Tangled Tales: Un-PCs

I don't even...

I don't tell my friends about my addiction or this blog, but I particularly don't tell my black friends. So when I called Corey to check with him on something, I had to pretend it was about a book.

• Me: "So let's say you're reading this book, and it's set in this fantasy land with wizards and stuff..."
• Corey: "Like Lord of the Rings?"
• Me: "Right...So, it's in this world and...Wait. Do black people like Lord of the Rings?"
• Corey: "Man, I told you before: you can't use me as some kind of bellwether about what 'black people like.'"
• Me: "Sorry. I know. But I was just thinking there are no black characters, and then you've got this whole 'Men of the West' metaphor and, you know, the orcs kind of--"
• Corey: "If this is going to turn into one of your 'Jawas-are-really-Jews' theories, I don't have time. I gotta get to work."
• Me: "All right. Imagine there's this character, and he looks like an old white guy when you first meet him, and he talks normally."

• Corey: "Like Gandalf. Are you sure you're not talking about Lord of the Rings?"
• Me: "No. Bear with me. He's an old warrior. And through the course of events of the book, he and his adventuring party comes across this Fountain of Youth."
• Corey: "Okay..."
• Me: "And when he drinks from the fountain, he's suddenly a young black guy."

• Corey: "So it's more like a Fountain of Youth and Style."
• Me: "Right. But here's the thing. Now that he's a young black guy, every time he opens his mouth, he speaks in Ebonics. He says stuff like, 'yo, blood' and 'I be' instead of 'I am.'"

• Corey: "...."
• Me: "So, would you consider that racist?"
• Corey: "I would consider that stupid."
• Me: "Right. But how would it make you feel about continuing to pla--uh, read--the book."
• Corey: "I don't know why I'd be reading that kind of book in the first place, but I'd probably stop at that point."

I said my goodbyes and hung up, satisfied that I had my answer, but I later realized that I don't know if he would have stopped reading because he thought it was racist or because he thought it was stupid. But here's my own verdict: when you have a game set in a fantasy world, and the only black character you include speaks in 1970s African-American street jive, it's at least a wee bit racist.

[Later edit: When I first wrote about this, the game to that point had included some silly elements but was otherwise a standard fantasy game. After this posting, the game completely jumped the rails, and absurdity and caricature became the norm. When a jive-talking black man was only one of dozens of looney characters and situations, it was less jarring than when he was the only WTF element in an otherwise normal high fantasy world. But I still think the developers should have thought a little harder about this one.]

Less problematic, I suppose, is including a character named "Bruce Leon" who speaks in Vietnamese:

Especially when his foreign-speak is kind of a puzzle...

Except according to my sources, gold is "kim" or "vang," not "dong."

...and it's actually reasonably accurate:

It's just, again, kind of stupid, given that a) there would be no reason for Vietnamese to exist in the world of Tangled Tales; and b) Bruce Lee was Chinese.

Oh, but I don't suppose I'll quit the game over it. I'm eager to see if a character named "Dextrous Gonzalez" shows up in the next world, encouraging my characters to "¡Andele! ¡Andele! ¡Arriba!"

Let's catch you up to where I am. After the first posting, I got in the mindset that the game was just a light, short diversion, so it started to annoy me a bit when it dragged on more than six hours. The area that I blogged about in the opening--the mage's tower and surrounding lands--turned out to be only one of perhaps many areas that the young wizard must visit in his quests. I'm currently in the second one. Once I began to think of Tangled Tales as a full game that might actually require multiple postings, I settled in and started to enjoy it a bit more.

Expanding my arsenal.

Most of the rest of the first area took place in the fortress of the evil wizard Xavier. There were a succession of puzzles necessary to navigate this dungeon, obtain a couple of spells ("Shield" and "Energy Blast"), and find a vial of adamantium dust to give to Master Eldritch. They included:

• Rescuing an NPC named Jennifer, who had been turned to stone by a medusa, by pouring a potion of un-petrification over her.
• Defeating the aforementioned medusa by holding up a mirror when she attacked.

Are you kidding? I play adventure games. My backpack always contains a mirror, a book of matches, a rusty dagger, two rocks, a pile of leaves, and a caterpillar.

• Finding a set of keys to release prisoners from Xavier's prison. One of them turned out to be a doppelganger who later tried to kill me while the party was resting.
• Killing a few of Xavier's lieutenants in reasonably-difficult combats.
• Finding some coal to light a magic brazier and get teleported to Xavier's inner chambers. This involved buying a pick from a disillusioned miner, picking up a dwarf named Sneezy (one of those rescued from Xavier's jail), returning to some caverns I'd already explored to let Sneezy use the pick to mine some diamonds, and putting the diamonds in a magic pool beneath the wizards' tower.

