The Legacy: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

                  

The Legacy

United Kingdom

Magnetic Scrolls (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 3 June 2020
Date Ended: 17 June 2020

Total Hours: 25
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 39
Ranking at time of posting: 310/379 (82%)

          

Summary:

A first-person adventure game set in a haunted house, The Legacy tries to blend point-and-click adventure gameplay, with inventory-based puzzles, with the tiled movement, real-time combat, and character growth of an RPG of the Dungeon Master line. In the end, some design choices make the game not work very well as an RPG, and it has a frustrating interface. I still slightly recommend it for the satisfying story.

           

*****

          
For me, adventure games usually start out fun. They tend to have more immersive settings than RPGs (at least of this period), so I enjoy absorbing the backstory and lore. I start exploring and mapping. I solve a few light puzzles and begin to feel good about myself. But there almost always comes a point in which I start to find the game increasingly unwieldy--a point where it has too many rooms, too many objects, too many puzzles, to the extent that even if I'm not technically blocked, I still start to feel mired.

I reached that point with The Legacy shortly after the last session. I can point to nothing technically wrong that the game did. It just kind of exhausted me. In particular, knowing that I was going to have to travel to other dimensions started as a mildly interesting prospect, then an annoying one, then an (illogically) enraging one. I mean, this mansion is already the biggest goddamned mansion in the entire world. Seven floors of it weren't enough?
          

By the end of the game, Irene was wearing a skirt, samurai armor, and a demon mask.

        

I don't often get the same feeling with RPGs, which is why I'm tending, towards the end of my experience, to think of The Legacy as more an adventure game with RPG elements than a true hybrid. The problem is that while The Legacy does feature experience and the associated development of skills based on that experience, none of the skill-building seems to really matter. Enemies don't get notably easier as you increase your skill with weapons. As for other skills, there's rarely a threshold above which you must build a skill to accomplish a task. Instead, each task has a slightly higher chance of success the higher the skill. So doubling your "Mechanical" skill means you only have to try five times to unjam that weapon instead of ten. RPGs tend to feature characters that grow more markedly in power. Aside from having more resources, my Legacy character didn't seem that much stronger at the end of the game than at the beginning.
 
There is one exception to that statement, and that is in the area of spells. The spellcasting system in The Legacy is so flawed that I can't believe the developers let it out the door. The basic problem is that they've populated the game with about 20 interesting and useful spells, and then they make you paranoid about casting any of them by making spell power a precious resource, reclaimable only (or almost only) through the use of a limited number of magic crystals.

There are times in the game that it seems like you have way too many crystals to ever worry about running out. But then you reach the lower levels of the basement and find a dozen or so magically-locked doors that will only open to "Key of the Shadow Lord"--and not just one successful casting, but sometimes multiple castings at the highest power. There were times that a single door wiped out my entire magic bar. The paltry two crystals that I'd saved "in reserve" turned out to be laughably inadequate when I started encountering these doors. Soon, I was wishing that I had never cast a single spell the rest of the game--that I had saved all my energy for those damned doors, and all my experience for improving my skill with the spell. When I ended the game, I didn't have a single crystal remaining--that's how close I came to not being able to win at all, despite your warnings and despite playing (I thought) conservatively with magic.

The annoying thing is that there are some great spells, offensive and defensive, that would have been useful throughout the game. A few tweaks would have created an adventure game with an excellent RPG-style magic system, such as allowing spell points to regenerate over time, or allowing the character to rest more often to recover both health and spell points. Instead, they made a game that would put a large percentage of players in a "walking dead" situation in the last tenth of the game.
  
The resting system is so bizarre, in fact, that I think it must be bugged. In 25 hours of gameplay, I only got explicitly tired once, and was only able to rest twice. It's like there was no difference between game time and real time. Similarly bugged is the food system: I was able to eat maybe four or five times, leaving a dozen or so unopened food items. I didn't particularly want to have to eat more often (especially since food is finite), but resting is a key method of health and mana recovery in most RPGs, and a true hybrid would have been more lenient.

The story didn't develop a lot from the summary I gave last time. The builder of the house, Elias Winthrop, made a deal with the dark god Belthegor to bind his family to service. Over the centuries, descendants of Elias, mad or evil, expanded on the house, made deals with lesser gods allied with Belthegor, and ensured Belthegor's return to the material plane every 50 years. The current year's event was meant to be special, with the last descendants of Winthrop's slated for sacrifice so that Belthegor could enter the plane permanently.
            

The areas of The Legacy

           
The game ultimately consisted of ten 20 x 20 areas, a reasonably sized "dungeon" even for an RPG. You have a lot of latitude in the order of exploration, and given that you find items in all areas useful in others, I don't suppose there's a single "right" order except probably to clear the ground floor and upper floor first. In short:
           

• The Ground Floor introduces you to the game and its conventions, including your first crude weapons. Zombies roam the corridors; they're easy to kill, and you find a fetish that allows you to walk past them with impunity.

• The Upper Floor starts to deliver more information about the setting and its story. The area is crawling with ghosts, who can be addressed individually or en masse through the burning of the painting that binds them.

• The third floor is somewhat nonsensically an Asylum with sterile hallways and padded cells. You encounter a lot more trouble with locked and secret doors on the level, which is prowled by blobs of fire, giant floating two-headed leeches, and an insane relative in a straitjacket.

