Game 184: Wraith: The Devil's Demise (1990)

All of Nite Owl's games came with an "Amnesty" option that would auto-generate an apologetic letter sent by someone who'd pirated the game or received a pirated copy, allowing the player to return to good graces by sending in various amounts of money. I have to wonder if the company ever received a single letter.

Wraith: The Devil's Demise

United States

John D. Carmack (developer); Nite Owl Productions (publisher)

Released 1990 for the Apple IIGS.
Date Started: 5 April 2015

Date Ended: 6 April 2015

Total Hours: 8

Reload Count: 5

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 24

Ranking at Time of Posting: 65/182 (36%)

Raking at Game #431: 185/431 (43%)

Wraith is a clear upgrade from Shadowforge (which we just looked at) while still using the same engine and graphics. It offers nearly identical gameplay to John Carmack's first game but adds more territory (instead of one city and one dungeon, we get three cities, four castles, and four dungeons), treasure chests, a few extra items, and a basic magic system. Unfortunately, many of the limitations of Shadowforge are still here: no character creation beyond the name, no attributes, no dialogue with NPCs, and the only result of leveling is a few extra hit points.

Part of the in-game backstory.

The land, an island, is called Arathia, and the player is a humble guard at the Temple of Metiria in the city of Tarot. An unknown power has recently emerged, stirring up monsters and conquering the castles of the lords of the realm. Metiria has come to the player in a vision, commanding him to find his way to Castle Strafire (on a small island off the coast) and there find an interplanar gate to Hell, where he can destroy the undead menace.

The pre-game documentation also has a map.

          
As with Shadowforge (and a billion other games), the player starts with limited gold and equipment and must slowly improve the character, including amassing a large stock of healing potions. Although the dungeons and castles are scattered about the land, the in-game manual offers a suggested order for exploration. Enemies only partially respawn in the dungeons, meaning you can kind of "half-clear" dungeon levels. Treasure chests never respawn.

Wraith is quite a bit harder than Shadowforge, mostly because the magic system also allows enemies to cast spells. They're much harder and often attack in packs, leaving you with nothing to do for round after round of combat other than keep quaffing your dwindling supply of potions.

The dungeon levels and towns are much larger here than the previous game. Towns are no longer violence-free, and in fact you're often attacked by monsters when straying from the main path. NPCs still offer no interaction, but you can kill them for experience and gold. You can kill merchants, too, meaning that you can never use that store, so it's a bad idea.

Accepting their offer results in them robbing you for all your money.

          
The game takes a step back from Shadowforge in its shops. Each armorer, weapon shop, and bowyer in this game sells only one item, so upgrading is a matter of visiting the town that sells the best version. Each spell is also only sold in certain towns, so restocking after a dungeon expedition means making a long circuit around the island to visit each set of shops.

Restocking on spells.

The spells consist of "Magic Missile," "Scare," "Lightning Bolt," "Fireball," and "Recall." "Magic Missile" performs about as well as a missile attack and "Scare" is a waste of time. "Lightning Bolt" (hits every enemy in a line) and "Fireball" (hits every enemy in an area) are indispensable. Later in the game, in a dungeon, you find a guy selling "Ice Storm," which acts much like "Fireball." "Recall" automatically teleports you back to one of the towns, so it's best to have at least one of these. Spells work in the early Ultima style, where you purchase multiple copies.

Confronting a big pack of enemies in a "ceremonial chamber." Three chests await me.

A big part of the game is finding secret areas in the dungeons, where you somewhat nonsensically find standard merchant counters and can buy special items. A "Detection Amulet" flashes when you're within 5 steps of a secret door (which is almost always, rendering the amulet a bit useless; I found it easier just to study the wall patterns). A "Stainless Ring" prevents your armor from being destroyed by rust monsters. A "Life Ring" protects you from paralysis and some other magical attacks. A "Demon Cleaver" is a powerful melee weapon. [Later edit: As an anonymous commenter noted below, I missed a few, including one that would have made some of the later battles a lot easier.]

As with Shadowforge, Carmack tries to give his dungeon rooms fun names and layouts, titled with text embedded in the dungeon walls (I think in real life, the character would have trouble reading these labels). Towards the end of the game, you start to see messages in the walls: "I WILL KILL YOU"; "ARE YOU READY TO FACE ME."

As he explores the castles and dungeons, the player eventually finds a key needed to access a secret enemy fortress, hidden in the mountains south of the starting town. This dungeon eventually leads to the small island where Castle Strafire is located. You have to explore the top level of the castle to find a scepter, and then explore the bottom level to find a portal to Hell.

There are a couple more dungeons and one wilderness area until you finally reach the Wraith's castle.