• Visiting the gypsy Esmeralda to learn a counter-spell to a "wall of mist" blocking passage to Xavier's chambers. (It was his name backwards.)
• Using the "Silence" spell to keep a deranged skull from repeatedly casting "Fear" on my party.

Entering Xavier's chambers involved a series of tough battles against three waves of foes. Xavier himself seems undefeatable. He disappears whenever a "Silence" spell is active and blasts my party to smithereens when it isn't.

Either way, I don't think it was necessary. I grabbed a vial of adamantium dust from his chambers and used a teleportation puzzle to escape from his fortress.

Would it have been that hard just to reach out and take it?

As I returned to Master Eldritch, I actually thought the game was about to end. The manual had set up the recovery of adamantium dust as the major quest of the game, and I'd explored every area I'd discovered. But, no, after taking the dust and leveling me up (I got to choose an attribute increase), Eldritch gave me a new quest to investigate a drought in a neighboring kingdom and ushered me to a portal that would take me there. I suppose the portal could theoretically lead me to dozens more adventures, so I'm not sure how long the game will last.

Doesn't this happen pretty much, you know, all the time?

The puzzles themselves aren't very hard. You don't type commands in this game (as in text adventures), nor do you directly employ your items by selecting them (as in graphic adventures and hybrids like Hero's Quest). Instead, you just select everything from the "action" menu. Since there is a limited selection, it's usually entirely obvious what you need to do, including when you clearly don't have the item necessary to continue with that puzzle.

One of the game's more memorable, if annoying, NPCs.

The more interesting aspect of the game is the role of NPCs. They are memorable in characterization (and not always in a bad way, as in Maxwell's case); they frequently remind you of their presence by piping up; and they have interesting quirks. I currently have one female NPC with multiple personality disorder, frequently switching between the warlike (and competent) Sif and the pacifist Nina who refuses to fight. Another, a gnome mechanic named Gnu Gnu, has a way of speaking absurdly enthusiastic sentences with all the words breathlessly strung together.

This foe is called a "Power Plant," by the way.

You saw the ridiculous cleavage portraits in my last posting, but women in this game aren't universally depicted this way, and Jenny the elf minstrel might be the most attractive female NPC we've seen in this blog so far. (Graphics didn't really support authentically beautiful NPC portraits until about this era.)

These NPCs don't just add character to the game, though: they're vital for solving puzzles. Without Sneezy the dwarf, I wouldn't have found the diamonds in the first area. In the second area, I needed Bruce Leon to kick apart a post to which a farmer had chained a pirate captain named Blade Jones. Then, I needed Blade Jones in my party to get a lift on his ship, at which point he and his crew robbed me and cast me adrift on an uncharted island, where I found the Fountain of Youth, which would have been useless without Maxwell in the party.

Not going sailing with pirates should be part of Adventuring 101.

Even when they're not entirely necessary for puzzles, NPCs often provide helpful (and unsolicited) hints. At one point, I came across a blank wall where a magic mouth asked for the "magic word." I would have figured this was some puzzle to which I needed to find the answer somewhere else if one of my party members hadn't noted that when he was a child, his mother taught him the "magic word." I tried "Please" on the door and it worked. (Incidentally, I doubt "what's the magic word?" is a universal colloquialism, so this puzzle would be tough for players outside of English-speaking countries.)

I'm grateful for this, because finding secret doors is otherwise a matter of bumping into every wall.

NPCs also fill in bits of lore, point out secret doors, shout battle cries before combat and victory cries afterwards, and drop hints when you don't have the item necessary to progress. A terrified priest named Imrahz wanted me to help him slay a demon but noted that the quest was "suicidal without a holy symbol." And kept warning me every three steps until I found one in a monastery.

I heard you the last 500 times.

 
NPCs have a way of disappearing when their role in the story is finished, unfortunately, and they take with them whatever equipment you've given them. And they won't go through the portal in the mage's tower, meaning you have to start each new area alone.

Finally, you can also continue to engage in dialogue with the NPCs after they join the party. I'm not entirely sure this is a first for CRPGs, but it certainly is a first at this level of depth. Origin continued these features into Ultima VI, which is otherwise a very different game. It's just too bad that their devotion to a quality NPC dynamic didn't translate to less goofy and stereotypical characters.

As  I mentioned, I'm currently mired in the second quest, trying to find the origin of a drought. As with the first area, it's mostly a matter of exploring and figuring out which puzzles you can solve now, and which  you need some other item or NPC to solve. The world seems bigger than the first one, with at least six indoor structures and dungeons.