• The fourth floor is a Museum (though not public) of powerful artifacts. You learn here the rituals that you need to banish the dark gods, and you acquire some of your most powerful equipment. There are many puzzles that must be solved by returning plaques and items strewn about the mansion to their proper places in the museum. Enemies are floor slimes (almost impossible to step around) and these disgusting crab things, the latter of which can be destroyed en masse with a ritual involving statues.

         

Returning plaques to the museum pedestals allowed me to take items on those pedestals.

           

• The Mausoleum is full of secret doors and has the bodies of former residents of the house, most alive and animated as skeletons. Kill one, and it rises again the next time you trespass on its bones unless you use "coffin dust" (which is in limited supply) to destroy it permanently. You have to kill all the enemies to get the Golden Torc, an artifact necessary to win the game.

             

Cutting into a skeleton with a chainsaw.

           

• The Egyptian Tomb is full of magically-locked doors. The primary goal is to summon and destroy the Karcist--the transformed spirit of the house's builder, Elias Winthrop. You have to fight your way through "sonic mummies," capable of damaging you even through doors. You have to summon the Karcist with the "Chinese Coins" you find on the Asylum level, and once summoned, you can kill him in regular combat or by first finding his heart and destroying it in front of him.

           

Old Elias changed his tune quickly once I showed him his heart.

        

• The Basement has a variety of demons and supplies you with information and weapons necessary for the lower levels. One important chamber lets you create an artifact necessary for the final level.

          

Making the Eye of Agala in a basement room.

         

• The corridors of the Sub-Basement are patrolled by the dark god Alberoth. You have to use an astrolabe (from the museum) in an observatory in the Egyptian tomb to banish him. There are also burrowing worm creatures to kill.

• The Sea Demon Caves are the home to walking fish creatures that demand human sacrifices, and their humanoid "servitors." You have to get past the dark jellyfish god Melchior (I don't believe you can kill him, but you can get him to ignore you with the Golden Torc). There are a number of teleporters, including an annoying one that takes you all the way back to the ground floor, but ultimately you find the exit to the Astral Plane and the final battle.

         

One of the sea demons, which hopefully you can see better than I can.

           
It's notable that the game gives you several approaches for conquering each level. I adopted a more classic RPG approach and insisted on killing every enemy that could be killed, and this wasn't much of a problem after the first half of the game. I ultimately exhausted the ammunition for most of the firearms, but on a lower level, I found a chainsaw that never seemed to run out of gas (I was mindful to turn it off after each combat, which helped)--and there are three or four gas cans in the game. The chainsaw got me through almost the entirety of the mausoleum and museum. I then followed some instructions in the museum to perform a ritual that made the ancient spirit of a samurai appear and embed his two swords with magic. His katana served me the rest of the game; few enemies survived more than two hits with it. On the same level, I also found a suit of samurai armor that served as my primary protection from then on, plus a demon mask that made me look like a lunatic but also strengthened my attacks.
          

A little ritual provides the best weapons in the game.

       
But the game also gives you a way around most enemies. Sometimes, they can simply be avoided, as in the sonic mummies, which will leave you alone if you find and carry the "boom box" (remember those?). Sometimes, there's a puzzle you can solve to destroy them all at once, and sometimes there's a weapon to which they are uniquely vulnerable. For instance, the worms in the sub-basement die quickly from blasts of rock salt from a modified shotgun. But by the time I reached this area, my katana was cleaving through everything so nicely that I barely bothered.
            

Instead of fighting this servitor, I can make myself look like him by wearing his robes and putting a squid on my head (seriously).

        
While you get some experience for killing individual monsters, you get more from solving puzzles, so the game doesn't encourage you along an RPG mindset.

I misunderstood the nature of the Ethereal Plane until almost the end of the game. While I'd been seeing doors to it throughout the house--and you can open more by casting "Dimensional Portal" wherever you see a glyph on the wall--I wasn't sure what its purpose was. I wasn't even sure that all the portals went to the same place. I assumed it was some place I'd have to visit for a penultimate or ultimate showdown. Instead--although it has some monsters and one NPC--it's more a method of fast travel around the game. If you take time to map the exits (which look like cubes), you can quickly get from, say, the sub-basement to the museum without having to find all the stairways. I was only an hour from winning when I realized how the plane worked and I thus missed its benefits for most of the game.
        

The Ethereal Plane with one of its monsters and a portal to its left.

         
A few notable encounters and puzzles:
     

• A "Magician of the Right Hand Path" named Charles Wenlock approached me in the Ethereal Plane. His "inner self" had been trapped there, and he needed to draw on my energies to escape. I said yes, even though I didn't exactly have a surplus of magic power. In return, he gave me some advice for surviving the Astral Plane and the final confrontation with Belthegor, plus a spell. The spell was automatically "implanted in my mind," so I didn't notice which one it was.

           

One of the few "role playing" choices in the game.

  

• In the Sea Demon caves, there was some kind of altar on which a stone was surrounded by a glass shield. Fiddling with the shield produced a message that it resonated with a particular note. This was a clue to use a flute that I'd previously found to play the same note, shattering the glass. It was still difficult to take the stone; electric tendrils going up and down two columns zapped me if I didn't time it just right.

         

Something feels Lovecraftian about this level.

