Sorcerian: Three More Quests, Final Rating

Encountering Zeus seems a little much for Level 2 characters.

     

Sorcerian

Japan

Nihon Falcom (developer and publisher)

Released 1987 for PC-88, 1988 for PC-98 and Sharp X1, 1990 for DOS and Sega Genesis, 1992 for TurboGrafx CD

Date Started: 24 January 2011

Date Ended: 25 January 2011

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: 28

Ranking at Time of Posting: 14/42 (33%)

Raking at Game #453: 254/453 (56%)

     

I played through three more Sorcerian quests today--enough to feel like I got the gist of the game. Although I allow that it's CRPG "enough," it's not my kind of game. I wasn't sure whether to progress to the second quest in the first group or the first quest in the second group. I tried the former and it proved rather difficult, so I theorized that within the three groups, the first quests are of uniform difficulty. This proved to be the case. In fact, the first quests of groups 2 and 3 were much easier than the first quest of group 1. 

    

    

In "The Master of the Dark Marsh," I was commissioned by a worried father to rescue his daughter from a dragon. The dragon, assuming the form of a human, had tricked the girl into eloping with him. When I found her, she had (for some reason) been transformed into a giant bullfrog.

   

Next quest, we get Jack-and-the-Beanstalk. This game is quite a melange of themes.

        

Professing her love for the dragon, she was reluctant to accept my help, but I gradually gathered the ingredients to make a potion--incidentally slaying her fiancé in the process--and ultimately convinced her to drink it. Her father rewarded me with a "Coin of Joy" that got me 200 experience when I gave it to the king. 

            

"The Garden of the Gods" was a short series of fetch-and-carry missions for Greek Gods. The mortals below hired me to figure out why Zeus suddenly started tossing lightning bolts at them.

An atheist is born.

       

I found Zeus in his throne room after bribing his guard with a bottle of wine, but he immediately tossed me back to the earth. 

     

       

Some seeds I had found soon sprouted into a beanstalk, which I used to climb up and visit other gods. Hephaestus wanted a Seed of Flame from Apollo, who wanted to know what would win Aphrodite's heart. Dionysus had the answer (a red fruit) but wanted a bottle of wine for his trouble, which I got from Hephaestus. Finally, I had to recruit a young harp player (the game would only allow me three characters in this scenario just for this purpose) to play Aphrodite's harp for Zeus so he'd chill out. Calmer, Zeus told me he got angry because his priestess, Adana, stole a bracelet that granted her immortality. 

    

Adana looks a bit like Figment.

      

I defeated Adana, returned the bracelet to Zeus, and got the expected gold and experience for my efforts. The scenario only lasted about 20 minutes and was still a bit tiresome. Neither of these two scenarios put much emphasis on combat. Both had a couple of screens that swarmed me with creatures, but the odds of defeating all of them (some of them flew) seemed so remote, and the experience rewards so paltry, that I really didn't bother--I just ran past them. 

   

"Whadda you got?"

        

After the gods, I took a break to train my characters in various skills. Training takes a couple of years, so you don't want to do it very frequently, but I dispersed skill in item identification, monster identification, trap identification, and combat among them. 

     

Wow. That's original.

       

My third quest of the day (my fourth total) was "The Lost Talisman," in which a talisman with the power to control the weather had been stolen by an evil wizard named Destru. My "monster identification" skill immediately came in handy, since I otherwise would never have guessed that these creatures attacking me--who look the same size as me--are "hill giants." 

     

"Talk like this."

      

One of my characters (the elf) died fighting Destru, but the resurrection potion worked, and...you know what? I'm bored even writing this. Trust me, it's not worth playing except as a historical curio. Better games await you, and me. I read through a walkthrough by some chap styling himself dammit9x. The other quests seem largely more of the same--particularly fetching and carrying with large amounts of backtracking. Naturally, they get more difficult, and as your characters age, they run the risk of dying in their sleep. The walkthrough confirms my suspicion that there's no real "end" to the game. In fact, in the Japanese PC version, the number of scenarios eventually increased to 50. You'd have to really love the game.

