Ishar: Legend of the Fortress: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Our hero does . . . something . . . in celebration of his victory.

          

Ishar: Legend of the Fortress

France

Silmarils (developer and publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST

Date Started: 22 February 2020

Date Finished: 10 March 2020

Total Hours: 21

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 38

Ranking at time of posting: 294/368 (80%)

 

Summary:

First of a trilogy for which Crystals of Arborea (1990) served as a prologue, Ishar offers a classic kill-the-evil-warlord adventure with tile-based, first-person gameplay similar to Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder. It has excellent graphics and sound but limited RPG mechanics, including combat and spell tactics, character development, inventory, and puzzle-solving. A couple of original features include a party morale system by which party members can override the player's choice to recruit or dismiss a character and a saving system that requires the party to pay gold, but neither really plays much of a role in the end.

****

I could have gotten three more entries out of Ishar, as this final entry covers more than 15 hours. But I played it over a week-long period in which I was moving from one house to another, and something about the process made it easier to just keep playing than to stop and write. I apologize if I elide anything important in my summary below, but the good news is that a lot of Ishar's gameplay is repetitive. The constant need to replenish your supplies and find a tavern for food and sleep means that you backtrack frequently to the towns of the west while overall gameplay drives you east.
               

Approaching the titular fortress.

        

When I blogged last time, I had explored about half the game, having just crossed the bridge into the land of Silmartil. Lands further along include Kandomir, Urshurak, Vargaeon, Baldaron, Zendoria, Gil-Aras, Uldonyar, Elwingil, Halindor, Fhulgrod, and finally Valathar. That sounds like a lot of territories, but each one generally only has a couple of (respawning) monsters and a couple of encounters. The entire game world consists of four outdoor villages, two indoor cities, two dungeons, and a smattering of huts and other wilderness encounters. It spreads across the entire game what Might and Magic would have on a single 16 x 16 map.

The culmination of the game was far to the east, in the large dungeon (or, I suppose, fortress) actually called Ishar. But to survive its perils, I had to solve several sub-quests in the main game area.

When I last blogged, my party consisted of Aramir the warrior (the starting character), the monk "Unknown," Nasheer the spy, Kiriela the priestess, and Golnal the warrior. Golnal and Unknown were pretty ineffective, and redundant, so I soon replaced Golnal with a paladin named Karorn, and eventually I dumped Unknown for a wizard named Zeloran. To get around party members overriding my dismissals, I simply put the unwanted characters at the front of the party with no armor, and I let them get killed by the next enemy.
         

This is infuriating. I don't know why some NPCs do it and some don't.

        

Nasheer eventually took off while we were sleeping, so I replaced her with a third warrior named Manatar. I liked that balance, but soon afterwards I had to get rid of Manatar to accommodate a quest NPC--a spoiled princess named Deloria who had been kidnapped from her village in Baldaron. I found her in a building in Elwingil, the furthest city to the east.
           

Manatar had good stats, but he wasn't with us for long.

         

Returning her to her father rewarded the party with a vital key to Ishar, but getting her out of the party was a bit of a chore. Karorn decided he was in love with her and refused to let her go. I tried killing Karorn, but his infatuation simply transferred to Aramir, and I didn't want to kill him.
              

Oh, boy. Here we go.

          

The solution to that problem involved a potion. Potions become important in the game during the second half, and it took me a while to figure out how they work. First, you have to find an empty vial, of which there is only one in the entire game, in the dungeon in Rhudgast.
         

The manual gives you the formulas but not the effects.

        

I had previously noted that various shops sell reagents like rat's brains and salamander oil. The manual tells what proportions of these reagents you need to make various potions, but it gives them nonsense names like "Trillix" and "Bymph." What you have to do is find an alchemist named Jon the Unique in Kandomir, who gives you a scroll that translates the nonsense names into actual potion effects. (I think these might be randomized for each game as a copy protection exercise, but I'm not sure.) The manual has recipes for 15 potions, but the scroll only translates eight of them: "Physical Regeneration," "Psychic Regeneration," "Invulnerability," "Cure Blindness," "Apnea," "Disrupt Charme," "Pig Detransformation," and "Brain Wash."
         

A scroll in the game tells you which words correspond to which effects.

         

"Disrupt Charme" turned out to be the potion I wanted, but it required a unique ingredient, "turtle slobber." Fortunately, I'd managed to obtain a vial by first finding a turtle near the sea in Silmatil and then giving it to an alchemist in Zendoria. I fed the potion to Karorn, and he got over his objection to losing Deloria.
             

Where did Jarel get the key to Ishar?

           

By this time, I was so enamored with my wizard, Zeloran, that I decided to fill the empty NPC slot with another one. I found one named Khalin in Elwingil. I spent a fortune getting them both equipped with the "Lightning" spell, which damages all visible enemies on the screen and makes wizards more valuable than warriors except that psychic energy runs out faster than physical energy.
             

Blasting dwarf-bandits with "Lightning."

          

A lot of the game's magic system is wasted. It costs so much to purchase spells that even by the end of the game, each of my spellcasting characters only had three or four. There's no point wasting money on "Healing 3" when three castings of "Healing 1" do the same thing. I never explored a lot of useful-sounding spells like "Dissolve" (turns the party into a gas cloud that can blow through enemies) or "Inversion" (changes NPC alignments). Some of them seem useless--I never encountered any poison for "Cure Poison" or any invisible enemies for "Invisibility Detection" (except for one that you can't detect that way). "Radar," "Invisible Party," and "Invulnerability" aren't even described in the manual, just listed. "Regeneration," "Resurrection," and "Repulse" (sends all your enemies to hell!) could have been useful but I just never had the money. I basically had my wizards cast "Lightning" (and "Mental Shield" when it was clear it was needed) and my priest and paladin cast "Healing I," and that was it.
           