    

• A juicy diary entry indicated that Josiah Maitland (grandson of Elias Winthrop) was poisoned by his wife for somehow "tricking [her] into marriage vows." 

• A note indicated that an entire Boston Police squad was killed when they tried to investigate the sea demon caves in the 1920s.

             
The final confrontation takes place on the Astral Plane. Fire blobs are back, and you probably don't have a fire extinguisher by this point. Even worse, teleportation cubes roam the hallways and transport you to other levels if they hit you. There are also energy barriers that require an artifact called the Eye of Agala, which you have to make in a ritual in the basement. Finally, Belthegor himself is behind an illusory wall. My magic was so low that I couldn't explore the entire level. I had to take a save at the beginning and keep staking out in different directions, reloading if I didn't find anything interesting, until I finally found the way to Belthegor.
          

From the Sea Demons' caves to the Astral Plain.

        
Belthegor can kill you instantly if you don't have the Golden Torc from the mausoleum. Even with it, you want to load up on all the magic resistance items and spells that you have before you enter. I don't know if he's immune to regular weapons or just extremely resistant, but I was only able to kill him with spells. Fortunately, the final battle is otherwise easy because your mana bar suddenly becomes inexhaustible. You just need to keep casting offensive spells (I alternated "Flames of Desolation" and "Obsidian Shards of Annihilation," which is perhaps the greatest spell name ever) and pound away at "Elixir of Health" if your health gets low.
        

I ended up fighting Belthegor three times because the game kept crashing during the final cinematic. This was the easiest of the battles. I didn't even have to cast "Elixir of Health" once.

         
Once Belthegor is defeated, a brief cinematic brings the game to a close. A storm gathers over the mansion, and its ghosts are freed or sucked up into it, depending on your interpretation.
   

This is the brightest shot I could capture.

         

Demonic eyes and skeletal faces appear in the clouds. Lightning bolts and tornadoes pummel the mansion until it is all destroyed or sucked away. A newspaper front page closes the game, suggesting the character was able to sell the property and finance a lengthy cruise. As the DOS prompt appears, you're given instructions to give a special name to the final save, perhaps anticipating a sequel.

       

I think that's a little unfair to the police. It's not their responsibility to explain the noncriminal destruction of property.

                

When I was done with the game, I reviewed some walkthroughs for what I missed. I never finished returning all of the items to the museum, including a plaque for a shuriken and a demonic skull, but it doesn't appear that would have done me any good. The "Hand of Glory," lit like a candle, would have kept the slimes from attacking me on the museum level. Oh, well. On the Sea Demon level, I could have gotten the servitors to avoid me by dressing like one of them, and I could have gotten the sea demons themselves to avoid me by burning an incense. I actually intuited both of these puzzles from the available clues, but by this point I was having fun just slashing everything with my katana.

         

I wasted a lot of time reloading on the Astral Plane because I forgot to put on the crystal glasses Charles Wenlock gave me; they would have prevented random teleportation. There are rooms on both the Upper Level and Asylum level that I never was able to enter. I never found the spells "Iron Fist of Agatta" or "Swift Limbs of Mercury." And I didn't unlock most of the glyphs with "Dimension Door." I think it's a measure of a good game that you can skip some content and still make it.

       

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

     

• 6 points for the game world, perhaps the best part of the game. The mansion is suitably creepy, the backstory (while a bit derivative) suitably detailed. I like the way that you slowly learn the mansion's history through scraps of notes, diary pages, letters, and so on. 

          

The game's epistolary revelations never get old.

           

• 4 points for character creation and development. The mechanics are sound. I like that you can choose among multiple defined characters or create your own. I like that you can spend your experience directly on skills. I don't like that the latter stages of the game require magic and thus punish you for not having invested heavily there, nor that development in other skills isn't well-reflected in the game. This is not Quest for Glory, where you can choose your strength and role-play that type of character. With just a few tweaks, it could have been.

           

Irene's skills at the end of the game. Very few reached 50% on their bars and a couple never did anything.

          

• 4 points for NPC interaction. Again, the mechanics are good, and I appreciated the dialogue options, but there are only a few people with whom you can interact.

         

Dialogue options with an explorer in the Ethereal Plane.

         

• 6 points for encounters and foes. This was another strong part of the game. I particularly liked that you could intuit the solution to most puzzles, but if you had trouble, some document or NPC dialogue would eventually spell it out for you. The puzzles were varied and fun, though not as much as some other adventure games I've enjoyed. The monsters are well-chosen for the setting and have their own strengths and weaknesses you have to figure out.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat is nothing special--hit or aim. The magic system could have been special if it hadn't been so suppressed by the game's miserly approach to magic points. 

         

Slashing mummies on the Egyptian Tomb level.

       

• 3 points for equipment. Most of it is puzzle-solving. You get two pieces of armor, a couple of magic upgrades, and far too many possibilities for weapons. I would have preferred the game content itself with one firearm than to leave so much specialized ammunition scattered around.

• 0 points for no economy.

• 3 points for a main quest with some side areas.

           

Attacked by the dark god Melchior.

