Gateway to the Savage Frontier: Summary and Rating

   

Gateway to the Savage Frontier

Beyond Software (developer); SSI (publisher)

Released 1991 for Amiga, Commodore 64, and DOS

Date Started: 18 March 2016
Date Ended: 4 April 2016

Total Hours: 22

Reload Count: 15

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 49

Ranking at Time of Posting: 192/214 (90%)

When the first of the Star Wars prequels came out in 1999, millions of fans joined me in staring at the closing credits with bafflement. "$115 million," we simultaneously thought, "and this was the best you could do?" The special effects were fine, sure, but not the story--and the story ought to be the easiest part to get right.

Right or wrong, I've had this thought a thousand times over the years in various situations. Compared to the part that I have no idea how to do, the part that I could do seems so ridiculously easy that I don't understand how the creators managed to screw it up so bad. I don't have the slightest inkling when it comes to cinematography, sound, film editing, or set design, but could I write better dialogue than Attack of the Clones? Of course I could. So could you. I could never make a living as a composer--I know nothing about the technique--but I'll bet I could take a pretty good turn at being a lyricist. It's hard for me to believe that the job of "lyricist" even exists. Once you've done the hard work of writing the composition, how frigging hard is it to come up with a couple dozen lines that rhyme?

Cleverbot writes more interesting dialog than George Lucas.

   

And so it goes with games. Why-oh-why, I think, given how much work the developers clearly put into the game engine, the interface, the graphics--all the stuff that I have no idea how to do--why couldn't they get the easy part right? Compared to the coding, the story is a cinch. Not having to write a single line of Basic Pasquale Visual Assembly Code++ or whatever, but getting paid to write the on-screen text and journal entries, is my definition of the easiest job in the world. Seriously, someone pay me to do it.

I know that I'm probably wrong and it's harder than it looks, but damn, you have to agree that until about a year and a half ago, CRPG developers just did not know how to tell a story. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, games almost always rely on framing stories rather than integrated stories, and too many of them feature the same old tropes. A distressing number don't bother to tell any story at all. Among the games I've played so far, you could count on your fingers all the games that even try--Ultima IV-VI, both Starflights, Quest for Glory, the Gold Box series--and some of them aren't exactly at the pinnacle of plot development. And don't tell me about JRPGs, supposedly famed for their plots. I don't know when they finally got it together, but it was definitely after Xanadu. The earliest game I can think of that tells a better story than I could devise on my own is probably Baldur's Gate, and after that the Bioware/Black Isle lines do a solid job. I'm in awe at the depth of the Elder Scrolls universe. The rest of you--I won't charge nearly as much as R.A. Salvatore. Call me.

The Gold Box series does best when it embraces minimalism and draws on classic themes. Pool of Radiance gets lost when it tries to talk about the Pool of Radiance, but it has a solid beginning with a group of adventurers here to clean up this town. Secret of the Silver Blades evokes The Seven Samurai until it gets to the goofy Well of Knowledge. The Krynn games do a decent job tying into the novels--which exist in a more graspable game world than the Forgotten Realms--though you sometimes feel a bit lost if you haven't read them.

So once again I am in a position of needing to commend Gateway to the Savage Frontier for telling any story at all while simultaneously noting that, three weeks from now, I'll have to read all my own entries if I want to remember what the game was actually about. Even writing the entries, a couple days after I played, I had to consult my own screenshots and re-read the journal entries. The Zhentarim were going to invade so I had to find a bunch of statues and bring them to a magic place where they did this Fifth Element thing and killed everyone. Some idiot wizard kept telling me where to go. There were some shambling mounds. Ceptienne who?

Part of the difficulty is with the Forgotten Realms in general. We've talked about it before. It has too much stuff: too many gods, too many monsters, too much ancient history. It is the walking antithesis to Brandon Sanderson's Laws of Magic. You basically have to accept anything as plausible. A bunch of statues caused a pyramid to emit rays of light that instantly summoned enough creatures to destroy hordes of orcs, trolls, and mercenaries? Sure, whatever. That must be a Level 10 spell; I don't have those yet. Then again, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights managed to tell decent stories set in the Realms by remaining internally-consistent, making the characters feel like the true centerpiece of the stories, and offering a number of interesting plot twists, none of which seem to have occurred to the Gold Box developers.

