Enchantasy: Obstacles at Every Turn

 

Well, it had better @#$*! not be "fantasy!"

       

Things are dark in the land of Savallia. The king has just died. The prince is missing. The king's brother, Duke Hawthorne, may try to seize the throne. After thousands of years of peace, evil forces are roaming the land looking for the Eternal Grimoire, an indestructible spellbook of immense power. The Mage's Council has tasked my party of four friends, led by a mage's apprentice, with forestalling all of the above.

    

In the last session, my party became complete, and I worked out a task list based on what NPCs had given me so far. I had meant to finish exploring the city of Tiernan first, and in particular to find the treasure map that Harry stole from Duke Hawthorne and gave to Boris, but in the intervening days, I forgot. I start this session by marching the party back to Keldar so that we can search the dungeon for Joey, the missing child.

   

We fight plenty of battles along the way, of course. I still like the combat system, but battles take a bit longer than they really need to. The primary culprits are missile weapons and spells, which absolutely crawl through the air towards their targets. You're about to say, "Well, then, crank the emulator," but the only way to truly speed things up is to crank the emulator so high that it over-reads all your inputs.

         

Trying to kill enemies with missile weapons before they get into melee range.

       

Another problem: 99 arrows (the maximum that you can carry at one) go fast. The stack is gone in three or four battles. The author probably didn't want players over-relying on arrows, which admittedly make many battles far too easy. I'm going to have to carry backup slings (which require no special ammo) for longer expeditions in which I want to use any ranged weapons at all. 

       

Chester reaches Level 2 on the way. Leveling brings an extra point to both strength and dexterity (the former allowing you to equip better weapons and armor), boosts to maximum health and magic, and a single training point to spend on the game's six skills: Weapons, bows, magic, lockpicks, language, and first aid. There are trainers in Keldar for all of these except "Lockpick," and when we finally reach the city, I train Chester in "Magic." This gives him two new spells: "Weaken" and "Cure Disease."

       

Yes, that's why we came to a training hall.

     

The entrance to the dungeon is in the upper-left corner of the city, behind a locked door. The game offers several ways to deal with locked doors. One is picking, which requires a pick and brings up a little minigame that I don't understand and have not yet won even once. The second is using a key, which requires no skill but causes the key to disappear. Some doors can't even be opened with keys but do open to a special "skeleton key," of which I have only found one. Anyway, the dungeon door opens to a regular key.

      

It appears that outdoor battles are all random in their locations, intervals, and compositions. In contrast, dungeon battles (at least most of them) are fixed in these variables. Thus, we only make it about five steps before we're attacked by a party of 10 cursed rats. The party doesn't come close to killing them, not even one, before they overwhelm and kill us. Since their square is in the middle of a corridor, these rats have to be defeated.

     

My first attempt is not promising.

       

I spend a little time grinding near Keldar. Jared and Rodell each reach Level 3. This raises their strength enough that they can wield long swords instead of short swords, and probably better armor, too, although Keldar doesn't sell any. Let me offer some praise for the economy. A lot of games tend to over-inflate it; but in Enchantasy, a gold piece is really worth something. Weapons and armor tend to cost around 10 gold pieces. Training costs 5. Potions are in the single digits, even for strong ones. I think that if nothing in your game costs 1 gold piece, there's no reason not to reduce all your fractions until the cheapest item does--and that's what this author did. There's a similar economy with hit points: enemies routinely have only 4 or 5, and the weakest attacks routinely do only 1.

       

While marching around Keldar looking for enemies, I notice for the first time (because I've been using roads until now) that overland travel is far more restricted in Enchantasy than most Ultima clones. You can't travel through most trees. The result is the feeling that you're traveling through a dungeon with outdoor textures. Maybe this is just true for the area around Keldar, though. I don't go far.

     

I find a grave at the end of a forest path.

      

At first, I think my grinding strategy is going to work, since you get a level every 100 experience points, which of course comes faster as you get stronger. But when I'm still unable to make a dent in the rats after several levels, I move on up the road to the king's castle, in whose dungeon I hope to find the king's stolen tiara. Again, I've forgotten something: the impassable lake of fire that greets you the moment you enter the dungeon. Until I deal with that, there's nothing to do here, and none of the NPCs in the castle have any hints.