A few other notes about gameplay:

• Although, as I mentioned last time, the game doesn't quite have Hero's Quest's sense of wit, it does have some funny moments. When I chose to hold up my hand mirror to a medusa I'd already turned to stone, it said, "It's not nice to gloat." When I attacked a magical mist, it told me, "You mist." (At least, I thought that was hilarious last night when I typed a note to include it in this posting, but in retrospect I had been drinking quite a bit of scotch.)

Chester declines to sample the Fountain of Youth. It's too bad, really, I was looking forward to having dialogue options like, "What'chu talkin' 'bout, Master Eldtritch?"

• As I get more spells, combat is starting to become a little more tactical, though I don't think it'll ever get nearly to the level of the better games I've played so far, like Wizardry, Dungeon Master, or Pool of Radiance. NPCs act on their own and only make physical attacks, so the only real decision I have in each combat round is whether to attack with my weapon or cast a spell. But the right spell--"Silence," "Energy Blast," "Time Distortion"--can make or break a combat, and sometimes the best move is to "Heal" an injured party member. Complicating things is that your spells always cast at the end of the combat round.

Most of the monster portraits in this game are quite good.

• A single "Heal" spell or a night's rest fully heals all wounds, regardless of how serious (except death).

• Spell points run out fast, especially when exploring a dungeon where the "Light" spell costs a point every move (I have a max of 130). But it was a lot harder before I realized I could rest basically anywhere. For the longest time, I was hauling myself out of the dungeon and all the way back to my chambers in the mages' tower to sleep.

• I said yesterday that there was no way to "rotate" the first-person view. This is still true, although it does change depending on the way the party is facing, but the only way to change the way you're facing is to approach the square from a different direction. Since what you see in this view isn't really that important to gameplay, I guess it doesn't matter.

Checking out a room from different angles.

• There was a puzzle in Xavier's fortress involving having to touch three dragons' heads--white, blue, and red--in the right order. There's nowhere in the game that tells you the order (at least that I found), but the "right" order is, of course, red, white, and blue. Perhaps Origin should have just put a stamp reading "For White Americans only!" on the box.

If you choose blue, white, and red, the game quits and deletes itself from your cheese-eating hard drive.

• A wizard in the second area sold me a spell for 100 gold pieces that he said I should use when surrounded by enemies. The spell is called "GNIHTON," which of course is "NOTHING" backwards, which is exactly what it does.

Wanker.

• On a farm, I found an adz, the nature and purpose of which I only know thanks to crossword puzzles (see also: jai alai, rara avis, Ara Parseghian, and Ima Sumac).

• I hate ghouls and ghosts in this game. They both paralyze characters very easily, and there's no "cure paralysis" spell. You have to haul the party to a healer.

• Gold is limited to 160 coins per party member. I was up to around 450 after Xavier's fortress, but I lost most of it when my party ditched me. I was steamed. I guess there's probably no way to save up for Esmeralda's answer to the mysteries of the universe then.

• I don't really think this game has a good handle on what a "gnoll" is.

My major quests at this point are finding a stolen copy of Ivanhoe for the monastery and rescuing a woman named Veronica who was kidnapped by a giant. I'm sure these quests will tie into the drought somehow.

Unless that's a Rose of Disintegration, I'd say you probably don't want to meet him anyway.

Later edit: And another great one from towards the end of the game.

Game 89: Tangled Tales (1989)

       

Tangled Tales

United States

ORIGIN Systems (developer and publisher)

Gary Scott Smith, Alex Duong Nghiem
Released 1989 for DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64

Date Started: 20 February 2013

         

Tangled Tales is a silly, inconsequential, pleasant, and relatively easy adventure-RPG hybrid, casting the player in the role of an apprentice to a wizard named Eldritch. The contrast to Chaos Strikes Back couldn't be starker, and as often happens when I go from one game to a wildly different one, I marvel at how many different approaches we manage to cover with the "CRPG" label.

The game is notable for an odd hybrid between a top-town iconographic perspective (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen) and a first-person view (in the upper left). As you move the character around the map in the upper-right, the first-person perspective changes to depict the rooms, corridors, and wilderness areas from the character's own eyes. You can't rotate the first-person view or anything, and to be honest, anything important that it depicts is described in the text area at the bottom, so it doesn't have a lot of purpose except as a series of pretty graphics. It's still somewhat fun.

 

Icons across the middle of the screen provide the actions of the game: look, cast a spell, take an item, talk to an NPC, perform an action, drop or give an item, save the game, view the party's statistics, equip weapons and armor, and rest (there's a second row of icons toggled by the switch to the right). Each of the actions has a handy keyboard shortcut that makes gameplay much faster.