What's particularly disappointing about Gateway is that it wasn't developed by SSI. With much of their resources invested in the Dark Sun engine, they allowed Beyond (soon to become Stormfront Studios) to develop Gateway, Treasures of the Savage Empire, and Neverwinter Nights. (SSI continued to develop Pools of Darkness and Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed, however.) This was a chance for a new developer to take the Gold Box engine and put its own twist on it--particularly since Beyond's founder, Don Daglow, has credentials going all the way back to one of the earliest RPGs, Dungeon for the PDP-10 (1975). On the other hand, this was Beyond's first major title, and perhaps they decided to play it safe. I understand they kicked it up a notch for Treasures of the Savage Frontier.

Moving on to other news, did I ever win the final battle against Valgaamon and his forces? Hell, yeah, I did! But I didn't handle such a dirty job myself: I subcontracted it! To who? Why, to the party that defeated the Mulmaster Beholder Corps: my victorious characters from Curse of the Azure Bonds! Thanks to Null Null, I learned that you can import characters from Curse into Gateway. They arrive at around Level 10 (compared to a max of Level 6-7 in Gateway), with spells one level higher--and yet they somehow work. So do all the items of equipment you bring from Curse despite the fact that they don't exist in Gateway. I'm talking about Ioun Stones, Wands of Magic Missile, Long Swords +3 Frost Brand, Girdles of Giant Strength, Wands of Lightning, Wands of Fireball, and Darts of the Hornet's Nest.

  

There was no reason not to spend a "Fireball" on the goblins.

  

I brought over two magic users who together had 9 castings of "Fireball," 6 castings of "Ice Storm," 4 castings of "Haste," and a Wand of Defoliation each (praise be to Moander!). My clerics didn't just turn the undead in Ascore; they destroyed them. This has to be the most bizarre Easter Egg I've ever encountered in an RPG. Why did the developers allow this, and why did they program all these effects that you couldn't find in-game? Are they just inherent to the Gold Box engine?

  

"Did I mention I killed Tyranthraxus twice?"

   

A couple of interesting things happened on the way to the final battle. First, I noted that the encounters were much more difficult: where 6 skeletons had appeared in the previous game, 12 appeared now. They still weren't hard or anything, but the game must do some kind of level-scaling.

Second, I got an extra encounter. Behind a door I previously couldn't access because I didn't have the "Knock" spell, I found a crazy little wizard going on about deciphering the tapestry maps for Vaalgamon. It didn't add a lot to the story, but it was an additional clue to help with the final maze.

  

  

Anyway, I probably could have let the computer control the characters and won the battle, but I played it straight, buffing beforehand with "Haste," "Enlarge," "Bless," "Prayer," and even "Resist Fire" for good measure. I was right that shambling mounds are vulnerable to "Ice Storm," and I had a bunch of spells and a wand. Vaalgamon did his best to cast spells and regenerate, but with fighters capable of four attacks per round, he didn't much stand a chance. I literally hadn't lost a single hit point at the end of the battle.

  

This was a pretty sweet experience reward.

  

Vaalgamon turned out to have a shield +5 a long sword +5, a Ring of Protection +2, and Bracers AC2.

But killing him didn't change the endgame at all! I still got the text about him and his followers being pulled beneath the earth by undead. So that was pretty pathetic. In any event, I now have two potential parties to bring into Treasure of the Savage Frontier: one balanced for the game, and one ridiculously overpowered. It's going to be a tough choice.

Finally, let's have a look at the fake journal entries, which are always a post-game Gold Box highlight. They're pathetic! Accounting for ones that I didn't get but sound real (e.g., I should have gotten them if I hadn't done Everlund-Silverymoon out of order), there only seem to be three: a nonsense set of directions, a fake entry in the word puzzle for the Kraken Fortress, and one (the last in the journal) that suggests Ceptienne was an opponent of the Zhentarim and instead of going after her statue, the party should have gone somewhere in the High Forest. What a let-down.

I don't really feel like spending time on a full GIMLET where I've already done like seven of these for Gold Box games. Let's do the quick bulleted version:

• 5 points for the game world. Gateway doesn't make horrible use of the Forgotten Realms setting, and I suppose it tries to tell a decent story. It needed to do a better job on the individual maps to make the player feel he's actually accomplishing something as he clears out monsters and undead. I did like the extra textual and graphic touches given to each map to make it feel more like a real place.

• 5 points for character creation and development. It has the usual D&D advantages, and a few in-game acknowledgements of character race, sex, and class, but advancement is extremely uneven and some of the classes cap way too soon.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. There are are some memorable NPCs, some of whom can join the party, but the Gold Box series still isn't doing much in the way of dialogue options.

  

This was the biggest plot twist in the game.

   

• 5 points for encounters and foes. Again, the Gold Box series offers some of the best monster variety out there, with plenty of opportunities for grinding if necessary, but the game has virtually no non-combat encounters. None of the Gold Box games have come close to improving on Pool of Radiance in that area. This one did do a better job with pre-combat encounter text.