Where do evil megalomaniacs find contractors that build faces into the castle edifice?

 
The enemies get progressively harder, and before long you're wandering into packs that, if the die rolls go bad, can wipe you out in a single round with multiple spells and attacks. You have to use navigation tactics, like hiding just outside a door (enemies can't shoot through doors) or tricking them to arrange themselves in a line so that "Lightning Bolt" can hit all of them. Health potions disappear fast.

Towards the end of the game, choosing the wrong stairway takes you to an area of instant death. There's a fortune-teller's clue at the beginning that keeps you out of here.

Since you can only carry 99 health potions at a time, and 99 of each spell, you find yourself casting "Recall" to warp yourself back to the main island when you need to restock. This means you end up exploring this series of dungeons several times--for me, I think it was six--before you finally reach the Wraith.

Confronting the Wraith and his guards.

The Wraith is guarded by a couple of "grim reapers." It took me a lot of "Fireballs" and "Lightning Bolts" to kill them. Once the Wraith fell, I got the following endgame text:

As the remains of the Wraith dissolve before your eyes, you hear the voice of Metiria applaud your victory. "Well done, my son! One last time I return you to your home."

After the Wraith fell to you, his minions gave up their evil and surrendered to the mercy of Metiria. The temples returned to their former glory and peace spread through Arathia.

Huzza for CHESTER, savior of our nation!

Wraith isn't a very good game for 1990, but it's at least a competent one. Tightly plotted and programmed, it offers about 8 hours of classic RPG gameplay at around the Ultima II level of complexity. It earns a 24 in the GIMLET, compared to Shadowforge's 20.

In some ways, it's a little late in the genre's development for a game quite this simple--especially one with a commercial release--but it's interesting to see Carmack's growing competence as a game designer. Dark Designs is a clear next step in his evolution; we'll have the third installment on the 1991 list.

Finally, it's time for Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire!

Game 183: Shadowforge (1989)

 

Shadowforge

United States
John D. Carmack (developer); Nite Owl Productions (publisher)

Released 1989 or 1990 for the Apple II.
Date Started: 4 April 2015

Date Ended: 4 April 2015

Total Hours: 2

Reload Count: 0

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 20

Ranking at Time of Posting: 42/181 (23%)

Ranking at Game #458: 153/458 (33%)
  

In preparation for this posting, I read the first few chapters of David Kushner's Masters of Doom and I was struck by the similarities I found between me and John Carmack. We're both about the same age, both nerdy and introverted as youths, more at home in front of computers than with other people. Our parents were both divorced at about the same age. We both experimented with burglary as teenagers (he was caught; I wasn't). We both got horrible grades in high school despite having the intelligence to do better. In our late teens, we both tried to break out of our "nerd" roles by investing more in physical fitness (Carmack studied judo; I joined the Army Reserves). And we both dropped out of college, made some of the most iconic video games of the 1990s, and became multimillionaires. Okay, that last part may have just been him.

From Kushner's account, Carmack got out of a year in juvenile detention in 1986 or 1987, was given an Apple II by his parents, and got to work on Shadowforge, his first game. Although admittedly based on the look and feel of the early Ultima titles, he programmed it from scratch and sold the completed game to Night Owl Productions, "a mom 'n' pop publisher that made most of its income from manufacturing camera batteries," for $1000. He used the money to purchase an Apple IIgs and used it to write his second game, Wraith: The Devil's Demise, after he'd dropped out of the University of Kansas. He used his developing programming skills to get a contract with Softdisk of Shreveport, Louisiana, and the result was the Dark Designs trilogy.

We, of course, have already had a look at Dark Designs I and Dark Designs II, both released in 1990. But some production issues at Nite Owl also delayed the release of his first two games until 1989 and 1990. I naturally should have played them first. Rather than compound the error now by looking only at Wraith, I decided to reach back to 1989 and call up Shadowforge first.

Shadowforge feels like exactly what it is: a first game from a teenaged developer who grew up schooled on Ultima. It's so small that the only disk image I've been able to find also has half a dozen other games on it.

The game takes place in the town of Jaterus, which is being threatened by an evil mage named Greymere Shadowsender. Greymere's newly-constructed Shadowforge has given him unprecedented power, and the town needs a hero to descend into Greymere's three-level dungeon and destroy the device.

A dungeon scene from Shadowforge. I'm about to fire a bow at one of two enemies.

There's no character creation except designating a name. Each adventurer starts with 25 hit points, 0 experience, 100 gold, two potions, and has only his hands and skin for defense. Jaterus has an armorer, a weaponsmith, a tavern, a bowyer, an inn, a temple selling healing potions, and a casino hidden behind a secret door. You can bet 50 gold pieces on craps there; odds seem about 50/50.