       

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. It gets almost all of those for graphics (good enough for what the game was trying to achieve) and sound, including (though I rarely rate it) a decent music score that accompanies the game rather than overwhelming it. The interface was mostly awful. Half the time you go to click on something, the game either ignores you or clicks on something else. The act of putting down a gun and equipping a spellbook sometimes took several minutes of fruitless clicking, often while an enemy was attacking. The limited inventory discourages carrying alternatives to most weapons or armor. Ideas like "document wallets" are only good if there's enough space for all your documents. Having movable/resizable windows isn't a bad idea, though I didn't make much use of it. Really all I liked from the interface was the automap.

• 5 points for gameplay. It's about as nonlinear as a game with "levels" could be. As with most adventure games, I'm vaguely curious to play it a second time as a speed run, but otherwise I don't see it offering rewards for a second pass. The challenge level (aside from the magic thing) and length were just about right.

     

That gives us a final score of 39. That seems about right. I definitely recommend it for its story, atmosphere, and encounters, but in the end it's hard to call it a true "hybrid." Its RPG side is simply too underdeveloped, and some key choices that would otherwise mark it as a good RPG turn out to be illusions. 

              

There is nothing corresponding to that lower screen capture in the game.

           

Allen Greenberg covered The Legacy in the October 1993 Computer Gaming World. His review is mostly positive, though his conclusion is an unremarkable statement that some may like it and some won't. If you get a chance, take a look at his review (starts on Page 30). It strikes me as an example of awful writing, but the kind where it's hard to explain exactly why it's awful. Every sentence has an awkward or uninspired word selection, an awkward use of the passive voice, a joke that doesn't quite work, or more words than are necessary. I don't know; I may just be in a mood. The bigger issue is that Greenberg clearly isn't as familiar with genre conventions as Scorpia and thus somewhat misses the point of The Legacy, which is that it's a hybrid that manages to be a hybrid better than, say, B.A.T. but not as well as, say, Quest for Glory.

        

European magazines rated it in the 70s and 80s. The best review from the conventional selection of magazines comes from the December 1992 PC Joker, which praises the interface, the sound and spell effects, and the overall attempt to hybridize the two genres. A few magazines compared it favorably to Elvira, which I would agree is probably its closest "competitor." One German review (April 1993 Play Time) argued that too many items are scattered randomly in the house, hurting the game's realism. I hadn't thought of that, but in retrospect I agree. The point was made well in a more recent review by blogger Roland Zarate on "Late to the Game": "The mansion makes [little sense] as an actual house. There are hundreds of rooms but no kitchen, the only bathrooms are on the east side of the second floor, and a fair portion of the rooms have literally nothing inside them."

       

MicroProse bought and closed Magnetic Scrolls the same year that The Legacy was released, so there was no sequel. The manual credits Jim Bambra for the "RPG system design" of the game; he later co-formed Pivotal Games and worked on mostly action titles, his credits ending in the early 2000s. Stephen Hand is given credit for the "plot design" and "adventure design." His further credits, from several companies, are mostly action and racing games, with the notable exception of design credits on Warlords III: Reign of Heroes (1997) and Warlords III: Darklords Rising (1998). Just a few years ago, Magnetic Scrolls founder Hugh Steers co-founded Strand Games, which has re-released several Magnetic Scrolls titles for mobile devices, including The Pawn, Guild of Thieves, and Jinxter. Whether The Legacy is on their list is anyone's guess.

         

As for my list, we move on to Amberstar while I devote occasional time to finishing Final Fantasy but most of it to finishing The Black Gate. A Japanese eroge titled Mad Paradox just appeared at the bottom of the list, bringing us ever closer to finally finishing 1992.

    

Game 368: The Legacy (1992)

I bought the GOG version, which says nothing about a Realm of Terror.

           

The Legacy

United Kingdom

Magnetic Scrolls (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 3 June 2020

   
The Legacy is a rare horror-themed RPG. We've had a few, including Don't Go Alone (1989), Elvira (1990), Elvira II (1991), and Waxworks (1992). I guess you could toss House of Usher (1980) in there, too. Most of these games are adventure-RPG hybrids and the one thing that they all have in common is that none of them are scary. They have horror themes, but none of them are truly horrifying the way a good Hitchcock movie is. I never screamed during any of them, the same way that no Dungeons and Dragons player ever screams at the appearance of a skeleton.
   
The reason, I think, is that the RPG enemy exists specifically to be fought, and usually in large numbers. The ghost, zombie, skeleton, demon, or whatever in a truly scary film or game is something of a mystery. It's unclear whether the protagonist will be able to defeat him with conventional means, or indeed any means. And the protagonist probably isn't even trying to defeat it--probably didn't even want anything to do with all of this in the first place. When the ghost appears briefly in the mirror, it's a viscerally scary moment because you don't know what it is or what it can do. You didn't even get a good look at it. The RPG ghost, on the other hand, has a fixed number of hit points and can be defeated with a variety of spells or magic weapons as it's spelled out in the monster manual--and you're probably going to fight 20 of them. The horror RPG faces the same problem as the zombie film: you can make the first one scary, maybe, but not the fiftieth.
             

A shot from The Legacy's opening cinematic. It's a dark game.

         
I think horror also requires a certain attention to location and story that the typical RPG hasn't provided through the current era. You can set a good horror game in a gothic mansion with 15 rooms, each full of lore. It's harder to do this in six 20 x 20 levels of similar wall textures. It is thus not surprising to me that most famous horror games have been adventure games. You can take time to craft more thorough stories and locations with adventure games. You don't need to supply dozens of foes because you don't need the character to build skills or earn experience points.

