Lord of the Rings: Forging Anew

Frodo gets ready to embark on his journey again.

I know how much I like a game by how attractive the "new game" button looks every time I fire it up. If I'm having fun, but I haven't exhausted myself with it yet, the button is full of promise: a fresh experience in a familiar place, rendered all the more attractive through the conviction that, now that I understand the game, I can do everything right.

"Understanding the game" can include a lot of things, such as what skills are useful and which are not, what to look for when exploring areas, how to fight certain enemies, and just overall familiarity with the interface. For instance, a few months ago I decided to check out Fallout 3, but I was hours into the game before I understood how the VATS system worked, how to turn on my flashlight, which items were worth collecting, and that I needed to especially watch out for skill books and those little bobbleheads. It was enormously satisfying to start over and fully explore those areas I bumbled through the first time.

(To stave off the inevitable questions: I think it's a fun game--my first first-person shooter/RPG combo--love the skill system, wouldn't mind if some of the buildings were a little smaller, wouldn't mind if ammo was a bit more scarce, don't understand why the main quest uses so little of the map, will review it when I reach that year in my blog.)

The CD version provides an animated cut-scene at a crucial moment.

I wouldn't say I particularly love Lord of the Rings, but I didn't mind starting over. There are a number of things I know now that I didn't know when I started, including the importance of using "perception" in just about every room, the need to walk around and make sure to get close to things in the environment so you get the message that something valuable is there, the need to buy lots of rations while still in Hobbiton, and the fact that the day/night cycle does mean something for some encounters. Of course, it didn't hurt that I'd missed or bollixed some encounters and I wanted to try those again.

The 1993 CD version has on-screen text instead of journal entry references. I suppose a drawback of this is I can't look them up again later.

Finally, I thought I'd use the experience to check out the other version--the one that came on CD in 1993. As I covered in my first post, the major difference is that this version includes scenes from the 1978 Ralph Baskshi animated film instead of static screens drawn specifically for the game (frankly, I like the latter better). It has a significantly improved interface, offering a "show" command for the inventory and allowing rapid scrolling between characters on most menus rather than having to return to the root menu to choose a different characters. The party is now capable of diagonal movement. You can turn off the music permanently. The graphics are unchanged but the sound is significantly improved. Commands execute when you hit their associated letters without having to hit SPACE to bring up the command bar first. Text appears on screen--no more having to open the PDF journal constantly. Perhaps most important, it offers an automap that greatly facilitates exploration. 

I like doing my own mapping in tile-based games, but in continuous-movement games, the lack of an automap ought to be a crime.

As an aside, by accident I originally wrote "1978 Rankin/Bass film" above. Wouldn't that be awesome? A stop-motion Lord of the Rings film in the style of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? If someone wants to Kickstart that, I'll contribute.

Anyway, never fear that you'll have to read about the same areas twice. I've already played through both the Shire and the Old Forest, so I'll pick up with Bree anon. I did have a few new encounters this time through:

• I successfully used "sneak" to enter the mill that Lotho and his human allies had set up in the Shire and destroyed the machinery. There was no reward for this but experience.

• In a cave where I saved one of the lost children from a spider, I found this scroll that I missed before.

Is that supposed to be some kind of threat?

• Near the location of the lost children, I had completely missed a healer who wanted "athelas." I had to wander around the woods, checking every tree, fighting wolves, before I found some, and when I returned it to the healer, he healed my wounds.

"Kingsfoil--aye, it's a weed!"

• I still couldn't save Hawkeye. Literally two seconds after he joined me, an orc attacked, we defeated it, he hustled me to a cave, and he left the party as two Nazgul appeared and attacked. I reloaded a few times, but each time they got the first attack and killed two characters without flinching. I don't understand how winning this is possible at all. I also still only found ELBERETH once, but this time I held on to it.

• There was an encounter I solved "correctly" the first time, involving a sick boy whose father, Farmer Maggot, needed me to fetch the healer for him. The kid was surrounded by protective dogs that I didn't disturb last time. This time, I wandered into his room before fetching the healer to see what would happen. The dogs attacked. Once I killed them . . .

I'm not too proud to say I reloaded here.

• In a building I didn't visit the first time, Rose Cotton said goodbye to Sam and gave him a token. No idea what it does.

• I met an elf NPC named Cirband that I had previously missed. He had some things to say about ELBERETH and the Old Forest.

• When I got to the Old Forest, I started to explore the non-secret path but I kept getting damaged by falling branches and attacked by wolves. It was easier just to take the secret exit.

• This time, I visited Tom Bombadil's house first. I got the token from Goldberry. When I showed it to Withywindle, she asked for the Springstone to restore spring to the riverbanks so lilies could grow. I gave it to her and she gave me lilies in return. When I gave the lilies to Goldberry, she gave me a blessing that increased everyone's statistics a few points, so the exercise was worth it.

• I still couldn't figure out the deal with the "ruddy oak" tree. From a comment I got last time, I gather he's supposed to join the party. I think I was supposed to give him an acorn, but this time when I found the tree that had the acorns, I couldn't get any for some reason. Anyway, apparently he was only necessary to find the Springstone, which I found through other means (a book in Brandy Hall had told me where to look for it).

• Because I visited Tom Bombadil's house before Sharkey's Shipping, the traitorous Athelwyn was still with me and could theoretically use "countermagic" to pass through a wall of ice in Withywindle's caverns. I say "theoretically" because every time I tried it, my party would briefly appear on the other side and I'd get a message that it sealed itself shut behind me, but then the party would abruptly return to the original side. Is whatever's on the other side anything I should go back for?