    

A quick GIMLET:

     

The game world is undistinguished fantasy fare. It combines so many themes from literature, mythology, and fairy tales, it really doesn't seem to know what it's about. Your actions have so little lasting effects that you can keep replaying the same scenarios (2). Character creation and development are limited, but there are interesting elements with the occupations and the skills. Managing the aging process adds a unique challenge to long-term players, and the skill system is mildly interesting. Fighters seem a bit overbalanced at the beginning (3). There are a number of NPCs, but your interaction consists of just listening to them and occasionally saying "yes" or "no" (2). 

     

Since I need you to finish the quest, I guess that's a "yes." That's some serious role-playing.

      

The encounters are mostly lame, but I like that each level has a "boss," and defeating him gets you a cool XP reward; no real role-playing opportunities that I could see, though. Though I usually like respawning, I don't like immediate, constant respawning (3). Magic and combat are extremely basic; you set your favored weapon or spell and then just hold down ENTER or SPACE to cast and attack; there are virtually no tactics, and you can just run away from most monsters (1). 

    

Trying to jump around and defeat these rock-tossing buzzards is more work than its worth.

      

You are limited to a basic selection of equipment, but you do find one or two useful upgrades every quest (4), and the ability to enchant the items with spells adds a nice touch and ensures that the economy never grows stale; you can always use more money for upgrades and training (5). There is no main quest, but the game consists of 15 side-quests, all of which have a clear objective and several sub-side-quests. You can "role-play" these only to the extent that you can choose not to give the quest item to the king or the gods and instead keep it for yourself (4). 

   

I didn't know where else to put this picture of me climbing a vine.

       

The graphics are very dated. I'm not usually much of a graphics guy, but I have to hold action CRPGs to a higher standard, as graphics are half the point. Sound is also very primitive. The controls are easy enough to grasp, although it's somewhat annoying that "jump" and "use" (to go through doors and talk to people) use the same control (2). Finally, the gameplay is very linear within the quests, with no role-playing opportunities or real replayability. The quests are, mercifully, quite quick (2). The final score of 28 seems about right. I liked it marginally more than Mission: Mainframe, but not enough to keep playing when there was no way to "win." Incidentally, every time I rank something in my spreadsheet these days, I scan backwards and see Swords of Glass sitting there with its paltry 27. Swords of Glass feels like the girlfriend I dumped too soon over a misunderstanding. I should have given it more of a chance. Oh, well.

      

On to Star Saga. Never played it, never heard of it, have no idea what to expect.

Game 42: Sorcerian (1987)

"In times beyond memory, people fought for their lives in a world where monsters and magicians held sway in places of power and mystery. In those days, heroic adventurers went forth on perilous journeys to prove their courage against their foes in battles to the death. They were called...SORCERIAN." (I'm not sure if that's a noun or adjective.)

 

      

Sorcerian
Japan

Nihon Falcom (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for PC-88; 1988 for PC-98 and Sharp X1; 1990 for DOS and Sega Genesis; 1991 for MSX; 1992 for TurboGrafx CD   

Date Started: 24 January 2011

               

I have a confession to make that will probably turn off some of my readers: I hate Japanese animation. Hate it, hate it, hate it. This is nothing against the Japanese. It's not a racial thing. I have known and loved many Japanese people. I just wish they wouldn't try to draw stuff. It's not really even the totality of the animation that I hate; it's mostly just the faces, and hair. I'm talking about this: 

        

        

These images make my physically ill. Why? I don't know why. It's not like they all look the same, but all of them are incontestably Japanese (in style, not in ethnicity). It's something to do with the eyes, noses, and chins--and definitely the hair. (Are there no short-haired men in Japan?) Maybe it's because anime characters never really look Japanese: they look like Caucasians drawn by people who don't spend much time around Caucasians. Maybe it's the odd agelessness of the characters, so that female figures you're supposed to be attracted to look uncannily like children. Maybe it's just the fact that no one actually looks like this, and yet there's an entire industry devoted to churning out these images. Whatever the cause, thankfully this paragraph is now long enough that the preceding image has been pushed off the top of the screen and I no longer have to look at it. The one in the lower right is from Sorcerian, so you can imagine that this game--along with scores of others--is going to be a bit of a problem for me right at the get-go. Thankfully, in this case the graphics quality is poor enough that I can't really see the anime influence except in the character portrait. All right. That's out of the way. 