Horror games rely more heavily on graphics and sound than other genres. You could write a fantastic horror-themed text adventure, but I doubt you could make a player scream. The same goes for the primitive graphics of the 1980s. It wasn't until the early 1990s that both graphics and sound (including music) advanced enough on the personal computer that developers could create true atmospheres in games and make a player really feel something in his gut. This is when we started to see an explosion of games that still define the genre: Alone in the Dark (1992), The 7th Guest (1993), Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet (1993), BloodNet (1993), The Dark Eye (1995), and others that you'll undoubtedly fill me in on because this isn't really my area.
          

The character approaches the mansion.

        
The Legacy comes out of this era, and the best I can say is that it's about as scary as a horror adventure-RPG hybrid could be, which means not very scary. Sure, the first time you open a door and there's a zombie, you maybe jump a little, but pretty soon zombies are just another thing to be killed so you can earn experience. The creators did a good job with the mansion except that, as with most RPGs, they made it a bit too big to plausibly be a mansion. The backstory is just a little too derivative of things you've already read or watched. It is horror-themed rather than horrifying.
   
If you can get past that, it's not a bad game. I had a very enjoyable first session. Mechanically, it's not unlike a first-person Quest for Glory. The adventure side of the game has a mystery to solve and a variety of puzzles necessary to solve it. The RPG side has a selection of skills and attributes that increase through use or through direct allocation of experience points. There's enough "extra space" with wandering foes to satisfy the RPG need for combat and character growth. These are the types of features you need for a true hybrid, and not just an adventure game "with RPG elements."
    

The Winthrop Mansion, as given in the game manual.

          
The Legacy comes from U.K. developer Magnetic Scrolls, a relatively long-lived creator of graphical adventures, including The Pawn (1985), Jinxter (1987), The Guild of Thieves (1987; I vaguely remember playing this one in the 1980s), Corruption (1988), Fish (1988), Myth (1989), and Wonderland (1990). The Legacy is the company's first game with RPG aspirations, although it uses the same basic interface as Wonderland. The commonly-given subtitle, Realm of Terror, appears only on some boxes and not, as far as I can tell, on any manuals or title screens, so I've left it off as per my policy. A lot of sites give it as a 1993 game, but plenty of reviews attest to a 1992 release in Europe followed by a 1993 release in North America.

It took me a while to get a screenshot illuminated by lightning. You can clearly see this is not the same house as in the manual.

    
The main character is the last surviving descendant of Elias Winthrop (1599-1662), who built the Winthrop Mansion in 1630. The style of house depicted in the manual was built nowhere in New England, probably nowhere in the world, until the mid-1800s. The manual tries to justify this with talk of "extensions," as if it wouldn't have been easier to just build a new house than to incorporate a First Period home into a Gothic Revival. Anyway, at some point, the mansion acquired some kind of supernatural curse; the manual claims that Edgar Allen Poe experienced it while visiting a friend, and that it clearly inspired his House of Usher. During his visit--in which the entire family had become sickly and insane--he saw an apparition that screamed, "Melchior! Free me! Perform the rite!"
         

The family tree from the manual is also given in a piece of paper in-game.

          
As the game begins, a newspaper clipping claims that three people are "missing" in some kind of undefined "tragedy." These three are likely Robert Prentiss, his wife Catherine, and his mother Karen, as all of their dates of death are given in 1992 in the family tree included in the manual. Karen had married Nathan Prentiss (died 1964), a descendant of Elias Winthrop through his maternal grandmother. The game's main character is given as a cousin of Robert, a descendant of Nathan's sister Sarah, although a graphical "break" in Sarah's line makes it difficult to determine how much of a descendant.
   
The game comes with eight pre-made characters from which you choose one. Each has different levels of strength, knowledge, dexterity, stamina, and willpower. Those first three attributes each come with five related skills, such as "Brawling" and "Lift" for strength, "Electronics" and "Mechanics" for knowledge, and "Firearms" and "Throw" for dexterity. Willpower determines your magic ability and whether you start with any spells. The language of the newspaper clipping is slightly modified for each:
       

• Brad Norris, a sophomore at New York University. Captain of the NYU ski team and member of the Debating Society, Norris is reportedly "planning a mondo party." He has fairly even skills and attributes but no magic at all. I don't have any theories to the origins of the name.

          

Brad's statistics.

        

• Charles Weiss of Bangor, Maine (yay!), a magician, astrologer, and student of the occult. He has a noodle incident called "the Arlington 'sacrifice' scandal" in his past. Balanced in most skills, comes with two spells. The name belongs to a founding employee at Oracle, but I'm not sure he would have been well-known in 1992. 

• Charlotte Kane, a New York businesswoman who may be planning to turn the mansion into a luxury hotel and conference center. Strong in knowledge-based skills and comes with "Crimson Mists of Myamoto," a protection spell. No idea on the name.

• Lucy Weston, a sophomore at UCLA, sorority girl, tennis and volleyball champion. Heavy in strength, dexterity, and associated skills; has virtually no knowledge and no magic. Her name is taken from the character in Bram Stoker's Dracula.