I never learned most of these spells.

          

Money is tight throughout the game. You need it for sleeping and eating--one meal and one night's rest costs over $2,000 in the eastern cities--saving ($1000 each), reagents (enough for a single potion might cost $7,000), spells, weapons and armor, and the occasional training. The shop in Elwingil sold high-level weapons and armor, and by the end of the game I was able to get my two warriors into magic armor and wielding the best swords, but no one else. I spent most of my spare gold on potion reagents because potions of "Physical Regeneration" and "Psychic Regeneration" are worth every penny if you're far from a tavern.

Meanwhile, the places that train characters in strength, agility, and intelligence (I never found one that trained constitution) seem to be there to compensate for very weak characters, not to provide regular character development to already-strong ones. Every time you try to train, there's a chance that it will go very well (increasing the attribute by 2 points), just okay (+1), or poorly (+0). I don't think I ever saw an attribute increase when it was already past 10. Thus, for most characters the only form of development is by leveling, which improves maximum health. Several of my characters hit level caps (Level 10) near the end of the game, but not everyone did.

I grinded quite a bit for my gold and still arrived at Ishar mostly broke. (Ishar itself has tens of thousands of gold pieces, but you'd have to slog them back to civilization while very near the endgame.) I decided the best way to grind was to repeatedly enter and exit the two indoor cities in Elwingil and Urshurak. Each one spawns about half a dozen orcs that leave 500 or 1000 gold pieces each. Repeatedly entering and exiting the city was a good way to build both wealth and experience.
         

By killing a large knight in Osghirod, I got a special helmet that allows you to see invisible enemies. This let me kill the invisible lizardman Brozl, who roams the huge area called Fimnuirh, and to loot from him five fire protection rings.

I spent a lot of time tracking down five rune tablets that you need for the final battle, or you can't hit Krogh. One was out in the open, on a pedestal in Lotheria. A second was in a hut in Zendoria called "The Forbidden House," so-named because my characters got cursed and slowly died of a wasting sickness after entering. I had to inoculate them with a potion before entering. Another was in the dungeon in Rhudgast. A fourth was on a pedestal in the outdoor area called Gil-Aras, but the party went blind the moment I entered the province. I had to use the "Cure Blindness" potion to see well enough to explore the small area. The fifth was in Ishar itself.
            

A rune tablet in an area that causes blindness the moment you enter.

         

In a house in Elwingil, one of Jarel's companions from Arborea, Thurm, gave the party five monks' robes that would disguise us as initiates in a certain place in Ishar.
          

Eventually, having explored everything else, I entered a teleporter in Halindor and found myself across the channel in Valathar. The entrance to Ishar is in the northeastern part of this island, but there were a few things to do first, including defeating the wizard who guarded the entrance. In the far southeast past some encounters with much tougher dwarf-bandits than I'd faced before, I found a pig standing in the middle of the forest. Since a wandering alchemist had recently given me some toad eye, a necessary ingredient for "Pig Detransformation," I figured that's what I wanted to use. I mixed the potion and applied it to the pig, and it transformed into an old woman named Morgula who offered to join my party.
             

When there's a potion called "Transform from Pig" and you find a pig, it's not hard to figure out what to do.

                       
I was reluctant to get rid of Khalin, but I figured Morgula must be special in some way since I had to go through so much trouble to get her. Sure enough, although she's weak as hell and her physical energy depletes while you watch, she has a spell called "Anti-Krogh." After I won the game and was doing my usual post-game research, I found that several web sites claim that Morgula is Krogh's mother, but I don't know where they get that, as her name appears nowhere in the backstory or in any of the NPC dialogue.
           

How do you turn down that kind of appeal?

         

It was finally time to take on Ishar. The fortress is quite large, with three separate sections separated by teleporters. There are numerous doors that you have to find keys to open, and one area that serves as the game's only real puzzle: a sequence of six levers, each controlling two doors in a small maze of corridors. You have to find the right sequence of levers to open the right doors, which I did through trial and error. There's a huge area full of poison gas that you have to mix five "Apnea" potions to successfully traverse.
          

A lever puzzle took much of the time in the final dungeon.

          

At one point, I killed a mage and looted from him an object that looks like the Silmarils logo, but I never found anything to do with it.
          

Anybody want to take a guess?

         

The final corridor features multiple encounters in succession. First, a medusa, for whom you need "Mental Shield" active for everyone to avoid petrification.
          

Why does it look like medusa is a statue? She's supposed to turn people into statues?

          

Then there's a huge red dragon. It takes a long time to kill him--and my primary fighter had to drink two "Physical Regeneration" potions during the process--but he doesn't do much damage as long as you have the gold rings from Brozl.
           

Poor dragon looks like he's cramped.

          
After the dragon was a door we had to be wearing our robes to enter . . .
            

This is the first I've heard of Krogh starting some kind of cult.

         
. . . then a corridor full of individual fights with spellcasters.
          

Killing wizards in the final corridor. I thought this was Krogh at first.

         

It all culminated with Krogh himself. He had a powerful magic attack, but it only took three castings of "Anti-Krogh" to kill him. I assumed it would be harder. I guess maybe it is if you don't take Morgula.
          

The evil Krogh. Fortunately, Morgula has a spell called "Anti-Krogh."

           

Alas, there was no real endgame. After Krogh died, the game played some triumphant music while one of my characters--Aramir, I guess--knelt in a circle of rotating pillars and held a crown above his head.
            