              

A Sorcerian mission. Those guys jumping on me are called "ouks."

     

Sorcerian is an odd offering: a PC game that looks like a console game. It is part of the Dragon Slayer series of games developed by Nihon Falcom for Japanese PCs (although some were ported to Nintendo, they are, despite their appearance, originally PC games). The series includes eight games, plus expansion packs, from 1984-1995, but Sorcerian is the only one to receive a DOS or (western) PC release. The original game was made in 1987, but the DOS port comes from 1990. Before anyone has fits at the screen shot above, I should mention that the game is inescapably a CRPG. It might be an "action-RPG," but it has levels and character classes and inventories and experience, and all the other trappings of a CRPG. If I exclude this one, I have to exclude Diablo later. I will allow, however, that action CRPGs, which depend a lot on graphics and sound, don't age quite as well as regular CRPGs, which depend more on tactics and story. In this, Sorcerian shares much with the game I just abandoned after my six-hour minimum: The Seven Spirits of Ra. Both feature combat by mashing down the SPACE bar. In Sorcerian, doing so controls four characters at once, some of whom have swords and axes, some of whom have staves that shoot spells, but it's no less banal in its tactics. 

         

"Creativity" was my watchword here.

            

You begin by creating a party of up to four characters, male or female, of one of four classes: fighter, wizard, dwarf, and elf. (This is the second recent game to conflate races and classes; the other was Le Mâitre des Ames.) You are assigned seven attributes: strength, protection, vitality, karma (basically charisma), intelligence, magic resistance, and dexterity, and you can allocate a pool of 3-5 bonus points to customize these attributes. Oddly, the attributes can be negative numbers; my dwarf above is so dumb he actually has a negative intelligence. All characters start at age 16, which would have been cool when I was 16 but seems kind of creepy now.

Those are some steep, pointy mountains.

          

After character creation, you take your characters to the town to purchase weapons, armor, and shields (fighters and dwarves) or staves, robes, and rings (elves and magicians). Other features of the town that you don't use until after your first mission are the magician (enchants items with spells), the herbalist (mixes reagents into potions; sells potions), the temple (resurrects the dead and allows you to build karma through confession and prayer), the elder's house (identifies magic items), the throne room (advances levels), and the training field (ups your attributes at the expense of years). The "musician's guild" exists, as far as I can tell, only to give you a sample of the different songs in the game, none of which I can get to play through my speakers.

The first quest.

        

After that, it's a simple matter of heading out on a quest. There are, from what I can tell, 15 different quests to play, organized in three "scenarios." I don't think there's an ultimate "main quest," and thus no way to "win" the game, although I suppose I'd call it winning if you complete all 15 adventures. Still, the lack of an ultimate goal frees me from what I consider any obligation to play through all 15. I'll play it until I get sick of it. I created a fighter (Fai-Tar), a dwarf (Da-War), an elf (Sil-Bani), and a wizard (Wii-Sar) and headed off into the first scenario. I've videoed a bit of it so you can see what it looks like to play:

The quest involves finding the royal scepter from the ouks in a dank cavern. I led my party somewhat randomly through the doors until I found a wounded adventurer named Goran who had been on the same quest. He told me I would need two invisible crystals to drain a room of acid and, later, a jewel to put in the hands of a demon statue. The crystals, being invisible, were a bit of a pain to find, but Goran's clues helped. I then had to find a jewel in one demon statue and transfer it to a couple of others. It was a lot of trial-and-error and backtracking (lots of backtracking).

Taking a jewel out of a demon statue's hands takes guts.

         

I had to contend with a variety of creatures, escape traps, and solve a couple of light puzzles that involved putting a blue stone from one place into another, and pouring water from one jug into another. There was at least one hidden switch that made a door appear, and a couple of holes that didn't look like doors but actually were, and two hydra-looking things that gave a lot of experience points (alas, they, unlike the other creatures on the level, did not respawn) but didn't seem to be guarding anything more valuable than an herb.

Hydras in the first quest are unexpected.