  

The pre-encounter text was welcome; the lack of actual options was not.

   

• 7 points for magic and combat. Still no complaints about the Gold Box engine here.

• 5 points for equipment. Reasonably good, but nothing new. The game is a little stingier than most until the end. Still no in-game item descriptions, and I've never liked the way that item distribution is fixed.

   

Some of the stuff my imported characters brought in. I still can't believe it all worked.

   

• 4 points for the economy. It starts better than most games in the lineage and offers a "money sink" in the way of magic arrows and potions, but it's still horribly unbalanced. The series will  never get this right.

• 3 points for quests. I didn't find the main quest compelling, and I'm disappointed in the lack of side quests along the way. Every city had a "lord" NPC and should have had a couple of quests, too. I give an extra point for a couple of alternate (bad) endings.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Despite a couple of interface flaws, the Gold Box remains unmatched in this area. Some graphics improvements (this is the first in the series to feature VGA graphics) were generally welcome even if I didn't like some of the styles.

  

The game definitely has the most complex graphics of the series so far.

   

• 4 points for gameplay. It has the illusion of being nonlinear but really isn't. It's also a little too easy, and in general it's not very replayable. But the pacing and length are okay.

That gives us a final score of 49, which I'm afraid is the lowest score I've given so far to a Gold Box title, but only by 1 (Secret of the Silver Blades got 50). Though low for the series, we have to note that it still puts Gateway in the 90th percentile of all the games on my list.

   

   

I can't find any evidence that Computer Gaming World reviewed this one aside from a one-paragrapher from Scorpia (as part of a macro-survey of 90 games) two years later. "A few nice touches have been added to the basic engine," she says, "but otherwise you've played this one many times before." In the same issue, she calls Treasures of the Savage Frontier "a yawner." MobyGames's round-up shows ratings between 45 (Amiga Format) and 73 (Power Play), with lots of comments like "staid" and "shopworn" and "derivative."

I want to make sure that my own criticisms are clear: I've never criticized a game for re-using the same game engine if the engine was good. I could have happily played Pool of Radiance derivatives for the rest of my life. My complaint has always been that SSI came out of the gate with a superb game in Pool of Radiance and then never improved upon it, save for graphics upgrades and a couple of interface improvements. In everything that really matters--story, NPCs, role-playing choices and dialog, quests, and combat, the series has at best stayed the same but for the most part gotten worse. Both SSI and its partners, like Beyond, repeatedly missed opportunities to use an excellent engine for even better stories, deeper role-playing choices, and more interesting quest options.

They still have Neverwinter Nights, Treasures of the Savage Frontier, Dark Queen of Krynn, and Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures to change my mind (and perhaps I should really be putting my hopes in fan-created games for the latter), and I'll hit them all in time. Right now, it's time to see if I can get a Mac emulator working for Shadow Keep.

Gateway to the Savage Frontier: Won!

  

When we last closed, my party was in possession of three statues but had no idea where to go for the fourth. I looked at the map and reasoned that it was probably in Sundabar, the only named city I hadn't visited. It was located convenient to Ascore, where I assumed the final battle would take place, so it seemed a decent guess.

But Sundabar was weird. It was a regular 16 x 16 town with all the services and amenities, but hardly any special encounters. It had lots of places where it looked like a special encounter should be, so I figured the game was waiting for me to have accomplished other things before visiting. I had experienced the same kind of feeling when I visited many of the Death Knights of Krynn cities out of order.

This was one exception. The game's love affair with harpies began here, and I would encounter hordes of them on subsequent maps. They're not even that hard. Yes, they occasionally cause "Charm Person" upon a successful attack, but this is easily dispelled and they're otherwise very easy to hit and kill.

     
So I returned to Secomber and Amanitas, who directed me to the Star Mounts in the middle of the High Forest.

As I reached the base of the mountain, I encountered a giant snake crushing a giant bird. The game asked whether I wanted to help. Nature sucks, you know, and snakes aren't necessarily less deserving of food than birds. I'm sure a druid would encourage me not to get involved. But I sighed and did what the game clearly wanted me to do and helped the bird. I hadn't saved in a while before this encounter, so I never found out what happened if you choose "Leave Alone." I'm actually quite curious.

Isn't this scene on some country's flag?