   

Thus, we go up the road to Macino and our third objective: search the dungeon for the burglar Blaze and the jewelry he looted from the jewelry store. The entrance to Macino's dungeon is across the hallway from the closed jewelry shop.  Our first battle in the dungeon is with a ghost, a bat, and an insect horde, so that's a lot more promising.

        

A typical dungeon battle.

            

The dungeon ends up being simple enough that we can explore without mapping. There are maybe a dozen combats--we have to leave at one point for more arrows--and a few rooms with small treasures. As I noted in a previous entry, secret doors are indicated by subtle changes in the wall pattern. I found one in the castle, which revealed itself when I S)earched for it. In this dungeon, I find one secret door, but I don't have to search: I just walk right through it. It leads to a chamber with a teleportal. I've already determined that you need "telegems" to activate them (this is perhaps another Magic Candle influence). Lacking such gems, I leave it alone for now.

    

Another room produces a mystery. There's definitely a shift in the wall pattern, and when I cast the "See Secrets" spell (which I got, along with "Lightning Bolt," on my next level-up), it shows a couple of question marks in the squares with the new pattern. But I can't get anything to happen with them. I try looking, searching, opening, knocking, picking, using my pick-axe and shovel, but nothing works. 

    

Clearly, something is there.

       

I don't find Blaze anywhere else. I do find, behind a locked door, an unnamed thief NPC who will train "Lockpick." Thus, between Keldar and here, I have all the skills covered. Blaze is either behind that mysterious secret door that I can't figure out, or he went through the teleportal, or he was never here in the first place and one of the other rumors is true.

       

And he sells lockpicks.

       

Now I waste a bunch of time going all the way back to Tiernan because I thought I remembered that they sold leather armor. They only sell leather robes, though (which only mages can wear), and Chester isn't strong enough yet. While visiting a general store to restock on food, I find a possible solution to my "wall" problem above: dynamite. I buy a stick, planning to return later and try it out.

      

I'll just take some rations and . . . hey, what's that in case #6?

     

In the meantime, I do what I should have done at the beginning of this session and explore Tiernan. It's a small town, and I spoke with most of the NPCs last time. I find Boris in a house on the west side; when I knock at his door and say I'm looking for BORIS, he says, "That's me! Come on in!" He tells us that Harry's name was "Dan" before he changed it. Boris had the treasure map that Dan stole from the Duke, but he's since passed it on to his friend Duffy in Portsmith. (As a youth, Portsmouth, New Hampshire was my backyard. This spelling irks me, even though I know there are other places that use it.)

     

Back in the Macino dungeon, dynamite does the trick and opens the wall. (For fun, I save and first test it on a regular wall, but the game says, "The wall is too sturdy!") On the other side lie two locked treasure chests, one with a Gem of Life, one with a training pass. I apparently can use the training pass to let any character train a skill, as if he or she leveled up. The Gem of Life seems to be for resurrection. So the enterprise does not help me solve the quest of Blaze and the jewelry store burglary.

    

I blast open a wall.

     

I save the game and then use the telegem on the teleporter, winding up in a new dungeon somewhere. I explore cautiously. I fight one battle, not too hard, then find a chest with another telegem. A secret door leads to a regular door which I cannot open with my picks or keys (not even the skeleton key). I wonder if dynamite will work on that. Having accomplished nothing, I reload from before I entered the teleporter. 

     

I really thought that ball would raise one of my attributes.

            

We head back to Keldar to see how we fare against the cursed rats now. They still kill almost all my characters before I've killed the fourth of 10 rats. But I notice something different this time: enemies are not capable of walking across the bodies of slain characters. In this particular battle, I had lined up my three non-mages vertically in a hallway that was only three spaces tall. Once they're dead, none of them can cross the bodies to get Chester. It takes forever to kill them one at a time with my sling, but I do it, intending to then resurrect the dead characters. Then I discover that when a character dies, he loses all the experience gained towards the next level. I decide not to keep the victory and reload instead.

        

Blocking my foes with the bodies of my friends.