          

By the time it was all over, I wasn't entirely sure what I had done, but I had the scepter, a new long sword, and some more herbs. A return visit to Goran's cave found him gone (or dead) but his axe left behind. When you return to town, you get the results of your quest, including items, gold, and experience... ...and much like Phantasie, you divide up the plunder among your party, or sell it. Once I had received my reward of experience and gold from the king, I returned to town and spent some of my loot. I found that the "savory" herb the hydras had been guarding created a resurrection potion, and I was able to create cure and heal potions out of other herbs I had picked up. The elder said that my long sword had a "flame" ability that he could release for 480 gold--way more than I have, so that will have to wait. Finally, I visited the throne room and each of my characters advanced one or two levels. A few additional notes, because I get the impression that y'all like bullet points:

• Each of your characters has an occupation that apparently he or she engages in when not adventuring. All of them start as farmers, but you can change them based on their levels and statistics. As far as I can tell, the only reason for the occupations is to give the characters annual incomes (years pass quickly in the game), and some of them are mildly amusing. If more were done with these occupations, it could make for an interesting role-playing element. I made my fighter a spy, my dwarf a translator, my elf a dancer, and my wizard an exorcist. I hope there's not a big call for that in the kingdom, though.

By day, he is a mild-mannered "cheese maker"; by night he clears caves of ouks...

• You don't get experience for defeating enemies until you clear out an entire area of them. But even after this happens, they start appearing again almost immediately. I'm not sure there's any way to completely "clear" an area. In a couple of places on the opening scenario, I was swarmed by rats (yes, rats) that respawned so quickly I was never able to even momentarily clear them.

• Hit points and magic points regenerate constantly when standing still, and quite quickly, so combat is about the difficulty of individual battles rather than accumulated battles.

• Enchanting items apparently takes a long time. I had my wizard take his staff in for enchantment, and the magician told him to come back in three years. However, the first scenario took my characters two years to complete, so maybe it won't be so long in real time.

"Morning or afternoon?" "What difference does it make? It's three years!" "Well, the plumber is coming in the morning." Cold War humor. You had to be there.

       

That's the gist of it. I'll play one or two more scenarios and re-evaluate. I admit to a little impatience because there is some awesome stuff coming up in 1988: Might & Magic II, Pool of Radiance, Ultima V, the first game based on The Lord of the Rings...I'm even looking slightly forward to The Bard's Tale III. But I have to get out of 1987 first.

Game 41: The Seven Spirits of Ra (1987)

Not many games feature an Egyptian setting.

          

The Seven Spirits of Ra

United States
Macrocom (developer); Sir-Tech (publisher)

Released in 1987 for DOS

Date Started: 23 January 2011

          

The Seven Spirits of Ra starts you, the Pharaoh Osiris, in the midst of an unwinnable battle against the minions of Set, the "god of darkness." The game explains that Set "envied the love the people held for their good king" and used his priest, Harumheb, to somehow deceive Osiris's guards into killing him. (From the screen shot, it looks like it happens on a boat.) Harumheb then sliced up Osiris's body and scattered the pieces across the land, where they were devoured by birds and beasts.


         
Osiris, having been "deprived of the rites of burial," is now a wandering "ka spirit" who must "gain the attributes of the creatures who consumed his body" in order to enter the Land of the Dead and "emerge victorious in life beyond death." An unusual setup for sure.

I haven't found a manual so far, so I'm just feeling my way through the game. Fortunately, hitting F1 brings up a help menu with the game's commands, including (d)rop, (e)nter, (p)ick up an item, (r)ead, (s)tatus display, (t)ransform, and (w)eapon select. Movement is with the numeric keypad.

This has a very "Atari-ish" feel.

I start off next to a pyramid, clad only in some kind of skirtish thing, under the blazing sun. Buzzards swoop in and attack, and my own attacks seem ineffective (perhaps because I do not yet have a weapon). Although my health seems to continually regenerate, one of them kills me, and one of seven little "man" icons at the bottom of the screen disappears. That's right: this is a CRPG in which you have "lives."

Near the pyramid is a strange symbol on the ground. When I stand upon it and "read" it, I am presented with some sort of odd hieroglyphic:


    
This would appear to be Anubis next to a giant playing card depiciting a cheerleader creating a spirit tower out of a beetle holding up the sun. I guess I'd better save these screenshots in case they become important later.

No matter how fanciful the setting, every CRPG has you fighting rats at the beginning.

