Revisiting: War in Middle Earth (1988)

The title screen omits the "J.R.R. Tolkien's . . . " prefix that a lot of sites include in the game title.

         

War in Middle Earth

United States

Melbourne House (UK developer and publisher); Synergistic Software (U.S. developer and publisher)

Synergistic version released in 1988 or 1989 for Amiga, Apple IIGS, Atari ST, and DOS

Melbourne House version released in 1989 for Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum
Date Started: 11 March 2011

Date Ended: 1 December 2020

Total Hours: 14

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting: 169/392 (43%)

         

It was time for another easy loss-win conversion. I first played War in Middle Earth back in 2011, lost it a couple of times, rejected it as an RPG, and moved on. This was still during the blog's formative period, however. I wasn't yet familiar with Synergistic Software (I didn't start the Campaign series for another two years), and I didn't realize that War in Middle Earth featured the debut of the World Builder engine, which would see us through Spirit of Excalibur (1990), Vengeance of Excalibur (1991), and Conan: The Cimmerian (1991).

   

I haven't found any detailed accounting of how War in Middle Earth was made. Although Synergistic's Robert Clardy is credited as the director and game designer, the "game concept" is credited to British developer Mike Singleton. You could imagine it was the natural evolution of either or both of the men's earlier titles. From the early Campaign series, Synergistic founder Robert Clardy always seemed interested in blending the strategic and the tactical, the campaign and the quest. These are also features of Singleton's earlier UK games, predominantly The Lords of Midnight (1984), its sequel Doomdark's Revenge (1984), and the lesser-known Dark Sceptre (1988). Singleton's games always play with creative approaches to time, with events occurring faster or slower than the player may wish depending on the point in the game.

       

[Edit: A few months after posting this, I had cause to re-visit the issue. I still haven't found a clear source, but what I think happened was this: 1) Melbourne House got the original license to make a Tolkien game and commissioned Mike Singleton to write it; 2) Mike Singleton began development on what would be the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, and ZX Spectrum version; 3) Synergistic somehow found out about the game in development and struck a deal with Melbourne House to produce their own version in the U.S. for more advanced machines; 4) Synergistic's version introduced elements that make the game more of a near-RPG, while the Melbourne House version remained a more purely strategy game (though taking place at multiple levels, like Singleton's earlier games); 5) both versions released at roughly the same time. If anyone knows better or finds a source that clarifies, I would appreciate a comment.]

   

Re-playing War after almost 10 years, I'm better-equipped to appreciate what Clardy and Singleton were trying to accomplish. I've seen other strategy-RPG hybrids in which squads and battalions can "level up" and there are persistent heroes leading them, but the World Builder approach does more than introduce RPG-style character development to armies. It literally changes the interface as you move from map to campaign to party, and you are essentially playing different games in those three interfaces. At the map level, you can study the state of the world; at the campaign level, you issue orders to armies and watch them fight; and at the street level (Synergistic calls it the "animation level," which is an unsatisfying term), individual characters interact with each other, use items, and fight one-on-one combats. 

        

At the local level, the hobbits set out from the Shire.

       

I was trying to think of a modern game that does anything similar and I came up short. There are games in the Far Cry and Assassin's Creed series in which you can view a large-scale map and see who controls what territory, but that "control" is largely theoretical; it has little influence on actual gameplay. All the real decisions are made at the individual level as in most RPGs. I can't think of a game in which one of your cherished party members can get wiped out while you're tinkering with the movement of armies on the world map, nor can I think of any in which you can lose your kingdom (and the game) because you were fiddling around trying to pick a lock on a treasure chest while the evil king's armies swept over your homeland.

         

At the campaign level, you view and give orders to armies.

        

That, of course, is part of the reason that the World Builder approach, however innovative, didn't really catch on. Most players don't want to suffer anxiety throughout the game, constantly worrying that events are happening at a different level. Perhaps more important, in its attempts to blend two or three different genres, the World Builder engine ended up being not very good at any of them. Character development, NPC interaction, and questing are too under-developed to make for a good RPG, and there aren't enough strategic and logistic considerations to make a good strategy game. Conan eventually abandoned the strategic side of the engine, and I rated it highest in the series. That doesn't mean that I feel that the approach was doomed from the start, however. I would love to have a modern game in which you feed and equip armies, manage them in battles against a foe, and then once you've conquered the castle, lead a party of four soldiers on an exploration of its dungeons.

      

The map level shows all your forces across the land.

      

I suppose I should say it even though it's obvious: War in Middle Earth is based on The Lord of the Rings. It starts at the local level with Frodo, Sam, and Pippin walking down a road, having been given the main mission to take the ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. Gandalf has left a note telling Frodo to meet him in Rivendell and suggesting he watch for Strider on the road. The ringwraiths are closing in.