Helping the bird meant fighting several giant snakes and two shambling mounds. This wasn't my first combat against shambling mounds in the Gold Box series--there were scores of them in Curse of the Azure Bonds--but I think they're tougher here. I don't remember the Curse mounds being immune to "Fireball" and "Lightning Bolt," taking half-damage from physical attacks, having a -4 armor class, and killing characters with suffocation attacks after 4 rounds. Fighting them was brutal, and I had to reload twice after watching attack after attack hopelessly go "swish" while some hapless character suffocated to death.
 

As difficult as the shamblers were, I don't think they were so difficult that I deserved the reward they carried. Each had a set of +3 plate mail, a +1 shield, a +2 composite long bow, a Cloak of Displacement, and an Ioun Stone that increased my wisdom by 1. Every shambling mound in the game had all of these items, and there were lots more, so I suspect this was a bug somewhere.
 

My fighter/thief's inventory at this point.

    
In any event, the bird turned out to be a Aarakocra--basically a species of bird-men whose name exemplifies onomatopoeia. They told me of a human woman who has established a lair on the top of the Star Mounts and flies around on black dragons. They offered to take me to the place, and I accepted.

Doesn't he look just a little like Sam Eagle?

The woman in question turned out to be a sorceress named Ceptienne. Her introduction was rather clumsy and I still don't quite understand what her "deal" is. She is manifestly the character on the box cover and title screen of the game. (I know that image previously appeared on the cover of 1984's Book of Marvelous Magic, but I still think that Ceptienne was created to be that woman.) Her apparition greeted me shortly after I entered her fortress--basically a huge 16 x 16 maze with lots of one-way doors--and called us "worthy adversaries."

I'm torn between mocking that armor and wondering where I can buy a set for Irene.

As I explored her fortress, found secret doors, and killed a slew of harpies, ogres, hellhounds, and medusas, her proclamations became more desperate:

Ceptienne's threats had the opposite effect than intended on the male party members.

Her fortress held two battles with two black dragons each, and I was reminded how much I hate black dragons for having a breath attack--acid--that nothing counteracts. You just have to hope that they don't target the same character twice in a row. I had one reload, but I was packing pretty decent +2 and +3 gear by this point, and dragons never have as many hit points as I expect they will. It never seems right that I can fight them with Level 6 characters.

Eventually, I found my way to Ceptienne's sanctuary, and she attacked, all pretenses of civility gone by this point. I forgot to get a screenshot with her party, but I think it had harpies and a couple of medusas. I got lucky with the initiative rolls and was able to "Fireball" and "Ice Storm" her (using the last charge in the wand) during the first round, which killed all the harpies and the medusas. I think it was just a couple of physical attacks after that. She was dead and the fourth statue was in my hands. I can't help but think the creators shortchanged her story.
 

"Visionless" hints at a greater depth to her story.

We headed back to Sundabar, and things were a lot different. Zhent patrols, desperate to reclaim my statues, were patrolling the streets and shaking down townsfolk. As I made my way through the city and the far exit, Vaalgamon tried to stop me first with an illusion...

I was very disappointed that this wasn't a real fight.

...then with temptation, as a stone fountain offered to reward me with fabulous wealth if I would throw the statues into the well.

Despite his protests, he collected his share of the gold.

I had to see what happened if I gave up the statues. The answer was I got 9,142 experience points and 63,818 gold pieces--far more than I could carry, but probably less than I already had, with nothing to spend it on. The game immediately ended and directed me to a journal entry that related Vaalgamon's conquest of the Savage Frontier and the party's subsequent imprisonment: "Our  riches have availed us nothing. We were hunted down, captured, and brought to this prison, where they keep us alive only out of a desire for revenge." I think this is the first time in the Gold Box series that the journal has been used to outline an alternate, "bad" ending.

Anyway, reloading, I did what I was supposed to do and refused the fountain. It turned into a giant stone golem and attacked me, but was no match for my Sword +3 of Stonecutting.

This reminds me of the Fred Saberhagen "Sword" series. Anyone else read that? That would have made a good RPG setting.

An illusion of a chasm and a combat with some fighters, harpies, and hellhounds blocked the remainder of the path, but I conquered both, exited the city to the west, and continued on to the final battles in Ascore.
 

Ascore was a ruin that showed signs of recent shoring-up by Vaalgamon's forces. As I wandered the hallways (the ruins took up only about half a standard game map), most of the battles were with skeletons and mummies, very easy to turn, making exploration a non-issue. One of the mummies did survive a turning long enough to hit Ghost and disease him, leading me to cast "Cure Disease" for what I think is the first time ever in a Gold Box game.