Sick of being bedeviled by buzzards, I escape into the Pyramid of Manu, "where fire is kept, yet warmth is not." I am immediately assailed by rats and snakes, against whom my hand attacks prove effective. I am able to pick up their little skulls, but I don't know why. Soon, a couple of flickering ghosts (interesting graphics effect) come along and prove unaffected by my karate, so I must flee. I really need to find a weapon.

Indiana Jones's personal hell.

Another nearby pyramid features so many snakes and ghosts that I don't stand a chance. All of my little men are soon gone. The game tells me I have been taken to "The Pits of Abot, where souls are cast forever into the lake of fire." Although apparently, "there is no escape from this place," it allows me to keep playing, so I assumed there must be an escape somewhere. After exploring for a few minutes, though, I must conclude that no, there is in fact no way out of hell. I restart.

Nice job with the lake of fire and demons, though.

All right. Let's deal with the "attack" graphic right away. The quick video below shows a few seconds of gameplay, with me attacking some rats. I won't linger on what it seems to depict, but I will say that the developers could probably have chosen a better animation.

I decided to try to explore the extent of the game map and found that it is 48 steps north-south and 127 steps east-west. The game can't quite figure out whether it's two- or three-dimensional, so you have things shaped like pyramids, but laid down flat (I can't walk behind them), and on the northern edge of the map, where I finally see the sky, I'm blocked from moving further by--well, the sky, I guess.

I'm having uncomfortable flashbacks to Frogger.

In the far southwest corner, across a river of crocodiles, I finally found a sword. It helped a lot with the buzzards and other assorted nasties. I thought to clear the map of them, but they seem to respawn. The game gives me points for every monster I slay as part of my overall "score"; I don't know if this actually does anything for me.


   
Even with the sword, combat is rather boring: I simply hold down the SPACE bar and wave my sword back and forth until my enemy dies, or until I run out of so much health that I have to retreat. Since you don't really seem to gain any benefit (other than the "score") for killing enemies, and since they respawn like mad, there seems little reason not just to hold down the space bar and run through them (they can't block you), killing them if you're lucky but not worrying about it if you aren't.


    
There are three pyramids on this opening map: Manu, Hetsahpet, and one that seems to have an entrance in the middle, so I don't know how to reach it. The pyramids are full of snakes, mummies, ghosts, and rats, and all of them respawn with exceeding swiftness. Fortunately, there are occasional potions scattered about that fully heal me.

Osiris in the City of Tombs

Battling through the Pyramid of Manu, I found myself in the City of Tombs, where I was assaulted by demons along with the previously-mentioned creatures. In one corner, I found a mass of rats. One of them was flashing, and when I killed him, I had the ability to transform myself into a rat. I guess I have 1/7 of my soul. This ability allowed me to creep down corridors that had previously been too small, and I found some other objects, including a staff (an alternate weapon that allows me to shoot fireballs, though it's tough to aim, and I hurt myself if they explode too close), something that looks like a statue of a cat, and several things that look like gold bricks.
     
Also in the City of Tombs, I ran into some guy that looks like Anubis. He has a riddle for me:
    

"Children?"

   
I really hope this is a riddle, discoverable within the game, and not some kind of copy protection.

The Seven Spirits of Ra was published by Sir-Tech (the creators of Wizardry) and developed by a company called Macrocom. To call it "obscure" would be an understatement. Neither the game nor the company has a Wikipedia entry, and it does not appear that there is a single "Let's Play" or walkthrough online (though in the past, my readers have been good about digging up things I haven't). MobyGames waxes on about the developer's graphic techniques, which apparently used some programming tricks to squeeze more color out of the CGA standard than should have been possible, but obviously it's hard to get excited about that now.

MobyGames also has an interview with the developers, Rand Bohrer and Neal White III, who come across as cool guys but otherwise don't offer many clues as to the game. For such a limited game, it hardly seems like the lack of a game manual should be crippling, but given how often I get slaughtered, and my lack of ideas about how to use the various items I've found, I can't imagine I'm not missing something.

