Vampyr: Won! (with Final Rating)

The game ends on a joke.

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 19 January 2014
Date Ended: 23 January 2014

Total Hours: 23

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 28
Ranking at Time of Posting: 61/134 (46%)

Ranking at Game #456: 251/456 (55%)

Well, my suspicions at the end of the last post were correct: the blue rose protected against the instant-death attacks of Vampyr. This means that the player has to die at least once to win the game.

It still wasn't an easy endgame. It took me five tries before I got the right combination of low-level mooks and made it through most of the castle with enough hit points and spell points to face the last two foes. Dalagash almost beat me, but I won with a handful of hit points to spare. I healed and attacked Vampyr. Sure enough, every time he went for the one-hit kill, the rose blocked him. That didn't make him a pushover. His regular melee attacks still sapped my hit points quickly, and he destroyed my armor.

Note that having no armor makes me "nude." I guess I was going commando.

When I finally killed him, I was down to 13 points. Then I had to finish off his summoned clerics. For some reason, rather than try the "Disintegrate" spell, I just attacked. Their magic missiles had me down to a solitary hit point when I killed the last cleric and won the game.

The one time that the rolls went my way.

All that was left was a scripted end sequence.

The Vampyr turns to gaseous form and returns to his tomb, defeated.

At the same time, the castle starts rumbling . . . The whole place is coming down!! Retracing your steps, you managed to scramble out of the castle in time.

TV Tropes calls this a "Load-Bearing Boss."

You seem to be stuck on this island. With nothing to do, you look around Calatiki. A dramatic change seems to be taking place. There are no more monsters running around trying to kill everything in sight. The vibrant birds sing a song of peace under a bright blue sky. Two serene days passed before you spotted a ship over the horizon. It's heading for the island! Aboard the ship, the captain tells you that he was sent by His Majesty to bring you back to the castle. 

In the castle, you are given a very shiny suit of armor and a beautiful sword. Afterwards, you are escorted to the throne room.

"Gideon, you have proven yourself to be a strong and courageous soul. The whole world of Quilinor owes you a debt of gratitude. To repay you for your service, I now pronounce you to be my castellan."

(Gasps, ooooo's and ahhhh's fill the hall. And then, a deafening round of applause.)

Let me get this straight: my reward is that I get to work for you?

 
At this point, the developers/gods spoil the solemnity of the occasion by showing up, shouting "Hey, dudes!" and chastising King "Tevin" (called "Tevon" everywhere else) for starting a party without them. They thank the player and disappear. The ending screens show Mr. Weston and Mr. Shao and an unnamed woman sitting in cabana lounges on a tropical island, attended by bikini-clad blondes.

It might seem like my playing of this game was rapid because I only made three posts, but it wasn't. I started a few days before my first post, and owing to having given myself the week off, I invested far more time than was sensible in the game. Though the main plot progressed at a quick pace, all the grinding and reloading took its toll, and in the final tally, I spent 23 hours on it. (Admittedly, about half of those hours, I was simultaneously watching episodes of The West Wing.) I don't think it was quite worth that kind of time.

To summarize what I said last time, and how I still feel: The game offers too few tactics to justify the raw difficulty of the monsters you encounter. Dungeon exploration is a frustrating, thankless experience, as you never find anything but a few key NPCs and a ton of random monsters along the way. Though in appearance it evokes Ultima, it has no complexity in its inventory, economy, spell system, or NPCs.

I'm not saying all of this to take down the game. As something written and published by two high school students, it's an impressive effort. But the nostalgia and love that I see online is a bit absurd. Everywhere someone talks about it, he or she seems to have been brainwashed by Dalagash. Its page on MyAbandonware calls it "one of the best of the early EGA RPGs." Someone nominated it in a thread asking "What is the best RPG game ever made?" Hell, my own comments board has been a bit Pollyannish. Some fan took the time to create a Facebook page for the game and notes:

I frigging loved this game as a kid, and I still do love it. It's one of those games that kinda grows on you. I'm yet to find another game as good as it.