Using the "action" command. Ever since I found a matchbook, "light a match" comes up as an action for every location, which is kind of annoying.

 
In tone and approach, the game invites comparison to Hero's Quest: It isn't very serious about itself, it takes place in a fairly limited game world, it has a bunch of light puzzles, and it's not terribly hard. It lacks the wit and...oh, I don't know..."jauntiness" of Hero's Quest, but it has a few of its own innovations, not the least of which is the ability to control a large party of characters instead of a single NPC. In fact, it's one of the first games on my long list in which a player-created PC is joined by memorable NPCs who maintain their personalities even after they join the party. This is something we'll see in Ultima VI and Ultima VII, which makes sense as this is also an Origin game.

When I say memorable, I mean memorable.

MobyGames claims that the game is "specifically aimed at younger people and non-hardcore roleplaying gamers." Some of the screenshots belie the "younger players" idea, but the game is definitely not for the jaded and cynical among the CRPG brethren, with exhibit A being the back story and age of the protagonist. The game comes with a booklet titled A Young Wizard's First Journal in which the PC records some thoughts pre-game, describing difficulties practicing spells, playing pranks on the townsfolk, turning squirrels into dragon-sized monsters, sparring with a fellow student named Drek, and getting into trouble with Master Eldritch. A series of mishaps causes the apprentice to lose all of the master's adamantine dust, which the master punishes by wiping the apprentice's spellbook clean and tasking him to find more.

I really hope that's not supposed to be me.

 
The character has a standard set of attributes--strength, intelligence, speed, and charisma--with the current level given not as a number but a textual rank. Strength proceeds through "puny," "weak," "athletic," "mighty," and "powerful"; charisma's levels are "offensive," "tactful," "diplomatic," "influential," and "persuasive." They start somewhere in the middle, and during character creation, you can trade levels in one attribute for those in another. The uses of the attributes seem straightforward: strength and speed help in combat, intelligence affects spell points, and charisma determines the selling price of items in town.

NPCs appear frequently on the map, and if you move on top of them, you can have a little conversation with pre-determined options. NPCs fill you in as to the game world, items, and other NPCs. Many of them will sell items, and some will cast healing spells.

Much of the game involves solving various interrelated inventory puzzles. As an example, a circus ringmaster in town laments that his bears have escaped. Later, you find them in a cabin, interrogating a blonde-haired girl who has apparently been eating their porridge and sleeping in their beds. To get past them, you have to bribe them with honey, which you get by purchasing a bucket in town and leaving it to catch the dripping honey from a beehive in the forest. Distracting them with honey lets you into the cabin, where you find a "Silence" spell and collect Goldilocks as an NPC. Later, the ringmaster leaves you some tickets to the reconstituted circus.

I think my mother skipped a couple of passages when she read me the story as a child.

During these puzzle-based wanderings, you run into a host of random and fixed encounters with creatures, including (so far) goblins, giant snakes, ogres, rats, and lizard men called "reptons." Combat is of the simplest sort. You simply hit the "attack" button, and the game tells you how you and your NPCs performed. It usually takes multiple clicks to win a battle. There are some small tactics: you can run away, cast healing spells, or cast other spells like "Fear" and "Silence" for your round while your companions make physical attacks. I haven't found any offensive damage spells yet.

A few rounds with a "repton."

The spellbook is a key to both puzzle-solving and overall survival. As I mentioned, you start with it blank and slowly accumulate spells during your explorations. The first one I found was "Light," right in Eldritch's tower.

Spells are divided into "Continual" spells, which drain magic until you turn them off, and "Noncontinual" spells, which have a fixed casting charge. Things got a little easier when I found the "Heal" spell.

Casting a "Light" spell to illuminate a dungeon.

So far, I've found five NPCs in the game, four of them through solving puzzles and one who works for a fee. The NPCs add a little color to the game. They make comments on the environment or holler war-cries before combat. (Goldilocks usually yells something like, "I'll break my nails!" but fights well anyway.)

Alvin really punctuates his sentences.

NPCs don't make combat any easier, though: the game scales the number of enemies you encounter relative to your total NPC count. With 5 NPCs, I face 13 giant rats instead of only 3.

Honestly, CRPG developers: Why not giant hamsters, or giant lemmings, for a change?

The game also has an odd approach to NPC equipment. I can choose what weapons and armor to equip for myself, but not for the NPCs. I can't even see what they have. If I find myself with a stray piece of armor or a weapon, an NPC might suddenly ask me, "Say, Chester, I could really use that dagger if you don't want it," making me wonder if he's been beating the rats with his fists the whole time.