 

A local-level battle has the Fellowship attacked by 20 orcs.

       

But zoom out to the map level, and you find that these are not your only allies. There are lights flashing in Rohan and Gondor, too. Eomer waits in East Emnet with 120 cavalry, and Faramir is camped in Gondor with 200 rangers. These are the only armies that you can control at the beginning, but others become available as the game progresses, some based on time, some based on luck (e.g., a hero has to encounter them), and some based on finding an item.

       

A campaign-level battle determines control of Minis Tirith.

       

You can't neglect any of the three levels. If you never visit the map view, you might forget about important units. It's frustrating to discover you had an extra army with 700 knights and 2000 infantry in some distant port minutes before you lose the game. The campaign level is where you probably spend most of your time, moving units from place to place--and you really do have to micro-manage them. (One of the most frustrating things about the game is units' stubborn refusal to follow your exact orders.) But if you don't venture to the local level frequently, you'll lose out on the ability to get hints from NPCs and to find items.

         

A random old man--not Gandalf--offers a hint.

        

There's an awful lot packed into this game, and no two attempts to win are going to produce the same outcomes, even if you route your people in the same directions. I had games where I was able to field an army of ents and other games where I never even saw an ent; games where I scattered the heroes hoping to find enchanted artifacts and games where I never picked up a single item and just focused on getting to my goals. Sometimes you meet a balrog wandering around in the wilderness. Sometimes you meet Gollum.

    

If I were more of a Tolkien fan, I think I'd be both intrigued and frustrated. In some ways, it's fun just to explore the map and note far-flung cities and ruined castles. But there's so little to do in these locations that it's ultimately unsatisfying. The only thing to do at the local level, other than enjoy the EGA graphics, is to pick up or drop the occasional object. You can't even instigate conversation with NPCs; you have to wait and see if they want to talk with you.

      

The game is hardest at the beginning, when the three hobbits are on the road by themselves and Nazgûl are swarming everywhere. If they run into you, there's a chance you can evade them, and even if you enter combat, there's a (small) chance you can defeat them, but in general I lost about half my games before even reaching Buckland or Bree and picking up Merry and Aragorn, respectively. If Frodo dies, not all is lost--any hero can bring the ring to Mount Doom--but there aren't many alternate heroes in the early game.

        

Most of my early games ended like this.

       

I gather that a lot of players use the early game to try to find artifacts. Once you get the message that Sauron's forces are on the move, the specific timing of which seems to be randomized for each game, the game changes considerably and time becomes more dear.

    

The game has several winning conditions. The player can win by bringing the One Ring safely to Mount Doom or by killing Sauron. The latter method involves bringing an essentially impossible number of forces to Barad-Dur, which itself has 9,500 orcs and 500 trolls and is surrounded by fortresses with just as many. I'm sure someone's done it, but I don't see how.

 

Sauron is well-protected.

        

The enemy wins by killing the ring-bearer, having a Nazgûl swipe up the Ring, and bringing the Ring to Sauron in Barad-Dur. But they can also win by conquering three of five cities: Minas Tirith, Edoras, Hornburg, Lórien, and Thranduil's Palace, the last of which is so far removed from the rest of the action that it's annoying to have to defend it.

    

One of the problems with the game is that it's fairly easy to win. You just have to bring most of the armies to the five cities and hold them against Sauron's repeated attacks. His forces grow and replenish as time goes on while yours don't, so it's a little unfair from a strategy perspective, but the AI in the game is pretty bad, and most of the time, Sauron won't send his forces very far to attack. So there might be 20,000 orcs milling about Minas Tirith, but they won't march off to attack the Hornburg; all of Rohan's threats seem to come from Isengard or not at all.

      

I task an army of elves to retake Lorien from the orcs.

      

If you can hold the cities, all you have to do is get a ring-bearer to Mount Doom. This is easier than it sounds. The key difficulties are supposed to be crossing the Misty Mountains and crossing the mountains into Mordor. You can try to clear the passes by sending armies against the strongholds there, or you can attempt to sneak through with a small band. But you can also walk around the mountains or even directly through them (this takes some coaxing) without using the passes.

    

One fun way to win quickly, although it requires a bit of luck, is to allow a Nazgûl to kill Frodo and take the ring early. The Nazgûl will make a beeline for Barad-Dur, entering Mordor through either Minas Morgul (west) or Morannon (northwest). If you can anticipate his route and intercept him, Faramir can kill him, grab the ring, and then quickly cross the mountains to Barad-Dur, sometimes even before Sauron's forces have been activated.

      

One ringwraith is no match for Faramir and 200 rangers.

