Game 451: Goblin Mountain (1987)

 

The party starts out. There is no separate main title screen.

    

Goblin Mountain

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published as code in the June 1987 Sinclair User

Code provided for ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 12 March 2022

Date Ended: 12 March 2022

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 14

Ranking at Time of Posting: 67/460 (15%)

    

Well, I'll give it this: Goblin Mountain is probably the most fun I've had with a type-in game. It offers a relatively complex experience with a fair amount of replayability. I could see 1987 me applying a little bit of imagination and spending a dozen or so hours with the game until I could afford something better.

  

The artist chose to depict "Goblin" Mountain with a rat.

     

Designed by Martin Page, Mountain builds upon his previous year's effort with Forest of Long Shadows. In the comments for that game, HappyChef suggested a relationship between it and Terrence Donnelly's board game The Mystic Wood (1980). As it happens, reviewers have also noted similarities between Mountain and Donnelly's previous game, The Sorcerer's Cave (1978). So clearly there's some inspiration going on from Donnelly to Page.

      

The Sorcerer's Cave (1978) involved arranging a tiled map in a way similar to this game.

     

Mountain plays like a more advanced Forest. There are four cooperating characters (the game is meant for one player) instead of just one per player. They explore a world of at least six 6 x 6 levels on one of four quests: Visit the Cave of Orcs; kill the Deathfiend; amass 200 experience points; and find the Scepter of Life. Character creation has you specify a name for each character (human warrior, dwarf warrior, elf warrior/wizard, human wizard), after which the game rolls for strength, endurance, magic, and agility. 

     

There are no NPCs in the game. Each tile can contain monsters or a treasure. Treasures include nine spell scrolls: "Fireball," "Lifedrain," "Repel," "Curse," "Teleport," "Invisibility," "Speed," "Wellbeing," and "Strongman." The first five are cast in combat and the last four outside combat. Any wizard who holds a scroll can cast the spell with magic points; points can be replenished at magic fountains. There are also magic weapons, armor, and wearables to find that directly improve your attributes or combat damage.

    

There's an object in this square.

      

For combat, you only have a couple of choices, mainly whether to try to flee and whether to cast an offensive spell before combat begins. Once fighting begins, it's resolved automatically. Character and enemy strength are compared, dice are rolled, and either a character or the enemy takes damage. A little Phantasie-like screen shows the enemies and party opposite each other as they trade blows.

      

A character is killed in combat against a lizard man.

   

The game can be quite hard. The randomization generally puts easier enemies on the first level, but sometimes there's a really tough party that you can't avoid. Traps frequently dump you down to lower levels before you're prepared, too. The key is to try to find items before losing too much endurance to enemies. I found that the "Invisibility" spell is particularly to be prized because it allows you to sneak past enemies while still grabbing items. "Wellbeing," a healing spell, is probably the most important in the game. Even with the best configuration, I found it hard to keep the entire party alive.

     

One of the levels I mapped. Highlighted squares have stairs down. The three squares I didn't map are probably accessed from beneath.

    

I won two of the quests: finding the Scepter of Life (I got very lucky with the randomization) and amassing 200 experience points. Barring luck, I think the experience point one is the easiest, since it doesn't require you to find a particular thing or place. You can just cautiously explore, fighting enemies you know you can take and running from others, until your characters have an average of 50 points each. You can get this without descending farther than Level 3. It helps that wizards get experience for casting. 

   

Winning the third quest.

      

The game technically doesn't meet my RPG definitions, since any character development is dependent on finding items, but it was short enough that I didn't much care. On the GIMLET, it does best in "gameplay" for being short and replayable, but a mixture of 0s, 1s, and 2s in everything else lands it only at a 14. I don't know--maybe it just looks good in comparison to everything else I've been dredging up these last couple of weeks.