The rest of the map, including the barrows and Sharkey's Shipping, played out much as before. I still couldn't figure out how to get into the barrow with the swan and crown. Owing to a slight difference in exploration pattern, Athelwyn revealed herself and abandoned me in a slightly different location, but otherwise I was soon on to Bree.

Did the Witch of Cardolan survive the centuries by attacking a party of six people and a horse while unarmed?

Arriving on the third map, I had Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, a pony, Druin the dwarf, and another hobbit named Nob Appledore, who I rescued from a cell in Sharkey's Shipping and seems to only exist for this game. We were all in pretty bad shape, so it didn't help that I was immediately set upon by wargs (who, in this game, look just like wolves). Everywhere I went, I was killed by packs of them, and it took a while before I found a way to thread past them and on to the city.

The day/night cycle mattered more in Bree than elsewhere, with certain shops only open during the day and many houses locked up at night. There were a couple places where I was attacked by Nazguls at night. I was surprised to find hobbit holes in the city--are they in the book?--but none of the occupants were very helpful.

Various NPCs had more rumors about Black Riders searching for me, Rangers fighting them, and bandits stealing horses. We wandered into Nob Appledore's house and he left me, but not before giving me something called "Durin's Pick," which I assume replaces the regular pick I already had.

At long last, I found a blacksmith where I could spend some of the hundreds of silver pieces I'd amassed. I bought chain mail and shields for both Frodo and Sam, who end up doing a lot of melee combat (Merry and Pippin have bows). But I was annoyed that the blacksmith wouldn't buy any of the extra daggers, gems, and other items I've been hauling around. I compounded the inventory problem by purchasing a "spiritcharm" and a gold ring just because they both sounded like things that will be useful.

The centerpiece of the city was, of course, the Prancing Pony, where I gave the name "Underhill" upon entering (unlike certain hobbits, I didn't say "B . . . Underhill. My name's Underhill" so unconvincingly it would have fooled no one). Aragorn, of course calling himself "Strider" at the moment, was hanging out in a corner. He told me to meet him in another room, and when I did, there was a little cut scene from the film and Aragorn joined my party, waving a broken blade around and spouting something about it being forged anew. I assume this is from the book.

Shortly after Aragorn joined, I ended my session. I think I've fully explored the city, but I want to make another pass at the NPCs, because there was a hint of a side quest I never fully got a bead on. Something to do with a resident named Bill Ferny stealing horses. I heard about him from some townsfolk, and when I entered the stables next to the Prancing Pony, I got a message that all the horses were gone. I suspect my horse was supposed to be among them, because when I entered the inn, the innkeeper said something about taking and stabling him, but for whatever reason the pony never left my side. I also never heard anything about Gandalf, so I want to ask all the residents about him as a keyword. Finally, there's a hobbit hole with a guy asking for a password, and I want to see if I can figure out what's going on with him.

After that, I still have the exterior of Bree to explore--perhaps I'll take another crack at those wargs, now that I have Aragorn--before moving on to, presumably, Weathertop or Rivendell.

The CD version of the game seems worth it for the interface improvements, and equally so for the sound. The original 1990 version had fairly primitive sound effects, but this one has some nice recorded effects, especially for combats, with daggers and swords swishing through the air, arrows finding their targets with a "thwack," wolves growling and yelping convincingly, barrow wights making a ghastly scream when they die, and so on. On the other hand, the video doesn't enhance the experience at all, especially since the characters in the animated film look nothing like the portraits in the game. Aragorn looks particularly awful in the movie, though perhaps I'm overly influenced by the Jackson films as to what he should look like.

I know I was a little down on the game in my last post, but I'm liking it more now that I feel more confident in the controls and gameplay mechanics. I look forward to what awaits the Fellowship next.

Game 145: Galactic Adventures (1983)

With all of its features crammed into two disks, Galactic Adventures wasn't going to waste space on introductory screen art.

Galactic Adventures

Tom Reamy (developer), Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II and Atari 8-bit

Date Started: 5 May 2014
Date Ended: 20 May 2014

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 90/142 (63%)

Galactic Adventures is a game of impressive ambition and complexity, beating against the cage of the limitations imposed by disk size and computing power. Taking perhaps some inspiration from Space or Empire I, it offers an open-ended science-fiction campaign setting, where you create a character, assemble a team, and perform a variety of both space missions and "dungeon" explorations that collectively increase your experience, skills, inventory, and finances. The gameplay experience, at least in 2014 terms, isn't as good as its ambitions, but the result is still impressive.

The game is a sequel to SSI's 1982 wargame, Galactic Gladiators, one of over two dozen strategy and simulation games the company published during an extremely prolific period from 1980-1983. It is part of the company's "RapidFire" line, which was a series of games published by the company but developed and programmed by third-party authors. In this case, the author is Tom Reamy, who programmed these two games before going into other pursuits.

The visitor's area of an opening planet.

The setting is a 7-planet alliance called the Interstellar Community of Intelligent Species, which has some limited government "but the emphasis is on the autonomy of the individual." This and the fact that it takes place in 2918 are the only background the game gives you, but the manual offers that "you don't need to read [the background]" and that the player "should also feel free to make up [his] own" history and lore for the setting.

The player begins by creating a character from one of seven races. Humans are there, of course, as are a genetic offshoot from humans called "Wodanites" (large, strong, have horns, modeled on Vikings). Other races are based on birds, amphibians, and even four-legged beasts. Each race has attributes in strength, dexterity, endurance, speed, intelligence, and "sensitivity" (which is the probability of successfully using certain artifacts). These attributes are immutable throughout the game except the very rare increase by 1 point by using a very rare artifact.