One element of the game that I never solved: there's a sword in a stone that was supposedly left there by Jarel when he swore off violence. Despite the message, I couldn't pull it out at any level or with the highest strength statistics.
          

Any ideas?

         

In a GIMLET, the game receives:

         

• 3 points for the game world. I like the layout, but otherwise it's a generic high-fantasy place with a generic high-fantasy quest. 1992 CRPG addicts are no longer satisfied with vaguely-described evil overlords trying to take over the world just because they're evil.

• 3 points for character creation and development. There's no creation process, just an assemblage of party members from the NPCs you find across the land. Development is quiet, almost invisible, and besides those of wizards and warriors, the game really doesn't call upon the varied skills of its other classes. 

• 4 points for NPC interaction. There are a few fixed NPCs who provide hints and items, and then there are the NPCs who can join the party. I'll allow a point for the uniqueness of Ishar's approach to alignment, where party members must vote to admit or expel new members, and apparently you can order one NPC to kill another, perhaps creating ramifications down the line (I never explored this), but none of it amounted to anything.

            

A few unnecessary hints do not constitute much in the way of  "NPCs."

          

• 2 points for encounters and foes. There aren't really any non-combat encounters, and monsters are generic high-fantasy denizens with the standard types of attacks. They're not even named on-screen. I thought the respawn rate was useful.

         

Here was a powerful thing from inside the final dungeon.

         

• 2 points for magic and combat. Even if I'd bought all the spells, I don't think they really would have afforded much in the way of combat "tactics." There isn't much to do in combat but attack, cast, and keep an eye on the related meters. The party deployment grid is mostly wasted, and you can't even do the "combat waltz" or other strategies common to Dungeon Master-style games.

• 4 points for equipment. You have a reasonably good selection of weapons and armor, with numbers denoting their relative effectiveness. The potion system isn't bad except that you only have one flask.

         

This shop in Elwingil offers the best weapons and armor.

        

• 6 points for the economy. It remains relevant to the end, and I like the way that it forces you to make tough choices throughout the game. It just lacks a certain complexity that I would need for a higher score, plus perhaps more of a "money sink" in those attribute trainings.

• 2 points for a main quest with some sub-quests but no side-quests. There are no alternate endings or player choices.

• 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics and sound are some of the best we've seen, just about perfect for the scale and nature of the game. I particularly appreciated the ambient sounds (including a murmur of voices in the taverns that I came to believe was "I'm riding down to Livermore with some recruits"). The music is suitably epic, though in my case turned off. The interface was only okay; too much mouse, too little keyboard.

• 6 points for gameplay. It has some minor nonlinearity and minor replayability (with a different party configuration). It's almost perfect in its challenge (including its enforcement of limited saving) and its length.

            

That gives us a final score of 38. That seems about right. I was thinking that it should at least cross into "recommended" territory, but in the end the game is too sophomoric in core RPG mechanics to break into the "truly good" range.
           

          

I expected the Amiga version to do quite well in European reviews (most U.S. publications, including Computer Gaming World, don't seem to have taken note of it), so I was surprised to find mostly low scores even in Amiga magazines. Scores ranged from 48 (Power Play, September 1992) to 89 (CU Amiga, July 1992). The consensus seems to be the same as mine: the graphics are great, but it lacks in RPG mechanics like combat and character development, and it doesn't have much of a plot. A few noted that with a Dungeon Master-style interface, they expected Dungeon Master-style puzzles. A paragraph from the British Amiga Action (July 1992), which gave it an 82, is representative:

           

Noticeably distinguished in the graphics area, Ishar: Legend of the Fortress plays almost as well as it looks . . . Perhaps the downfall of Ishar is its simplicity; you begin to wish for more activity, interaction, and involvement, more problems and less roaming . . . Certainly a valiant effort by Silmarils and, if they can learn from this, a firm foundation for a sequel.

           

Not everyone felt as positively as I did about the pay-to-save mechanism. My fellow blogger, Saintus, abandoned it after one session for that reason. Magazines, if they mentioned it, mentioned it negatively. In contrast, a lot is made in the magazine reviews about the party morale or alignment system in which characters form bonds, defy orders, and "have their own personalities," none of which is reflected in the game in any interesting way. I suppose Ishar did some trailblazing here, but I'll concede that an NPC "has his own personality" when he actually says something. Yes or no votes on other party members aren't quite enough.
                                             

Does this really add that much?

              
Silmarils will have plenty of opportunities to continue to improve on this system. Ishar 2: Messengers of Doom will be along in 1993 and Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity in 1994. We also might have them for Robinson's Requiem (1994) depending on my decision on the genre. After that, Silmarils changes its focus to action games and ultimately goes out of business in 2003.

Although some commenters have suggested a certain amount of "Frenchiness" to this game, I think it's safe to say that we've long-since exited the era of truly outré French titles like Mandragore (1985) and Tera: La Cité des Crânes (1986). Instead, Silmarils seems to be following early-1990s Germany by producing copies of successful American games, albeit with some of their own twists. I'll miss the bizarre nature of the 1985-1989 French "golden age," but then again there are still a few titles on my clean-up list.

I gave the choice of the next "upcoming" game to Sebastian, who designed my banner, and he opted for Lands of Lore (1993). That'll be along in a few games. Next we'll finally take a look at Planet's Edge.

Game 360: Quest for Power (1981)

Problem #1: Nothing Arthur or Galahad did was done "for power."