• Professor Henry Jones, head of the Department of American History at Pennsylvania State University, authority on the Salem Witch Trials. Strongest in knowledge and its skills; not so bad in dexterity; comes with "Sight of the Walker," which seems to have something to do with dispelling illusions. Naturally named after Indiana Jones's father.

• Jane Olson, a New York daily Post reporter. Strong in all skills but has no magic. Probably an homage to James Olsen of Superman fame given her profession.

          

Jane's version of the newspaper clipping.

         

• Major Robert "Boomer" Kowalski, retired from the U.S. Marine Corps after decorated service in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf. Strongest in strength and dexterity skills; has no magic. No idea on the name.

• Isobel Gowdie, the most mysterious of the characters, described only as a "widow" with an ancestor who lived in the area. Balanced but weak in all skills and attributes but comes with both "Flames of Desolation" and "Sight of the Dark Walker." Her name comes from the famous Scottish self-confessed witch of the late 17th century.

          
You can also edit one of the characters, change the name, and define your own. I turned Isobel into Irene, giving her enough willpower for "Flames of Desolation" and "Sight of the Dark Walker," otherwise favoring knowledge skills but putting a few points into "Firearms."
      

My character.

        
The game's opening cinematic shows a car arriving at the mansion on a stormy night. Glyphs on the main gate posts glow as the gate opens to admit the car. As the car approaches the front of the mansion, we see a light on in the cupola. (The mansion shown in the cinematic, it must be said, looks very little like the one in the manual except for the size and a certain dedication to symmetry.) The front door opens into an entry hall, and the view immediately goes up the split staircase and into a dead-end hall before the viewer is consumed by some tentacles coming out of the floor.
 
Gameplay itself begins in the entry hall, and right away we see that The Legacy features some excellent period graphics. There will be banal, repetitive textures in some of the hallways and less important rooms, but when the game really needs to convey a sense of place like an "entry hall" or a "study," the artists are up to the challenge, and I find myself wondering again why more era titles (e.g., Wizardry, the Gold Box series) couldn't have offered this blend of the generic and the specific when the occasion called for it.
          

Gameplay begins in the entry hall.

        
The engine, known as Magnetic Windows, brings an Amiga or Atari ST-style windows GUI into the game. The windows for the character portrait, exploration, messages, and automap can all be moved, overlapped, and re-sized. Most actions are accomplished with the mouse, in somewhat obvious ways, for instance clicking on an object and dragging into an open inventory space in the character portrait, or double-clicking on an object to use it. Right-clicking on things brings up a contextual menu, and right-clicking on the "desktop" behind the windows lets you save the game and adjust settings. I wish there were more keyboard backups for some of the actions, such as the "Hit" and "Aim" buttons in combat, but one thing the developers did anticipate is the difficulty using the mouse with the right hand while moving (as in most games) with the numberpad or arrows. Instead, they mapped movement to the QWEASD cluster, which works relatively well.
            

The various windows and game options.

          
The game uses tiles in which you can turn and face any direction. Occasionally, for an especially detailed room, you transition to a single-screen view in which you can't rotate, but that's rare.
 
The entry hall is 3 x 3, and the game is spatially sophisticated enough to let you walk under the two upper parts of the split staircase. The front door is magically locked behind me. There are a couple of tables, a statue of a demonic creature behind a glass display case, and a painting from 1662 depicting "the burning of a warlock at the stake." I am compelled by my history to note that if this was supposed to be a real event, it must have happened in continental Europe because there is no record of anyone accused of witchcraft having been burned in North America, and even England had stopped the practice well before 1662.
          

The painting in question.

       
There are also a couple of notes on the floor, and as I explored the ground floor of the mansion, I would continue to find more of them. The first, slipped under the front door, was from E. Croxley & Co. Realtors, welcoming me to the house and noting that some of the furniture had been sold to pay for the family's debts. But the others are from a "Marcus Roberts of Boston," who clearly preceded me in his explorations of the mansion and has presumably died there. His notes so far have conveyed the following:
            

• The mansion's various historical owners have been given to "vile depravities."

• Every 50 years, disappearances have been recorded in nearby towns at the same time that "strange lights [were] reported in the skies above the house." The last batch was in 1943.

• Roberts believed the house is possessed by an "infernal entity that is preparing to break through to our world."

• As he explored, Roberts discovered portals to other planes through which "demons and other monstrous beings" enter the house, particularly on the second floor. I also have him to thank for all the zombies roaming the ground floor, as he apparently released them from the mausoleum.

• At some point, Roberts decided that it was necessary to find something called the Golden Torc, apparently in the lower levels.

           

One of the messages from the mysterious Marcus Roberts.

        
I started exploring using my normal "right wall" approach and soon found a zombie in a corridor east of the entry hall. Irene had begun the game with no weapons, just a spellbook, so I tried out "Flames of Desolation." It took three castings to kill the creature. There were more zombies later on, and I ran out of spell power after killing three of them. Spell power doesn't regenerate on its own. Neither do hit points. The manual is a bit cagey on how exactly you do regenerate these bars. I eventually found a first aid kit that helps with health. Spell points are supposed to be regenerated with meditating, but you apparently have to find some special crystals first. You otherwise do occasionally need to rest and eat, but you can only rest in rooms with a special symbol that I haven't found yet.
             

I cast a fireball at a zombie.