The player races of Galactic Adventures.

Each character also has a selection of weapon skills and "advanced" skills, the latter group drawn from a list of 7 object skills (star pilot, engineer, gunnery, cyborg jockey, physics, lock pick, and linguistics) and 7 people skills (transvaluation, noetic logic, holistic logic, bio transform, mind cloud, atomic wand, and medical). A character could have all of these skills, but it makes more sense to specialize from the outset, since unlike attributes, the skills are advanceable through both practice and purchasing something called an "RNA tab."

Creating a new character.

You only create one character, but you can recruit others from the streets of the planets, or even from the survivors of defeated enemies (a mechanism I can recall in no other game), which includes 8 additional species. The party can be as large as the lead character's "leadership" rating, which goes up through successful adventuring and can get as high as 20. Unfortunately, party members cost up to $1,000 per day depending on their levels, so you have to balance power with economics. Players also have the option to spend $10,000 to clone the lead character once or twice. Clones never cost any money and can take over if the lead character dies.

The game begins in the "Visitor's Area" of the character's home planet, from which the party can purchase equipment at the market, visit guilds to get assignments, go to the space port to blast off into space, or just wander the streets looking for encounters. The player starts with 30,000 "frilbees" (the game's currency) and a generic vehicle called a "transport."

My party (right) encountering another party (left) on the streets of Valhalla.

I found that wandering the streets was the best way to develop in the early game. As you roam, you encounter a variety of parties that you can fight, talk with, trade with, or ask for work. Fighting is risky, since occasionally you'll get arrested for disorderly conduct and made to pay half your money. A better approach is to recruit individuals with needed skills and look for "jobs." The "jobs" concept is one of the game's interesting innovations. They draw from the various object skills and have a defined complexity level, so you might get an "engineering job at level 7" or a "lockpicking job at level 5." To complete it successfully, you need to have the appropriate tools for the trade plus adequate level in the related skill.

If you select a job, you have the option to play a mini-game to simulate performing it or go with "abstract resolution" in which a random roll is made against a base probability of success. (The base probability is 50% if the character's intelligence plus skill level equal the job level.) The mini-game is essentially a variation on Mastermind with alien races instead of colored pegs. You have to figure out a random selection of 7 races in 4 positions with between 1 and 10 guesses dependent on the variance between your skill level and the job level. After each guess, the game tells you how many correct positions you guessed and how many races were correct, but in the wrong positions. You deduce from there. I've played a lot of Mastermind and I find it very difficult to beat in less than 7 guesses, so I lost the game a lot. If you fail at a job, you get fined; if you succeed, you get paid and your skill level has a chance of increasing.

Fortunately, my skill level here is high and I get 10 guesses. In guess 4, I was correct about three of the positions.

Space travel is the least complicated of the game's primary mechanisms, but first you have to save up $200,000 to buy your own spacecraft. Once you have it, you can transport cargo or passengers between planets for reasonably good rewards and fairly low risk. Navigating space is a matter of selecting a destination and then moving the space ship to a "hyper-gate" and hitting the SPACE bar. The trick is that the hyper-gate moves randomly around the screen, you have a limited amount of fuel, and your ship's thrusters obey the real laws of physics. If you're already accelerating by 1 unit to the "east" and you turn to the "south" and accelerate by 1 unit, you don't immediately turn south; you end up accelerating by 1 unit to the southeast. Frantically trying to thrust in the direction of the gate will just deplete your fuel and send you careening on an unintended tangent. You have to carefully plot the use of both forward and reverse thrusters to get the bearing right, while simultaneously trying to anticipate where the gate is going to go. The process isn't easy, but fortunately the main menu offers practice in both hyper-gate navigation and combat.

Trying to reach the hyper-gate.

Pirates occasionally intercept you in space, and combat takes place on the same kind of map but with the added difficulty of trying to face your enemy and fire lasers (with success dependent on the "gunnery" skill). You can channel fuel into your shields and even use a tractor beam to capture and board the enemy ship. Boarding ships and defeating pirates in tactical combat is the only way to recruit the valued "Gorsai" species into the party, who have near-maximum attributes in both strength and dexterity.

I've already described what sound like a lot of gameplay elements, but the heart of the game, like almost every SSI title, is really in tactical combat on complex battlefields. Once again, I find myself wishing I'd rejected the "DOS-only" rule the moment I thought of it in 2010. If I had, I would have played this game early, and would have seen what is probably SSI's first fusion of strategy game and role-playing game. I would have referred to it when analyzing the combats in Wizard's Crown, Shard of Spring, and Pool of Radiance, and I would have been giving Tom Reamy credit for introducing this kind of combat mechanic into the CRPG genre for the first time.

A tactical combat screen with numerous options.

You can get into these battles on the streets of planets or by boarding Gorsai ships, but for the most part, the tactical combats take place on a variety of planets and asteroids that you visit by accepting quests from one of the game's four guilds: the Agency (a massive intelligence service), Space Patrol, the Adventurer's Guild, and the Sensitive's Guild. These missions always whisk you to some other world, where you engage in a text-based dungeon crawl through multi-roomed structures and find combat in most of them.

The beginning of a guild mission.