I mean, really? Have you looked around? At all? Let's get it together, people. This is an okay game, impressive for the circumstances for which it was produced, but it's not up to competition with most of the commercial RPGs of the time. 

These exuberant comments are even more mysterious when you note that half of them are followed by admission that they never won the game, or got stuck in some kind of impassable bug. That's a symptom of a bad game, guys. The only evidence I've found of anyone else winning the game is a YouTube user named "Firebrand319" who posted a video of the endgame. You might note that he was only able to win by hex-editing his character to ridiculously high stats and hit point totals. I'm not pointing that out to bolster my own "accomplishment," but to suggest that if such a thing is necessary, the enthusiasm of his comments (one actually says, unironically, "this is probably the best game ever made") is a little misplaced.

Let's look at my own sober assessment, via the GIMLET.

1. Game World. Quilinor is a generic high-fantasy kingdom. Unfortunately, having been unable to get my hands on the manual, I can't account for the back story, but the world in the game itself is inoffensive but bland. None of the towns have any particular character, nor is there anything to find in between them. I give it some credit for the sequence in which a town is taken over by evil forces and then liberated, imparting a small sense of dynamism to an otherwise-static world. The inclusion of "Heaven" was an interesting touch, if a bit self-indulgent on the part of the developers. Score: 4.

2. Character Creation and Development. During creation, you specify the name, roll for attributes, and allocate points to fighter, mage, and thief skills. The skill system is intriguing, but by the end of the game I wish I'd channeled everything into fighting and magic, as the thief skills proved completely unnecessary. Despite the sense of being able to create your class through these skills, only a certain limited type of character can hope to prevail in the game.

Experience point rewards and leveling are steady but not overly-generous. This is one of only a few games of the time to award experience for quest completion as well as combat. I'd think this was a good aspect of the game except for the level cap. I hate hitting a level cap before the end of the game. You could argue that it was my fault, since I did so much grinding, but I maintain that the giants' dungeon would have been functionally impossible at a lower level. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. Good in the sense that the game has a lot of NPCs--maybe eight or nine per town--and that the player learns the clues necessary to advance in the game from talking to the NPCs. There are no dialogue options or role-playing choices here, but it's still about as good as Ultima III. I was a bit disappointed at how few NPCs offered anything valuable, though. In the Ultima series, you could trust that if you spent some significant effort to get to an NPC (finding a secret door, unlocking a door, dispelling a force field, finding him in the corner of a dark grove), he'd have something important to say. In this game, there's no correlation between the position of the NPC and his utility. I also didn't like that the NPCs weren't named, and their dialogue wasn't long enough to get any sense of "character" out of them. Score:  3.

I do like how enemies have dialogue lines, too.

4. Encounters and Foes. There are no special encounters in the game or puzzles to solve, with the exception of needing that rose for the endgame. There is a small selection of monsters, almost all of whom exclusively do melee damage--though evil clerics, rust monsters, the dragon, Dalagash, and the Vampyr are exceptions. Unfortunately, I can't say how well they might or might not have been described in the documentation. If you like grinding, the good news is there are plenty of opportunities, as no area ever "clears." Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. Both very weak. Although combat takes place on a special screen, like Ultima III, the limited inventory and spell system doesn't support any real tactics, and it plays more like Ultima II, where enemies line up to be smashed down. The spell selection in the game is extremely limited, and as I noted last time, you really have to save almost all your spell points for healing. Score: 2.

The game's non-combat spells. "Wizard Eye" helps in dungeon exploration, but it doesn't last long, and you can't afford to waste too many spell points.

6. Equipment. The game is also weak in this important RPG category. You have a standard D&D-inspired selection of weapons and armor, purchased in shops or (sometimes) looted from corpses. There's a "condition" system that I didn't spend a lot of time covering, by which both weapons and armor slowly degrade with use, and you have to replace them when they break or fall apart. Functionally, this just means you need to carry a few backup weapons. The lack of any other items--potions, rings, wands, scrolls--just makes your exploration and combat options even more limited. Score: 2.