         

Quest for Power

United States

Crystalware (developer and original publisher); Epyx (later publisher)

Released in 1981 for Atari 800 and Apple II. Rereleased in 1982 as King Arthur's Heir

Date Started: 5 March 2020

Date Finished: 5 March 2020

Total Hours: 1

Difficulty: Very Easy (1/5)

Final Rating: 10

Ranking at time of posting: 9/360 (0%)

           

Quest for Power is another insulting game from Crystalware, a company that was either knowingly scamming its customers or so clueless about what made a good game that they must have never played one. I admit that their titles at least sound interesting--I was sucked in by the backstory of House of Usher (1980), for instance--but if anything they've gotten progressively worse as time passed, losing core elements that made them, if not "good," at least memorable. A commenter named Tronix recently posted some background on the company, and while we can't take an anonymous Internet comment as gospel, what he says makes sense given the quality of the games. I'm particularly disturbed about the part where they "skipped town" while still owing money to a lot of developers. I hope the developer of this game, Marc Benioff, managed to recover.

There isn't much to say about Quest for Power. Like the other Benioff/Crystalware collaboration, The Forgotten Island (1981), it's a short adventure with a few light RPG elements, recalling in structure the old Adventure for the Atari 2600 (1979). It takes about as long to play and win the game as to read the manual, and the lengths that Epyx went through to puff up the manual for the re-release (as King Arthur's Heir) are particularly absurd given the paucity of actual gameplay. 

           

You have to have several artifacts before you enter Canterbury.

           

The backstory casts you as Sir Galahad, son of Arthur's "good friend" Lancelot, who Arthur designates as his heir to the English throne if he can find and return the Scroll of Truth, which Merlin has hidden somewhere on the island. Good lord, that sentence alone manages to mangle the Arthurian legends in about a dozen different ways. The whole point of Galahad's story--in the few sources where he actually appears--is that he's too pure for the mortal world, and he is taken bodily into heaven at the end of the Grail Quest. Arthur and Lancelot are hardly "friends" by the end of Arthur's reign; Merlin should be long gone; and the realm wouldn't be known as "England" for over 400 years.

              

There are several places to buy necessities. This particular list makes it look like I'm about to murder someone and then dump the body off-shore.

            

Your little icon sets out from Camelot to explore the land, which I guess is roughly shaped like Britain except that for some reason it's surrounded by a wall. Your journey will take you to the Caves of Somerset, Hastings Mountain, Sunderland, Essex, the Castle of Skenfrith, the Black Forest, the Eagle Stone, Canterbury, Hillsborough by the Sea, and Leeds. (Of these, only Canterbury has any authentic Arthurian history. "Hastings Mountain" doesn't even exist.) The manual makes it sound like these are all exotic and interesting places to explore, but really they're just names written across the screen with maybe one NPC and a treasure item.

           

This would have made World War II a lot easier.

        

To win the game, you have to defeat a series of enemies (The Devil of Skenfrith Castle, the Black Wizard, Gogmagog--none of them appear in actual Arthuriana) and acquire a series of treasures. For instance, you explore the Caves of Somerset to find the key to Essex, where you find Moses's Rod (where's Kenny when you need him?), and so forth. The enemies named in those parentheses, plus a couple of dragons, are the only fights in the game.

             

Canonically, Galahad could probably do this.

          

Combat is a matter of random rolls. Each round, each fighter does 1-9 points of base damage against the enemy but each round, one of the two combatants gets 10 added to his roll. For instance, you might take 7 damage while doing 19 in the first round, but in the second the Black Wizard gets the bonus and does 15 damage to you versus your 3 damage to him.

                

Looks like I got lucky this round.

              

As you start off with only 3 hit points, the first combat--whoever you fight it with--is a risk. But if you can win, you'll gain enough power and extra hit points that further combats become much easier. After your second or third combat, you're basically invincible.

         

In battle against Gogmagog.

        

Gold chests pop up randomly as you explore, and there are a few places where you can spend your gold on an axe, a rope, and a boat. There are three NPCs (Ambrosius, Amadas, and some random guy in Essex Castle) who give you spectacularly unnecessary hints, and one of them must be bribed over 1,000 gold for his. 

    

I'm sure I would have found it on my own anyway.

      

Once you've found enough artifacts and have built up enough power from killing enemies, the guard Oberion (facepalm) will let you into Canterbury. There, you find the Ark of the Covenant. If you open it without the three major artifacts (Anselm's Staff, Solomon's Ring, and Moses's Rod), you'll be melted in the manner of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. With the three artifacts, you find the Scroll of Truth.

Completing my quest.

Granted, I had the emulator speed cranked up to 250%, but it only took me about 20 minutes to run around the map and do what I needed to do. The game minimizes its control scheme; the manual actually brags about this. All action is mapped to the joystick except for the (T)rade command. If you have certain items (torch, boat, rope), you're assumed to use them when the situation calls for it.

Returning the Scroll of Truth to Camelot wins the game. You get a picture of the throne room at Camelot and your score is displayed.

            

You can tell it's Camelot by the "C" on the banners.

           

But of course it doesn't end there. As with half of Crystalware's titles, there's supposedly a Great Mystery lurking beneath the surface, with players encouraged to solve it and send their solutions to the company, with promises of a $250 cash prize. (The Epyx re-release removes any mention of such a puzzle.) As usual, I not only didn't solve it, I don't even know what they're talking about. Is it something you're supposed to find in the game? A hidden message? Is it simply winning the game? 

                

Can anyone identify the source of the image Crystalware used? Reverse image searches were no help.

       

The manual says that to solve the mystery, you must a) read the entire manual, b) "go to each of the magical places and talk to all of the magical people." "It is then," the manual says, "you may understand the very neurotic mystery." Did the author not know what "neurotic" means, or is that a clue?

              

I wonder if they paid anyone.