The map culminated at a door where Vaalgamon's voice taunted me and then, inexplicably, gave me a lot of detail about the encounters to come:

The voice wasn't kidding: the final area was unusual. It was basically a maze, but I had to navigate it while in the combat screen rather than in the usual exploration interface. Each section of the maze offered a combat, some very difficult, some laughably easy, but when the combats were over, the party didn't exit the combat screen. Instead, at least one character had to find his way to one of the combat screen exits (as if he was fleeing from battle), where we'd immediately be taken to another combat screen. You actually don't even need to win the combats, I discovered--you can just have a character immediately run for one of the exits, and your whole party follows, leaving the monsters behind.
 

The party receives some instructions from the game, post-combat.

There must have been about 10 separate maze segment/combat screens in all, though you don't need to hit all of them to make it to the exit. They started off quite easy with a horde of goblins who were incapable of even hitting me and only had 4 hit points each. I resisted the urge to waste spells on them and killed them all in melee combat.

Must...not....Fireball...

     
Others alternated between easy (one had a single goblin, but I think that was just Vaalgamon smack-talking me) and quite hard (trolls, ettins, shambling mounds). Vaalgamon appeared in between each screen to taunt me.

This man has played some Wizardry.

Some maps I had found in Ascore purported to help with the maze, but after some bumbling around, I found that all I needed to do was follow the rightmost wall. This took me through 5 combats before depositing me in a room occupied by Vaalgamon himself--along with a bunch of wizards and 10 shambling mounds.

I would have died in this battle if the game hadn't slapped me in the face with the fact that I could just walk off the screen via a northern passageway instead of bothering to fight. It wasn't at all subtle. First, Vaalgamon himself accused me of trying to sneak out the "back gate," as if I was doing anything but finding my way there randomly.
 

Then, as we entered combat, the game gave me a nudge-nudge wink-wink with, "To the north, light pours through an opening to the outside." My party was in decent shape health-wise, but we had almost no spells by this point, so after a hard look at all the shambling mounds, I directed my party into the north hallway and out the door.
 

My party does the sensible thing.

Especially given the endgame narrative, the game doesn't seem to be designed for the party to win this final battle. Vaalgamon is pretty hard by himself: he's a mage, but he has some kind of protection against magic, so his spells can't be disrupted with "Fireball" or whatnot. He regenerates hit points every round and is somehow capable of casting multiple spells per round. But the bigger problem is the 10 shambling mounds, whose difficulties I described above. Fighting groups of 2 or 3 was hard enough. By this time, I had gotten a Wand of Defoliation somewhere, and it certainly helped, but it only affected one mound per round, and for only half his hit points or less.

Still, I'm sure that winning the battle is possible. I have this idea that the Wand of Ice Storm might affect the mounds, if the party keeps it long enough. I was out of Potions of Speed by the time I got here, but they'd certainly assist, along with Potions of Invisibility to keep the mages from targeting you during the first round. A couple of "Fireballs," maybe coupled with the Necklace of Missiles, would take care of all the mages except Vaalgamon himself. "Stinking Cloud" might work against the shamblers (I'm always under-valuing that spell). The problem is that you have to save before entering the maze, so every attempt at the final battle means first slogging through the half a dozen rooms/combats before him. I tried it a couple of times (after winning) but failed both times. Just as I was contemplating trudging all the way back to Silverymoon to get more magic items, I accidentally saved over my pre-maze save with a post-game save. My most recent save before that was back in Sundabar, so I don't know if I want to go through the trouble. If you've won the battle against Vaalgamon, I'd be happy to hear how you did it, as well as how it affected the post-game text below.

The ending was narrated in a long series of text screens. Having won the "coward's" way, I ran out the exit and into an ancient plaza, "surrounded by great pyramids." Vaalgamon and his allies rushed out behind me but were grabbed from beneath the ground by the hands of undead and dragged screaming to their dooms.

My party celebrated for a moment and then happened to notice that armies were approaching from all directions. "From the north, twin columns of orcs seem to stretch to the horizon." Trolls amassed to the west, and a "great mass" of mercenaries to the south. From the east, "a broad column of soldiers in full armor, black horses marching in perfect order across the forbidden sands."

My NPC Kervish chose this moment to straighten up, whip off his glasses, shed his dorky persona, and announce himself as an agent of the Lords' Alliance, a partnership of cities that includes Waterdeep, Neverwinter, and Silverymoon.

Under his instruction, Broadside ran to the top of a pyramid and placed the four statuettes on an altar. A fifth statue arose from a hiding place, "and the entire structure begins to glow!"

Blinding flashes of light "lance through the ancient stones in all directions." Apparently, the light served as a beacon to a bunch of ferocious monsters--the game is unspecific but an image shows dragons and worms--who rose up behind the invading armies and slaughtered them.