       

The longer way involves fully activating the armies of Gondor, Rohan, the Elves, and the Dwarves by bringing the leader their associated artifacts, then using the armies to clear a path for the ringbearer's small party. Those items, and the other artifacts in the game, are always found in the same places. Experienced players inevitably develop early-game strategies for collecting as many of them as possible before deciding which paths to take to Mordor.

        

The hobbits find an elven blade at Tom Bombadil's house.

      

I won three times during this revisit, once with the Nazgûl/Faramir strategy (though it took a few reloads), once by painstakingly following the strategy laid out by a fan named Leon (excellent site), and once through my own method of holding the key cities while sending Frodo, Gandalf, and 500 elves around the mountains of Mordor to walk in from the east. 

        

Gandalf approaches Mount Doom from the east. Faramir already holds it, so there's no concern about enemy forces.

      

I had originally given War a 21 on the GIMLET. In reviewing my ratings, I think I got it right for 9 of the 10 categories, but I can't countenance the 2 I gave it for "gameplay." It's eminently replayable, has a bit of nonlinearity, and offers a good challenge in a reasonable time frame. I bumped the score to a 6 and thus the final score to a 25.

       

The winning screen!

      

As I said, the game ultimately under-performs in its constituent categories. As a strategy game, it doesn't work well because you have no control over the development of your forces and there's no advantage to controlling any cities except the five key ones. As a wargame, it doesn't offer enough combat tactics. Your only options are to have units "charge," "engage," or "withdraw." ("Charge" seems to offer a potentially-large payout for an equally large risk.) As an RPG, the characters don't develop, and not enough happens at the street level to make it interesting. These problems persisted throughout the World Builder series, although they did get better. The two Excalibur games brought stronger (if still not very strong) approaches to character growth and inventory, and Conan gave us a lot to do at the local level. Both offered lovely VGA graphics that made it fun to visit different locations. We have one World Builder game ahead of us--1993's Warriors of Legend--and I look forward to seeing the engine in its final form.

BRIEF: Outroyd (1985)

This title sounds like a portmanteau of "outrage" and Dan "Aykroyd."

     

Outroyd
Japan

MagicalZoo (developer and publisher)

Released in 1985 for MSX and Sharp X1

   

If I'm going to make any progress on this list, it means not taking the bait on games like Super Rambo Special and Outroyd, the latter of which is listed as an RPG on Wikipedia, sourced to an MSX game library. There's a reason I don't often accept the definitions of platform-specific game databases. This is the second time that Wikipedia list entry has been based on the RPG definitions of a source rather than Wikipedia's own definition of the genre.

       

The hero navigates a city-like map.

     

Outroyd is set on the world of Quorn in the year 2108. I have no idea why it makes a difference what year it is if the game is set on a different world, but there you have it. The machines have staged an uprising and have nearly wiped out humanity. The hero is a resistance fighter named Ramon Okudaira. He wears an armored suit and spends the game invading robot bases and mowing them down with a variety of weapons. There are statistics for energy, defensive power, and offensive power, but these are all inventory-dependent and do not improve through fighting. The game is thus of the usual action-oriented type, in which every victory produces equipment upgrades to fight the next wave of (harder) enemies.

    

I suspect it wouldn't take long to win--it is a cassette game, after all--but I had trouble getting it running and keeping it running. (This was my first attempt at a cassette with the MSX emulator.) I shall thus leave it for the Action Game Addict and move forward.

         

The game has a bit of an attitude.

       

Secrets of Bharas is still in progress, but I have little to report except fighting a bunch of battles. Maybe in a few days. We'll have another entry tomorrow to make up for this brief one.

Game 391: Legends of Valour (1992)

       

Legends of Valour

United Kingdom

Synthetic Dimensions (developer); U.S. Gold (U.K. publisher); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS; 1993 for Amiga, Atari ST, and PC-98; 1994 for FM Towns

Date Started: 28 November 2020

   

Older gamers, who remember the era before the death of game manuals, often talk about that magical time in between purchase and play, often during the car ride home, when they opened the manual and started to get a sense of the plot and mechanics. The manual to Legends of Valour would have left me absolutely drooling. It promises an immersive, gritty, personalized experience in a complex simulated fantasy environment. I've said multiple times that I prefer small, local, personal stories to world-threatening events, so I am 100% on board with playing a young naif freshly arrived in the big city, looking for his cousin Sven.

    

The city is Mitteldorf, built on a volcanic island named Wolfblood ("build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius" indeed). A newspaper (The Mitteldorf Post) presents it as an unruly place of haves and have-nots, ruled by a semi-competent king named Farley. A City Watch keeps a certain amount of order, but justice is only a distant aspiration. It is a place of taverns and brothels, shops and arenas, thieves and scoundrels. Men and monsters mix on the streets, cults and guilds compete for members, and of course there's a dungeon underneath the city. Into that dungeon, Sven has disappeared, searching for a lost jewel.