          

The only three people to talk with in the game are Ambrosius, Amadas, and the guy at Essex. Amadas, at Hastings Mountain, says that "you must have Solomon's Ring and Anselm's Staff and Gogmagog to make it past Oberion!" (Once you defeat Gogmagog, his power "fuses" with you or something.)  Ambrosius is hanging out by something called the Eagle Stone, and he says, "Ah, son of Arthur [???], the staff is in the caves." Essex says, "The Ring of Solomon is in the Skenfrith Castle." I've looked for anagrams, initialisms, and other wordplay and can't find anything. Thus, I'll give a reward of $50 to whoever can solve the mystery, which is five times the value of the GIMLET I gave to Quest for Power. It's the first game so far with 1s straight across the board.

*****

Let's talk about how we got so far down the list:

     

1. I'm having trouble with Planet's Edge (1991). The introductory application starts up okay, but every time I hit ESC to move on, DOSBox crashes with a "corrupt MCB chain" error. I've tried multiple versions. I've tried running INSTALL and configuring video and sound different ways. I've tried running it with LOADFIX. I have not tried another computer with a different configuration of DOSBox, which I will next week after I move.

2. Minotaur: Labyrinths of Crete (1992) turns out to be a two-player game. (You're supposed to connect over AppleTalk.) There's a "single-player mode," but it just lets you explore the dungeon, pick up items, and test them, not play in any meaningful way. It moves to the rejection list.

            

Wandering the Minotaur dungeon.

             

3. I thought I had a working copy of OrbQuest from reader Lance M., but I lost it or never downloaded it or something. I had to ask him for it again. He came through, but I had already half-drafted this entry by then. It'll be soon.

4. I'm moving this week, so I didn't have time to approach a game as complicated as Ultima VII.

     

Anyway, this means I need two more games to add to the "upcoming" list, replacing both Quest for Power and Minotaur. The earliest game on my list that I haven't played is Sands of Mars (1981), another Crystalware title. We have three more, in fact, and I think I'm going to try to cover them all in one entry, but we'll leave it as Sands of Mars for now. After that comes a random roll! It lands on Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven (1993). For those worried that I'm going to get too far away from 1992 before playing Might and Magic IV/V, don't worry--we're going to have a discussion next week about designating "landmark" games that I should prioritize in a given year.

Ishar: Trophy RPG

A minotaur takes apart my party while I hit him occasionally for 2 hit points.

           

Aside from its graphics and sound, which I began my first entry by praising, Ishar feels like a "lite" version of every game that inspired it. It's like it took a bunch of other RPGs but only copied their most superficial features. It has the character attributes, skills, and leveling of a lot of RPGs, but not with any depth or complexity. It has the switches and keys of a game like Dungeon Master but none of the challenging puzzles. It has a combat system that looks something like Might and Magic III or Eye of the Beholder, but it doesn't really get it right. It's like a movie with great cinematography but bad acting and not much of a plot.

I don't know how to judge its combat system. Either the developers screwed up or they deliberately did something different but in doing so introduced new problems. On the surface, it adopts a Dungeon Master convention of giving each character an attack button and having them trade attacks with enemies in real time. It even does one better by mapping the attacks to the function keys. The problem is that there's no cool-down, so it hardly makes sense to have all your characters attack. In fact, it makes the most sense to have the character with the best combat skills attack exclusively, keeping the others up front only as meat shields, to spread out the damage taken from enemies. The attacking character has to eat more often to regain stamina, but otherwise there's no downside.

I'm not sure I understand the little combat formation grid that you can activate on the right side of the screen. Each character has a unique symbol, and you can arrange those symbols on a 5 x 5 grid to make ranks and formations. It's not a bad idea, but I don't think the game really makes full use of it. Characters not in the front rank can neither hit nor get hit in melee combat, but beyond that, I don't see where the specific position and arrangement matter. Someone correct me if you know more.

             

This arrangement doesn't seem to do anything different than putting one character anywhere in the front rank and the other characters anywhere in the other four ranks.

            

The worst part about combat is how the game treats missile weapons and spells. If a character is equipped with a missile weapon, hitting the attack key doesn't launch it; it brings up a cursor so that you can click on the specific enemy that you want to target. Why is this extra step necessary? Melee weapons don't target specific enemies. If combat paused while you made your selection, that would be one thing, but instead enemies continue to attack while you take your hand off the keyboard and move it to the mouse to point at a specific enemy and click.

Spells are even worse. To cast one, even in combat, you have to click the "Action" button, then "Cast Spell," then the name of the spell, and then target it, all while enemies are pounding away.

            

Casting takes too much time to do in combat.

         

Both missile weapons and spells are a god-send, however, when you encounter the occasional enemy who refuses to advance. I wasted a lot of hours trying to melee a minotaur guarding a bridge with a morningstar in each hand. After several full-party deaths, I realized I could stand a square away and pelt him with arrows (albeit expensive ones), "Magic Missile" spells, and daggers until he finally collapsed.

A lot of spells are defensive or healing spells, and party members are useful for their other skills, including "Lockpicking," "First Aid," and "Languages." But you need far fewer than the four companions you can choose to go on the adventure.

As for the innovations with NPC interactions, they've mostly been annoying. The one time I tried to kick an NPC out of my party, the other characters voted to overrule me and keep him. Meanwhile, NPCs that I want to retain have a way of disappearing in the middle of the night, with all the expensive stuff I've bought for them, when we stay at inns.

         

Coward.

        

I broke off the last entry by suggesting that I was going to try to map the island, which I estimated at 100 x 400 and concluded was "big but not unmappable." That's the problem with doing multiplication in your head. I had calculated it at 4,000 squares, which is the same size as a dungeon of 10 levels of 20 x 20. In fact, 100 x 400 is actually equal to 40,000--not Fate: Gates of Dawn, but still a few too many to map unless you really love the experience. 