7. Economy. The towns and dungeons feature scattered treasure chests, but I got all the money I needed from killing monsters. Even the most expensive weapons aren't that expensive (which is good, since you have to buy multiple copies). The most expensive thing in the game is training. The bottom line is that I always had the amount of money I needed when I needed it, and there was neither any struggle when it came to money nor anything to really "save" for. Score: 3.

It was interesting that you can pick pockets, but utterly unnecessary to the game.

8. Quests. One main quest with only one outcome. There are no side quests, but after I won I discovered (through online material) that there is one "side dungeon" off to the east. (It has one of those barely-noticeable entrances.) Judging by the maps, it appears to be a bit of a navigation nightmare, but it has a bottom level covered in treasure chests. I confess I'm a bit interested in what the signs on this level say, so if anyone's been there, please comment. Anyway, nothing terribly special about the main quest, though I did enjoy its progression of individual stages. Score: 3.

This bit of NPC dialogue references that side-dungeon.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Decent iconographic graphics. The PC speaker sounds were at times creative, but mostly bothersome enough that I turned it off. The interface was easy to master and familiar to an Ultima veteran. I just wish I could have moved on the diagonal or that my enemies couldn't. Score: 3.

10. Gameplay. Mostly linear, too difficult, too long. No replayability. Score: 1.

The final score of 28 puts it lower than the threshold at which I typically "recommend" a game (which is around 35). It was certainly worth a look, though, and if they ever stumble upon this entry, I congratulate the developers for accomplishing this much at such a young age.

As I noted last time, I wasn't able to get in touch with them. The person I'm reasonably sure was Mr. Shao never returned my phone message. I think I found Mr. Weston's workplace, but the woman who answered the phone both times I called said he wasn't in, and the place oddly doesn't have any voicemail. I wasn't about to leave a paper message with her. ("Mr. Weston, a man named Chet called. Something about a vampire?!") In both cases, it doesn't look like they went on to do anything with games.

There was an oddity during gameplay that I wasn't sure where to note, so I'll cover it briefly now. NPCs in the game make repeated fun of someone named "Erik." One NPC notes that he "angered the gods" and that "he's been turned into a eunuch." If you visit Heaven, you find Erik behind a fence, next to a sign that says, "Erik the Scum -- Don't feed the animals! He won't bite now. He's been neutered. He's now a eunuch."

If you kill him, in Heaven, the voices of Shao and Weston laugh about it and express admiration of the player.

In short, the game progresses in its treatment of "Erik" from what first sounds like teasing to actual malice and cruelty. So who is he? Well, an Erik Naylor is credited with the "basic game design" in the manual, which sounds rather important, yet Weston and Shao are the only listed authors and are the only ones to ask for shareware funds. Was this just two teenagers having fun with a friend who contributed a bit to the game, or were the developers originally a trio who had some kind of major falling out? I guess we won't know until someone shows up and comments. It's not a "who wrote Swords of Glass?"-level mystery, but nonetheless an intriguing addendum.

*****

In list news, I've had to list two games as "NP" (not playable). The first is Empire II: Interstellar Sharks (1982). I'm upset about this because one of my commenters, Odkin, took a lot of time to scan the manual for me. I can't find the game anywhere. I'm wary about saying this because every time I do, someone responds with a link and says "this took literally 5 seconds of Googling." But I think in this case, I've exhausted the possibilities.

The second is The Missing Ring (1982). I'm able to find the game, but something about every version I can find makes the text unreadable. I thought it was an issue with my emulator, but it's true on the Virtual Apple version as well (you have to get to character creation before the problem appears).

I'll hold out hope for finding playable versions for these games, but in the meantime it elevates Sword of Fargoal to the next early game while Synergistic's Spirit of Excalibur will be my next 1990 offering. The latter seems like it might be more of a strategy game than an RPG, but I want to play it because of its theme.

Later edit: I underestimated my readers yet again. They had solutions for me on both games before the end of the day. They're both back on the active list. Sword of Fargoal will still be next because I already played it and wrote the post.

Vampyr: Draft Two

The opening screen of the second version. That's some awful verse. Dalagash better stick to raising vampires.

