Friday, June 6, 2014

Game 147: Dragonflight (1990)

     
Dragonflight
Germany
Thalion Software (developer and publisher)
Released 1990 for Atari ST and Amiga, 1991 for DOS
Date Started: 6 June 2014
    
Take a look at the character portraits in the screenshot below and see if you agree with me on something: they're clearly not from a game made in the U.S. I'm not saying they're bad; there's just something ineffably foreign about them, as if drawn with an artistic aesthetic that U.S. developers didn't have. Am I crazy? If not, what is it, exactly? It's driving me nuts.

Outdoors in Dragonflight. My four characters' portraits are in the lower left and the commands are in the lower right. On the map, you can see a city and the road next to it, and various types of terrain.

The portraits are just one way that playing Dragonflight is a somewhat foreign experience. Again, I add that I don't necessarily mean unpleasantly so--just that the combination of different graphics aesthetics, translated text of dubious quality, a new emulator, a weird combat system, and a slightly odd combination of an oblique and iconographic interface come together to create a vaguely alien setting. The trick is to value such experiences rather than compare them negatively to more familiar U.S. games. If I practice this on European titles, it'll be less jarring when I start to encounter more Asian RPGs later this decade.

Dragonflight is the first RPG from Thalion, a German developer that specialized in Amiga and Atari ST games. The company had a reasonably prolific period between 1989 and 1993 before going out of business in 1994. Its only role-playing games are this one and the better-known Amberstar (1992) and Ambermoon (1993), which I guess take place in the same setting, though (judging by the screenshots) with a very different interface.

This game is providing my first experience with an Atari ST emulator. It was released for the Amiga and Atari ST in German, French, and English, but only for German in DOS. I also heard that the DOS version is buggy in a way that prevents winning the game, so it seemed prudent to try one of the others. After trying and failing to get it working in an Amiga emulator, I invested the time to learn the ST system and the Steem emulator. This will come in handy for a small number of games released solely for the ST. (If the screenshots seem inconsistent, it's because the emulator lets you size the window any way you want and I didn't figure out how to fix the ratio until late in this gameplay session.)

The game takes place in a land in decline. Some years prior, a war caused irreparable damage to an area of land called the Dragon Vale, the only place where dragons would birth their young. Following the war, some kind of spell fell over the Vale, no one could enter, and dragons disappeared from the skies. Since (much like in Drakkhen) dragons seem to be the source of the world's magic, their disappearance has caused all kinds of strife. As the game begins, four students of Pegana University, all orphans, have been given a quest by headmaster Dambrano: re-discover the old magic and find out what happened to the dragons.

A brief opening cut scene.

There is no character creation in the game. Every player starts with Bladus, a male human fighter; Rinakles, a male elf mage; Dobranur, a male dwarven cleric; and Andariel, a female elf archer. The manual's back story gives them all some light characterizations: Bladus is in love with his own physique; Rinakles is a bit absent-minded; Andariel is beautiful and in love with the woods; and Dobranur is given to drink and creative cursing.

There don't seem to be any attributes for the characters except hit points and spell points; I assume both increase as experience does. "Weaponpoints" and "armourpoints" are unexplained by the manual, but they seem to be a function of inventory rather than attributes. "Character points" serve as a karma meter; they are lost by fleeing in combat, attacking fleeing enemies, and other role-playing scenarios I've yet to experience.

Bladus's character screen.

The game begins after a brief address from Dambrano, who gives them all "stasis rings" (allowing for resurrection if they present them at a temple) and part of the "Great Map." He suggests that the party tries to find the other 11 parts and directs them to Benglur in the town of Brindil-Bun, who has another piece. After that, the party starts out in the middle of Pegana, with no other clues. Each character has 100 gold pieces, 100 units of food, and a torch.

Starting out. Note how the houses are oblique, but the people and fountains are iconographic.