There are miscellaneous NPCs running all over town, and one key difference between this game and Ultima is that you can't talk to any of them. You can't attack them, either; they really serve no purpose at all. The only "dialogue," as such, comes from tipping the bartender, who provides a handful of hints for the quest ahead.

The armorer, weaponsmith, and bowyer each offer 3 or 4 items escalating in price and quality. As you enter the dungeon--which is right off the city; there's no outdoor area--you start to encounter goblins, ogres, and such. Killing them gives you experience and gold, which you spend on better equipment and a stock of healing potions.

That's about all there is to it. At first, your expeditions to the dungeon are short, but once you get the best equipment and can carry more than a dozen potions at a time, they last a lot longer. Cleared rooms remain clear while you're still in the dungeon, but they respawn when you leave and return.

None of the three levels is terribly large. Although there are no special encounters or treasures to find, Carmack does make use of the walls and textures to create "scenes," often with large letters giving some kind of room title like LABORATORY or GOBLIN BARRACKS. This shows a clear Ultima II influence.

You get a new level for every 100 experience points, and each one comes with another 3 or 4 maximum hit points. Resting in the hotel restores maximum hit points; potions convey only 1-12 per gulp.

Combat consists of hitting (S)hoot if you see enemies from a distance and (F)ight if they're adjacent to you. There aren't many tactics except to take care that you don't blunder into foes. You can make some limited use of the terrain to make sure you don't get attacked by more than one foe at once. Foes that have missile weapons have no melee capability, so the best approach to them is to close the distance and start whacking. There is no magic in the game.

I fight an elder demon in melee combat on the way to the Shadowforge.

There are a few secret doors in the dungeon, signaled by subtle breaks in the wall pattern. Behind these, you can find special encounters with "merchants" who provide special items. I got a suit of "water walking" armor this way, along with a "light blade." I needed the former to get to the stairs from Level 2 to Level 3, and the latter to destroy the Shadowforge. There was apparently a magic bow somewhere, but I didn't find it.

The introductory text warns you not to confront Greymere directly, "since he can kill even an experienced adventurer with only a few spells," but when I ran into him on the third level, I was able to kill him in a few hits.

Greymere a couple of hits before death.

That kind of rendered the rest of the quest moot, I thought, but I kept exploring until I found the Shadowforge and hacked it to destruction.

In my version of the game, the endgame text shilled Wraith, meaning this is either a slightly later version or Night Owl didn't publish the original until they had Wraith in hand.

Overall, it was pretty easy. I didn't die once, and it took less than two hours to win. The game does allow you to save, and it autosaves every time you enter a new area. Death has you resurrected in the town's temple with a slight loss in experience, only 5 gold pieces, and no potions.

I almost expected some encouraging words from Lord British here.

It's a promising game, certainly impressive for someone who was in his mid-teens when he wrote it. It showed that he was capable of whipping up a functional game engine that could serve as a basis for a more complicated experience, which he essentially offered in Wraith. Compared to other 1989-1990 games, particularly commercial titles, it doesn't offer much. It gets 1s, 2s, and 3s across the board in the GIMLET--its best categories are "Economy," "Interface," and "Gameplay"--culminating in a total score of 20.

Next up, we'll see how he adapted the engine in Wraith: The Devil's Demise.

Tunnels & Trolls: Won!* (with Final Rating)

I'm sending that postcard. New World had better send me a freaking certificate for this one.

Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan

United States

New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS
Date Started: 22 March 2014

Date Ended: 5 April 2015

Total Hours: 41

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 46

Ranking at Time of Posting: 154/181 (85%)

Ranking at Game #431: 386/431 (90%)

I was in the midst of starting over when a thought occurred to me: what if instead of basing the enemy difficulty on the maximum character level, the game used something like the average character level, and what if it reads a dead character as Level 0 instead of excluding him from the calculation entirely? I reloaded with my original party, deliberately got Stahr killed in some random combat, and progressed forward. Sure enough, where I'd faced 12 dragons or 12 cave bears before, I now faced 7 hobgoblins. The resulting corridor was still hard, but not nearly as hard as before, and I was able to limp through it to the endgame.

At the end of the corridor, I was teleported to Khazan's tomb, where I had the option to place the Demon's Eye in either of his statue's eyes or on his forehead. The "forehead" solution seemed a little odd, but putting it in either the right or left eye would have violated symmetry, so I chose the forehead and was congratulated by Khazan.

Why, thank you.