From both enemies and traps, the main character and the NPCs can take damage, ranging through "Not at all," "Bruised," "Lightly," "Heavily," "Intensively," "Critically," "Unconscious," and "Dead." In keeping with the game-for-novices theme, though, there's no permanent death in the game. When you die, Eldritch simply resurrects you with all hit points and gold. Unless there's some disadvantage that I'm seeing, it's actually a better deal than paying for healing and resurrection.

The Grey Lord needed a crystal ball like that.

The game takes place in a walled town with several buildings (including the mage's tower) and the small surrounding Fairhaven Valley, which contains a few structures and small dungeons.

A map of the valley from the mage's tower.

 
The game began in my bedroom in the mage's tower, and this is what I've accomplished so far:

• Explored the tower, got the quest from Eldritch to find some more adamantine dust, and found the "Light" spell in the library. Eldritch also told me to get help from a man named Riley.

• Visited the tavern. Ate some stew that was so bad that it caused me to faint, but got a book of matches. Found 40 gold pieces in a barrel. Talked to a dwarf fighter named Sir Isaac who wanted some apples. Tipped the bartender for some intelligence and found that a man staying at the inn plans to take on the evil wizard Xavier by himself.

• Visited the inn, but the desk clerk wouldn't let me into the back room until I paid 70 gold pieces for a room, which was 40 more than I had.

No, thanks. I think I'll just find some acid for my eyes.

• Visited the bucket shop. Couldn't afford a bucket yet, but discovered from the owner that an adventurer named Alvin had headed up north to kill goblins and could probably use some help.

• Met a fighter at the fighter's guild named Sedrick, who wanted 50 gold pieces to join me and insisted on saying everything in rhymes. I later hired him, but he got too expensive and I had enough other NPCs, so I booted him.

Anybody want a peanut?

• Headed outdoors. Freed a bunny from a cage. It turned into a beautiful nymph who gave me some magic seeds.

That is the most pathetic-looking bunny I've ever seen.

• Found a rope leading downward in a hollow tree. Followed it into a goblin lair, killed some goblins, and picked up my first NPC: Alvin the elf.

• Found a shovel in the dungeon. Used it to dig and plant the seeds outside in a garden. Seeds grew into a big apple tree. Plucked the apples and gave them to Sir Isaac in the inn. He joined me. Also dug with the shovel in the garden to get some worms. Fed the worms to some fish in a fountain, who rewarded me by retrieving a blue key.

• With the gold I'd obtained from the goblins, got a room at the inn, met Riley, and got him to join me.

Oh, yes. There was a whole Sir Isaac Newton/gravity thing going on. The game thinks it's terribly clever.

• Found some sale coupons in Moe's Magic Shop. My fellow apprentice, Drek, had been going on about waiting for the next sale. When I returned to the mage's tower and gave him one, he ran off excitedly, allowing me to search his room and find the "Heal" spell.

• On another part of the map, found a pool full of slime. Swam through it, to the astonishment of my NPC friends, and found a cave full of lizard men.

Calm down, man. That's just how I roll.

• Found a statue of the ancient Archmage Fizzle on an altar in the lizard men's cavern. Invoked it. It told me that Fizzle was slain by the evil wizard Xavier and asked if I'd avenge him. I said yes. Told me to seek out the "secret study" under Fizzle's cabin in the mountains. This is where I encountered Goldilocks and the three bears, as covered above.

"No" just gives you the chance to do it again.

That seemed good enough for my first session. There are a few open puzzles, including a locked door in the mage's tower, a pink pool in the basement of the mage's tower that I have to throw diamonds in for some reason, a miner wandering outside offering to sell me his pick, and the search for the evil Xavier's fortress. A few other notes before I close for the night:

• There's no sound in the game.

• At one point, I chose not to kill some "friendly" snakes and got a reasonably funny screen:

• There isn't much to buy in the game, but it's also slow to give up gold pieces (I've been chronically under-funded), and there's at least one reason to save up lots:

If it turns out to be "42," I'm going to be pissed.

• You only get one save slot, so you want to make sure you haven't screwed anything up before saving.

• I'm not sure if my many combats are doing anything to advance me in the way of "experience." There's no experience meter in any event.

• Time passes in the game, and quite quickly, with only about 84 moves between noon and midnight. But the time doesn't seem to affect anything: stores are always open, NPCs are always in the same place, and it doesn't get dark or light.

• A limited set of actions in each area almost guarantees that you'll choose the right one. It would be very hard to get stuck in this game.

I don't know how long this game will take, but if a prophecy from a soothsayer comes true, we won't be spending very long on this one.

Then again, maybe she's talking about Keef the Thief.