The interface is almost completely mouse-driven, which I don't like. You can move with the numberpad, but none of the other commands seem mapped to keystrokes. The game window combines oblique-angle shots of buildings with more top-down iconographic shots of people and objects like fountains and trees. Commands are fairly limited. You can click on each character portrait to view statistics and inventory, and there are commands on the right side of the interface that change depending on context. In towns, you can cast spells, view objects, talk to NPCs, and knock at doors (the only way to enter buildings). Outside, you get options to cast, attack, board or exit a ship, enter a city or building, make camp, search, or save and load.

I spent most of this first game session exploring Pegana, buying equipment, and talking to NPCs. There's no day/night cycle in the game, but time still passes and consumes rations. I was down to 40 units of food when I finished mastering everything. I found two taverns, an equipment shop, Pegana University itself, a bunch of private homes, and perhaps 12 NPCs wandering around the village. Some of the private homes were locked; others were open and had NPCs.

Buying more food in a tavern.

NPC interaction is one-way, in the old Ultima mode, and consists of walking up and hitting the "talk" button before they walk away. Some NPCs have very brief responses, like "Greetings!" or "Get out of my house!" Others have paragraphs of things to say.


Some of them seem to be expecting some kind of answer, but there's no way I can find in the game or the manual to reply to them, except to show or give an item. Perhaps these questions are just meant rhetorically.

Buildings--which you enter by positioning yourself directly in front of the door and hitting "knock"--all lead to menus rather than explorable areas. Returning to the university prompts a dialogue with Dambrano, who seems to be expecting us to return with spells.


I wasn't able to afford much more than short swords at the blacksmith's shop (there don't seem to be any class restrictions on equipment), so I equipped everyone and headed out into the wilderness to experience my first combats.

Equipping items. At this point, I figured out how to lock the screen ratio.
 
As usual, I'll save a longer combat post for when I have more experience with the interface, but at first blush, it seems original and odd. The party and its foes face each other on a side-view screen with a gridded tactical map in the upper-left corner. You select actions for each character, including moving one square, attacking, casting a spell, and defending, then watch them all execute (along with the opponents' moves) at once. Right-clicking switches between movement options and other options. At Level 1, each character has only one action per round, but I guess it can grow up to 9.

The execution phase. I'm wounded by an orc as my various characters try to cluster around the foe. One of them is walking off the wrong way. I'm still getting used to things.

If you don't have a ranged weapon or spell, you have to close with an opponent before you can attack, and you have to be facing the opponent. This is where I run into trouble. Movement options are to move left, right, forwards, or backwards, and to turn around, but there seems to be no movement option to turn left or right. This suggests there are only two squares from which characters can attack each enemy--from the front and rear. Characters adjacent to the enemy on the sides can't attack. Moreover, enemies seem to be capable of moving on the diagonal, but characters cannot. I feel like I must be missing something here, but I can't figure it out from the interface or manual. Help appreciated.

Fighting a couple of bears in the "planning" phase. Bladus, the selected character, needs to turn around. My two charaters on the left need to move forward, and the character in the bottom-right needs to move up one square and turn around. Then I can start attacking.

Whatever turns out to be the case with combat, the manual hints that I should use Bladus and Dobranur for their weapons (Bladus favors the sword, Dobranur the axe), Rinakles for spells, and Andariel for a bow. When I get to the point that I have spells and can afford a bow, it will be less important to have everyone able to melee attack.

Both characters and enemies can flee by moving off the screen, and the manual says that there is a "character point" penalty assessed for attacking fleeing enemies--another element which seems to be inspired by Ultima IV.

A few more notes:

  • The main town featured a statue with a dedication to Gary Gygax. That was classy.


  • The only sound in this version of the game seems to be relentlessly awful music, with no option to turn it off, so I've been playing with the sound on my computer turned off. This means I can't watch Mad Men during the boring parts.
  • Full party death gives you a screen that suggests the possibility of resurrection--then dumps you back on the main menu.