            

Time for a change of scenery! With a little help from the one-armed bandit, we sail to Hazlett and then from there to Portsmith. This is the first place I've been that is inaccessible by road from the first continent. Portsmith is a port city with ships to Hazlett, Aramon, and theoretically Shaaran, but that boat is apparently under repair. The city has a full set of services, including a training center and a guy behind a locked door who teaches "Lockpicking" without making me go through a dungeon.

      

The city's centerpiece is a library of 7 levels with dozens of bookcases and NPCs. I dutifully search all of the bookcases and find nothing. All the NPCs but one tell me to shush; they're reading. But there are also a lot of books open on tables, and they give me a bunch of game hints. In short:

     

• Pirates exist and are organized into some kind of society.
• There's a lot of gold in caves.
• About teleportals and telegems.

        

This is about two hours too late.

     

• Savallia may have been visited by aliens from other worlds.
• There are magical wells in the "far outreaches of Savallia" that boost attributes (some Might and Magic influence?).
• I should be able to find horses grazing in random fields. I've been wondering where to use the M)ount command. I keep expecting to find a stable in one of the cities. I guess you're meant to wrassle them yourself. 
• A grid of origin and destination ports for ships.

       

Let's just hope this is current.

      

• Legend says that a Baldric, wielding the Mystic Sword, slayed the Darklord. His resting place is a mystery.
• A note about the onyx stones that return you to the entrances to dungeons.
• Islands on the fringes of Savallia remain mostly unexplored and may have great treasures.
• Thieves who specialize in lockpicking may be found in the dungeons.
• Things about the Eternal Grimoire that I already knew.
• Many years ago, an explorer named Yeoman claimed to have been transported to an unknown land by a whale. 

   

There's a librarian named Kathleen who seems ready to answer questions about other subjects, but I can't find the right keywords.

   

In the tavern, I decide to see if the game supports intoxication. It doesn't appear so, but I did learn that if you buy enough rounds, the bartender stops trying to sell them to you and instead lets you engage him in normal conversation. Unfortunately, I don't get anything useful out of this one.

   

Elsewhere, a man wants me to free his nephew, Trent, from Duke Hawthorne's dungeon. Audrey, who's from a village on Hawthorne's island, is having trouble getting back home, as ships are no longer traveling there; she's heard about a pirate south of Dalia who will help.

          

Or I could spend 45 minutes at the casino.

     

Speaking of pirates, I find Duffy in a locked house, but he tells me that some pirates robbed him of the treasure map. When I ask about the pirates, he refers me to an authority on them, Vernon, who lives on an island south of Kadaar. He makes an allusion to whales, making me think that this is where the whale will take me if I can find the horn to summon it. My quests are starting to assemble into a kind of chain.

       

Knocking up another NPC.

      

The armory has leather suits, copper shields, and longbows. My fighter, thief, and ranger aren't strong enough for the shields, but they are for the other upgrades. While buying them, I run into the game's inventory limit, which is apparently 25 common items. Items like potions and onyx stones don't stack, so there's a disincentive to carrying too many of them. I sell some excess stuff to the wholesaler. I wonder if there's any benefit to carrying quest items like letters or books after you've already read them.

    

There's a mage's guild in town--I didn't know there were any more outside Keldar. The man in charge is named Howland. He tells us to inform him as soon as we've found the location of the Grimoire. In his locked apartments, we find a power sling, which has a weapon strength of 2 versus the regular sling's 1 (but versus the long bow's 7; I guess I won't be abandoning bows and arrows after all). That's a decent upgrade for Chester, who hasn't been contributing much to combat.

       

Absolutely, random person who I've never heard of! I'll just turn the all-powerful spellbook over to you.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• I said I was going to spend a lot more time searching things in towns, and I did. I recovered a lot of keys, some food, the occasional potion, and a couple of onyx stones. Onyx stones return you to the entrances to dungeons.

    

It's also a bit of a pleonasm.

       

• On the way from Tiernan to Keldar, we found a house occupied by a "Translator," who said he'd translate any document for 5 gold pieces. This may be an alternative to a high "Languages" skill.