       

I got pretty lucky on the dice this time, I think.

       

The manual suggests that the player may eventually join a guild and get quests--and of course, there's probably a "main quest" that will become apparent at some point--but at the outset, he'll be occupied with keeping himself sheltered, fed, free of disease, and out of jail. The setup makes Valour sound a lot like Alternate Reality: The City with an actual plot; I can't imagine that the developers were not familiar with and inspired by The City.

     

What the manual promises, the game matches--at least in its opening moments. There is a pre-title sequence with some lovely cinematics, including what is probably the best water animation that we've seen so far. We zoom in on a mountain; a hawk flies in circles; a large dragonfly beats its wings above a rippling surface; a lone figure pilots a small rowboat as giant manta rays swim beneath him. This is some next-level stuff. I know from reader comments that the game doesn't hold up, but I'm not discouraged by the beginning.

      

This probably has nothing to do with anything you can do in the game.

          

(The pre-title sequence actually begins with three Nietzsche quotes stuck together to suggest that they're part of the same passage. We'll see some of the same material later at the beginning of Baldur's Gate. The specific use of this material got my hackles up, and the original draft of this entry grew to about 2,000 words on Nietzsche, how he is both misunderstood and perfectly understood, and how the CRPG hero is an ironic Nietzschean archetype--ironic because I think Nietzsche would have hated video games and regarded anyone who spent his life playing them with utter contempt. Anyway, as you can see, it was getting out of hand, so I cut the material and saved it for a later special topic about the use of Nietzsche in CRPGs.)

  

The game distinguishes itself from all those less-philosophical RPGs.

        

The character creation process isn't bad. The game automatically rolls for strength, intelligence, health, speed, and "inheritance" (your starting wealth); the manual warns you not to get too hung up on these figures, since you have lots of chances for improvement. You select a male or female and from human, dwarf, and elf options that change the character portrait in predictable ways.

   

The character's face is customized by clicking on its parts on a stone tablet. You can cycle through six hair options (alas, no bald option), nine hair color options, seven eye options, eight nose options, nine lip options, and six facial hair options. You cannot escape a healthy set of sideburns (which oddly do not change color with the rest of your hair) no matter what you do.

    

Once you accept the character, the game gives you a random name for your father (I got Sedgley Cooper), his trade (baker), and your town of birth (Headless Cross). You enter your own name.

         

The provincial little place I'm about to abandon.

      

You're then given a chance to spend your "inheritance" at the blacksmith's shop and general store in your village before heading off to Mitteldorf. My first negative impression of the game comes from the use of only a single suit of "armor" in the game. While perhaps historically accurate, it's far less satisfying than having different pieces of armor to find, purchase, and equip throughout the game. Even worse, the different types of armor appear to have no names, just styles and prices. You can get an all-golden set for 210, a vaguely-samurai set for 230, or an all-silver plate set for 240. You can also get two shields--both cleverly named "shield"--for 32 and 38--and an axe for 40. 

    

For those players who are more price-conscious, the general store has three "costumes" for 70, 80, and 98, and, mysteriously, a chunk of "ore" for 12. I could have afforded the most expensive of everything, plus the ore, but I decided to go with a "costume" instead of an armor set to save some money for Mitteldorf. I bought an axe and, of course, the ore. That was just too odd not to buy.

       

The styles are eclectic in Headless Cross.

         

The game really begins as you arrive in Mitteldorf. I think a lot of the content, including names, is procedurally generated, so from here my experience may not match anyone else's.

       

An NPC greets me as the game begins.

          

I'm greeted as I enter the town by a bounty hunter named Storr Wildfowl. He welcomes me to the city and advises me to read the notices outside the Custom House, across from the town gates. The dialogue interface gives me a few keyword starters, plus buttons for attacking, pickpocketing, and insulting. I spent a little time on the dialogue. "Where" and "What is" bring up sub-menus where, altogether, I can ask the following questions:

    

• Where is the town gate?
• Where is the market square?
• Where are you going?
• Where am I?
• Where is the Custom House?
• What is the day?
• What is the time?
• What is your name?
• What is your religion?
• What is your trade?

          

Some dialogue options.