          
As I ran out of spell points, I tried attacking zombies with my fists. This worked out for a few of them. For physical attacks, you just have options to "hit" or "aim" and then hit. Hitting temporarily depletes an accuracy bar, so you can't hit a bunch of times in a row without losing accuracy with each successive strike.

You can't really do a "combat waltz" because enemies in melee range are in your square, not an adjacent one. Trying to side-step to another square requires passing a roll to escape combat first. But I did manage to somehow get one enemy stuck facing perpendicular to me, so I could beat him without retaliation. Later, I couldn't replicate this. I'd really like to find a weapon, but I've got nothing so far. When you attack with no weapon, I'm not sure if the game treats whatever you're holding as a weapon (e.g., a flashlight) or whether it assumes you're temporarily dropping that object and using a fist.

I didn't notice that my fist attacks increased my "Brawling" skill, but my experience bar did increase. It seems to increase a little bit with almost every successful action, including exploring new areas, finding objects, and defeating foes. You can then spend the experience directly on skills or spell power, but I've just let it accumulate for now, I guess waiting for the first time I try to use a skill like "Electronics" and it goes poorly.
    
I've been relying mostly on the auto-map so far. Based on it, I'm guessing that the main floor is 20 x 20. The automap annotates rooms and doors relatively well, but it doesn't do anything with objects, stairs, or puzzles, so I'm probably going to restart and create my own maps, since I use the mapping process to annotate things like locked doors and unsolved puzzles.
   
You'll be happy to know that I've left the music on. The main theme isn't really very melodic or insistent. It basically consists of three lugubrious bass notes, a pause, and then either a succession of percussive beats or a non-melodic flutter in a higher register. It has a clear "haunted house" vibe and sets the atmosphere well.
       
I didn't deliberately plan this, but it appears that I'm playing The Legacy along with my cousins at The Adventure Gamer. At least, I assume it's still active. Voltgloss posted an introductory entry on 2 March 2020, but there hasn't been a second one yet. Perhaps someone from there can clarify.
       
Time so far: 2 hours
       
*************
      
I had intended to return to Ultima VII for this entry, but it's taking me longer to catch up to where the game glitched than I thought. I'm still devoting a portion of my playing hours to that game, so when I finally do catch up, I'll stop introducing new titles and pick up where I left off.
     

Game 58: Questron II (1988)

    

Questron II

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1988 for Apple II, Apple II GS, Atari ST, Amiga, and DOS

Date Started: 12 June 2011
        
Questron II is a sequel to a game that I didn't play as part of this blog, but it was the first CRPG that I ever did play, way back in the mid-1980s. [Ed.: I later rectified this mistake and played it.] When I started playing, I didn't even own it. I'm not sure I even had my own C64. But I was over at this other kid's house and I saw him playing it, and somehow I managed to convince him to leave me alone in his room while he went off and did something else for the afternoon. I was hooked.

Later, I must have gotten a C64, or gotten this particular game, because I have a vivid memory of playing the game in my room and winning a boatload of money at roulette. I was so excited, I ran out of the room to tell my mother. I remember shouting something like, "Mom! I'm playing this game where the most money you ever have is like seventy-five gold pieces, and I just won two thousand!" She said something like, "Uh....great, honey!" while doubtlessly contemplating the likelihood that she would never have grandchildren.

I'll also forever be grateful to Questron for teaching me what a "mace" is. When I first saw that you could buy "mace" in a weapons shop, I imagined you were buying the chemical spray. It kind of spoiled the immersion for me. I mentioned this to my friend and he called me a "retard" but fortunately explained what it really was.

There are three other things I remember about the game:

1. Your character is a peasant who works his way up in the world.
2. Different weapons are good for different monsters.
3. When I won, there was an extended end-game sequence that showed you paraded through a castle and being lauded by the king or something. For me, this set the bar for end games, and I was usually disappointed in future games by how little they gave me.

Writing all of this, I again feel like a bit of a berk for not playing it on this blog. What was my excuse? It didn't have a DOS release? I wish I could go back in time and slap the me of February 2010. (Though it turns out if I did, I still wouldn't have played Questron--see below.) For now, suffice to say that Questron was based on the style of Ultima (Barton says they even licensed the "style and structure" of Garriott's game). In the casino games and stat upgrade games, it featured the first mini-games of any CRPG, I think. These are all things that carried over to Legacy of the Ancients, which I did play here.

The plot of Questron wasn't all that compelling. You have to build up your character so you can take on the lamely-named Mantor, who rules over the even-more-lamely-named Land of Evil with his epically-lamely-named Evil Book of Magic. When licensing the "style and structure" from Ultima, the creators apparently decided this included the needless slaughter of dozens of hapless castle guards, because such massacres feature prominently in both Questron and Legacy. In Questron, the castle's king even knights you for it.

As Questron II opens, a wizard named Mesron is telling me that yeah, Mantor is dead, but his Evil Book of Magic is still around, and it's "so evil that it cannot be destroyed by normal means." Moreover, "its very presence, anywhere in our continuum, poses the threat of corruption and doom to all civilizations." That's some evil. His solution? Send me back in time to the planet of Landor, where the book was created by six "mad sorcerers," and stop its creation. Unfortunately, like the Terminator, I can't take any weapons with me, and the trip will "cause the loss of some of my Questron-renowned power." This is the game's way of saying that I'll get kicked back to Level 1.