• Some beds are depicted as permanently occupied. If you try to speak with the sleepers, they just say "Zzzzzz" to all your questions. I don't think there's any way to wake them up.

• As per the last session, I supplemented my combat-related earnings with the occasional visit to a casino, where I could reliably make about 30 gold in 5 minutes.  

• Most NPCs remember if they've spoken to you before, and their dialogue changes in small ways to reflect that. 

      

Well, get one, you moocher.

      

• One of the fountains in the castle courtyard is a healing fountain.

• Walking up to windows shows you the insides of structures. 

        

Cool.

    

• Fleeing combat is relatively easy. Any character can initiate it by hitting R)un. You get kicked back to the previous square. If it's a random wilderness combat, you successfully skip the battle, but if it's a fixed dungeon combat, it just begins again when you re-enter the same square.

            

Do you have to rub it in?

      

So I wrap up this session not having accomplished very much, but I'm about to go away for a few days, and I need to write about this session before I forget. The game's AOL page did warn that it's a 200+ hour game. Even accounting for hyperbole, I'm guessing we're looking at something close to the 33 hours it took me to win Antepenult last year than to the quick game time of most Ultima clones. Still enjoying it, though.

    

Time so far: 10 hours

Game 526: Psionics (1993)

If I were a software developer, I would never release "V1.0" of anything. Even if it was 1.0, I'd call it 1.2 or 1.3 so my audience wouldn't think they were getting the first draft.

       

Psionics

United States

Nachos Software (developer)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 20 July 2024

Date Ended: 20 July 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)    

       

Psionics is a very quick, simple RPG written in QuickBASIC. It was written by an Adam Stanchos, who apparently decided to lean in to the obvious mangling of his name and call his label Nachos Software. It was 21:00 when I typed that last sentence. I stared at it for a second, left my computer, drove 30 minutes to a supermarket that stays open until 22:00, bought the ingredients to make nachos, came home, cooked them, and returned to the computer with a generous plate, which I am now eating. Irene thinks I'm a lunatic, but I bet at least one of you is off making your own nachos right now.

      

You bastard.

     

Stanchos lived in El Paso, Texas, and distributed his games as freeware. For $10, you could get a printed manual and--ha!--a cluebook. I've been able to find two other titles credited to Stanchos: a space shooter called Red Baron (1998) and an RPG sequel to Psionics (using an update of the same interface) called Gene Splicing (1998).

    

Psionics isn't a great game--it's too short and simple--but it tells a competent story with decent graphics and a perfectly usable interface. At some unknown point in the future, humans have started developing psionic abilities. The PC is one of them. He has agreed to travel to a starbase called Nexus to be studied by a group of curious scientists. A couple of days of tests proceed uneventfully. Then the PC is awakened one night by sounds of screams and a power outage. He discovers that monsters have escaped their laboratory cages and are attacking the station personnel. He must fight his way through the monsters and escape the station.

         

From the opening narration.

     

Character creation consists of rolling for values between 1 and 10 for strength, intelligence, agility, and endurance; choosing a gender; selecting a portrait; and giving the character a name. The game also randomly generates your maximum hit points and PSI points. I never got more than 3 PSI.

      

I meant to go with the bald guy, but I messed up.

     

You start the game in your sleeping chambers, a 2 x 2 room. The interface uses a tiled, first-person view with a few buttons. The game supports a mouse, but all its commands can also be called by simply hitting their first letter. (This is how to design an interface. Why is it so hard for some developers?) You can save anywhere and have one save slot.

        

The game begins.

      

You open the door and head out into the hallway. You immediately come upon your sponsor, Dr. Gilliand, being eaten by mutated lab rats. You can choose to help him or leave him. He dies either way, but if you help him, you have to fight the rats. If you do help, he tells you to get off Nexus, but it's not like you couldn't figure that out for yourself.

        

The only role-playing choice in the game.

      

Enemies attack with regularity throughout the game. There are only seven or eight types, including jumbo-sized tarantulas, Vordoxian serpents, mad dogs, deranged baboons, and Zandorian dragons. Some of these come in "mutated" varieties, which are harder. They attack in packs of one to four. In battle, you have only three options: fight with a weapon (or, at the beginning, with your hands), make a psionic attack, or run away. Psionic attacks never miss and do the most damage--almost always killing enemies in one shot--but you can only make as many psionic attacks as you have PSI points. 

