. The number of enemies in each stack is randomized each time the player approaches. If you don't like it, you can back off and try again. That stack of kobolds to the east may vary between 4 and 10. An unarmed, unarmored character can take them no matter what. At 4 kobolds, he loses 10 life points; at 10 kobolds, he loses 28. He'll earn 12 gold pieces and 41 experience points per kobold.

        

As I said, when you first approach a stack, you have the option to fight or flee. Fighting commits you to the battle until the end. There are no tactics, choices, or interrupt keys. You watch as the enemies' hit points decrease alongside your own. If yours deplete first, you lose the game, but that's only a concern for the first few levels. After that, as long as you heal up regularly, you're not in much danger as long as you keep an eye on your total hit points and return to town when they get too low.

        

Combat is just watching.

        

This setup is at least playable, if unconventional. It's a great game for a data collector. Expending the lives of a couple dozen doomed introductory characters, you slowly learn which enemies you can take and which you cannot, and you start clearing the land by nuzzling up to each enemy party, assessing it, and either taking it or moving on. By Level 10 or so, though, you can take just about any enemy, and it becomes less necessary to pick your battles and thus record data.

                        

A hypothetical starting data table.

                        

Towns offer four services: guilds for healing and leveling up, armor shops, weapon shops, and rations shops. Each town, for some unfathomable reason, only offers three of these services. In a game with a small land area (88 x 40), about a dozen towns, and no danger when walking between them, the lack of a specific service is only a momentary annoyance, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.

   

Rations are an afterthought. You might have to worry about them a bit at the start of the game, but you get them from combat, so you rarely have to buy them.

    

There are five types of armor: cape, leather, banded, chain, and plate. There are nine types of weapons: stick, knife, club, battle axe, war axe, short sword, long sword, broadsword, and two-handed sword.

       

Armor is expensive.

       

You earn enough experience points to level up at 500, then 1,500, then 3,000, then 5,000, and so forth. Each new level requires 500 experience points more than the last one. Each new level gives you a handful of extra hit points, increasing throughout the game. I don't believe you get anything else from leveling, meaning I could have rejected this as an RPG and saved a few hours.

   

Mostly, you use towns for healing, which costs between 4 and 7 gold pieces per hit point. This amount is randomized every time you visit the guild, and you definitely want to pay attention to it.

          

Oh, and ratcheting up the number of LPs you want to heal, 10 at a time, gets very old very fast.

      

All right. Let's work from that setup. You begin the game. You spend your 1,000 gold pieces on a cape (500) and a club (200), saving 300 for healing. You move around the land, looking for low-level enemies to fight, like gnomes, kobolds, and witches. You learn to avoid "swamp guys" (sumpfkerle) and yetis, which use the same icon. You look forward to upgrading to better weapons and armor so you can kill harder enemies, but you start to notice a problem: you're not making any money. In fact, you're losing it. With almost no exceptions, it costs more money in healing to make up for battle, even if you wait for a 4-gold-piece-per-hit-point offer, than you earn during battle. The 1,000-gold piece purse you need for a suit of leather armor is awfully far away, and you're running out of gnomes and kobolds.

       

But I did say "almost no exceptions" above. There is one repeating encounter in the game, one enemy that will not clear from the map, and this one enemy reliably offers—for at least a modestly armed and armored character—more gold than it takes to heal the damage it causes. This enemy is a stack of rats, found in the far northwest corner. Until you find this enemy, you are doomed. Once you find him, all challenge is removed from the game. You just put the emulator in warp mode and grind against them every time you need money; and trust me, you will return to this well until the final minutes of the game, because the hit point/money ratio problem never goes away. My Level 77 character, marching through the dungeons with the best weapon and armor, might lose 200 hit points against a hydra and earn 600 gold pieces. It takes 800 gold pieces to heal 200 points of damage. There are no other ways to heal—no potions, no resting. Dungeons offer chests with gold occasionally, but not enough to make up the shortfall. Every 10 minutes or so, it was back to the rats.

         

Another batch falls.

     

The shortfall issue is the final nail in the coffin, but honestly, the game would be boring even if you made plenty of money from regular battles. It would still be a joyless, deterministic affair of fighting and healing, fighting and healing, with no other resources to manage, no random encounters, and no tactics or strategies. And while it feels like you could reduce a lot of games to this kind of statement, there is something in their randomness, resource management, and player agency (if only illusory) that makes them interesting. The mathematician in me wants to deny it, to say that a + b = c and (x(a+b)^n)/q = c are functionally the same thing, but there is something in those variables, operators, exponents, and vectors that makes a huge difference. 

    

Anyway, the rest of the game. Because of the rats, there's no particular reason to clear the enemies on the overland map, except the few in your way, but I did so anyway. What else are you going to do while bustling from place to place? The experience does feel a bit genocidal, though, given that the enemies don't respawn. Standing in one place, they aren't even a threat.