Upon studying the map in more detail, I realized that a map might be superfluous anyway. Kendoria is a large place--much longer east-west than north-south--but it's mostly made up of small islands interconnected by bridges. It doesn't take a lot of effort to comprehensively explore an island. You just run around its perimeter and crisscross the interior a few times.

            

Kendoria is less a "land" than an archipelago.

        

The game begins on the furthest-west island, which is divided into Fragonir to the north and Angarahn to the south. Fragonir had the village on the docks, while Angarahn had the other village I explored last time. Between the two of them, they have a strength trainer and an agility trainer, but I still haven't felt flush enough to use them. Angarahn has some encounters with orcs that seem to respawn. Enemies typically leave bags of a few hundred gold when they die, but it costs about 1,500 gold pieces to have a meal and a night's sleep at a tavern.

East across the bridge from Angarahn is a large island with Lotharia on the west and Fimnuirh to the east. Lotharia has a small village to its north with a spell trainer. There were several encounters with werewolves or maybe bears, probably bears because later I fought some things that looked more like werewolves. Fimnuirh is a huge, empty area where I keep getting attacked by something that I can't see. I suspect that this is the "invisible lizard man" named Brozl that I learned about in an NPC's hut. The NPC told me that to kill him, I would need to use a Mental Vision Helmet, wherever that comes from. I'll need to kill Brozl because he has some magic rings that "protect from the dragon's fire."

           

I have no idea what race this NPC is.

         

There was an interesting encounter in Lotharia with a floating head calling himself "Azalghorm the Spirit," the messenger of the "Silmarilian Gods." He told me that we "could attempt" three quests, all of which would help us "when you finally have to face [the] evil Krogh." He said the quests were called "The Magician's Talisman," "The Exhausted Witch," and gaining possession of all of the rune tablets. I have no bead on the first two quests, but I found one rune tablet on a pedestal in Lotharia and the other on a pedestal in the dungeon.

          

The main quest turns into sub-quests.

          

East from Fragonir and north from Lotharia is a small area called Osthirod. There were some encounters with tall, powerful werewolves plus a hut where a "medium" offered to give me medical advice for 1,000 gold pieces. I took a screenshot of some kind of tall sentinel in armor blocking access to some part of the area, but I neglected to mark where it was.

Most of my NPC companions were killed by the bears and werewolves, plus some bandits that I met in Osthirod's neighboring nation of Rhudgast. I replaced them with a weird monk named "Unknown," a warrior named Fragorn, and a priest named Kiriela, who I found standing around in the wilderness of Fragonir. Soon afterwards, Fragorn disappeared when we stayed at a tavern for the night, so I replaced him with an effective "spy" named Nasheer. Unknown is kind of useless except for his "Magic Missile" spell and Kiriela is useless except for her "Healing I" spell. Golnal is just useless, but the party wouldn't let me kick him out. Aramir remains the best melee fighter.

          

Who's your god? Hugh Hefner?

        

Osthirod and Rhudgast occupy the same island, separated by a large, impenetrable thatch of forest. You have to cross between them on a small strip of land to the south. A pathway leads north from this strip of land to a dungeon entrance--the first in the game. There wasn't much of a transition as I entered the dungeon, and it was small enough that I suspect it exists on the same scale as the outdoor map and could be mapped on the same piece of paper with it.

           

The dungeon had some keys and levers but no puzzles.

          

The dungeon was small and to-the-point. There were some doors I had to find keys to open and some barriers I had to lower with a lever. Monsters included skeletons, giant spiders, and some behemoth that took a couple of reloads.

           

The photographer didn't make it.

        

The rewards for the dungeon were a few treasure chests, an empty flask, and a rune tablet.

          

Primitive cultures. They're always placing rune tablets on a pedestal.

             

All geography ultimately funnels to the land of Aragarth, on the far eastern side of the Osthirod/Rhudgast island. A bridge leads from Aragarth to what is essentially the second half of the game, and this is where I got bottlenecked for a time by a minotaur, until I learned how to kill him from a distance. On the other side of this bridge, I found the land of Silmartil, a much less hospitable place than the western lands. After I died at the hands of some barbarians, I decided I'd better do another loop around the lands I'd already explored and grind a bit.

I mostly need to start spending some money. I've been very stingy. My characters would probably do better with some more armor (so far, I've only found leather), helms, and shields, and everyone could train a few points in strength or agility perhaps. I need to stockpile more rations to restore Aramir's stamina, since every attack reduces it by 1%. If the dungeon respawns, that might be an easy way to earn both experience and wealth.

              

This is probably the key to character development.

         

Aramir is Level 6 now, everyone else either 3 or 4. I guess leveling affects maximum health and stamina, but as far as I can tell, skills are fixed from the beginning. (Unless they increase when you pay for attribute increases.) I'd probably do well to try to find better party members, but then again maybe I should be grateful that I have four of them who seem to get along and don't bail on me at night.

To recap, Ishar is a pleasant enough game, but one that doesn't grip me with its mechanics or its story. At least it's pretty to look at.

Time so far: 6 hours

Game 359: Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar (1983)

I feel like we've seen that dragon before. Interesting logo for Sanctum (bottom right).

          

Might & Magic: The Lava Pits of Aznar

United States

Sanctum Software (developer and publisher)
Released 1983 for Apple II

Date Started: 27 February 2020

Date Ended: 29 February 2020

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 85/368 (23%)
     
This is an interesting but frustrating game, created three years before its more famous namesake debuted. It's so obscure that I can't imagine Might and Magic creator Jon Van Caneghem ever heard of it. A search today finds a couple file hosting sites, a MobyGames entry, and a single ad from a 1983 issue of Creative Computing. Sanctum Software (of Springfield, Virginia) seems to have existed only for this game, and I can find no trace of author Rick Hoover.