The game ended with my party's triumphant return to Yartar, where I was allowed to keep playing. I rested, re-memorized spells, identified and sold some equipment, and saved the game for the sequel. I also apparently used the story of my victory to chat up women in bars.

"Oh, yeah, I totally killed Vaalgamon."

I don't know if I exactly like what the game did in the final area, but it was at least original. Overall, I feel like Gateway distinguished itself best in the final third, with some memorably difficult combats, an interesting use of the combat engine for maze exploration (in no previous game has the configuration of the wall patterns mattered slightly in combat), and the longest, most verbose set of victory screens that we've seen so far.

I hate to make you wait three days for the GIMLET, but this post is already getting pretty long and we have a few things to talk about, particularly if I'm able to win that final battle for real.

****

Let's talk about some items on the upcoming list:

1. Shadow Keep (1991). I got a Mac emulator--Basilisk II--downloaded and working with some effort, but it appears that just about any game offered for download, including Shadow Keep, is in ".sit" format, which requires something called StuffIt Extractor to unpack. I've downloaded two versions, and all they do is crash the moment I start them up after screwing up my file associations. If someone has the software and wants to unpack the game for me, I'll play it; otherwise, I've had it up to here with sites that force me to download whatever archiving program the creator happens to favor for some nobody-cares mega-dork reason. [Edit: readers contributed several solutions to this one. Thank you!]

2. Dungeon Quest (1985). I don't know why it's listed as Dungeon Quest everywhere, because the title screen calls it The Dungeon Masters Assistant (that isn't a typo; the game's name has no apostrophe). The "game" is some kid's programming lark, has no story or main quest, and while it technically meets my definitions of an RPG, it simply isn't worth spending time on. Since it also freezes and crashes at just about everything, I'm listing it as "NP" on technical grounds. In a strict sense, I could probably suffer its glitches long enough to get some kind of posting out, but it wouldn't enrich anyone's life for me to do so.

Gateway to the Savage Frontier: Things Get Real

The largest combat in the game so far.

     

After a lackluster start, Gateway to the Savage Frontier became a massive treasure hunt for four magic statues that I would have to take to the ancient city of Ascore and somehow use to stop the invasion of the Zhentil forces. In the years since the fall of Ascore, the statues had been scattered across the Savage Frontier. As we closed the last posting, I had found the first one, in the Host Tower of the Arcane in Luskan.

Since then, I've collected all the others. In fact, I've won, but I'm going to split the postings, partly for the sake of length, and partly because I want to give the final combat a few more tries before I write it up the way I "won" it.

   

Another one down.

  

The game has provided a reasonably good Gold Box experience. I've been grousing about Gateway a bit, but it's important to keep in mind that it's only inferior compared to its predecessors. Without their legacy, it's quite good. It has an actual plot, for one thing, maps that are chock-full of encounters, and a tactical combat system that remains excellent nearly three decades later. I didn't have any problem convincing myself to fire up the emulator, nor to keep playing when I could have stopped a lot sooner and milked it for three or four entries. Moreover, it finally started to get challenging in this session, with several large, difficult combats and (it turns out) several ways to approach them.

As I closed last time, I had found some intelligence that the next statuette might be on the Kraken Cult-controlled Purple Rocks, another island somewhere west of the mainland. I was heading back to Tuern to try to find passage, but I needn't have bothered. A Kraken showed up to destroy my ship on the way back, and I found myself shipwrecked on--you guessed it--the Purple Rocks.

   

This screenshot made me want to play Pirates! again.

   

Purple Rocks was a half-map that had only a few encounters, including a boat over to the Kraken Cult fortress across the strait. In one house, a "town leader" told me that the Krakens had enslaved the town.

   

  

There were a couple of battles with Kraken guards allied with margoyles and otyughs. This would be a good time to point out that Gateway seems to fall in love with certain monster types and does its best to ensure that you encounter hordes of them for two or three maps in a row, then never again. Towards the beginning of the game, it was owlbears, soon to give way to margoyles. Otyughs and scrags were prominent in this section. Later, it was griffons and hellhounds. I got rather sick of all of them.

    

Why humans are fighting alongside otyughs is never quite explained.

   

Anyway, the battles gave me two pieces of paper with nonsense letters on them, and I don't mind telling you that I was stumped by the puzzle. I assumed they were cryptograms at first, but playing with that yielded no results, so I just put them away for later. As usually happens in the Gold Box games, the clues didn't really matter and I just made it through the ensuing map through brute force. Much later, I consulted a walkthrough, and it turns out I was supposed to lace the messages together, alternately taking one letter from each, and then reversing the order of the words. It would have given me some intelligence about how I could have intercepted the statue on the next island without exploring the whole thing.