Within the last 48 hours, either I or Blogspot have managed to completely lose two entire posts I typed about Vampyr. The two posts took me right up to the final battle with Vampyr and chronicled my rapid descent into absolutely hating the game.

Nothing like this has happened in four years of using Blogspot as my blog host, and I can't begin to account for it. One post is simply completely missing from my drafts. Another somehow got overwritten with notes from a different post. The trust I'd developed with the service is now broken, and I'll have to type my posts in some application on my computer first. I don't know if I use Word whether encoding issues will screw things up when I paste the text to Blogger. I guess we'll see.

In any event, I don't have the heart or stomach to type everything again, so I'm just going to have to provide a summary. This is really depressing. I had channeled a lot of rage and frustration into those two postings. I had a nice discussion of iconographic, tile-based games, some thoughts on game music, and some good examples about the differences between games that are challenging and games that are just difficult. I can't seem to re-conjure any of it now.

To start, thanks to HunterZ's comment, I sought out the second version of the game, which fixed many of the bugs I discussed in my first post. In addition to this, it offered a slightly different opening screen, naming the game's villain, and some additional music. (The first version opens with a PC speaker version of Bach's toccata and fugue in D-minor for organ; the second adds the first couple dozen measures of Beethoven's fifth symphony.)

When I finished my first post, I had completed the first quest and had received a second one to find out who Dalagash is. No other help. I used the excuse to explore the land, discovering that it occupies about 80 squares north-south and 100 east-west, plus some additional islands. The land doesn't wrap on itself; instead, the north, east, and west borders have impassable mountains and the south is blocked by the ocean. You can hire boats to take you to the islands but there's no way to sail on the ocean yourself.

Arriving at one of the island towns.

The towns are all very similar, offering weapons, armor, transport, and training. The training is the big difference among them, as different trainers allow development in different skills. The town of Myron, however, allowed training in all the skills, so I generally tried to go there when I could level up. You get 45 skill points to distribute with each level-up, except a couple of times when I got 12 or 0, and I think this was a game bug.

Purchasing some armor.

The game is a lot like Ultima II and Ultima III in that you can steal chests in the towns, kill NPCs, and massacre guards, and not only do you suffer no permanent karma, the towns completely re-set when you leave and return. As with those games, such crimes are a legitimate way to grind for both experience and gold.

The quests were as follows:

1. Find out about Dalagash. I accomplished this by learning about someone called "The Bard" who was being held in the town of Zachul. I found him in a locked area guarded by an evil cleric and a vampire. He told me that Dalagash is a powerful mage who has discovered the location of the tomb of Vampyr (note that this is a proper name) and plans to raise him.

Perhaps the most verbose NPC in the game.

2. Free the town of Myron, which had been invaded by evil clerics. The developers created a new map for the town in which all the town's NPCs were huddled in hiding spaces and secret areas, and evil clerics were wandering around proclaiming their victory. (One shouted "I'm the new mayor!" while the real mayor hid nearby in a secret area.) I tried but failed to defeat every single group of evil clerics in battle--their magic missiles were quite deadly--but it turned out that all I had to do was kill their leader, a vampire, in the northwest corner. NPCs directed me to his location.

A town resident hides while I do the dirty work.

I confront the invasion's leader.

3. King Tevon discovered that Dalagash would need the Talisman of Invocation to raise Vampyr. He told me to retrieve it from a dragon's lair "up north." I hadn't found any other dungeons "up north," but I checked again and realized that one of the mountain tiles had a tiny hole indicating an opening in it.

Would you have noticed that?

I was unable to get anywhere in the dungeon with my Level 8 character, so I settled in for a long grinding session. Because I wanted to train in Myron, I decided to do it there, but as an island, enemies spawn rarely. Instead, I grinded myself against guards. There's no penalty for killing them in the game, they provide decent experience, and once you leave the town and return, they come back to life and have forgotten your previous massacre. You'll have to imagine all of this couched in jokes about Ultima and Questron and such.

Killing NPCs for profit.