The combat is difficult, complicated, and more than a little exhausting. I can easily see why SSI chose to add a quick combat option to Wizard's Crown, the next RPG to use this kind of interface. Assuming no one is ambushed, it begins by positioning the various party members on the map, and there are limitations in this process I can't quite figure out. The party and its foes then trade turns, during which the party has group options to surrender or flee, and individual options to move, attack, load weapons, use items, rest, and dodge. After each side makes its selections, they execute all at once. The speed of the actions, and the enemy's AI, are just fine in AppleWin with an accelerated processor, but at era-specific speeds they're an unmitigated nightmare, and winning even the simplest combats would have been a multi-hour process.

Combat takes place on a variety of terrains, each with their own logistical challenges.

As I said, combat is extremely difficult and deadly as well as long. I learned the hard way that characters with melee weapons have almost no chance of successfully reaching enemies before being killed or rendered unconscious by enemy phasors and explosives. Meanwhile, characters of low weapon skill (less than 10 or so) miss constantly. If I was really invested in this game, I'd probably spend a lot of time winning low-risk battles on planets before accepting any guild missions.

In this combat option, character "V" is going to move two spaces to the northwest, then attack "Y" with his laser sword. Note that the icons above each character indicate whether they have ranged or missile weapons.

The funny thing is, there's a way to cheat the entire thing. SSI built in the ability to change to two-player mode at the beginning of each round, just in case a friend happens to wander into the room or something. The friend can play the enemy while you play the regular party. Of course, you can exploit this mechanic to take control of both parties yourself and just have the enemies "rest" while the PCs pound on them.

You don't have to kill every enemy to win; they'll depart the battlefield if sufficiently wounded. After combat, you have the ability to recruit from among the survivors as well as "rob" the defeated party (I rather prefer "search" instead) of their money and equipment. You then can continue to explore the area by moving north, south, east, or west to the next sector.

A rare complete victory.

Very often, in between sectors, you'll encounter some kind of challenge that you need a skill to solve, like a locked door (requiring lock picking) or an especially dense swamp (requiring the "cyborg jockey" skill, or more effective use of the cyborg transport). When these occur, you engage in them the same way as the "jobs" back on the planets.

I guess the ultimate goal of each quest is to explore long enough to find the path off the planet, but at any point you can "give up" the mission. I'm not really sure what the difference is, since you get adventuring experience even if you "give up."

The game is full of things we haven't yet seen in 1983 and that I've never seen before at all. There's an extremely long list of weapons of different types and classes. There are special artifacts called "k-devices" spread throughout the galaxy (relics of an earlier civilization) that have a variety of powerful effects (a "k-reanimator" is the only way to resurrect a slain party member). Combat occasionally takes place in zero-gravity, which includes an additional "bounce phase" where characters careen backwards in proportion to their actions during the round. Certain weapons are illegal on certain planets, so they'll be confiscated by customs when you arrive. An "adventure construction" option lets you make your own quests and encounters.

Even the skill system, which certainly isn't unique to this game, has a few selections that I've never seen elsewhere, such as "atomic wand," the ability to duplicate small objects; and "bio transform," the ability to change the appearance of a living organism. The two "logic" skills sound extremely interesting. "Noetic logic" is the art of persuasion through highly-structured reasoning, and "holistic logic" is the ability to make intuitive leaps. Of the latter, the game manual says, "Some of its uses are gathering information (like tracking down a rumor through the back alleys of a space port city), or confirming if someone is telling the truth, or predicting the likely actions someone will take." Unfortunately, I never really found uses for these logic skills, but perhaps I needed to develop them more.

There is no main quest in the game; the manual encourages you to "set up a number of your own goals, like reaching a certain rank in the shortest elapsed time, or collecting all possible K-devices, or amassing a fortune in Frilbees." However, there is a general goal to reach the rank of "Independent Adventurer" before you die. In my time with the game, the best I ever got without dying was "Trial Adventurer," but I only played for 131 days of game time, and this is the sort of game that's meant to be cherished for years. If I had bought it when I was 10, I could see myself rushing home from school every day to fire it up and see if I could get through one of the adventures before dinner. Alas, I have too little time and too long a list these days.

My best attempt at a high adventure rating.

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 2 points for the game world, which was deliberately left under-developed. The alien races are a bit goofy and the planets are essentially uniform.

Blasting off from spaceport.

• 4 points for character creation and development. The various mechanisms to develop skills, and the satisfying effect that this advancement has on gameplay, are almost unique to the era.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. There isn't much to the street encounters on the planets, which are essentially the only NPCs in the game, but you can role-play them to a limited extent.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. In this I'm rewarding both the "jobs"-based encounters as well as the variety of alien enemies and monsters that you fight, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

• 4 points for combat. A great early example of the tactical combats that would make SSI famous. Unfortunately, from a modern perspective, the battles are a little too long and difficult.

• 5 points for equipment. A great selection for such an early game, including weapons, armor, tools, and artifacts.

Some of the options in a weapon shop.

• 4 points for economy. Given the costs of maintaining a party, buying items, paying for botched jobs, buying ships, and--especially--keeping a full stock of fuel, money never goes out of style.

• 2 points for quests. There's no real main quest, just a general goal, but the guild quests are mildly interesting.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are (as usual for the era) relatively primitive, and there's no sound. The interface is mostly menu-driven and doesn't have any real problems.

• 4 points for gameplay for being completely non-linear and fairly replayable. Overall, though, I found it too difficult, and many of the mechanisms took too long even with a modern processor.

The final score of 33 is pretty high for the era, though perhaps a smidgen lower than the point at which I'd say "definitely check it out for yourself." In contemporary times, Computer Gaming World called it a "superb job," praising its combat mechanism in particular, and advising readers to "treat yourself to a great game system and role playing fantasy."