     

I'm not sure how the game determines whether the NPC likes you, especially minus a charisma statistic. The game seems to roll for success after each question, which creates the following humorous exchange:

• Me: What is your name?
• Storr: Storr Wildfowl
• Me: What is your trade?
• Storr: Bounty hunter
• Me: What is your religion?
• Storr: I worship Aegir, God of the Sea
• Me: What is the time?
• Storr: None of your business

    

Amidst a lot of restarting (Storr walks away if I take too long to take notes), I check out the "insult" system, which involves randomly-generated slurs. "Your mother was a geriatric dung beetle," I say. "And you have the dress sense of a rotting ogre," he replies. This reminds me of Swords and Sorcery (1985), another British game, although the two seem to share no ancestry other than their country of origin.

      

As Storr glides away (more on that in a minute), I spend some time studying the interface. The three boxes in the upper left are for unique magic items that I will apparently find later. The lower left has "examine" and "disk options" buttons, plus a box in which various objects appear when I encounter them in the environment. There's a set of status bars for health, energy, injury, "appeal" (that must be the charisma bar I was looking for), hunger, thirst, and fatigue. Next to that is a set of controls that I am dubbing the "GTFO Panel," named after my reaction if you tell me that you actually use this, instead of the far more convenient arrow keys, during actual gameplay. Then we have the action panel, which includes three options for combat (crush, thrust, slash), the game map, buttons for casting mage and priest spells, sleeping, using, and shouting, "Hey!" The word "Hey" literally appears in the game window.

   

The upper right has your pockets. By default, it shows your gold, but there are six buttons that change the display to show the other trading items used in Mitteldorf: gems, spices, pigments, ore (aha!), hide, and tar. In a nod to realism, the manual notes: "That doesn't necessarily mean that you have several tons of merchandise in your pockets; some of your goods may consist of letters of credit, bills of lading, that kind of thing."

       

Buildings indicate what kind of place they are.

        

The lower-right box shows what you're holding in your hand, along with arrows to throw or drop it, and the six boxes above it show your backpack contents, which may be readily transferred to the hand.

   

Keyboard backups for these buttons are unforgivably scant. The action panel is replicated with the function keys, but in a weird configuration. F1 executes "thrust" (middle of the top row), but neither of the other attack options have keys. The middle row picks up with F2 (map) and continues in order through F7 (Hey!). Gods know why they didn't just go from F1 to F9 with all the buttons. Nothing else has a keyboard shortcut.  

   

That leaves the main game window, a mix of good and bad elements. On the plus side, you can see enemies and NPCs in the environment, which immediately puts it above the Gold Box and most Wizardry derivatives. On the negative side, the window is non-interactive--you can't even move your cursor into it--which puts it below Dungeon Master and any game based on it, and of course Ultima Underworld.

   

In between, we have a couple of neutral factors. The graphics are uninspired, and the ground looks particularly blah. There's an option turned off by default to add some texture to the ground, although even this goes away when you move. 

      

NPCs use several means of locomotion.

      

Like Alternate Reality, the game features continuous movement--or, at least, movement in very small increments so that it appears as if it's continuous. I realize that this is supposed to be appealing, but I'd rather have a tiled game with immersive graphics and an interactive environment than a continuous game with the opposite. The existing system must have slowed down a lot of PCs, because there are game options to use a smaller window and to have the game render shorter distances.

   

A game day lasts about 16 minutes of real time. You get a static transitional screen when day becomes night and night becomes day. 

    

The sky graphics for night turning to day are nice.

     

The game map is interesting. It shows the streets and paths of a large and sprawling city and gives you the names of its establishments. It's up to you to annotate their precise locations on the actual map. I'd like to do that, but I haven't been able to find a high-resolution copy of the original map; the one at the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History, for instance, has the annotations already printed. Someone let me know if you have a good source for a blank one.

    

Sven's letter said that he's been staying at The Boarding and drinking at The Snakes, so I need to be on the lookout for both places, but to begin I'm happy to check out the Customs House notice board. This requires going into the Customs House, which buys and sells the various commodities. The owner greets me and promises me the best prices short of the black market. His "notices" board has the following notices:

    

• Government warning: Beware of everyone! Especially the government. The last part looks like it might be graffiti.

• Rusty Cutlass All your medical needs. Open every day, daylight only. Specialty leaching service. This one has a little map indicating how to get there from the town gate.

• Legends of Valour helpline. This gives a U.K. phone number and says it costs 48p per minute most times and 36p per minute.

• A note from Sven! He says he's been delayed but will meet me at The Hanged Man later.

• A job to collect a chest from the Hanged Man and deliver it to Potch's Supplies. Payment is 22 groats, the game's currency.

     

It looks like I'm looking for The Hanged Man next. This just the sort of place I could find immediately or not find until the end of the game depending on my exploration pattern. I try my best to explore right around the town gate (which is on the eastern edge of the map) first.

        

NPC images are digitized photos, which is not something I particularly like.