In the next room, I found another statue of Khazan. His staff, which I had previously recovered from the depths of a sea goddess's temple, began shouting to be returned to him. I put it in his hands. Then I had to run around a series of six squares and recite passwords I'd gotten from a ghost ship.

Khazan woke up, said he'd get started on "enforcing the treaty between the Death Empress and myself" and named me "Crusaders of Khazan!"

I rather thought we were already.

Kind of a pathetic ending. Empress Lerotra'hh and Khara Kang are still going to be around; they'll just have Khazan checking and balancing them. Anyway, Khazan zapped me back to Gull with enough experience points to rise three levels, and the game let me keep playing if I wanted to.

Oh, no. I learned my lesson on leveling up.

In total, a slightly unsatisfying conclusion to an unsatisfying game. There are some strengths to Crusaders of Khazan, which will come out in the GIMLET, but the fusion of literal gamebook text with a CRPG frame is something I hope we don't see again.

Let's see how it rates:

1. Game World. Tunnels & Trolls is somewhat famous for offering little in terms of a game world and back story, saying only that it takes place in "a world somewhat but not exactly similar to Tolkien's Middle Earth." The computer game had to assemble a world from a large variety of gamebooks, and none of it holds together very well, with numerous inconsistencies in themes and lore. Although some encounters reference previous decisions, most of what you find in the world is stand-alone text encounters. While the backstory offers a relatively clear mission, a lot of the game world seems to have nothing to do with it with references to Khazan and Lerotra'hh uncomfortably shoehorned into the text that the developers were adapting from gamebooks. Oh, it's still better than a lot of games of the era, but certainly not up to New World's usual standards. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. The races and classes don't offer much more than a typical D&D derivative, and I really don't like Tunnels & Trolls's approach to character attributes, by which what's "high" or "low" depends a lot on the attribute itself (e.g., 20 is a very high speed but a somewhat miserable luck score), and by which damage comes directly out of "Constitution" and spell points come directly out of "Strength." I also don't like that the attributes seemed to go up and down randomly in the game, even when they weren't cursed. Finally, the fact that the game punishes characters for leveling is simply unsupportable. Nothing is good about T&T's system. Even the character portraits are ugly. One redeeming feature: some dialogues, quests, and items are tied to race and sex, so different parties face slightly different games. Score: 4.

Only in this game is this an occasion for cursing.

            
3. NPC Interaction. "NPCs" don't really exist as interactive things in the game. They show up as part of encounters, but in such cases you just visit them once and then never hear from them again. There are no particularly notable personalities in the game, and most encounter dialogue is goofy. It's interesting that you can recruit some NPCs to join you in guilds, I guess to replace dead characters, but I'd rather just reload and keep developing the characters I made. Score: 4.

One of the few places in the game where you can ask questions directly of an NPC; in this case, an imprisoned demon.

4. Encounters and Foes. When I first started playing the game, I thought this category would rank very high. Oh, I suppose it still will. After all, this is one of only a few games of the era to offer such a variety of encounters in which the characters have real options for solving them. The problems are, as I've covered extensively, first that the encounters are too literally drawn from gamebooks, and second that the options aren't really role-playing options, or even logical choices to solve puzzles. In almost all cases, there's no way to predict which choice will lead to a positive outcome to an encounter.

And--it's hard to believe I'm saying this--there are just too many of them. You're trying to just get a damned dungeon mapped, and every two squares you have to read a wall of text, make some arbitrary choice, and half the time get yanked from wherever you are and deposited unceremoniously somewhere else. Finally, since the main plot depends so much on successful outcomes to a handful of encounters, you basically have to "encounter scum" to win the game.

As for foes, they're neither horrible nor great. Like any RPG, they have various strengths and weaknesses, and a few combats thus require special tactics. Score: 6.
 

Option 5 is evil and if you choose Option 6 you're just a cad, but none of the rest can be discerned by logic or role-playing.

5. Magic and Combat. I generally like the approach taken by Crusaders of Khazan to combat: a separate screen on which the party can plot tactics and (occasionally) use elements of the environment to their favor. Auto-combat is a welcome option even if I hardly ever used it. In execution, combat has a couple of problems--primarily that enemies seem either incapable of hitting you at all or, on the rare occasion that they do connect, killing you in one hit. Late game combats, especially, become a game of "quick draw" by which the side that goes first absolutely obliterates the other side.

The magic system is nothing special: a variety of spells with silly names (so you constantly have to refer to the manual to remember what they do) organized by level. A few of them are quite necessary to survive in the game and offer some important combat tactics. As we'll see in "Economy," I didn't have a chance to explore all the spells. Score: 5.