Yes. Yes, it is.

  • Moving overland is much like Ultima IV, where harder terrain like forests and mountains forces you to hit the movement key multiple times to walk one step. 
  • For some reason, the houses in town are all numbered.

Is this like an address, or are you inexplicably showing me programming code?

So far, the game seems inoffensive, but I haven't experienced any particularly strong innovations, and having to do everything with the mouse is horribly slow and annoying. Maybe it will improve; certainly, the character point system suggests a depth of role-playing still to come, I haven't investigated the magic system, and dungeon-delving promises a completely different interface. For the next post, I'll try to check them all out.


69 comments:

  1. Absolutely right about the portraits.
    Oftentimes there is something unmistakeably 'european' about Amiga-games from England or Germany. Sometimes it´s just mere amateurism on behalf of the graphics people, but, yeah, there's a certain quality to those portraits.. I wan't to say it´s because usually these kinds of portraits are like mugshots, same angle, lighting, tone and posture; these are all wildly different. the guy on the upper right even has some stars to go with him. Weird.

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    1. If I was to guess, it's down to the range of historical material they have to draw from. Different regions had their own prominent portrait \ sculpture styles that changed over the centuries in Europe depending on the fashions of the era, whereas American artists lean towards the the ren-fair \ silver age hollywood \ book cover aesthetic.

      The Euro portraits appear alien to modern sensibilities because the US portraits are a too-perfect idealised fantasy with a giant cultural footprint.

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    2. What it is, mostly likely is that these artists couldn't draw to save their lives and they're only part-way masking that by doing VGA pixel art "look at how many colors!" tricks on them. If you saw the same portraits in CGA with four colours, their shoddy construction would be much more blatant.

      On top of that, a lot of the character portraits in early european RPGS are copied from Dungeons and Dragons illustrations, so you have a lineup with 10 badly drawn mugs and a couple of okay ones thrown in.

      It's that combo of amateurish art and inconsistency that gives that era of european gaming its particular style.

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    3. I believe the style is called 'Art Noobeau'

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    4. Not being able to draw worth a damn would be a good explanation if all US games of the era had good \ consistant art (even U6 has its share of disasters), and if there weren't other examples of European games developers would could draw but still had a distinct style - Speedball 2 - released the same year by a European developer and heavily influenced by 2000AD \ Heavy Metal.

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    5. I think it might actually be the faces themselves. First, they're somewhat "realistic"--none of them are impossibly attractive or goofy-looking the way we often see in U.S. games. Second, they all have a certain . . . Teutonic quality, with prominent facial features (especially cheekbones). They're like the opposite of anime.

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    6. I don't think US releases of the era are completely consistent, but they did have a lot more professional graphic artists, people who might have jumped from comics or illustration to game graphics (Ultima Series and other Origin games spring to mind) to do the best art there. European releases, esp. on Amiga at the time were made by hobbyists with deluxe paint who learned as they went.

      Of course there's wonderful pixel artists with distinct styles on the Amiga, a lot of them in the demoscene - other Thalion alumni, Henk Nieborg, who is responsible for a lot of art in Lionheart, then some in Amberstar/moon and later on Adventures of Flink and Lomax and a lot of gma and nds titles is an amazing pixel artist that came from the amiga era - but it's worth noting that he also can't draw a human face to save his life.

      I am a pixel artist professionally and I've seen a lot of wonderful pixel artists with shoddy fundamental art skills, which they're hiding via good pixel technique. Then you look at the art in, say, U7

      http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-vii-part-two-serpent-isle/screenshots/gameShotId,23590/

      where this pixel art is not the best, but it's clearly the work of someone with an illustrative background.

      http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/ultima-vii-part-two-the-silver-seed/screenshots/gameShotId,165492/

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    7. I didn't do my research but another rather well-received European RPG (The Dark Eye franchise) series under the name of Realms of Arkania also had similar portrait art.

      http://img.gamefaqs.net/screens/f/f/d/gfs_45845_2_1.jpg

      Same artist or same influence? *shrug*

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    8. So you are trying to say that the European graphics is not professional? That's prejudiced as hell.