The game doesn't support female characters, but we must market those legs!

Galactic Adventures is little-remembered today. It has no entry on MobyGames or Wikipedia. I couldn't find the original manual (not even the MOCAGH has it), but thankfully someone named Dan Vernon translated it to HTML 12 years ago on an obscure site; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to play the game. One YouTube user has uploaded videos for both the Atari 8-bit and Apple II versions. Its obscurity is all the more notable given that it had a clear influence, in both combat and skills, on Wizard's Crown (1986), which in turn influenced Pool of Radiance. Unless he had an obvious inspiration that I'm missing, Tom Reamy is the grandfather of the combat system I love so much in the Gold Box games. I'm just glad that SSI simplified the system a bit and offered "quick combat" options in later games.

Unfortunately, according to Tom's own account, both Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures "got better reviews than sales," and he went broke trying to make a living out of software programming. Ultimately, this forced him to transition to other fields. I've written to the last e-mail address I can find for him, and I hope he responds, but for now it's back to Middle Earth!

Lord of the Rings: Exploration Angst

You existed before the rain? Does that mean you existed before the earth had a hydrosphere? What did you drink back then?

Lord of the Rings has me asking a question that I rarely ask when playing an RPG: How do I know I'm encountering all the important stuff?

CRPGs have a variety of ways to ensure that players don't simply bypass key NPCs, encounters, and items:

1. Limited number of tiles. The default for the first decade of RPGs was to construct a world with a limited number of explorable tiles. If the player wants to make sure he hits everything, he just makes sure to step on each tile. This dynamic is found mostly in first-person games like Might & Magic and Pool of Radiance, but we occasionally see it in a top-down game like Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan.

2. Environmental signaling. So you have a continuously-moving world or even a tile world so large that you probably can't hit every tile (such as most top-down tile-based RPGs from the 1980s). How do you ensure that the player hits every encounter? You make the people and icons with which he can interact extremely visible, standing out against the overall bland background. Examples include the very obvious towns and keeps of Ultima IV and Ultima V and the way that key NPCs stand out from drab commoners in Baldur's Gate. 

This game in no way signaled me that this tree was important. I just happened to be lucky enough to walk up to it. How many important trees have I missed?

3. Facilitate exploration. For large, continuously-moving worlds where some of the encounter locations might be non-obvious, the game can assist you in a variety of ways that facilitate exploration, including automaps that slowly reveal, obvious paths and routes of travel, and breaking the game world into small, discrete maps that are easy to explore in their entirety. This is the most common strategy in adventure games and hybrids, like Elvira and Hero's Quest; we also see it in a lot of modern games, like Dragon Age.

4. Quests. Quest-oriented games make things easier by letting you know there is a specific person to talk with, or a specific thing to find, within a map--ensuring that you won't stop searching until you locate it. Some games even provide obvious quest markers.

5. Making the consequences of missing something unimportant. I suppose some players embark on a game like Skyrim insisting that they will talk to every NPC, find every item, and solve every quest, but they must get exhausted fairly quickly. In a huge and open world like Tamriel, the developers simply have to make most items, people, and encounters ancillary to the main quest--fun if you stumble upon them, but not tragic if you don't.

Various games mix and match these strategies. Baldur's Gate and its sequel both have relatively small maps with automaps (#3) and highlight chests and barrels you can actually open when you hit the ALT key (#2). NetHack has both a limited number of tiles (#1) but also lets you see from a distance what you're likely to find on those tiles (#2). Oblivion's dungeons (as opposed to the overworld) are small enough to systematically explore (#3); it has markers for the quest locations (#4); and it makes it clear which items are indispensable relics and which you can save inventory weight by not picking up (#5).

Lord of the Rings has been giving me a lot of angst, and I realize it's largely because it has none of these features. The maps are continuously-moving and huge, so they're tough to explore systematically. There are no quest logs or lists that let you know what you still have to do in an area. There's no automap. It's impossible for me to separate key quest items from spurious junk. I suppose the only saving grace is #5--perhaps a lot of the encounters I'm missing are entirely optional, and have no bearing on my ability to win the game. But I simply don't have that kind of faith yet.

Luckily, I happened to walk into the right area to find this item. If I'd skirted the north part of the cave, I would have missed it.

Many key encounters are triggered by happenstance when you wander into a particular section of the map, and even then only under certain conditions. For instance, in the last post, I noted about finding the elves and the ELBERETH word, "the area where I encounter them seems to have a certain probability of producing a Nazgul . . . and a certain probability of triggering the elf encounter." A reader alerted me that, in fact, the elf encounter always happens if you're walking west when you enter the area of trigger pixels, and the Nazgul encounter always happens if you're walking east. This is on top of having to stumble into the right set of pixels in the first place. I now know what an anonymous commenter meant when he said that this game "can be very unforgiving to players without a walkthrough."

There are other sources of angst. There seems to be no reliable way to heal all my characters (save making the long walk back to Hobbiton to purchase rations). Throughout this last expedition, every combat bled a few more hit points from one or more party members, until I was at the point I was constantly reloading because every hit was killing me. At some point, however, my hit points did all spontaneously regenerate for no reason I could tell. I didn't even notice when it happened. I don't like this kind of inconsistency and unpredictability. I like games where I know I can periodically return to town, sell my excess equipment, buy new equipment, train, and heal.