6. Equipment. A mixed bag. You find a lot of items over the course of your adventures, and it's often hard to tell what's a plot item and what's just a general piece of gear. The identification system, by which you pay a mage to tell you all about the item, is pretty good. The weird thing, at least by conventions of most RPGs, is the lack of enchanted weapons and armor. About 50% of the gear that my characters wore and wielded at the end of the game were the same things I bought in the shops of the first town. Score: 4.

One of the few magical weapons I found in the game.

            
7. Economy. This is a strong aspect of the game that I didn't cover in detail during the postings. You get money from combats and quest rewards, but most of it comes from finding gems and jewelry that you then sell to special shops. You can never have enough money. Between food, ammunition, ships, healing, and replacement equipment, you bleed money as fast as you earn it. A couple of the towns have beggars, and by god you'd better pay them, or you might see half your gold evaporate from thievery.

The most expensive commodity in the game is spells. Some of the higher-level ones cost tens of thousands of gold pieces, and I never even came close to being able to purchase all of them. In some ways, that's too bad, but in general I like an economy where you never run out of reasons to make money, just like in real life. Score: 7.
           

8. Quests. The main quest was a little nonsensical at times, but the game does, at least, have one. More important, New World is one of the few developers of the era that truly understands the concept of "side quests" and their importance to RPGs. We've seen a few in the "Gold Box" titles and an occasional focus on them in Interplay's games, but they're far from the norm, and more than 75% of the games I've played so far have rated 5 or less in this category for that reason. That said, none of Crusaders of Khazan's side quests are particularly compelling--most are inseparable from "Encounters"--so there's still work to be done. Moreover, Khazan doesn't offer many opportunities for role-playing in its quests, nor any alternate outcomes in the main quest. Score: 6.

I'm glad I didn't choose "put it out of its misery," but I frankly don't know what the horse god's blessing actually did for me.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics in this game are godawful. I've criticized Khazan for putting too much text on the screen, but in some ways, I think they should have gone to all text. You can't tell what half the stuff on-screen is supposed to be, and even the cut-scene graphics are tiny and poorly-composed. Neither is the sound anything to sing about. The interface, on the other hand, is okay. Not great, but okay. The redundant keyboard and mouse controls work pretty well, and there's generally some on-screen hint as to your options. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. Khazan deserves credit for highly non-linear gameplay (such that you can blunder into the endgame tasks in the wrong order!). Its non-linearity, the varying difficulty associated with different classes and races, and the different encounter options make the game fairly replayable. It's a little long, but not horribly so. Where it really falls apart is in the "difficulty" item. Combats are punishingly hard through most of the game, and they get progressively worse as you level up. Score: 6.

The total is 49, but I'm subtracting 3 points for all the bugs and dead-ends, resulting in a final rating of 46.

           
Normally, I regard the space between 35 and 50 as "I recommend you check it out, but it's not really what I'd call 'good,'" so basically that works. Nonetheless, I don't think a consideration of the individual categories really gives the proper sense of playing Crusaders of Khazan. Generally speaking, if a game is going to top 40 in my score, it's good enough that I don't want to stop playing. With Khazan...just imagine that you're trying to clear a map. A map of ugly colors that make it hard to tell what the terrain is actually supposed to be. You step on some random square and a text encounter appears saying you've been captured by an orc patrol. This happens no matter how powerful your characters because it's scripted like a gamebook. You're whisked to some dungeon where your party is forced to work the sulfur mines. Eventually, you escape, but every third step, without any warning of means of prevention, you step into a pocket of gas and two of your characters die. You have to keep reloading.

Eventually, you come to a chamber where a bunch of orcs are having dinner. One of them invites your party to join them. Since you were just their slaves and are trying to escape, you think this is a bad idea and decline. A text box tells you that the orcs, offended at your refusal, recapture you (again, there's no chance for your party, no matter how powerful, to shrug off this event) and you're back in the mines. You reload and counterintuitively join them for dinner. One of them asks you if you want the bread or the fish. You eat the bread and a character dies. You reload and choose the fish and it says that you "choke and gag" on a fishbone but everything otherwise seems okay. Later, you realize that your "Constitution" score is 3 points below normal and it never seems to heal all the way to the maximum.

Moving past the room, you find yourself in the chambers of the king of the mines, Lord Bozo. You cringe at the stupid name. His guards attack you and you kill them in a single round without taking any damage. Then Lord Bozo attacks. His speed is higher than yours, so he gets to go first, and he clobbers your mage to death before you can act. In the next round, he kills your rogue. Annoyed, you reload. You try to prepare for the next combat by quaffing some potions that purport to increase your attributes, but they don't actually go up. Lord Bozo kills you again.