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    9. Where in god's name are you people coming from?

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  2. So soon after Lord of the Rings, you again do not have the fun of creating your own characters. Sorry. The portraits are a bit strange, but I prefer no portraits at all. It spoils the imagination.

    The tactical system looks cumbersome, but I await your full take on the system.

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  3. The team that made Amberstar and Ambermoon also made another very similar RPG, and also one of the most underrated of all time: Albion.

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    1. I'll look forward to it. Lest anyone get the impression you were contradicting what I said above: although many of the developers are the same, Thalion had gone out of business by the time of Albion, and the developers were working for Blue Byte Software.

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    2. Albion starts out amazingly strong. Nearly no other RPG had captured my imagination on how it would be to travel to a completely alien world like it. Sadly, later on I feel it devolves a lot, but I'm going to let you judge for yourself when you get to it.

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    3. I never played much of either, but I know Amberstar has the reputation of "best RPG ever for the Amiga" for many fans. Why Amiga? Apparently the sound/music is much better than on other platforms.

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  4. Yes, European games tend to look different. Look at screenshots of the French game Ishar for another unique style.

    As far as I remember you can't attack sideways. I don't think you are missing something. It is quite limited.

    You can turn off the sound in Steem directly by selecting Options (the wrench) -> Sound -> Output Type -> None (Mute)

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    1. It's very weird. Perhaps I won't mind so much once I have ranged weapons and magic, but for now it bothers me that two characters end up being useless for the latter part of the battle.

      Thanks for the note about the sound. I knew there was some emulator way to do it, but complaining seemed funnier.

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    2. There is a way to do it on Windows Vista and up regardless of emulator: Go to the sound icon in the bottom right (you might have to click the up arrow. Right click on it, open Volume Mixer. Then you can mute things on a per-application basis. VERY useful trick I've found.

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  5. The portraits actually remind me of Eye of the Beholder. They seem more poorly drawn however

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    1. Ha. I was also reminded of EotB! Because that was my first game with portraits, the Dragonflight portraits don't look weird to me.

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  6. Thalion had a reputation for high-end games that didn't sell well. I remember a side scroller called Lionheart, fantastic graphics, very difficult. Does the style of this game remind you of Legend of Faerghail, the other german RPG of that year?
    Dragons as the source of magic, hmm, a familiar idea, it's also in Game of Thrones.

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    1. No, it seems very different from Legend of Faerghail. Faerghail never felt like a foreign game except for its occasional bad translations. In Dragonflight, the entire aesthetic feels different.

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  7. The more I look at it, the more similarities I see. The font is from Eye of the Beholder as well as the general interface style ( albeit loosely). Without going to google im going to say this came out just after EOB :)

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  8. Eye of the Beholder was published a year later, actually.

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  9. Yeah i went and googled after posting.. perhaps it was the other way around and THAT would be odd!

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  10. Haha, there's a subtle fun in writing your magic points as 00005.

    Re turning: What's the difference between the left and right turn-around buttons? Are they "look left" and "look right"? If so, it seems likely that "look in" and "look out" are not possible.

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    1. So that's the weird thing. As far as I can tell, those buttons do exactly the same thing. I have no idea why there are two different ones. But there don't seem to be any "turn right" or "turn left" options.

      I've fought a fair number of combats by now, and the enemies never turn right or left, either, bolstering the probability that it just isn't possible. Weird combat dynamic.

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    2. From the screenshots it seems that they probably just didn't have the budget to do the sprites for two more directions.
      It's funny how Amberstar, while generally a more technically advanced game, has a somewhat simplified combat compared to this, both mechanically and graphically.