        

The game world, courtesy of DecafSlurper's entry in the German C64 wiki (see below).

       

The world has a couple of lakes, and if you want to cross them (the larger one blocks the entire eastern part of the world), you have to buy a boat for 5,000 gold pieces at a dock. Once you have it, it appears any time you enter the water—a mechanic that would be welcome in The Ormus Saga II instead of forcing me to open the command wheel and choose "Board Boat." There are a couple of mountain ranges for which you have to feel your way through invisible passages. 

         

Navigating to those enemies and that chest requires testing the mountain range for invisible passages.

       

The map has seven dungeons, most guarded by an old wizard who wants you to do something before he'll step aside and let you in. Most of them want you to free another old wizard from somewhere else, some of them on the overworld map, a couple in other dungeons. One of them wants you to kill an ogre on the map.

        

An old man guards a dungeon . . .

. . . and wants me to do something before he'll get out of my way.

      

The dungeons are the worst. They're only one level each, but the smallest is around 20 x 20 (worm tunnel) and the largest is around 34 x 34. They only let you see a one-square radius around you; there's no "Light" spell here. Dungeons are jam-packed with monsters, which, unlike the ones on the surface, you cannot avoid. Even high-level characters cannot completely clear most dungeons in a single try; you inevitably have to back out one or two times to refresh your hit points. In addition to monsters, dungeons have treasure chests that earn you both cash and experience. Most of them also have chests with one of the Magic Stones.

         

Exploring a dungeon. There's an old man to my right and a stack of lions or something to the north.

      

I mapped one of the dungeons just to show you, but I don't think it's necessary to map them. Using my normal "follow the right wall" approach, I found all the Magic Stones, even if I didn't find every other chest or encounter.

        

The one map I was willing to make. "GA" are giant ant stacks; "GS" are giant spiders. "$$" is treasure. The treasure square with the magic stone is guarded by a demon.

      

Two of the stones are in the hands of dragons on the overworld. I didn't even notice when I obtained them. I just mowed through the critters and noticed them in my inventory later. 

           

Approaching Tenomy's tower.

         

Once you have nine stones, you can enter Tenomy's Tower, which is four (comparatively) small levels. As with the dungeons, I had to back out a few times to heal in the middle of my explorations. The tower has a lot of hydras, the game's toughest enemies, plus Tenomy himself. No individual enemy is hard when you have enough hit points, though.

      

Approaching Tenomy, with a Hydra to my northeast.

            

When Tenomy is dead, you get the endgame text: 

            

With his last ounce of strength, Tenomy tells them: "I will return with even more monsters, and then I will be the victor!" Then there's a loud bang, and he disappears. You pick up the last and largest magic stone and leave the tower. When you reach the [base of the] tower, it collapses.
   
When you arrive at a nearby village, you are greeted with a joyful welcome, and for the next five days, celebrations take place throughout Aldora. And you will forever be remembered as Aldora's hero. The end. 

         

The endgame screen.

         

I found two versions of the game online. Unless I have something set incorrectly, the one on the Internet Archive is broken. If you move to the southern part of the map, the graphics go all wonky, and when you enter dungeons, the walls are somehow made up of monsters.

    

The second version, I found on a site that I will not name, but I will say that for every game you download from the site, you have to deal with half a dozen re-directs and malware links hidden behind fake download buttons. I don't know why I keep using it. This one works okay, but it starts the character in a different location and some of the initial enemy encounters have hundreds of enemies in the stack. If you refuse to attack and re-engage, they then have the proper single-digit numbers. I could not get the game to successfully save and reload with either version.

          

I didn't have a place earlier for this image of my sailing the lake in my 5,000-gold-piece boat.

      

My GIMLET score for Magische Steine comes to 14. It earns 1s and 2s in most categories, but the final score, however low, can't really convey the almost despairingly monotonous gameplay. If the game only required you to find three stones in as many small dungeons, I'd regard it as a cute misfire, but 6 hours is almost offensively long, and that's with an emulator cranked to 200% most of the time and in "warp" mode while grinding. Thankfully, I'm still engaged in my Stephen King marathon.

    

But if I thought my time with the game was too long, my heart goes out to commenter DecafSlurper, who wrote an exhaustive article on Steine for the German C64 wiki. (He says he enjoyed the process, for what it's worth.) Although I didn't consult it until I had won the game, I was gratified to find my understanding of the mechanics confirmed. And whatever my opinion, the game must have been at least somewhat popular among early players, as 64'er continued to feature tips and hints throughout 1993 and 1994. Despite the setup in the endgame text, I cannot find any evidence of a sequel or any other game written by this author.