     

The first door I try (you open doors just by walking into them) opens into a set of guard barracks, which in turn opens into the Guild of the Men at Arms. This is one of three guilds mentioned in the Mitteldorf Post; the others are the Thieves' Guild and the Mercenaries' Guild. There are also two "fellowships" and four temples that you can join. The Post specifically says that the Men at Arms are recruiting, having lost members recently "in a series of mysterious accidents." The guild also has two ads, one offering training, the other offering used weapons for sale.

    

My impression is that I can join multiple guilds, so I figure I might as well do it while I'm here. It turns out maybe I was a little hasty. After I pay an initiation fee of 24 groats, the guildmaster tells me that my "trial" is to "secretly" fetch a bronze helmet from The Armoury within two days. "The code word is 'blueboar,'" he says. The Armoury is a shop, according to the map. I have no idea why I'll need a codeword. I also pay 50 groats to improve my weapons skills to "the first Dann." I trust this works, I've yet to figure out how to actually see my skills.

         

What the heck.

      

Out in a courtyard, I hail a guardsman and ask him where The Armoury is. "51 poles northwest" is his reply. The Hanged Man, he further offers, is 30 poles west. I have no idea how long a "pole" is, but the same guard says that the Market Square, which is marked on the map by default, is 48 poles west. It's about halfway across the map, so The Armoury should be about that, just to the northwest, and the Hanged Man should be a little more than halfway to Market Square. I go to save my progress so far and find that you can only save at taverns, hostels, and inns, so I guess it's the Hanged Man or bust.

      

After wandering into several generic hovels and residences, I figure out that most shops have clear signs on the outside. I soon wandering into a major square called The Stone Circle, and lo and behold, an inn on the north side is labeled "The Hanged Man." I enter just as the game switches from day to night.

      

The Stone Circle was easy to find.

         

There's one NPC in the tavern, Choker Bloodaxe, the town executioner. He has no dialogue on Sven, but he tells me The Armoury is 23 poles north of here, so I guess I've gone far enough west.

    

The tavern has its own notice board, some of which duplicate the Custom House. There are rules for roach racing, a gambling game the tavern offers. Sven has left another note, saying there's "something weird" happening in the city, and he'll meet me at the Troll's Arms. I can choose from a variety of unappetizing food and drink options. I don't see any option to take the quest to deliver the chest.

       

We have a roach burger, a brain, and two pie-looking items with horns sticking out of them.

       

The roach racing gambling game costs 1 gold piece and pays out 2, 3, 5, or 10 depending on which roach you bet on. Theoretically, the first roach (paying 2:1) has the best odds. I'm going to have to spend some time recording trials when I have more gold and time.

      

"Roach races" were in the PLATO Oubliette, which partly influenced Alternate Reality, but I don't remember roach races in Alternate Reality.

     

I save the game. Despite a bit of trepidation, I decide to head out on the streets at night, since I only have two days to return to the guild. A couple blocks north, a guy in a hood asks if I want to buy insurance. I say no, but then ask him where The Armoury is. "Here," he replies. I turn and, sure enough, the building next to me has a pair of crossed swords on it. Finding things in this game is going to be easier than I thought.

    

Despite the late hour, the door is open, but when I walk up to the "counter" inside, I get a message that it's closed. I wander upstairs and find a set of "Power Gauntlets" on a table. I guess maybe there are individual pieces of armor. I don't know much about this game's approach to ownership and thievery just yet, so I decline to take them. Instead, I head back outside to wait for daylight.

   

A werewolf wanders along as I wait. The Post had an article about how werewolves were becoming a problem on the streets at night. I hail him and he says "Grrrr" to all of my questions, but he otherwise doesn't seem interested in attacking me.

         

What is your trade?

        

In the morning, I enter The Armoury again. The notice board has a "message for blueboar" that the item I seek is no longer here. Instead, it gives me directions to a nearby place called the Charterhouse. The directions are solid, and pretty soon I'm in the Charterhouse, where I find the bronze helmet on a table upstairs. I grab it and hightail back to the Guild of Men at Arms, where I am welcomed as a Grunt. I decline to pay the fee to take on the next quest just yet.

 

I'm confused as to whether I'm in a plot to steal this helm, or whether I'm just picking it up.

         

Finding the bronze helmet. Note the image in the lower left.

I feel like your guild ought to have some hyphens in its name.

     

As Day 2 comes to a close, my food, water, and fatigue meters have hardly budged. I haven't officially fought any combats, but a couple came upon me--random NPCs with a bone to pick--while I was typing up paragraphs for this entry, and both were easy. Thus, Valour may have been inspired by Alternate Reality's mechanics, but it was definitely not inspired by its difficulty. 