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  11. At least a few games such as dragon lance (warriors of the lance or something) and alien logic: sky realms of jorune had similar approach to combat where combat happens as a side scrolling mini-game.

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  12. From what I remember, this game got better after I got past the initial hurdles. The characters are so slow, poor, and weak at the beginning that it's hard to even avoid starving. It was tough going until I got a second combat action for one of them.

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    1. Yes, I've just had everyone run out of food on the bottom level of a dungeon, and I'll probably need to restart.

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    2. "I'd rather starve than eat another bloody mushroom"

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  13. Shame that you couldn't get the Amiga version of the game to work, it is - as usual at that time - a fair bit nicer than the Atari in the technical department, especially the music.

    It'll take a couple of years more before the other platforms will catch up to the Amiga (and eventually overtake it).

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    1. Does the Amiga version have any sound other than music? Because I don't really care about game music.

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    2. No, just music. Actually the same music as the Atari version just improved by the better hardware.

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    3. During that era, usually the ST had the better sound and the Amiga the better graphics. More often than not, games were 1:1 ported between both systems. But I don't want to start that!

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    4. I don't understand why a developer would waste a lot of time composing music for game, but offer no other sound. And I can't get into the mind of a gamer who would want to hear constant, looping music during gameplay.

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    5. One reason is for sure that it was far easier in 1990 to add some music than sound. Music composer software ("Mod tracker") had been around since 1987 and was quite easy to use. Recording digital sound effects was much more difficult and disk space consuming.

      I checked some Let's Play videos and it seems that Amberstar and even Ambermoon just had music too.

      That said, I actually enjoy the background music while playing. It sets a retro mood and brings back memories.

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    6. I think it's just my own quirk. I don't like background music in general. I love jazz, but I never have it going in the background while I work; I only listen to jazz when it's the only thing I'm doing at the time.

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    7. Come on, BGM is a staple part of every movie and video game ever made. Back in the time where it wasn't possible for speech, music was the only audio input you could get from both.

      Done well, a video/movie BGM would sound like... I dunno, elevator music? Puts you in the mood but doesn't catch your attention.

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    8. Movies are different. The music is carefully composed, timed, and modulated in volume to match the scene of the movie. If the movie is made well, it never overwhelms the foreground. If films had a constantly-looping tune playing in the background with no regard for what was happening on the screen, it would suck.

      As for BGM being a "staple part" of video games, I don't know what to tell you. I turn it off. I turn it off even in modern games where it reaches cinematic quality and they hire academy-award winning composers to create it. I don't want to hear music when I play a game. The only exception is brief introductory and victory tunes, like Hero's Quest's little leitmotifs.

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    9. Even Fallout? Wait, you probably haven't played 1 or 2 yet. Fallout 3's BGM (not the radio broadcasts) may be a little too intrusive for your standards. But the BGM for 1 & 2 are pretty atmospheric.

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    10. Huh, you might want to have a listen to http://supermarcatobros.com/podcast/ sometime. It analyzes a lot of video game music from a composers perspective, and explains why you'd want to use specific music in a specific place.

      Sure, it won't magically make you start liking the music, but might help you review music when you get to games with it, from a technical standpoint. Or at least help you respect some of the composers who worked on it.

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  14. Combat seems to be the same, as in Thalion's later game, except grid turned, your characters down, enemies up. I didn't try Dragonflight, but in those games, you can't move ahead (except in the first two rows, where you can move freely), only advance whole party forward with one row, if no enemies ahead.

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  15. No, you can't turn around, so yes, each opponent can only be attacked by two characters in melee. However, you will soon find spells for Rinakles and Andariel, as well as a bow for Andariel, and by then you will beat the opponents up four ways - Bladus using a sword, Dobranur an axe, Rinakles a spell and Andariel a bow, since you *can* put three guys in a row and use ranged combat for the rear two. I seem to remember something about a throwing axe.