In any event, I can't really see this as a CRPG. I have to stop accepting MobyGames's word for such things. Its predecessor, ICON: Quest for the Ring, seems to have identical gameplay but is not listed as a CRPG. Granted, I was recently very flexible about what constitutes a CRPG, but I have to draw the line at games that feature "lives." There appears to be no attributes, character development, or leveling, and combat is all action-based. It is, at best, an "adventure game."

Still, there's some interesting stuff here, including the setting, the ability to transform into animals, and the existence of hell. Most games, when you die, just show you a screen or cut scene saying you're dead and giving you a chance to reload; The Seven Spirits of Ra drops you in an inescapable lake of fire. The interview suggests that the final battle plays out like the duel between Merlin and Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone, with the foes transforming into various creatures that trump each other.

I'll keep playing a while to see if I can figure my way through the game a little better--and I'd love to hear from anyone else who has played. Otherwise, don't be surprised if this is my one and only posting on the game. [Ed: It was, for a long time, and then I won it over 10 years later.]

*****

Further reading: Over 4 years later, I went and played Macrocom's first RPG: ICON: The Quest for the Ring (1984). And over 10 years later, I took another look at Ra and won it.

NetHack 2.3e: Final Ranking

The sarcasm is really uncalled for.

I've gone back and forth as to whether to make a GIMLET entry for NetHack. (You're getting it on the same day as my entry for Pirates! because I feel like I trespassed upon your tolerance enough with that game in a CRPG blog.) NetHack doesn't feel so much like a game that you finish and evaluate as one that becomes an ongoing part of your life. Although I played it for about 20 hours, I know I didn't discover even a fraction of what there was to find. Many of you have suggested that I read the spoilers for this version, but I'm having trouble separating v. 2.3e spoilers from later versions, and I've already discovered things I wish I hadn't. Some of what you think I might have missed are features introduced in later versions, like the "explore" option. Thus, if you're a player of the latest incarnations of NetHack, keep in mind that this version is somewhere between Rogue and what you've got.

1. Game World. I can't rank this one too high, but no roguelike really goes over-the-top in its depiction of the world and your character's backstory. You are an adventurer seeking the Amulet of Yendor, and the multi-leveled dungeon lies before you. That's it. There's no real history or lore to the place. Score: 1.

2. Character Creation and Development. Development is satisfying, swift, and tangible. As you slay monsters, you gain experience and automatically rise in levels. Scrolls, potions, and certain items increase your strength and armor class (but can just as quickly deplete them). Your choice of class really does make a difference, if only for difficulty reasons (the encounters seem to play out the same). There are no quest rewards that I could find. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. There aren't many NPCs in this version (at least that I could find): the occasional shopkeeper and such, but the interaction is very basic. There may be others at lower levels. I have to give it a low score pending news that I missed a large chunk of the game: 1. Roguelikes are never really about NPCs anyway.

4. Encounters & Foes. Deceptively complex. Your various foes, featured as letters, don't seem like much of anything until they start attacking you. Eyes put you to sleep, killer bees sap your strength with their stings, leprechauns steal your gold and teleport away, quantum mechanics teleport you away, and nymphs seduce you for your equipment. You start to realize that every little letter requires a different approach from the moment that you first notice it. Although there aren't really "role-playing" opportunities here or scripted encounters, there is a lot of strategy involved, many of the encounters are random, and the enemies respawn. My, do they respawn. I usually regard this as a good thing, allowing you to bolster your experience if you so choose; in this game, it can be quite deadly. My visit to the mysterious vault, and the guard that showed up, hinted at a depth of other types of encounters that I didn't get a chance to experience in this version. Score: 6.

I never really did figure out what this was about.

5. Magic and Combat. I wasn't a huge fan of the magic system, which features learned spells in a spellbook that nonetheless fade away as you use them. Wouldn't the magic points have been enough? Combat, as I've said, can be fairly tactical depending on the type of creature. The problem is, you can't outrun anything, so while it's nice to think that you can tailor your tactics to the particular foe--missile weapons, magic items, and such--you almost always end up in melee combat even when you don't want to. I guess this is where teleportation comes in handy! I feel like I didn't get to explore a lot of combat options, though: does moving rocks around help with tactics? How can you best use your dog? That sort of thing. I'll try harder on this in later versions; for now, I'll give it a 5.