You spend the next four hours grinding your characters in the mines so that you'll get strong enough to defeat Lord Bozo. You take him on again, and this time he has twice the hit points as before, and he kills all four of your characters in the first round. You stare at the "game over" screen and wonder what you're doing with your life.

That's what it's like to play Crusaders of Khazan.

Do you change the position of a lever? Yes! Nothing happens! Do open a curtain! Yes! You're automatically turned to stone!

I'm gratified to find my experience echoed in reviews. Oh, Dragon loved it, of course. Five out of five stars. Someone at that magazine, 'round about 1983, said, "Holy @$&%, guys! Look at this! A role-playing game on a computer!!" and got stuck on that note all the way into the mid-1990s.

But the February 1991 issue of Computer Gaming World had dual reviews from both Scorpia and G. Marc Clupper. (They said basically the same things, so I'm not sure why the magazine decided to go with a "two views" format.) They both note the weirdness caused by the out-sourcing of the programming to Japanese developers, and they both make the point that it didn't live up to New World's usual standards. Clupper's "it could have been so much more" echoes Scorpia's "Tunnels & Trolls could have been a good game."

Scorpia gives this rundown of the history:

[Tunnels & Trolls]...became popular in Japan and, as a result, the Japanese requested a computer version. Liz Danforth, who had prior CRPG design experience...and had worked with Ken [St. Andre] on the revisions of the original T&T system, did the initial design for the computer game.

The material was then sent overseas. The Japanese translated the text, and did all of the programming. After its release in Japan, the game made its way back to New World Computing, where it was re-translated into English, and released in the U.S. During all this, there was no communication at all between the designers and the programmers.

Scorpia's review reminded me--because I stretched out playing so long, I hadn't been thinking about it--of how many "clues" appear in the game that ultimately lead nowhere or turn out not to be true, such as one involving the need for the "Teacher" spell to defeat Khara Kang, or another that suggests you must have a female dwarf in the party. She also confirms my perception that:

Much of the design was taken from individual T&T scenario books and woven into one complete adventure. Ergo, the plotline and events are not as tightly constructed as they could have been, and the bugs make it much worse.

Scorpia concludes that she "can't, alas, recommend this to anyone" except hardcore T&T fans. I don't go quite that far. It's an interesting take on a CRPG with elements that we haven't seen before. I'd recommend it to both hardcore T&T fans and students of CRPG history. If you're not one of those, load up a Gold Box title.

None of this ended up having anything to do with anything.

          
I should note that New World published a pretty long cluebook for this one. The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History has it for download [59MB]. (I can't get over how great that site is; they even take the time to OCR the text so you can search it.) I consulted it for a couple of the late-game maps and I found it remarkably inept--almost as if it was designed by someone who didn't have the game in front of him. The book annotates only about half of the encounters on any given map, and there are no actual numbers on the maps to correspond with the text description of the encounters. In places, it tells you what item or artifact you need to solve an encounter, but nowhere else in the book does it tell you where to find that item. It's like when it came to Tunnels & Trolls, the company couldn't do a damned thing right.

We're not going to hold it against New World, though. Everyone's entitled to an occasional screw-up. They published King's Bounty the same year, and in 1991, we're going to get Might & Magic III. I'd rather get two great games and one flawed one than three mediocre ones.

With apologies for readers eagerly awaiting Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire, I've re-elevated Wraith to the next game, since I've already played it. I won't have much time in the next week, and I want to have a block of uninterrupted time for The Savage Empire. I also kicked Flight from the Dark down a couple notches because I'm waiting for the book version to be delivered. Up next, then: a couple of early John Carmack games.

Tunnels & the Ultimate Trolls

Good. Let them have it. The Dragon Continent sucks.

God, I've never been so mad at a game. I've played plenty of RPGs that sucked, but rarely have I played a game with so much potential that so completely squandered it. It has a solid character development system, a very open game world, and a decent combat system, but none of them can overcome the game's flaws.

A quick rundown of the game's major problems:

1. Its adaptation from a series of gamebooks means that the game as a whole lacks thematic unity. There are dozens upon dozens of independent encounters that feel disconnected and random, with no connection to the main quest except (occasionally), a throw-away line about Khazan, Khara Kang, or  Lerotra'hh.

Some interpolation about the main quest from an otherwise unrelated encounter, probably drawn from a gamebook.

         
2. The game is too in-love with verbose text-based encounters that eschew the main game interface for a more literal gamebook experience.

3. While these encounters have options, they lack role-playing options, or even any sense to their puzzles. They whisk you this way and that, with no consideration of tactics, roleplaying, or even fairness.