           

Most of the game's enemies.

        

And combat options.

      

You get experience for each enemy that you kill, and you level up at reasonably tight intervals. Leveling up gives you an extra point to a random attribute and more maximum health. Your maximum PSI points only increase if your intelligence increases, which mine never did. PSI points do recharge fairly quickly as you move about the station, but you still need to resort to regular weapons in a lot of battles.

        

My final level-up.

    

The game starts on Level 5 of a five-level space station, and the hardest part is surviving long enough to find a weapon. The first weapon you find, on Level 5, is a dart gun. Later, on lower levels, you find a laser pistol, a laser rifle, and an automatic laser rifle in that order. You only find two types of armor: a shield belt and a suit of Kevlar. There are also assorted healing packs, but they're curiously underpowered. Fortunately, you regain health at a rate of 1 point per 10 moves, which is generally enough to stay ahead of enemies as long as you judiciously run from battles with four enemies.

    

I only mapped Level 3, which occupies 22 x 10 coordinates but doesn't use nearly all that space. I don't know for sure that all the levels are the same size, but none of them felt much larger or smaller. I never found any secret doors. If they exist, finding them isn't necessary to progress.

     

Level 3 of the Nexus starbase.

      

That's really all there is to the mechanics. The story unfolds as you explore the levels. On Level 5, you find a trashed laboratory with cage doors torn off their hinges. You find an elevator, which will take you to Levels 4 and 3.

   

On Level 4, you find a security card necessary for some of the doors on the lower levels, including the door to the exit. On Level 3, you see a member of the station personnel run to a particular door, swipe his security card, and disappear inside. If you follow him, you discover that you're in a shuttle hangar where you can make your escape--but only if you have a shuttle key.

   

More elevators go down to Levels 2 and 1. In a back room on Level 1, you find a woman looting an office for a shuttle key. When confronted, she says that she's another psychic, but for some reason bitter about being treated like a "guinea pig." After reading the minds of the scientists and discovering that they intended to dismiss her because she was "unstable," she deliberately melted the locks on the doors to the animal cages and caused the whole crisis. 

         

Better for who?

      

You have to defeat the "screwed up gal" in combat--she uses psionic attacks, of course--to get the shuttle key.

      

The author is at least on-the-nose with his naming.

      

After that, it's a simple matter to make your way up to Level 3 and into the shuttle bay. There, you meet a grotesque creature with the generic name of "genetically-engineered being." Ironically (given the name of the game) he is immune to psionic attacks, so you have to defeat him with your rifle, which takes at least six rounds. The only real difficulty I had in the game was restoring my hit points to their maximum before taking on the creature. I kept spinning in place outside his door, but I got attacked by other creatures and kept losing the points I'd regained.

      

Should have called the game Laser Guns, then.

     

Once the creature is dead, the game narrates the ending: You climb into the shuttle, activate it with the key, and fly away. "Leaving behind the horrors of Nexus, you are finally safe. The danger over." Then the words "THE END" come up on the screen, and you're back at the DOS prompt. 

      

The somewhat morose winning screen.

     

The whole thing took me less than 2 hours. I give it a 21 on the GIMLET. It does best (4) in the "game world" category for telling a story that I hadn't encountered before with a beginning, middle, and end. I like the interface and the monster portraits, though none of the other graphics are anything special, and the piercing sound effects are actively hostile (3). Character development and overall gameplay (modest difficulty, certainly doesn't drag) are worth 3s. There's no economy (0), and everything else gets a 1 or 2.

    

Psionics frankly feels a bit like a demo for a more extensive game, and perhaps that's what we get with Gene Splicing (1999).  I can't get it to run--it freezes on the "Nachos" screen--but MobyGames has some screenshots, and I paged through the game manual. It seems to take place in the same universe. There, the PC is an agent for the Space Security Administration. Combat is a bit more complex, as is inventory, and you have multiple characters in the party. If I ever get to 1999, I'll figure out how to emulate it then.