    And as far as I remember, opponents can't move diagonally, either, though I see how you could get the impression. Compare their positions on the tactical grid before and after movement.

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  16. The combat system remind me of an old RPG game (Which I could not find in your master list):

    SAPIENS ( windows port here: https://archive.org/details/Sapiens_1020 )

    It's from 1986 by Loriciel a French developer. Combat is side scroll and real time, but depend on your character strength and agility. You have items, crafting, 3D navigation, hunger management and a decent story line with some twist.Pretty neat for a 1986 game.

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    1. MobyGames has it classified as action/adventure, which is why it never made it to my list. If it has all the things you indicate, I should check it out when I get back to 1986. I'll add it provisionally.

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    2. Sapiens is from 1996 and is a windows game.

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    3. 1996 version is a remake, Mobygames has some screenshots from orginal version(s), including a CGA DOS one.
      What's amazing is that is looks like the guys who made it are still in business and the game is still being sold (and getting updates): http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/sapiens.htm

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  17. And here I was hoping there would be some connection to the Pern book Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey.

    You said you haven't seen much in the way of innovation, but what about the tactical grid? Have earlier games had that?

    I agree that the portrait aesthetic is odd. I wonder if it's because the foreheads are cut off? I think a more familiar style would show the whole head.

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    1. I half-expected this to be a licensed game based on McCaffrey's books too, but nope, nothing of the sort. The backstory of its dragons proves as much. Also, McCaffrey's books don't have elves.

      The top two portraits have shadowy lighting you don't see in American portrait studios, where the whole point of a portrait is to show people's faces, not half-hide them.

      The dwarf's portrait actually resembles that of an American driver's license - full-forward, direct lighting, in order to be easily recognizeable by people OR by pattern-matching computer software (according to "Burn Notice", anyway). You also see this done in American prison mugshots.

      I don't know what's up with the elf archer portrait, though I agree that it just looks badly cropped by any aesthetic. I can't believe that any photo studio, even a German one, cuts the forehead off of the pictures they take.

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    2. There is a Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern games from early 2000-s, which is a somewhat decent RPG/Adventure marred by awful control scheme.

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    3. As we'll see next time, the creators DO acknowledge a debt to McCaffrey for the title.

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  18. Atari ST? Excellent! I'm glad to see our host is mastering the tools of his trade. Hours spent now learning configuration options will pay off handsomely later. I look forward to the day that he is able to get an obscure game to run that nobody else could.

    Yeah, foreign games are just weird. Between not having read the same fantasy source books, and general oddness (armourpoints sounds directly translated) they're just plain odd. For the reverse experience, Darklands tells a story of

    The oblique/iconographic thing never bothered me. It strikes me as the sort of thing that the modern gamer is trained to see. People are so...how to call it...professional now when they play games. Back then, we just played the game. Today, people try to get inside the heads of the designers. Frankly, I prefer the old way, it's more fun and less work.

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    1. Forgot to finish...Darklands tells a story from an American perspective, but of Europe. There were all sorts of things I had never heard of. It was great not just playing a game, but learning something.

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  19. It's doesn't really seem fair that the first plan to solve this dangerous mission, most like ending in death, is to throw some orphans at it.

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    1. To be fair, there doesn't seem to be anyone else left.

      The novella that came with the game explains it: this is near-apocalyptic fantasy. Magic has been mostly forgotten. Veteran heroes are either dead, insane, or too old and frail to do anything. Surviving civilizations are on decline, either warring with each other or simply to survive.

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    2. *or simply trying to survive.

      Sending out some orphans is basically the last-ditch effort.

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    3. Your description of a "novella" makes me realize I don't have all the documentation for the game. The manual I have only has a brief snippet of the novella. I found a full one online, and I'll try to read it for the next post.

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  20. Yeah, it's like Neverwinter Nights:

    Lvl 20 Paladin: "Did any of the trainees manage to avoid being massacred by goblins?"