When I wrote last time, I was stuck in the Shire because I'd missed a key gate to the Old Forest and the only other exit was blocked by a Nazgul I couldn't defeat. When readers alerted me to the gate, I visited it, found out I needed a key, returned to Brandy Hall, found it, and ultimately let myself out.

I wish more parts of the game were this overt in their hints.

Leaving the Shire produced a multi-screen cartoon sequence recounting the fate of Fatty Bolger, who had stayed behind, posing as Frodo to throw off the Nazgul. (I guess he's in the book but not the films.) Meanwhile, my party arrived in the maze of the Deep Forest.

The game oversold the perils of the forest a bit. I didn't even have to follow the long set of directions I'd received from a book in Brandy Hall. I just had to go east for a few minutes and help a songbird tied to a tree. As a reward, he opened a secret door out of the forest. But this was yet another encounter that I had to be lucky enough to trigger by walking close to the relevant tree. I could have easily missed it entirely.

 

The "previously unseen" hole is apparently large enough for three hobbits, a dwarf, and a pony.

The rest of the map consisted of four major encounter areas:

 

1. A long road leading across the north of the map from the Shire to the next map (Bree, I assume). This is where I would have emerged if I'd defeated that Nazgul instead of taking the forest gate. The road was full of encounters with wolves and bandits that sapped my hit points. (I had the option to give my gold to the bandits, but who does that?)

 

What if I do want trouble?

 

2. "Sharkey's Shipping," a couple of buildings whose owners are apparently in league with Saruman. There was a store on top and a couple of dungeon levels beneath the main building where I fought a bunch of guards and orcs, freed a hobbit prisoner named Nob Appledore, destroyed an evil book, and recovered an artifact called the "Golden Wheel" that the orcs had been desperate to dig up. It apparently has something to do with finding "Durin's Axe" in Moria.

 

The "White Hand" appears again as an item you can buy in a store. Saruman's allies aren't doing a very good job concealing their presence.

 

On this map, Athelwyn revealed herself to be a witch in league with Grimbosh, the manager of the place. When I entered his room, she left my party and switched sides. Fortunately, she didn't use magic in the ensuing combat, and I killed her. I'm curious what would have happened if I hadn't wandered into this particular room. Would she have stayed with me until the end?

If you surrender the Ring, the game immediately ends.

After I left the main "Sharkey's Shipping" building, I found a journal in another building that gave me a password that would have prevented some of the battles with humans and orcs. The danger of doing things out of the game's chosen order.

3. The Barrow Downs, which I remember from the book. I had a bunch of encounters with barrow wights that occasioned many, many reloads before I defeated them. I recovered a variety of treasures from the barrows, but I'm not convinced I hit every encounter or did everything the most optimal way. Among other things, there's this barrow I can figure out no way to enter:

 

 

At one point while I was exploring, the entire area became shrouded in gray and my party members disappeared one by one. Eventually, I was taken, too, and I awoke in a barrow with a wight about to sacrifice me. The only way I could figure out to escape (after multiple deaths) was to use the HELPHELP word of power, which summoned Tom Bombadil, who freed me and helped me against the wights before disappearing at the exit. He didn't cleave in their heads with an axe or anything; he drove them away with some goofy song.

Using a word of power.

4. The residence and environs of Tom Bombadil, perhaps (let the flame wars commence) the most idiotic character in Lord of the Rings. My advice for writers is that if you're going to invent a near-omnipotent character who's supposed to be older than any other living thing, don't name him "Tom." It breaks the suspension of disbelief a bit.

In the game, Tom asks me for the Ring. If I give it to him, he does a little trick and makes it disappear, then gives it back to me. The game plays some triumphant music at that point, but I don't know what I accomplished. Did he steal it and give me a replacement? That would be a neat twist.

 

If he's so damned powerful, why doesn't he take it to Mordor?

 

I never got to fully explore dialogue options with Tom, as the moment I left his room, he disappeared and never returned. Despite his great age and power, he seems unaware that his wife, Goldberry, is deathly ill upstairs in the bedroom. She asked me to find some lilies to cure her.

Unfortunately, the nearby pond where she normally gets lilies is frozen over, and the only place to recover them is from the spirit of Withywinde in a cave. Withywinde asks for some kind of token from the person who sent me to her, and this is where I'm stuck. When I first encountered Goldberry, the paragraph read:

Tom's wife, the beautiful Goldberry, is here. She is lying in bed, ill. Beside her, a blackened willow leaf floats in a bowl of stinking water. "My lilies..." she whispers. "My special pool lies south of this house. Please...bring me lilies. Take this token and whatever you may need from this house." She offers you her token, a golden leaf pasted against oak bark.

 

Sounds great, but this token never appeared in my inventory, and it's not in the room when I use the "get" command. Without it, I don't think I can get her lilies. I have no idea if this is a vital quest to progress, but it's emblematic of the frustration I have with the game. I'm currently dithering around, trying to figure out whether to restart, move on, or keep trying to find an alternate solution.

There's also this wall of ice I can't get past. Torches don't melt it.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• Yes, Frodo can wear the Ring and does turn invisible. Fortunately, the game doesn't pester me with a flaming eye shouting "I . . . see . . . you" everywhere I go. But using the ring costs me 1 willpower point every time I put it on, and enemies still happily attack my other party members, so the utility of the item seems limited.

• My pony can attack enemies in combat. I don't know whether he's biting them or using his hooves.

 

• Perhaps even more nonsensically, the pony accompanies me into every building, room, and dungeon. When my characters use "sneak," he somehow sneaks.