     

*****

     

If anyone has the hardware, time, and willingness to extract files from an original Apple II 5 1/4-inch floppy disk and render them as a .dsk file, please email me (crpgaddict@gmail.com). Thanks!

Enchantasy: Never Tell Me the Odds

 

Chicken dinner.

        

At the end of my first session, my mage PC was joined by his fighter friend, Jared. This session joins the two characters on the road to Macino, in the north-central part of the game world, where their friend Rodell is supposed to be waiting. We win one combat on the way but get killed in the second and are forced to reload. Moments later, we face the exact same combat that killed us, in the exact same place, and get the exact same attack and damage rolls--which means it had the same outcome.

   

It turns out that the game must generate a bunch of seed numbers and store them in a file. Even entering a city, or quitting and reloading, doesn't break the pattern. Casting a spell like "Minor Heal" does, fortunately. Between pre-generating a list of seeds and simply generating random numbers when you need them, what programming advantage does the former offer?

        

Move over, Warren Buffet.

      

More on combat below, but for now we manage to make our way to Macino with only one more battle against a single warrior-bear. It gets us 4 gold pieces; the rewards for combat so far have been relatively pathetic. We spot a dock with a ship's captain just to the east of the city as we enter.

        

Macino's the first city so far to have its dock outside the city, on the main game map.

      

Rodell is waiting near the entrance and joins the party, telling us that we should find our fourth companion, Shyra, in the city of Tiernan. He's a Level 2 ranger. He comes with a bow and a few arrows but no armor. Jared doesn't have any armor, either. I find an armory in the city, but I can't really afford anything because of the need to constantly replenish food.

   

The game does something pretty cool with a beggar, Suffield, that we meet near the entrance. He asks for gold pieces and despite being relatively poor ourselves, we give him 4. He happily says that's enough to get a room at the inn for the night (the bastards charge us 10 gold pieces!). Then--and here's something I've never seen in an RPG before--he actually goes and gets a room at the inn. We encounter him there later, where he says that the innkeeper also gave him a job. I'm always complaining that beggars in RPGs never seem to improve their lives no matter how much gold I give them. What an awesome counter-example. 

      

I do wish the author had put keywords in bold or CAPS. It feels like NPCs are constantly using air quotes or making puns.

      

The city has a dungeon that we accidentally stumble into. We're driven back by a tough battle that leaves us all nearly dead. Rodell and his bow are the only reasons there's a "nearly" in that sentence. We find that paying to rest at the inn fully restores health and magic points. Oddly, the healer does nothing for regular wounds. When we try to pay her (while injured), she just says we don't need her services. She must be for poison or death or something.

       

A dungeon battle that left us in rough shape.

     

In the tavern, we meet a lumberjack named Worrell who says his job has become deadly with monsters now everywhere. We also meet a man named Corey who says that he repairs slot machines for the Slots of Fun casino. There's also a piano player who plays one of the game's tunes for a gold piece.

   

Because the game's economy has been so tight, I decide to analyze odds at the slot machine. Each roll costs 1 gold piece. There are three reels. Various combinations of five symbols pay off different amounts shown on the screen. The highest is three smiley faces at 50 gold pieces; the lowest is a heart with any two other symbols (except other hearts, which pay more) at 3 gold pieces. My first attempt at figuring the expected payout goes awry because I fail to realize that the first reel actually has six symbols. The sixth is a sort of hollow smiley face that figures in no winning combination.

   

Accounting for that extra symbol on Reel 1, and assuming that each symbol has an equal probability of appearing, there's a 0.16667*0.2*0.2 = 0.6667% chance of any of the first eight combinations appearing. Number 9 has a 2.6667% chance, and number 10 has a 13.333% chance. The cumulative probability of any winning combination is 21.333% Multiplied by their payouts, I come up with an average payout of 1.4933 for every gold piece spent. I track around 300 rolls, and my results roughly jibe with these calculations: I win 21% of the time and get an average payout of 1.38. 

     

I only get 3 on this one.