    Lvl 8 Cleric: "Yes, milady"

    Lvl 20 Paladin: "Then they must save the city"

    Lvl 8 Cleric: "Um, why don't You save the city"

    Lvl 20 Paladin: "I'll be too busy telling them where to go and selling them items."

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    1. This is why in game settings like Eberron almost everyone is a NPC class with basically no combat skills. Even the head of the local temple probably isn't a Cleric, they are an NPC class which has some healing, but not attack spells or armour skills.

      Also: Have the lvl 20 Paladin missing a leg, from his final battle. Sure, he knows how to fight like nobodies business, but getting to the battlefield would be a challenge unless their name is Terry Fox.

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    2. Why are you always about six months behind these days?

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    3. I let myself get a bit behind when I got busy. Then I got a girlfriend and suddenly had a LOT less time for blog reading. Now I'm making time for it, reading on my cell phone, stuff like that, and trying to catch up.

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    4. Well, congratulations on the girlfriend in any event!

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  21. Dragonflight was one of my favorite childhood games despite it's unorthodox approaches to certain things such as UI and combat.

    Firstly, it's a great shame your playing it on the ST because this game has a fantastic soundtrack by Jochen Hippel (One of the best Amiga music composers), that unfortunately sounds horrendous on the ST. Here's a couple of samples of how it SHOULD sound if played on the Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhuaU-WNQb4 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBTDMy0ng1I

    I have had Dragonflight running fine on WinUAE, I can maybe try and find the correct settings and post them. Regarding the game itself, it's a hugely epic and hardcore game with great complex dungeons, challenging combat and non-linear progression. It's very much a game where you have explore and investigate things yourself with very little hand holding or direction. It's not an easy game by any stretch but it always reminded me of a good blend of Ultima and Dungeon Master with it's own very distinct atmosphere. It's a highly underrated game in my opinion and one that has very much remained obscure.

    I've personally never had a problem with the visual aesthetics, I love that the characters all have a very Nordic appearance and despite the portraits not necessarily being classical in the sense of what you'd find in EOTB, they have something emotive and stylised about them that I always loved. This was an Amiga game first and foremost, and many perhaps don't realise that the Amiga platform was commercially more successful in Europe and the UK than the US (I pin this down to the dominance of the Arcade gaming culture at the time) and as a result there were huge amounts of games produced in Europe that I (being from the UK) spent my childhood playing where this art style is quite typical; It's not bad, just different, clearly to what some of you guys were/are used to. Someone mentioned Speedball 2, well the UK's Bitmap Brothers pixel art was iconic, featuring some of the best looking games on the Amiga (Chaos Engine, Xenon 2, Gods, Magic Pockets etc) and its likely some of the colourful art used in Dragonflight was inspired by that style.

    Anyway, I hope you do continue to persevere with the game and perhaps try and see if you can get it working on WinUAE for the Amiga version. Pretty sure the default settings worked more or less last time I tried it.

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    1. I appreciate your comment, and I agree that the Amiga version of the music sounds better, but I would turn off the music no matter how good it sounds, so there's really no point in my sacrificing several hours of play for that reason.

      I hope I didn't give the impression that I thought the portraits were ugly or unappealing. I though they were just clearly a different aesthetic, but I couldn't put my finger on why.

      Delete
    2. Not at all, I recently found your blog and it's nice to find someone taking the time to play undiscovered gems such as this and write about it, especially in this era of super casual gaming.

      Delete
    3. PS. This is the previous poster, the wordpress comments integration for Blogger is appalling (forcing my name as my blog ID) So i'll be posting under this display name for any future comments.

      Delete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. DO NOT COMMENT ANONYMOUSLY. If you do not want to log in or cannot log in with a Google Account, choose the "Name/URL" option and type a name (you can leave the URL blank). If that doesn't work, use the "Anonymous" option but put your name of choice at the top of the entry.

2. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

3. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.