Aznar was one of many early-1980s attempts to mimic the tabletop RPG experience in a text-based computer game. Its approach is similar to the better-known Eamon (1980): the player creates a character which is stored on a "hub" disk. Once loaded from that disk, he can then set out on adventures in any number of "module" disks. Hoover only ever created one Might & Magic "module," but he clearly intended to create more.

There are some ways in which he accomplished his goal admirably. Aznar is much larger and longer than an Eamon adventure or even any of the Maces and Magic titles. It takes place in an interesting setting: a ruined fortress sitting atop a volcano. I was never able to find any documentation for the game (there's a lot of in-game documentation, but it's all about the mechanics), but the goal seems to be to find and defeat the High Lord of the fortress and retrieve his magic amulet. The fortress is a sprawling place, but with logical clusters of rooms forming living areas, a dungeon, and guard quarters, as well as places where the man-made parts of the fortress transition memorably to caverns and underground hot springs.
          

My map of the game (click to enlarge).

             
The game is a proper RPG and makes use of its character elements. During character creation, players choose the character's race (human, elf, dwarf, hobbit), alignment (chaotic, neutral, good, evil), and class (warrior, wizard, and thief). Of these choices, the class is the most important. Each comes with a set of skills or (in the case of the wizard) spells that will see them through the adventure and must be used judiciously. Each class has its own way of navigating through the dungeon and solving puzzles, much like the later Quest for Glory series. So where a thief might pick a lock, a wizard will cast "Open Lock" and a warrior will just smash the door. But one thing I like is that warriors are not just unnuanced brutes. They have their own set of skills--"Power Leap," "Tower of Will," "Battle Lust," and "Death Blow" (as well as the aforementioned "Smash")--to employ at the right times.
           

Character creation.

          
The character's race matters less often, but it does matter. Elves and dwarves are alerted to some traps, for instance, and hobbits avoid damage that some other characters take. On studying the code, I don't think that alignment matters at all. Of the four attributes (strength, dexterity, wisdom, and charisma), I'm not sure charisma is ever called into play, but it's possible (I think) to create a character so dumb he can't even read, which blocks several parts of the dungeon and may even prevent winning.
        

The wizard gets across a lava pit in his own way.

       
The game also has a more advanced combat system than most text-based RPGs of the era. The game brings up your enemy's statistics along with your own and asks what type of attack you want to make. You either enter the name of a weapon or a special type of action like BACK STAB (for thieves), DEATH BLOW (for warriors), or BURNING HANDS (for wizards). Each class has to be careful about over-using skills during combat because they have a limited number of "class points" and need to save as many as possible for puzzles. You get experience for combat and solving puzzles, and you level up several times during the adventure. There are also (trivial) considerations of food and sleep.
         

Doing battle with an ogre.

           
Unfortunately, the game undoes itself with a horrible approach to its parser. I'm going to assume that it came with a document explaining the most common commands and thus forgive it for making me figure so much out on my own, but even then there are lots of problems. I'm no programmer, but my sense of most text-based games is that the commands are independent from the immediate situation. So if you're playing Zork, for instance, the game recognizes GET LAMP as a valid command even if there's no lamp in the area. It then feeds you back a context-specific error message like "there is no lamp here."

What Mr. Hoover seems to have done is to define the list of valid commands for each room at the moment that you're in the room. Thus, if you type OPEN DOOR in a room that has a door, no problem--the author anticipated that. But if you type OPEN DOOR anywhere else, the game has no idea what you're talking about, and you get a generic error message ("I do not understand this") as if you'd typed gibberish.
            

I'm in front of a golden door. I have a golden key. It shouldn't be this hard.

            
What makes this approach particularly infuriating is that the author wasn't consistent in his anticipation of commands. Sometimes the room is waiting for you to type LOOK, sometimes EXAMINE, and sometimes SEARCH. There are times that the verb is enough and other times where you have to specify a particular object. This is particularly annoying in places where the game didn't even bother to highlight the object in the description of the room, or even mention it. There's a hallway where, in order to get a password to a later room, you have to SEARCH WALL even though every room has walls and there's nothing special about this one's. There's a room where you have to SEARCH OGRE to get a set of keys, but the game didn't bother to tell you that the dead ogre is in front of you. There are a couple of rooms in which you have to intuit that LEAVE is the way out despite the command not being used anywhere else. I had to inspect the game's code when I was stuck in some of these situations.

Another oddity is that there is no sense of permanence. You can't drop objects, for instance, and the game just adds most items you find to your inventory automatically. It's common for the game to immediately transition you to the next room when you find a secret door or pick a lock, but when you return to the original room, the door is hidden and the lock locked again. Although it's generally good about remembering that you already killed certain monsters, there are a couple of rooms in which you can type ATTACK repeatedly to fight the same monsters indefinitely.

And then we have the spelling. While most of the text is well-written, it is peppered with the occasional howler of an error, as when in the instructions the author seems to think the singular form of THIEVES is THIEVE. Even worse is when you have to deliberately misspell what you want to do. A thief has to SNEEK throughout the game, and if you want to find the 300 gold pieces hidden at the bottom of the COULDRON, you'd better spell it that way.
            

A misspelling mars an otherwise decent description of a torture chamber.