Even with my new level--13--the dragon's dungeon was extremely hard, and I lost my character multiple times while just trying to find my way around. Rust monsters kept destroying my armor, and other enemies pounded down my hit points in single combat. At some point, I accepted death, went to Heaven, and bought a +3 weapon and armor there, as they're the best in the game. (In this version, the "gods" occasionally send you back, and they did for me.) This barely helped.

An entire floor, with an obvious path to something significant, requiring me to walk through lava, turned out to be a red herring. It might have been a funny joke if it wasn't so annoying to get there.

I hate you.

I ultimately found the dragon in a secret area on the second level. He was capable of breathing fireballs that did devastating damage, but the "Protection from Spells" spell helped a little. After a few tries in which he killed me, I was able to defeat him and return the talisman to the king.

The dragon looks a bit like a dog to me.

4. The king then asked me to find a sage who had gone missing. He gave me no hints where to find him, but I only had one dungeon I hadn't explored. It was full of parties of giants who pounded me to goo. I returned to grinding but found that the game has a level cap at 15, so I didn't get far. Getting through the dungeon was an enormously frustrating process helped only by the "Exit to Land" spell which would whisk me out of there when my hit points got too low. In the end, I just barely made it to the sage alive and got his information: Vampyr's tomb is on the island of Calatiki but I need to get a "keystone" from Dalagash before I can enter his tomb.

Note the two giants--cleverly dressed in one-strap green togas like the Green Giant--poised to attack me as soon as I'm done with the conversation. Fortunately, I saved just enough spell points for the "Exit to Land" spell.

5. When I returned to the king, he told me that Dalagash's minions had raided the castle and stolen the talisman (seriously?! You had one job to do. It would have been safer with the dragon!), so he gave me the final quest to go to Calatiki and stop Dalagash. I knew how to get there from some NPC dialogue: hire a captain named Marsus in the city of Maninox.

I should have sent it to the Marx Brothers.

I'll cover the final dungeon (or what I assume is the final dungeon) in a moment, but let's deal with my frustrations with the game, which are legion:

• The monsters are ridiculously hard, particularly the giants, evil clerics, and vampires. One group of them was capable of killing my maxed-level character with the best equipment in the game, and you have to fight dozens of groups in each dungeon.

10% of my hit points blasted away--just the sort of message you want when you're trying to get through a dungeon to the boss.

• The combat system doesn't offer any tactics to help compensate for this difficulty. Your sole advantage is bad pathfinding, so if you face a group, you can run to the far left or far right, and they'll reliably line up and take you on one at a time. This isn't enough to save you.

• There's no way to save, rest, or restore magic points in dungeons, so you've got to get through them with the magic and spell points you had at the beginning. They also reset when you leave. You could easily spend hours exploring a dungeon only to die, or have to flee, and find that you've made no progress.

• There are a number of spells in the game that are potentially helpful, but you soon find that it's irresponsible to spend spell points on anything but healing. For instance, a useful mass-damage spell called "disintegrate" can clear the battlefield--but at a cost of 16 spell points, or more than a quarter of what I had at my highest level. This same number could cast five "cure light wounds" spells. You face too many groups of enemies for the ability to kill one of them to be consequential.

• There are no inventory items, like potions or scrolls, to help you, either.

• Given all the above, the level cap is unforgivable. With no items or tactics to mitigate the difficulty, increased hit points and spell points are all you have going for you besides blind luck.

It's not "the" Vampyr, it's just "Vampyr." And I'm trying.

• In dungeons, enemies spawn by just literally appearing in your path. You might think you have three empty squares between you and your goal, but these could easily hold three combats with creatures that don't even show up until you take a step forward. It makes it extremely frustrating to navigate through dungeons.

• Monsters can move on the diagonal, but you can't. That means there's essentially no way to outrun them.

There were NPCs who warned me about the bite of rust monsters and the touch of vampires. What did they warn me for? There's no way to avoid them, no way to outrun them, and no way to sneak by them. In combat, you could theoretically get a couple of missile weapon shots at them before they come into melee range, but swapping weapons wastes a round, so you don't gain much. You basically just have to hope for lucky combat rolls.