    

Speaking of inspiration, Bethesda's Todd Howard has noted several times that The Elder Scrolls series was modeled partly on Legends of Valour. You can see it in its guilds, guild quests, and focus on skill development. It amuses me that The Elder Scrolls is only two steps away from Alternate Reality on the RPG family tree, particularly since Alternate Reality was influenced by the PLATO games. That's yet another major RPG family we can trace back to PLATO.

    

So far, I like the setup of the game, but I'm less enamored with its interface and mechanics. By next time, perhaps I'll have gotten used to the latter.

   

Time so far: 3 hours

Secrets of Bharas: Across the Mighty Ocean

The party exits its clipper to take on some enemies.

           

Secrets of Bharas continues to be a relatively well-designed game mechanically, but it's also turning into a bit of a grind. The game assigns "titles" at various level intervals; for instance, a Level 3 mage is a "Conjurer," and a Level 15 warrior is a "Hero." These titles go all the way up to Level 50. I don't know if that's a level cap or just a point after which there are no more new titles. Either way, I thought it might be a distant aspiration. Now, it's looking like I'll need to hit that level to survive the game.

     

My characters are about Level 18 now, and that's taken a lot of grinding. After the last entry, I kept up my pattern, looping around the world, fighting combats, purchasing the next weapon or armor upgrade whenever I had enough money, and testing myself against the dungeons every few loops. Throughout this process, I wondered what would happen first: being able to survive a dungeon, or running out of weapons and armor to purchase and still having enough for a clipper.

     

Early in the session.

      

It turned out to be the latter, although by only a hair. By Level 13, my characters could survive individual dungeon combats reliably. A few levels later, they could clear out a level. By Level 17, the only thing keeping them from fully exploring dungeons was running out of magic points necessary for keeping everyone alive with healing spells. I thus bought a ship, which seems to be the intended thing to do, since I technically haven't received any quests that require dungeon exploration yet.

     

Dungeons are relatively boring. Levels are a short 16 x 16 with a worm tunnel design and no navigation puzzles so far. You enter on an "elevator," which might immediately take you to other floors, or you may have to find a second and subsequent elevators deeper in the level. I followed one dungeon to Level 6 before I had to turn around, so I'm not sure what the maximum level is. Other than monsters, the only thing I've found in dungeons so far is treasure chests. They're rare but a good deal, proving as much gold as 20 combats.

       

This dungeon lets you access the first three levels from the entrance.

      

Combats don't seem to scale in difficulty in dungeons, but they do outdoors. Again, the scaling is of the maximum difficulty, not the minimum or average, which is how I like it. But the maximum is getting tougher. Spellcasting enemies appeared around Level 10, and enemies in transports (which have special attacks and defenses) appeared around Level 16. I started losing characters even if they started combat with full health. This prompted me to do a more thorough job at my own combat spellcasting.

        

Mixing a "Full Heal" spell.

         

Dungeon exploration allowed me to leapfrog a couple of weapon and armor categories, particularly since the equipment I was finding was +1. Eventually, I had everyone clad in plate mail, copper gauntlets, bronze helms, and large shields, wielding the best melee and missile weapons their classes could support. I had bought plenty of reagents for spell mixtures, and I still had plenty of money. It was time to purchase a ship.

    

Ships come in four varieties: single-mast, double-mast, "gallion," and clipper ships. Clippers are the most expensive, but since they're not that much more than the lowest class of ship, I figured I might as well start at the top. There are also land transports--carts and chariots--that I haven't yet explored.

      

Purchasing a ship--a milestone in any game..

       

Boarding and disembarking from a transport is needlessly complex. You have to go into the combat formation and drag characters on and off the transport. If you enter combat while in the transport, you use the transport's weapons (I'm not yet sure how this works for carts and chariots, but enemies in those transports seem to have some kind of missile weapon). For characters in a ship, this tends to work pretty well. They no longer get individual turns, but the ship's weapon is a cannon, and it reliably kills one enemy per round, no matter how tough, which isn't necessarily true of my regular attacks. Any damage is taken by the transport (which has its own hit points, and can be repaired in towns), not the characters. The characters still get the same experience and money for killing enemies this way.

       

From Surya to Dharthi, in the shade of Wairan . . .

        

Yajiv the Big-Nosed, the seer, had asked me to see him after I purchased a ship. His dialogue changed to offer this:

      

Three lands remain unexplored; these are Wairan, Nadhi, and Jalamuki. [Ed. It's rare to find a properly-used semicolon in a CRPG; it's particularly noticeable after all the mistakes in Defender of Boston.] Jalamuki is by far the most dangerous, but your travels will eventually lead you there. The land of Nadhi consists of several large islands, all strewn by great rivers. On the other hand, the land of Wairan is a vast desert. Nadhi lies to the east and Wairan to the southeast.