We have to pause to consider the game's understanding of time travel, which according to Morle the Magician is quite common among sorcerers. I was a bit worried that if I stopped the creation of the book, Mantor would never rise to power, and I'd revert to a poor peasant. But according to Morle, "Going back in time to prevent an event can do nothing to alter the years between the event and the moment you move back through time. Only the future after your departure will be altered." Right. So let's work this out. Someone invents a time machine in 2012. You jump in and go back to November 22, 1963, run up to the sixth floor, and wrestle Oswald to the floor before he can shoot. But Kennedy still dies because, after all, you can't change the past. You return to 2012, and then, suddenly, Kennedy is alive. Only he's 95, so he probably just keels over.

So if I could go back 16 months and convince February 2010 me to just get a C64 emulator already and play Questron, I still wouldn't play it, but returning to June 2011, I would suddenly find a saved game on my hard drive. Man, time travel messes with the mind.

There's other stuff about the back story that we need to talk about, but you've all suffered long enough without any screen shots. Character creation consists of nothing more than giving your character a name, after which the game kindly recounts the story from the first Questron:


A disembodied voice explains that I'm on my way to another planet, Landor. "Although you are now a baron on Questron," the voice tells me. "You will have no title on Landor. Gather your strength. Marshal your allies. Learn where the sorcerers are and how to attack them. Remember your people and good luck." I wake up with a dagger, a suit of rawhide armor, a gold key, and the Evil Book of Magic, which for some reason they have sent with me. I am immediately attacked by something called a "Mavin," which the game manual describes as an ape-like creature.


Killing it with my sword takes a quarter of my hit points, so I duck into the town north of me.

Aside from better colors and graphics, the game is essentially identical to Legacy of the Ancients:


We've got the same top-down interface, the same keyboard commands listed to the left, the same statistics (hit points, food, gold), and the same message box at the bottom. I'm not exactly complaining; this is a game I can immediately start playing without messing around figuring out the controls. But I'm disappointed that combat in this franchise still hasn't advanced beyond hitting "(F)ight" until the enemy is dead.

Here's Keeganac's character sheet:


I note that there's no "experience" statistic, and that killing the Mavin got me some gold, but it didn't say anything about experience. One of the things I hated most about Legacy of the Ancients was that all the combat got you nothing but a few paltry gold pieces. Leveling occurred at fixed intervals and was tied to solving quests. It doesn't look like they've changed that in Questron II. They also haven't changed the annoying way enemies can attack you on the diagonal, but you can't.

The nearby town--Folman--has a food shop and an armor shop and a few little NPC villagers who all say one line when you (S)peak next to them, although nothing terribly useful so far.


Not really knowing where to go--the game manual suggests a first step is to seek the "Hall of Visions" so I can communicate with Mesron--I start exploring and find another town shortly to the south. When I enter, the game throws a copy protect question at me:


These are all monsters in the game. If there's one thing about this series, the creators did come up with some original monster names. Questron had pit screamers, dirt weirds, and Irish stalkers. Legacy had mime ghouls, venom floaters, and ventro flailers. This game, in addition to the ones above, has brawn warriors, snooper slinks, and jelly nymphs. Unlike the previous games, this one comes with a manual that fully describes each of them.

Anyway, in the second town, Ontaga, I found that old Questron staple:


They had two games: blackjack and high-low. Even better, they haven't changed the rules on blackjack since Legacy: winning pays even money, and 21 gets you double. Settling in for 20 minutes of 'jack, I turned my 203 gold into 1,290. But I noticed a curious thing: it was harder and harder to win towards the end. With those rules on payouts, I should have been able to keep going indefinitely (Legacy had you break the bank if you won too much, and then the guards chased you out of town). The dealer was getting a lot of 20s and 21s when I had 18 or 19. I wonder if the program is specifically designed to cheat if you win too much.

I kept moving on and found a couple other towns. The only weapons anyone will sell me are daggers, oddly enough, and the only armor I can buy is leather. One armor shop didn't even have anything! (And I don't think it's a Demon's Winter-style thing where you have to cycle through items.) I did buy some rope & hooks for crossing mountains and a bunch of food. It turns out that tavernkeepers give hints when you tip them, and one of the tips was germane to my quest:

Now if only I knew where Redstone Castle was. Also, I think it's "soothe."

The third town--I forgot to note the name--also had a magic shop where I can buy magic missile, one of the game's four spells. The others are fireball, sonic whine, and time sap (ironically appropriate).

My reactions after playing for about 45 minutes are: this is it? The same old game--from the gambling, to the combat, to the rope 'n' hooks, to the dumb leveling system, to the useless one-line NPCs--with slightly better tiles? My nostalgic fondness for my first CRPG doesn't extend to wanting to play the exact same game, especially not in the same year that Pool of Radiance blew all of this (seriously? Only four spells?) out of the water.

I decided to take a gamble. I would return to Ontaga and lay all the rest of my 1000 gold on one game of blackjack. If I won, I would keep playing to the end. If I lost, I would do my six hours as quickly as possible (yes, I know, shut up)--probably with a new character, because I'm only at 58 hit points and I can't yet figure out how to heal in this game.

#$)(*&.

The dealer busted spectacularly. I now have 2,024 gold. I'm going to see my mother for dinner tomorrow night. I can't wait to tell her.