I didn't get one here.

When you enter Vampyr's castle, you're greeted with a sign welcoming you to your "dome." This didn't bode well.

Vampyr's lair consists of three levels. You first have to go from the ground floor to the second level to confront Dalagash in his chambers. He laughs and disappears the moment you show up, but until you confront him, he doesn't use his "keystone" to open the walls to the lower level.

Dalagash vanishes while one of his evil clerics approaches from the west.

The lower level consists of a series of caves with bats, evil clerics, vampires, and giant spiders. It's not very long, but the creatures wear you down quite quickly, and there are a couple of places where you have to waste hit points walking through lava.

Healing myself after wading through molten rock.

If you're lucky, you have enough spell points available for a "Protection from Spells" spell when you confront Dalagash. He shoots fireballs that can wipe out a third of your hit points in a single attack. The spell mitigates this a bit, but I still lost to him seven or eight times before I was able to defeat him.

Unfortunately, defeating him doesn't stop the resurrection of Vampyr, who you must now face with your crippled hit point and spell point total. He'd be a hard enough foe no matter what, but what's worse is his attacks are capable of killing you instantly, and they succeed almost all the time.

Can anyone figure out what "merika sheree vee geia favi uri seputa kree hyce xiz" is supposed to mean?

I've been in the castle about 30 times now. Only 12 times did I make it to Dalagash and Vampyr--the rest of the times, I was slain by random enemies or it became clear before I got to the end that I'd never make it, and I just reloaded. Eight times, I was defeated by Dalagash. The other four times, I engaged Vampyr but was killed within three rounds by his instant-death melee attack.

I took out my rage on the angels. It wasn't a good idea.

Late in the process of writing this updated post, I think I solved the final piece of the puzzle. Commenter Nate Subra offered a "semi-spoiler" about a "blue rose" that you find in Heaven. I thought I had searched everywhere and talked to everyone without finding it, so I didn't pay much attention, but it later occurred to me that this might be important. I returned to Heaven and found a previously-overlooked NPC selling it. I purchased it and got the "gods" to send me back to the mortal coil. I can't imagine the rose does anything but protect against Vampyr's attacks, but to find out, I first have to navigate back to him and survive the battle with Dalagash again. Either way, my next post will be my final.

Game 135: Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation (1989)

     

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1989 for DOS
Date Started: 19 January 2014

    

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation is a 1990 shareware offering from two Virginia high school seniors, Brian Weston and Victor Shao. This is not an opening sentence that fills you with confidence as to the quality of the game, but I'm pleased to report that it's good. Not great, but good. If I could track them down, I'd send them their shareware fee. I'd even adjust it for inflation.

A player of Vampyr could be forgiven for thinking it was a lost Ultima title. It looks most like IV but plays like a combination of II and III, with only a single PC, NPCs responding in single lines of dialogue, and a separate combat map that takes place on a blank tiled floor, no matter what the original terrain. It has most of the same keyboard shortcuts as the Ultima games, including (K)limb and (Z)stats. The layout of the castle is almost identical to Ultima V, with a jester greeting you upon entry to a large courtyard, the king's chambers on the second floor, numerous locked and hidden doors, and the occasional treasure room. It does the whole bit where you can't see through walls or trees, and squares remain dark when they're so obscured. However, as we'll cover, the game does have some innovations that transcend its Ultima-inspired origins.

The opening area looks somewhat like Castle Britannia next to the city of Britain.

 
Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about the back story of the game. The brief document that accompanies the files only tells you:

Welcome to Vampyr: The Talisman of Invocation, an adventure game set in the world of Quilinor. Here, the monsters are very nasty, the merchants are stingy, and the citizens are just a bit crazy. You, as an adventurer, must travel throughout this world to save all these creatures from a certain destruction.

The authors of the game (fairly) expected the player to contribute $10 for the full manual and $20 for the manual and hint book. Unfortunately, their addresses are no longer valid. I think I've tracked them down, but I haven't been able to make contact just yet.
 