Seek out the Gem of Vision, the Amulet of the Third Eye, and the Helmet of Goat Empathy. I will speak with you then.

      

I've heard nothing of these artifacts, but I assume they're in the dungeons and I'll hear more about them in the towns on other continents. In these objects, we see some Indian themes that go beyond the simple use of Hindi names that has characterized the game so far. In interests of cultural respect, I have avoided snickering at the "Helmet of Goat Empathy," though I admit it took some effort.

    

Later dialogue suggests that Gems of Vision and Amulets of the Third Eye are not unique artifacts.

      

With the visit to Yajiv out of the way, I took to the seas. Nothing seems to attack you on the water. I expected vast ocean distances between continents, but in fact the next continent is on the next screen. The six continents of the world are arranged tightly together in this configuration:

      

The lands of Bharas.

       

The world wraps, so you can get from Surya to Jalamuki by going north. I decided to explore Dharthi first, the land of the dwarves, but I was discouraged by early combats on the continent. My ship's cannons didn't perform as well as in Surya; I couldn't even hit most of the enemies I encountered. You can't cast spells while on a ship; you have to move the ship to land and then have the characters disembark. Also, the computer never casts spells if you leave combat in its control--one of the weaknesses to an otherwise impressive autocombat calibration system.

   

Spells are the saviors of large, otherwise-long combats, and I wonder if by the end of the game, I'm going to wish I'd made a party of three mages and three healers. There aren't many spells in the game, but a few of them--particularly the mage's "Vallum Flammae" (flame wind) and the healer's "Somnum" (sleep)--make combat a lot easier. I still have three spells to acquire, but I have to learn these from NPCs rather than gaining them automatically by leveling up.

        

"Flame Wind" streaks towards my enemies.

      

Dharthi looks like a large, unified continent, but in fact a river cuts through the middle and divides it in two. I scouted the coast and find the town of Amiens in the southeast; I know there are at least three other cites, Parthenay, Normandy, and Toulon, plus the dwarven palace.

   

As I start to speak with the NPCs in Dharthi, I again realize that there's a complexity to NPCs in this game that we've never quite seen, not even in Ultima. A lot of them have authentically interesting perspectives and stories. The first one I meet is an elf named Dolpon. He has a long screed about how since the Summit, all the people of the world have started to think of themselves as citizens of the world rather than their nations of origin. Travel has gotten so much easier between continents that people can find better lives for themselves in faraway places. Dolpon himself came to Dharthi from Hawa because in Hawa, he had trouble escaping his family's reputation for piracy. A dwarf woman named Nolipa is fiercely proud of her nation's development of healing spells, but she didn't have the magical skill to become a healer herself. A dwarf named Nevaal has been traumatized by his service as a soldier and now wanders the land as an explorer, content that he will never have to kill anyone again. As with 2088, these NPCs are written by educated, thoughtful developers who use them to make both subtle and overt commentaries on politics and society. They almost feel a bit out-sized for such a limited game. 

    

Speaking of out-sized.

       

Many of them convey essential information, of course. From a dwarf named Kilthorpe, I learn about the history of the coal mines in Dharthi, now abandoned. These seem to be the continent's only dungeon. Loferrin, a half-elf, half-dwarf, tells me that Yaniv the Powerful will only speak to someone who has the Orb of Sparks; I can get one from his former student, Sita, in Orthos. 

    

Miscellaneous notes:

    

• A lot of the NPCs talk about how reagent prices vary from town to town, just like they did in Ultima IV, and how by noting the prices, you can get the best deals. While this is true, reagents are never so expensive that it's worth trying to keep track of relative costs.

• Having all my characters' names start with "VI" seemed like a funny homage. Now I wish I'd varied them more. It's tough to remember who's who.

• Death reduces the character's maximum health for a while even after resurrection. The game notifies you where you've "returned to full health."

• Selling weapons, which you often find at the end of combats, is one way to make a lot of money fast. However, there doesn't seem to be any way to sell magic weapons.

• Both Dharthi and Surya have pyramids in the landscape which, when you try to enter them, ask which god we pray to. "All" is filled in by default, but it doesn't accomplish anything.

      

Maybe I should try "None."

      

As I close, I've just found the second dwarf town, Normandy. I'm having mixed feelings about the game. It's competently programmed, and interesting for the reasons I've outlined, but also a bit padded. An Ultima-esque romp through a few islands, towns, and dungeons should take closer to the dozen hours I've invested already, not the 25 or 30 that the game seems destined for. I'll give it one more session to see if I can get anywhere with the plot.

   

Time so far: 12 hours