Before I left Purple Rocks, I fought a battle with some pirates guarding a lighthouse. Afterwards, Broadside made a point that if the bad guys were guarding a lighthouse, maybe we should put out the light. This is one of many places where the game puts words in the mouths of your characters. I don't really like that, but as Quirkz pointed out in the comments to my last posting, it's rare that games even acknowledge your character names, let alone give them dialogue. He saw these quotes as a forerunner to the NPC "banter" that you get in the Infinity Engine games. Seen that way, it's not so bad.

  

Cool off, Jaree-ra.

    

A ferry took us over to the other island, which was also a half-map. Decoding the above message would have led me to a particular door, where I could have intercepted a small number of Kraken guards carrying the statue to a ship. (And dousing the light apparently gave me a little extra time to get there.) Instead, I almost immediately bumbled into a room where some guards set off an alarm. This apparently caused the Krakens to retreat and hole up in the southwest corner of their fortress. This was all invisible to me at the time--when I encountered the forces in the southwest room, I just assumed that's where they were all along.

   

   

They weren't very hard--just a group of fighters and otyughs, arranged at the outset in a way that made them vulnerable to "Fireball." If you're going to give players clues to how they can make the mission easy, then doing it without the clues ought to at least be hard.

    

The only thing hard about this battle was not accidentally catching my own characters in the "Fireball" blast radius. Man, I miss the "center" command.

    

After the battle, I got the second stone, and the warrior Jagaerda bid me farewell. She had been pretty useless in the first place, with her AI leading her to run around ineffectually in the rear of the party. I should have given her a bow.

  

  

Without much trouble, a boat took us back to Neverwinter, where I had to figure out the next place to go. I decided to head to Secomber, where the mage Amanitas had indicated he'd be. Before I did, however, I returned to Silverymoon, keen to spend some of my accumulated riches on those Gauntlets of Dexterity.

The austerity with which I'd begun the game had by now devolved into the usual Gold Box insanity. My characters were leaving coins on the ground after most battles because they couldn't carry any more, and by the time I got back to Silverymoon, I had more than 100 gems and around 75 pieces of jewelry, each of which might be appraised for thousands of gold pieces. I was not only able to buy the Gauntlets of Dexterity, I was able to buy a pair for each character, including my NPC fighter. (The Gauntlets raise your dexterity by 1.) Even after sinking much of the rest into Potions of Invisibility, Potions of Speed, Potions of Extra Healing, and +1 arrows, I still had plenty left.

   

    

In contrast to the plenty I was suddenly experiencing economically, none of my characters had increased a level in about 5 maps and wouldn't for about 3 more. The game is maddeningly uneven in this area. My two clerics and mage had already maxed their levels at the end of the last post. My fighter/thief, paladin, and ranger had a couple more levels before hitting their max--but they would only level up 1 more time during the second two-thirds of the game.

On to Secomber! The city was at the south of the game map, in contrast to Silverymoon at the north, so I made my way there by cutting straight through the heart. This took me through a large forested area labeled on my map as the "High Forest," and it's here that the Savage Frontier best earned its name. I had multiple encounters with ettins, hill giants, and giant snakes--the sort of beasts that you'd expect to live in a place called the "Savage Frontier."

  

I thought the graphics for the ettins were pretty good.

And the area had lots of uses for "Snake Charm!"

      

Secomber was  a pathetic map, just one-quarter the size of a normal game map. It had an inn, an armorer, a boat rental place (signs warned of danger on the roads), and a fixed combat with some gnolls. The only purpose to the city seemed to be to visit Amanitas in his house.

    

Erek doesn't seem to realize that, owing to my having done the maps out-of-order, I've never met him.

    

In a babbling, absent-minded way, Amanitas suggested I go to the city of Llorkh next. It lay east of Secomber. To get there, I would have to pass through the city of Loudwater. I looked up Amanitas on the Forgotten Realms wiki later, and it turns out he has a bunch of lore attached to him from one D&D module--1987's "The Shattered Statue"--and two D&D sourcebooks: The Savage Empire (1988) and Lords of Darkness (1989).

Loudwater was a standard 16 x 16 map with a bunch of services. The city is divided in half by a river, and you have to cross a bridge to get from the west to the east. It was on this bridge that the Zhent general Vaalgamon set up the army of fighters and manticores that introduced this posting. The manticores are capable of multiple ranged attacks per round, and the fighters are no pushovers. I was unprepared for the battle the first time and they slaughtered me.

   

Things go poorly.