     

In other words, good odds. By the time my experiment is over, I have over 300 gold pieces from a starting point of about 40. But the favorable gambling odds don't break the economy as much as you might think because the game forces you to watch the reels spin and pauses for a couple of seconds after each outcome. It takes me almost an hour to earn my 260 gold (artificially prolonged by the fact that I'm recording the results, but still). Sure, I could cheese it by putting the emulator into warp mode or writing a macro, but the point is that the author tried to limit the amount of gambling a player would do by making it boring. There's a modern analogue, I suppose, in games like Red Dead Redemption, where you can reliably make money at a lot of gambling games, but you actually have to play the full game, including watching the players' moves, taking time to shuffle and deal, and so forth--and even then, there's a maximum to what you can win. This is gambling done mostly right. No one would take the time to save and reload to win these slots.

   

With my newfound wealth, I go back to the armory and buy a short bow for Jared, a sling for Chester, cloth armor and wood shields for Jared and Rodell, and more arrows and food. There are a few things about the purchasing and inventory process that I like. First, when you buy something, even though equipment all goes into a common pool until you equip it, the merchant asks who you're buying it for. He alerts you if that character can't equip the item because of strength or class. Second, I like that the game uses a common pool for unequipped items, arrows, food, keys, and so forth, so that you don't have to micromanage each character's unique inventory.

       

Thanks for letting me know!

      

It turns out that the maximum number of common items, including food and arrows, is 99. We'll see how I feel about that later. The number feels small; a single combat can easily take 10 or 15 arrows. Food depletes somewhat slowly, but I still think that maximum might put an artificial limit on, say, dungeon exploration. Maybe it's meant to add to the challenge in some way.

 

I also buy a pick-axe, because it seems like something you should have, and something called a "telegem." I assume it's going to be an auto-mapping tool, like the gems of Ultima, but when I use it, it seems to be looking for a portal nearby. I really need a place to buy keys and picks, as I'm constantly encountering locked doors.

         

Sigh. You were not "robbed." You were "burgled."

       

Upstairs, I find a house belonging to a married couple, Grace and Bo, who used to run a jewelry store. It is now closed, as their stock was stolen in a burglary. They suspect a notorious thief named Blaze, and they're offering a substantial reward for the recovery of their property. Everyone in town has an opinion about Blaze. Corey and Suffield think that he's hiding in the dungeon.Worrell heard that he died and was buried on an island by fellow thieves.

   

Rather than search the dungeon right now, I decide to head to Tiernan and pick up our fourth party member, who I assume is going to be a thief. Tiernan is in the far southeast of the game world, and we're in the far north, so I try to reach it with ships, even though my funds are somewhat low again. I pay the captain outside Macino to take us to Keldar. From Keldar, the only other place to travel is Hazlett, which gets us about two-thirds of the way to Tiernan.

    

Between ports.

      

Hazlett is a floating city, full of wooden docks, and not much else to do. Odolf is the retired captain of the SS Minnow, whose ship went down after it was torched by flames from the sky (I suspect a dragon). Lester is an aspiring scientist who wants to become as great as Leo, the greatest scientist in Savallia. Leo lives in Riisa Village. Edwin is a small boy who lives in a house with his mother, Silvia, a healer's assistant. Edwin has recently learned in school about the knights who used to guard the king's castle. The greatest of them was Sir Kenway (who I also heard about in Macino), who wore a powerful set of silver armor. It was lost when Kenway was trapped in an underwater cavern.

    

I've been exploring the cities somewhat cursorily, as I know I'm going to have to do it again when I have a proper supply of picks and keys; every city has a lot of locked doors. For now, there are no ships heading to Tiernan or any destination to the south, so I leave Hazlett to finish the trip overland.

      

Finding our way across the land. The signs really do help.

          

Predictably, we face several battles along the way. The game uses a relatively simple turn-based combat system on a tactical grid. It echoes both of Enchantasy's major influences--Ultima V and The Magic Candle--while not being quite as complex as either. Enemies start some distance from the party, and some (magicians and archers in this example) can attack at range. If the party is surprised, enemies go first; if not, the party goes first. Each character gets one action (though that may change as we level up): move, attack in melee range, shoot a missile weapon, cast a spell, or apply first aid to another character. Assessing monsters and equipping items can be done freely and don't count against the character's turn. Movement can be done in eight directions instead of just the four that you can use in the exploration window.