An example: Near a volcano, you're given the chance to explore a tunnel. This is another "text map," where instead of actually entering a tunnel, you get a narration of events on-screen. In a large cavern, you find a number of slaves being whipped by fire demons. One is killed and tossed into a furnace. Suddenly, a bunch of demons rear up behind you and block the way back. Your options are:

a) Fight your way back

b) Plunge deeper into the cavern

c) Surrender

If you fight your way back, you get into a combat with a shadow demon and 16 minor demons. I don't know what you need for "Speed" to act first, but the lead demon used "Blasting Power" on me for 263 points of damage (far more than my 60 hp) and killed my lead character. In subsequent rounds, I lost another character before everyone was able to kill the demons. There's no way to avoid losing at least one person with this option.

Okay, so try again. "Plunge deeper." You get into a combat with 6 minor demons. They're not tough. I defeat them handily. No one dies. But after my victory screen, the text says I'm overwhelmed by demons and taken prisoner. The demons "decide to make an example of me" and throw Stahr into the furnace, killing him. Then I'm enslaved.

Reload. Only by surrendering--the most counterintuitive solution--do I get a postive outcome. I try to escape during an earthquake and only have to fight a handful of demons to get out.

Many of the encounters are "Morton's forks," leading to the same outcome no matter what you do. On the top of a hill, you see a circle of ancient stones. You're given the option to climb or leave. If you try to leave, you get pursued by a hellhound, at which point you have the option to fight or run. If you fight, you face battle with two hellhounds. If you run, you face battle with a hellhound. If you climb the hill, you find an altar to a demon. You're given the option to cast it down, investigate a wooden cask, or run. If you run, you get pursued and attacked by a hellhound. If you cast down the altar, you get attacked by a hellhound. If you investigate the cask, you get attacked by a hellhound. Basically, from the moment you step into the square--which offers no warning about what's to come--you get attacked by a hellhound no matter what you do.

The moment you step on this square, you're screwed.

          
Compare this to how a real RPG handles such things, allowing the player to employ his skills and the game mechanics to sneak, assess things from a distance, cast buffing spells before combat, and flee if necessary. Here, every player faces the same options no matter how strong, skilled, or prepared he tries to make his characters.

Really? That's as much information as you're going to give me to make this decision?

           
4. There are a handful of miscellaneous problems with items and spells. The "Froststaff" is supposed to teach rogues the "Freeze Me" spell (yes, I looked up a spoiler), but it doesn't do anything. You can't "use" or "equip" it. Most of the potions don't work as advertised, and neither do a lot of the spells. The "Remove Curse" spell absolutely never works. There are a lot of miscellaneous drains in attributes that the game doesn't bother to explain and can't seem to ever be healed.

5. To win the game, you have to collect a series of specific items and passwords, which means solving various encounters in precise ways. If you don't "encounter scum" to make sure you get the optimal outcome, you can easily put yourself in a "walking dead" scenario very early in the game. For instance, I don't think there's a way to defeat Khara Kang without a "Death Wand" that you get from an encounter with some mer-people. But the mer-people claim the wand as their own, and you either have to successfully bargain with them (involving an attribute roll) or kill all of them (violating role-playing) to keep it, and nothing at that point in the game alerts you that it's a necessary artifact.

These gremlins pester you every time you leave Khazan. But you have to (counterintuitively) be friendly with them and offer them money to get a password necessary to win the game.

             
In another place, a demon gives you a quest to recover his jeweled eye from a dragon. If you solve the quest, you can't win the game, because you also need the eye to awaken Khazan. You'd better not use the Bag of Winds to escape from storms on the ocean, because you need it in the final area. There are a dozen things like this.

6. But none of the above problems compare to the most egregious: merciless adjusting of enemy difficulty based on the player's level and attributes. We've seen this happen subtly in other games in my chronology, and quite often in modern games, but never in the kind of game-breaking way that Tunnels & Trolls does it, where the escalation in monster difficulty ensures that the game gets significantly harder for every level or attribute you increase. It's so absurd, in fact, that the simple act of quaffing "Warrior Juice" before combat, which increases your character's strength, simply serves to exponentially increase the difficulty of the enemies in the following combat.

I didn't realize this last point until more than halfway through the game. I noted that the encounters were getting more difficult, but I thought it was because of map progression, not my own character progression. Sick of always getting my butt handed to me in combat, I settled in for a long grinding session in a map that offered near-infinite battles with dire wolves who seemed incapable of hitting me. I spent several hours in the area--mostly letting the game fight on "automatic" while I did other things--and rose about 6 levels. Little did I know how much I was dooming myself.