   

But I was exhilarated because Gateway hadn't provided any seriously challenging combats so far. In the entire game, I don't think there was a single battle that I had to buff for. I reloaded and got it together with "Prayer," "Bless," "Enlarge," and "Mirror Image," then re-engaged. I won the second time, but mostly because my mage managed to get a "Fireball" off early in the round, followed by a blast of the Wand of Ice Storm from my thief. This killed the manticores before they could fire their quills or whatever. I took care of the fighters slowly with multiple castings of "Hold Person" from my two clerics.

   

One thing about the Gold Box games that never gets old.

   

I was amused later to discover that you're not really "supposed" to fight this huge battle. Instead, you're supposed to cross the river via a back way (through an inn), and pick off the various enemies in smaller encounters on side-streets and back alleys, then fight a much-reduced force on the bridge. Oh, well. I liked the big combat, and I got all the side encounters anyway.

At the end of the combat, a fighter named Rishpal approached my party and said he was disgusted with the way Lord Vaalgamon fled the field and let his minions take all the damage. He offered to join my party to get revenge. For once in my life, I declined to acquiesce to such an obvious trap and told him to get lost. Apparently, if I'd taken him, it would have later turned out that he was a spy.

   

   

I left Loudwater and headed over to Llorkh. Not three steps into the city, I fell into a trap and found myself in an arena. Guards roughed us up and took the two statues. General Vaalgamon appeared and said he'd spare our lives if we could survive the arena combats.

    

How about I decide for myself what's "too many to resist"?

    

What followed were three combats, with no rest in between, against ogres, hellhounds, and griffons. It wasn't quite as exciting as the triple no-rest combats with the kobolds in Pool of Radiance, but it was still pretty good. I really started to warm up to the game's increased challenge at this point. It wasn't too challenging, I hasten to add, since I won the combats without having to re-load. But two of my characters were knocked unconscious, so that's something.

   

After the combats, we were tossed into a cell, which we escaped in due order. We went around freeing the other imprisoned arena combatants, including a half-orc named Muthtur who joined the party.

    

   

When Vaalgamon left, he apparently didn't take the two statues with him, because I found them--along with a third--after a tough combat with another bunch of fighters and griffons. The game had decided that griffons were its thing by this point, and I don't think there was a map in the rest of the game that didn't have them.

    

    

The rest of Llorkh wasn't that interesting. There were scattered combats with Zhent fighters, griffons, and whatnot. There was some backstory about the city having been stolen from the dwarves by Zhent forces, but it never went anywhere. (Although there were some acknowledgements that I had a dwarf in my party, which was nice.) The map was really only notable for an encounter with a medusa. It was prefaced in the usual way, with my party finding "statues" of warriors and townsfolk.

     

Any experienced adventurer knows what this means.

    

I should mention that just about every city has featured a little "variety shop" selling flasks of holy water, flaming oil, and mirrors. You'd think I would have bothered to outfit my party with mirrors for just an inevitability--medusas are, after all, listed among the creatures in the bestiary--but I hadn't. So in the ensuing battle, I ended up reloading about 4 times before I finally got the jump on her and defeated her before she could turn a character to stone. 

   

    

The encounter availed me hardly anything. A lot of fixed combats in this game offer no particular treasure or loot after them, or even significant experience.

This medusa battle was far from the only one in the game. There were at least four more, and I think three of them had two medusas in each combat. Did I ever bother to get a set of mirrors? Of course not. After every medusa battle, I said to myself, "Well, surely THAT one was the last medusa battle in the game." When my reload count seems awfully high for a relatively easy game, you'll know why. As to why I didn't just suck up the stoning and pay for healing, most of the combats took place on maps with no temples. In Llorkh, the only temple was the Temple of Bane.

   

Damn it.

   

I'll save the rest of the story for next time, but for now let's have some miscellaneous notes:

    

• The developers introduced battles against margoyles like this about 50 times:

  

We get it. They blend with the wall. You're not being clever.

   

• This game does a better job than previous Gold Box titles in alerting you when a major battle is about to happen:

   

   

• The game is way too liberal with safe places to rest. There should have been one safe place per map. It would have made the entire game more challenging and tactical.

• It occurred to me that my perception of how strong or valuable a character is as a fighter is highly correlated to his icon. I keep thinking of Broadside as doing more damage than everyone else because he has a two-handed weapon in his icon, despite the fact that I equipped him with a long sword ages ago.

 
Coming up next: the exciting conclusion to the game, or the really lame one, depending on whether I have any success re-attempting the final battle before then. You'll see what I'm talking about.

Time so far: 19 hours
Reload count: 11