Character creation is a quick process. You specify a name and race (human, elf, dwarf, and "corantir") and get automatic rolls for physical strength, mental strength, dexterity, constitution, charisma, luck, life (hit points), and gold. The rolls are random, from 3 to 20, and it's hard to get a well-balanced character. You next spend 180 skill points among nine skills: attack, defense, offensive magic, defensive magic, miscellaneous magic, lock picking, climbing, stealing, and perception. You don't specify a "class" but rather define one for yourself based on the number of points you channel into fighter, mage, or thief skills. I found that the early game is very hard if you don't prioritize fighter skills.

 
You start in an outdoor area next to a castle and town, wielding a dagger and wearing cloth armor. The castle contains the land's lord, King Tevon, who immediately gives the player a quest:  to go to the forest to the northwest and find out what happened to a group of clerics he sent there to investigate a gathering of monsters. Presumably, if I fail in this quest, he'll send someone to find out what happened to me.

The dungeon in question wasn't too hard to find. It was small, with only one level, and after wading through some monsters, I found the group of clerics huddled in a corner. From their dialogue, I gather they had been ensorcelled into following someone named Dalagash. I stole some document from the head cleric, defeated him in combat, and ran off.

My "stealing" ability was 1 at this point, so I suspect this was a scripted encounter. Or maybe if I'd "passed," he wouldn't have noticed and attacked.

The king rewarded me with gold and experience points and bade me to go figure out who "Dalagash" is. I have no clue where to go for this, so I've just started exploring the land. It's quite large, and I think I'll have to resort to mapping. I'm guessing Dalagash is the "vampyr" of the title.

Could you maybe be a little more helpful?

But let me back up. Before I could complete this first quest, I had to defeat enough monsters to rise at least two levels. The opening parts of the game are horribly deadly. At Level 1, I lost about 80% of my combats and had to reload. It took me a couple of hours to get the necessary experience points for Level 2, then maybe half that to get to Level 3. You "level up" by visiting a trainer in the castle or one of the towns, at which point you have 45 points to add to your various skills. The twist is that each trainer specializes in certain skills, so you can't choose to increase every skill at every trainer. In any event, after I made Level 2 and put almost all my points into attack and defense, combat became a little more manageable.

You see enemies coming your way on both the overland and dungeon maps. Once they attack you, or you attack them, you're taken to a separate combat screen, much like Ultima III, which unfortunately offers no terrain options to funnel the enemies. Your only options are to cast a spell, move into them to attack, fire a ranged weapon, or swap weapons. You can flee by moving to the edge of the screen, but once you're back on the game map, the monster is still right there next to you, so you haven't saved yourself much (although you can use a save/reload trick described below).

Fighting three skeletons. I've just cast "magic missile."

There are a lot of other NPCs--jesters, guards, magicians, shopkeepers--hanging around the castle and towns, and each has a line of dialogue if you (T)alk to them. In a welcome departure from Ultima II, NPCs of the same type don't all say the same thing (e.g., "Ugh, me tough"; "Pay your taxes!"). Talking to the various guards in the castle produced a variety of responses, from "get out of my face" to "your mama says you're ugly--just kidding, little fella!"

At the same time, NPCs don't impart quite the same volume of lore that you would get in an Ultima game. In an entire town, only one or two NPCs out of 15-20 might have something worthwhile to say, and even then it's pretty cryptic: "beware the false dragon's lair!"; "blue is for servants, hearing the call." Also, none of the NPCs are named.

A rare helpful tip from an unnamed brute.

Each town has a couple of stores, and I upgraded my weapon and armor almost immediately. You can only have one suit of armor at a time, but you can keep up to five weapons in your backpack and (S)wap amongst them in combat; the most common reason would be to switch between a missile weapon and a melee weapon. I haven't found any other types of objects (e.g., potions, wands, scrolls) so far, and I suspect they don't exist.