• Similar to encounters not triggering unless you hit a particular area of pixels, you can't collect items from a room until you get the message that "you have found something that you can use," and you can't interact with locked chests until you get the message that you've found them.

I could see it from a screen away!

 

• In combat, if characters fall below 6 life points, they go "unconscious" and lose a point every round until they hit 0, when they die. But if the party finishes the combat before that happens, the characters will regenerate to a minimum of 6 points and automatically wake up.

• The manual indicates that there is no mechanism to resurrect dead characters. I guess no particular character, not even Frodo, must survive, but it seems wrong to let canonical characters stay dead. I've been reloading.

In good conscience, how could I continue without Sam?

• In one of the barrows, I finally found some decent weapons: "barrow daggers." Most of my party members are equipped with these; Druin has his axe; Pippin has a bow; and Sam now has a "spider sword" I found in a cave. I have an extra sword awaiting another character getting the sword skill. I still have no decent armor.

• Even as a non-fan of the books, I object a bit to the idea of the little hobbit band doing so much fighting and killing before they even get to Rivendell. Sam is supposed to slowly and reluctantly evolve from a gardener to a warrior, and I have him killing humans within the first few hours of the game.

He even looks depressed about it.

• Mystifying items in my inventory: various gems (can I sell them later?), a "springstone" that I dug up on one of the barrows, a "leaf belt" that I can't equip; a red acorn; a signet ring that I found way back in the Shire.

• I hope there are stores in Bree because I have a ton of cash.

• Torches never seem to run out.

• I like that some puzzles have non-obvious solutions that you have to suss out based on your inventory or skills. Destroying this evil book, for instance, was a matter of selecting "use" on a torch. I suspect there were other solutions, too.

• I still can't tell you much about magic. I only had a spellcaster (Athelwyn) for a brief time, and I only had her cast a couple of spells (which deplete life points) before she betrayed me and died.

The game has some good elements, but I'm already getting frustrated with it, so I might divert to something else for one post while I wait for any hints about Goldberry and/or decide what to do next.

Lord of the Rings: A Different Shire

What? Already? I thought we had to go through the battle of Helm's Deep first!

Lord of the Rings (the game) recaps Lord of the Rings (the book) without any sense of urgency, and with lots of changes to the plot even in the opening area. Frodo understands the importance of destroying the Ring, knows the Black Riders are searching for him, and has been given specific instructions to get to Bree as fast as possible, but instead he lingers around the Shire for weeks, finding lost children, rescuing stray dogs, and otherwise running errands for his neighbors. 

In this, the game is no different from a host of other RPGs in which the hero temporarily but repeatedly ignores an apocalyptic threat to retrieve a family heirloom from a dungeon or collect 16 bushels of wildflowers for an alchemist. We've all been in this situation plenty of times. It's just odd to see it in an established plot. It's also odd to see Frodo joined by rangers, wizards, and dwarves that don't appear anywhere in the books.

As a game, I'm finding Lord of the Rings to be fun with a few flaws. As some of my commenters warned, the sheer size and sparseness of the maps recalls Faery Tale Adventure, which I described as "huge, boring, and empty" before quitting it. Fortunately, although LOTR has a lot of empty territory and structures that seem to serve no purpose, it's not quite as bad as Faery Tale Adventure. It might take 5-10 minutes between interesting encounters rather than 20-30.

A good 60% of the game consists of just this.

The opening map is big enough that I found it tough to explore systematically. The game starts in the upper left-hand corner, and normally in such situations I'd keep the western border visible as I moved methodically south to the bottom border, then move one screen east, then move to the top border, and so on, investigating any structures or people that I encountered on the way. LOTR makes this impossible by putting all kinds of rivers, walls, and hedgerows in the Shire, some of them long enough that you've become utterly lost by the time you get around them. I eventually resigned myself to following first the perimeter and then the road network, hoping that between the two, I encountered all the stuff in the middle.

An unfordable river.

Several interface issues significantly mar the game. The first is the inability to move diagonally, which extends the already-long journeys between points. The second is the music, which keeps playing unbidden. There's an option to tun it off, but it only silences it temporarily; it always returns later. Very annoying. The third issue is the horrible inventory and character selection system. Let's say I want to have Merry give Frodo some rations and have him eat them. This is the key sequence:

-SPACE to enter the command interface
-C to change characters
-4 to select Merry
-U to enter the "use" menu
-3 to enter the "trade" menu
-1 to trade to Frodo
-Then the number associated with the item I want to trade
-X to exit the trade menu
-X to exit the "use" menu
-C to switch characters
-1 to switch back to Frodo
-U to enter the "use" menu
-2 to enter the "equip/use" menu
-The number of the rations to eat them

Complicating this is an inability to quickly view a character's inventory, so in reality it often means repeating the first few steps multiple times until I find the character who actually has the rations.

Aside from those issues, it's a reasonably pleasant game with a lot of features that I like about RPGs, including lots of NPCs to interact with, lore to collect, side-quests to solve, and puzzles to unravel, usually using the game's skill system. It doesn't particularly excel in any of these areas, but together they make for a decent RPG experience.

This week, I explored the Shire, solved a variety of side quests, and assembled a party of companions bigger than the book's Fellowship. In doing so, I encountered areas, places, and characters that I generally recall from the films and what I read of the books--Hobbiton, Bucklebury Ferry, Buckland, the Green Dragon Tavern, the Brandywine Bridge, and so on. They seem to correspond imperfectly to maps of the Shire taken from the books, but otherwise they were familiar.