My meteoric rise in power meant that practically every fixed combat was a hellish ordeal, with most monsters capable of killing characters in one hit. If I got ambushed in the first round, forget it--my whole party died.

This turned out to be a really bad idea.

        
Since I last blogged, I've explored most of the rest of the maps, reloading about a million times. I found Khara Kang in his fortress and, after about 12 tries, killed him with the Death Wand.

My characters are invisible here. It's a handy spell.

Well, I killed him in combat, anyway. The script said that as he died, he called out to Lerotra'hh, who opened some kind of portal to allow him to escape.

Later, I found Lerotra'hh in a dungeon called "The Digs." Well, technically, I went there first, but when I saw that an encounter with the Empress was pending, I left, because I had been warned by a commenter that killing her before killing Khara Kang breaks the game.

To be fair, there's a subtle in-game hint about this, too.

Her chambers had a series of puzzles that would be too boring to relate, including a battle with someone name "Fisk" who you needed a pair of Winged Sandals to defeat. Otherwise, you have to sit there and "block" for 30 consecutive rounds before he just collapses. A walkthrough helped me with that latter part, but not where I was supposed to have gotten the Winged Sandals.

When I reached Lerotra'hh, I was able to kill her quite quickly with the same Death Wand I used on Khara Kang.

But again, she wasn't really "dead." She cried out to Khara Kang, who scooped her up in that same kind of portal. They threatened revenge if I didn't wake up Khazan.

Not much of a "defeat," if you ask me.

           

The endgame is supposed to take place on the Uncertain Isle, where the old emperor, Khazan, slumbers. I made it to the isle.

I made it through a maze of teleporters.

The game starts to try my patience.

         
Using some special boots I'd found previously, I made it across a sea of lava (because walking on lava is only dangerous to the soles of your feet). I made it past an encounter where I had to give up an artifact called a "Heart of Fire."

           
I made it past a herd of buffalo, where I had to know the name of one of them from solving a previous encounter a precise way, and through a garden encounter where I had to have a Bag of Winds and have previously gotten a password from another encounter (I didn't have it; I was using a walkthrough to help by this point).

Even the walkthrough didn't tell me where to get this; it just told me to say it.

           
At last, I reached a final set of corridors, the end of which leads to Khazan's tomb.

And there my game ends. I can't get through the corridors. They're full of encounters with groups of monsters who always surprise me (no matter what I do) and always get the first attack. Their sheer number and power results in an instant slaughter. If I could survive the first round, there are some spells that could help (unfortunately, you can't cast them before combat), but there's no way to even come close surviving the first round, as the GIF below demonstrates.

              
I've reloaded numerous times. Sometimes the specific enemies change, but there are always too many of them, and they always wipe me out in the first round. I've seen videos online of people surviving the same area. They have half my characters' levels, strength, and stamina, and they therefore face much weaker enemies. Basically, I screwed myself by leveling up.

Replacing my characters with weaker NPCs was a decent idea, but ultimately futile.

           
I reloaded a save from before I entered Khazan's tomb and tried to swap out a couple of my characters for lower-level NPCs. Unfortunately, NPCs cooling their heels in the various guilds manage to level up along with the active characters. Their stats weren't nearly as good, and this helped a little with some of the encounters, but I still can't do anything about that last hallway.

Dragons bathe my party in fire before I can even react.

           
There's no way to create new characters in the middle of the game, so if I want to get a winning screen for this one, I'm going to have to start completely over, minimize leveling, and hit only the necessary encounters. Since I didn't take extensive notes, this will basically involve just following a walkthrough.

Even if I do that, it's going to take a little time. So let's move on to Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire.

*****

A couple of modifications to our master game list: I checked out Ellak's Tomb for the C64. It was a little tape magazine game with a first-person interface. Although you can make four characters--warrior, thief, wizard, or priest--there's no inventory for the characters and no sense of character development. I'd call it a "half-RPG." It's not worth anyone's time and I dumped it.

Meanwhile, Operation: Overkill II looked really interesting, but it was a BBS game, and I'm not sure if it's playable offline. I downloaded it, but it kept telling me that it couldn't find certain files, even though those files were in the directories. I applied for an account in a bulletin board service that offers the game, but in general, online-only or multiplayer games don't appear on my list for a reason, and I'm inclined not to pursue it if it keeps throwing obstacles at me.

This means that the first 1991 has appeared in the playlist! For most of the year, like I did with 1990, I'll be selecting games at random. But I want to start the year strong, with a title I know I'll like. so I decided to put Eye of the Beholder there. (Death Knights of Krynn or Might & Magic III seemed too obvious.) We'll have an intermediate end-of-1990 post before then, of course.