        
The game begins at the locked door to the fortress, where right away the character has to use his skills or spells to get in. A bridge crosses a moat of lava on the other side, and a dexterity check determines if the character makes it across (with a loss of hit points) or dies immediately in molten rock. A trap must be disarmed on the next door or else the player experiences another instant death. In the fourth room, he has a limited amount of time to search it (for an orc sword and a note) and to reach the attic (for some gold, a battle with a stirge, and a golden key necessary to exit the fortress later) before the room collapses. If he gets out before it collapses, he finds himself in a hallway with no way to get back to the entrance, and things are quite a bit less deadly from then on. There are only a few instant deaths and the player can save anywhere.
          

An early room.

             
The main part of the fortress has some memorable encounters:
           

• A group of half-orc guards drunk on ale in a storeroom. One of them is sober enough to fight and must be defeated. In an alcove of the room, the player discovers a troll feasting on one of the half-orcs and must kill it, too.

• A watery cave with a broken sword in the water. If the player tries to investigate the sword, a slime drops on him from above and must be defeated.

• A waste room with a plank crossing it. Careful players must find a quiet way to cross; otherwise, an otyugh erupts from the water and does battle.

• There's a magic sword called "Ewansil" and a suit of leather armor hidden among a pile of bones in a fountain room.

• If the player enters a kitchen, the terrified staff jumps down a trash "shoot" to escape him. If the player follows them down the "shoot," he finds (fatally) that it goes directly into a lake of lava. I guess he was so scary that the staff was willing to commit suicide.

• Entering a small cave, the player finds a bunch of statues of previous adventurers in realistic, lifelike poses. He has only a moment to think "uh-oh" before he's attacked by a basilisk. The creature gets very favorable rolls with its gaze attack and is tough to defeat.

          

That's never a good sign.

          
In a "great hall" upstairs, the player finds a secret door in a fireplace. This goes to a series of tunnels that end in a cell in the dungeon. (There are prisoners, but they're all mute and insane from torture.) Searching the other cells results in getting surprised by an ogre and tossed back into jail, so after it happens for the first time, you have to pre-emptively ATTACK the ogre the next time, get his cell keys, open up the sixth cell, and get a hint to use the magic word ELWENTHRAL when stuck on the water.

Later, in a lower area, some stones cross a boiling underground lake and lead to the treasure chamber, where the player loots 500 gold pieces. (There are other opportunities to get smaller amounts throughout the fortress, but no place to spend it.) Using the magic word produces the boat, which the player can then sail downriver to a hydra's lair. I think this was supposed to produce a hydra, but the game was bugged and no command worked while in the lair, so I just left. You then have to climb down a well, and go through some other passages.
            

Summoning a magic boat.

          
There's a secret door that only opens with a password; a set of runes only tells you to "speak the word" to open the door. You can spend a frustrating hour trying to figure out what the word could possibly be, or you can remember your "obvious clues" in cryptic crosswords and realize that what you want to say is literally THE WORD.

Later, there's another room where you're asked a password, and you've had to search a wall to find that the "gambler's password is look backwards." But it's not LOOK BACKWARDS; it's LOOK, backwards, or KOOL.

You pass through a room with a genie by just giving him your real name and defeat a two-headed troll in a "shaft room." Climbing down the shaft puts you in a cool cavern, and this is where my game ends. There's something bugged in the program that prevents the command prompt from loading in the cavern, so the game just hangs.
            

The last screen that I can experience.

            
However, I can tell from the game file that I'm very near the end. I'm supposed to search the cavern to find a wight, kill it, then search again to find a trap door in the floor. This leads to an encounter with the High Lord. Killing him lets you take his amulet, and the gold key found very early in the game (pity the player who didn't think to type SEARCH in the attic) opens the doorway out. The fortress rumbles and crumbles behind the player as he switches back to the "genesis" disk to save his progress. I was so close I'm going to call it a win, though if someone who knows more about what they're doing wants to fiddle with the code, I wouldn't mind seeing if there was a final graphic or something.

My character aged six years in the dungeon, and judging by the code, it's possible for you to spend so long trying to solve the game that the character literally dies of old age.
             

My character towards the end of the game.

           
Without the ability to at least scan the text in the code, I wouldn't have gotten very far in the game--the parser would have defeated me--and in the day, I would have felt that the game's advertised price of $39.95 was absurd. I presume other players felt the same way, which is why we never saw a second adventure.
            

The game has an okay combat system, but the "most advanced combat system" might be pushing things.

          
Aznar gets a 18 on my GIMLET, doing best in "gameplay" (4) for its modest length and replayability, "character development" (3) for the way it actually uses the character during the game, and "magic and combat" (3) primarily for the use of magic in puzzle-solving as well as a few combat tactics. It has no NPCs and no economy, and I set "graphics, sound, and interface" to 0 since it has no graphics or sound and the interface is punishing. (I normally wouldn't punish a text-based game for a lack of graphics and would have given it at least a 1 if the text hadn't been full of errors and the parser hadn't been a nightmare.)
           

My final battle, against a two-headed troll.

        
This is certainly one of the last text-RPG hybrids that we'll see. It's interesting how so many of these games didn't quite come out right despite (presumably) the greater ease in programming a non-graphic game. I think a truly excellent text-RPG hybrid, fully evoking the experience of a tabletop gaming session, is possible, but I suspect we'll never see it.

****

Update from 7 March 2020:

Reader Lance M. managed to fix the program and navigate Chester through the rest of the game, including the encounter with the High Lord:
               

             
The final battle with the High Lord:
        

              
And the endgame text:
           

         
This text gives us the additional information that the sequel would have been called The Outside of Hell Mountain, a title that recalls such classics as The Outside of the Wasteland and Wizardry: The Inside of the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Anyway, thanks, Lance! It always feels incomplete if I can't include the final shot.