Some of the side-quests that I solved include:

• Anson Goodbody's dog had run away. I found it nearby and used the "charisma" skill (it took me a long time to figure this out) to get it to follow me back to him. He gave me a shovel for my troubles.

If only I'd paid attention to his warning.

• Two children missing in the "East Forest." It took me a long time to solve this one because the East Forest was one of the last areas I visited owing to my exploration pattern. The children were found in different places, surrounded by monsters. Returning them got me some rations from one family and a pony companion from the other.

Saving one of the children from a spider.

• A dwarf in the Green Dragon was looking for someone to find his ancestor's axe, lost in some ruins. I found it while solving the "missing children" quest above, gave it to him, and got him to join me.

Equipping Druin with the axe I retrieved for him.

• A songbird trapped in a spider web in a cave. I killed the spider and freed it, and it gave me some hints as to finding and dealing with some elves.

• The elves in the southwest regions of the map who told me the magic word ELBERETH, which has the power to drive away Nazgul. It took me a while to find them. The area where I encounter them seems to have a certain probability of producing a Nazgul (which kills me practically instantly) and a certain probability of triggering the elf encounter.

Notice he says "TIMES of need." Not just one time. More on that below.

• A ranger named Hawkeye who appeared in the southwest. He joined my party and I thought he'd be a permanent companion, but he only lasted a few seconds before we were attacked by Nazgul at the entrance of a cave, and he told me to run away while he held them off. I heard him die in the distance.

• In a building called Brandy Hall, I got a ghost to leave by giving him some pipeweed. He had been haunting the library, and once he left, I read the books and got a lot of hints for future map areas.

Happily, he accepted pipeweed instead of his pipe.

Solving each quest not only produced (occasionally) a tangible reward, but also made subtle adjustments to my characters' attributes: dexterity, strength, endurance, luck, life, and willpower. There is otherwise no experience or levels in the game.

The game's combat mechanism isn't very good so far, but it has the potential to get better. When attacked, you enter a special combat mode and do the fighting from the regular command interface, where you can move, attack, use a word of power, cast a spell, use an item, or use a skill. At these opening stages, most of my characters have no weapons except torches and fists, no armor, and no magic. I haven't experimented enough to figure out what skills, if any, really help in combat. I could see the mechanism supporting much more tactical combats later in the game.

Note this game's conception of orcs. It looks like something I remember from a cartoon but can't quite put my finger on.

Post-combat, the only way I've been able to find to heal characters is to eat rations, which restore a couple of hit points but only once per day. There's no "rest" mechanism. Apparently, I'll later find a spell called "Kingshand" and some "kingsfoil" herbs, but not yet.

One possible side-quest that I didn't solve had to do with a large, ugly mill, apparently owned by Lotho Sackville-Baggins, guarded by three humans. The humans kept throwing me out the moment I entered, and none of the skills I had helped me. The episode seems to refer to the book, where Lotho allies with Saruman to take over and industrialize the Shire. I suspect that in the book, the process didn't start while Frodo was still in the Shire, but perhaps I'm wrong. In any event, I couldn't figure out what to do with the place.

My refusal to give Lobelia the key to Bag End came to haunt me later in the game, when she suddenly appeared near Bucklebury Ferry and demanded it again. When I walked away a second time, the "Shirriff" arrested me and threw me in jail to await the inevitable arrival of the Nazgul.

When the game otherwise ends through combat death, it's accompanied by an image of Sauron putting on the Ring and using it to conquer the world.

Sauron looks a lot like popular conceptions of Satan.

As I finish my explorations of the opening area, my company consists of Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Merry, Druin the dwarf, a pony, and a female wizard named Athelwyn. Druin and Athelwyn are clearly non-canonical additions to the party; also non-canonical is the way they refer to my party as "The Fellowship," which hasn't actually been established yet.

(This would be a good place to mention that One Wiki to Rule Them All has been my constant companion, filling in details about minor characters and places, and helping me understand which characters are from the book and which are invented by the game.)

 

At this point, I'm a little stuck and could use a hint. The only way out of the Shire seems to be a path guarded by a Nazgul (they appear in scripted locations rather than randomly), and I can't defeat him because I used ELBERETH to get by a different Nazgul on the bridge leading into Buckland. The manual had warned, and I had forgotten, that each word of power can only be used once. I think what I needed to do was to cross the river via Bucklebury Ferry rather than the bridge, thus avoiding the first Nazgul and saving ELBERETH for the second one.

Using ELBERETH on the first Nazgul.

The Nazgul doesn't seem impossible to defeat, just really really hard. He basically kills my characters with one blow, but they are capable of wounding him, and I suppose with a lot of luck, I might be able to eventually defeat him with only three or four characters lost. Obviously, I'd rather get out of the Shire with almost everyone alive. Suggestions welcome.

If I end up having to start over, I'll change my exploration pattern and see if I find anything new. For those who have played the game, these are the items that I'm carrying right now. If I'm missing anything, I'll take a light hint about it: The Ring, a sword (which no one can use), something called a "bladepart," a signet ring, a "White Hand" (no idea what it actually is), a "ghost ruby," rations, pipeweed, a "star key," a shovel, torches, a prybar, a bow, mushrooms, and an axe.

None of the discontinuity between the book and the game bothers me terribly because I don't have any particular fondness for the book. I'm curious how true Tolkien fans have felt while playing this game. Do you hate Athelwyn the same way some fans hated Arwen in the films? Or do you just shrug and go with it?

If Gimli had known as much about the loss of Moria as Druin, the Fellowship would have been saved a lot of trouble.