The magic system is a little weak. There are eleven spells available in combat--seven offensive and four defensive--and five non-combat spells. Oddly, the non-combat spells of "cure light wounds" and "cure critical wounds" aren't available in combat, when you'd most need them. Most of them have names that give away their purpose--"fireball," "spell protection," "iron skin"--but a few, like "mystical boost," are mysterious (I haven't been able to get it to successfully cast). You have all the game's spells available at the outset, but some of them require more magic power than a Level 1 character has. Success and power of spells, as well as (I think) how many points they eat up, are governed by the associated skills.

A few random notes:

• Armor and weapons have condition statuses (excellent, good, fair, bad), and they degrade with use. Once a weapon gets to "very bad," it's only a few more blows before it breaks. This means you need to carry around several weapons. Fortunately, enemies often drop them.

• You can (P)ick anyone's pocket if your "stealing" skill is high enough. If you fail, generally nothing happens, but occasionally an alarm goes off and you have to flee town or get attacked by guards. The same dynamic applies to picking locked doors in towns.

You see an ankh anywhere on this screen? I didn't think so.

• I guess I'm playing this one a year late. Despite the MobyGames date of 1990, all of the files have summer 1989 dates, and the copyright notice says "1989, 1990."

• You can (L)ook at enemies adjacent to you to learn a bit about the number of monsters in the group and their weapons and armor.

• You can save anywhere in the wilderness, but you can't save in castles, towns, or dungeons.

• Each town has a pub. If you buy a round of drinks for the pub, you get different dialogue lines from the NPCs than before you bought the round.

I have not. And without more to go on, that doesn't really help.

• I'm not sure how much to trust this king. There's a torture chamber in his castle.

• Some of the towns on the water have ships for hire, which will transport you to other port cities, saving you the walking time. This is a rare dynamic in games of the era. I don't think you get to board and man your own ships in this game.

• As far as I can tell, time doesn't pass in the game. Any time you're outdoors, you can (R)est and recover hit points and spell points, but the game doesn't track days or time of day.

• Character creation does not include a choice of gender. Enough people call you "fella" that I think you're supposed to be male, but I can't say for sure.

A confusing choice.

Perhaps the game's oddest contribution to the genre is what happens when you die. Instead of a "game over" screen, you find yourself in Heaven, sporting a pair of wings. There are angel NPCs to talk with and (quite naturally) a weapon and armor shop.

And the shops sell the best items I've seen in the game so far.

Eventually, you find your way to the "gods," who are, of course, Brian Weston and Victor Shao. They assess to see if you're worthy of being sent back to the world. I don't know what happens if you are, or how they even make the evaluation, but every time I've been assessed, they've said "you proved yourself to be unworthy" and I've been blasted to ash right there in front of them.

Didn't I already die? Do I go to "Heaven 2" now?

There are some in-jokes in this section. The janitor who sweeps up your ashes is the authors' computer science teacher. Elvis is alive and playing "Hound Dog." One of the angels asks if you've seen The Heavenly Kid, a (best-) forgotten film from 1985. Another angel references the old "Hans and Frans" skit from Saturday Night Live. You can attack and enter combat with either Brian or Victor, but I suspect they're invulnerable.

As I said, it's not a bad game, but there are a number of programming mistakes that put cracks in its professional veneer. The game often registers the wrong keypress, especially if you hit something unexpected. For instance, if you get a yes/no question and accidentally hit something like SPACE, you might find yourself in the midst of casting a spell. If you reload an old game after ending up in Heaven, your icon still has its angel's wings. Sometimes reloading doesn't return you to the hit points and spell points you had when you saved--just the position. Reloading always resets the enemies on the map, so if you find yourself approached by an enemy you don't want to fight, saving and reloading will make him go away. There are numerous typos in the conversations. Monsters sometimes don't disappear after combat, so you have to fight them multiple times in a row. However, just as I was wrapping up this post, HunterZ alerted me to a later version of the game that supposedly fixes some of these problems, so I'll be using that one for subsequent play.

I have absolutely no sense of the game's size and scope--no indication whether it will take another three hours or another thirty. Hopefully, my inquiries to the two authors will be returned, and I can report on a manual next time, maybe have some idea what the titular "Talisman of Invocation" is.