6. Equipment. This is perhaps NetHack's strongest suit. You find an enormous variety of weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, and wands randomized throughout the dungeon, and all of them are unidentified when you discover them (unless you've had a magic item of the same type before). They are harmful as often as helpful, as anyone who has come across a Scroll of Disintegrate Armor or a Potion of Poison can attest. This adds an enormous amount of strategy to the game: when should I try to use an unidentified item, and when should I play it safe? Even better, some of the items have non-obvious uses, or work together in ways that I only started to identify: throw a bit of food at a wild dog, and he becomes your pet. Use another magic item while you're confused, and unexpected things occur. And none of this even gets in to the uses of corpses. I just wish food wasn't such a prominent feature of the game. I know it's all about the challenge, but I feel like the damned thing is challenging enough without always fighting starvation. Finally, the game takes perverse pleasure in identifying your unidentified equipment after you die. I'm going to give this the highest score I've given to a CRPG so far: 8.

Some of these things might have been very useful.

7. Economy. You occasionally run into stores, so unlike Rogue, you can actually buy stuff with your accumulated gold, which makes it all the more infuriating when a leprechaun comes along and steals it. But, gods, how I wish the shopkeepers would identify your stuff for a fee. Hell, their own items aren't even identified! You could pay 100 GP for a potion and have it kill you. Score: 4.

Thankfully, this shopkeeper is selling food!

8. Quests. The one main quest is to find the Amulet of Yendor, and I don't think there are any side-quests in this version, although I could be wrong. The main quest itself isn't all that compelling--like most roguelikes, it's just a MacGuffin. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, & Inputs. The array of keyboard commands is dizzying at first; almost all letters are used, and lowercase and capitals do different things. But you get used to it surprisingly quickly, partly because they make intuitive sense, such as (w)ield and (s)earch. I didn't like how in the middle of combat, the game would suddenly decide that the messages were too long to fit on one screen, so I'd have to hit SPACE to continue the fight; outside of combat, SPACE means "pass," and I would get into a rhythm by which I would hit it accidentally in the middle of combat, wasting a turn. That's about my only complaint. As for graphics and sound, complaining about them in a roguelike somewhat misses the point, but I will risk your disdain by saying that I wish they were a little more advanced. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. In a sense, NetHack is extremely linear, propelling you forward through layers of the dungeon. However, you do have a lot of flexibility as to how fast you descend and how much you want to risk starvation for the sake of extra experience on lower levels. The randomization of the dungeon and the strengths and weaknesses of each character class make it enormously replayable. Unfortunately, most of the time you're "replaying" at times you wish you weren't, such as just after your valkyrie gets transmogrified into a mimic on the 15th level. The game is enormously addicting at lower levels, but dying on a higher level really takes the wind out of your sails. Although I've heard reports that some NetHack masters are able to ascend in almost every game, I find it fiercely challenging, which is at once part of its charm and utterly exasperating. In a regular CRPG, I might punish this type of difficulty, but it's not like you don't know what you're getting into when you fire up a roguelike. Score: 7.

I will venture that this is the only game where this happens.

The final score of 42 seems a little low, although keep in mind that I didn't get to experience everything, and I might have ranked it a few points higher if I did. I hear that later versions have more NPCs, more complex dungeons, quests, and such, and I expect a significantly higher ranking then.

Even as I finish up this review, I wish I hadn't closed out the game. I should probably do something unique with NetHack and leave it continually open until I win, perhaps playing a little bit every day or every week, in between other games. I probably will do this with the next version (which I expect I'll get to around summertime), but continuing with this version when the next level offers so many innovations seems a little silly. The next time, I also plan to keep a much more careful log about what the different items, foes, and corpses do.

I did briefly consider cheating (at least, just backing up my saved games) to win, just so I could report on what it was like. But this opens things up for all kinds of abuse later on, and I'm not very good with self-regulation unless I establish fixed, absolute rules. My use of a hex editor to cheat my way through Mission: Mainframe already puts me in dangerous waters. Plus, when I finally win NetHack--just like with Rogue--I want the satisfaction of beating it fair and square.

****

Edit from 11/29/2013: Almost three years later, after I ascended in NetHack version 3.0, I returned to this version, won it, and lowered the GIMLET slightly to 36. See that post for more!