     

Again, there are some neat touches here. I like that you can quickly see the status of the enemy party in the upper-right corner; you can also use the A)ssess command to get more specific statistics about each of them. If you try to equip a bow when you have a shield equipped, the game warns you that you can't do that--and then asks if you want to unequip the shield. That's something I've never seen. It's almost as if the author of this game wanted to make the interface as helpful as possible rather than to punish the player for every mistake.

   

Missile weapons really improved our survivability, and we get through the battles without much trouble. As our hit points start to drop a bit, we find a delightful surprise on the way to Tiernan: a little inn on the side of the road. I like that the game doesn't make it too easy to restore all your health and magic but occasionally provides conveniences like this.

     

Nailing a bat from a distance.

      

While fiddling with the controls looking for some way to turn off the music, I find that there's a "combat frequency" setting that you can use to increase or decrease the number of random battles. It's already set pretty low, though.

   

If I'm getting attacked this much at 3, I'd hate to see what 10 looks like.

     

The game mixes good and bad sound. I like some of the effects, like the creaks of the doors opening and the smash that accompanies hitting enemies in combat. Some of you might like the opening theme, which seems to pay homage to The Terminator, but I find it a bit too emphatic. The dramatic tune that introduces each combat is too bombastic. The game doesn't give you any options to turn off sound that I can find, let alone turn off music independently of sound. I've thus been mostly playing with my headphones hanging on their hook next to my window. This caused a bit of farce the other night when I heard some clanging and thought that the raccoons were tearing apart my bird feeder again. I went charging outside in the middle of the night to find that Irene had brought the feeder indoors. 

        

We grab the last party member.

      

Shyra is waiting as soon as we enter Tiernan. She's in the city looking for someone named Boris, who supposedly has a treasure map. She joins the party at Level 3 and, as I expected, she's a thief. She also joins with no armor. There's an armory in town that sells leather suits, but none of my characters are strong enough to wear them; I hope strength goes up with leveling, then. 

    

The full party.

       

With the team together, I have a couple of options. I can head back to some of the earlier cities and try to start solving some of their side quests, or I can pretend that I'm starting anew and just begin exploring systematically. I decide to play by to-do list in order of priority. This is what I have now, organized by importance and urgency:

       

• Kelder: Re-explore. Explore dungeon, looking for Joey (missing child).
• King's Castle: Re-explore, explore the dungeon, looking for king's tiara.
• Macino: Re-explore. Search dungeon for Blaze and the missing jewelry.
• Tiernan: Fully explore, looking for Boris and his treasure map.
• Udim/Forest of No Return: Explore, looking for the magic horn.
• Aramon: Explore. Try to find Wade, who was researching the legend of a Mystic Bow.

The above task came from a diary entry in Macino that I forgot to mention.

     

• Keldar: Bring healing ointment to sick NPC.
• Dalia: Explore and buy a Locator, then explore Jack's Cave and the cave near Tiernan for gold.
• Mountains???: Search for Jamal/missing prince.
• Kadaar: Explore
• Shaaran: Explore
• Hawthorne Land: Explore city and castle, talk to Duke Hawthorne.
• Portsmith: Explore
• Sonora: Explore
• Haskett: Re-explore.

      

"Explore" and "re-explore" includes searching just about all stumps, shrubs, and pieces of furniture for items. Almost every time I do, I find food, a key, a pick, or something else. Gods know what I missed in the early cities. 

      

I need to do this more often.

     

I am really liking this one. Although it looks at first glance like a bog standard Ultima clone, it offers a delightful surprise almost everywhere you look. This is the second time in the last year or so that I've been surprised, in a good way, by an Ultima clone, the first being Antepenult (1989). It feels like I've been happily surprised a lot lately. Fifteen years into this project, it's finally serving its purpose.

Time so far: 5 hours

 

****

 

I know this is going to upset some people, but I'm going to kick Betrayal at Krondor a couple of notches down the list, so as to give me time to finish reading the novels on which the game is based before my first entry. I expect Quest for the Holy Grail and Syndicate will be quick, so it won't be that long.