Game 525: Monsters Lair (1980)

Grammatical errors in the main title are never a good sign.

       

Monsters Lair

United States

Independently developed; published via mail-order by Soft Sector Marketing, Inc.

Released 1980 for TRS-80

Date Started: 9 July 2024

Date Ended: 9 July 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Completely user-definable, but fundamentally easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

     

Monsters Lair is one of those sad games to come out of the CRPG dark ages, as developers tried to figure out how to bring Dungeons & Dragons to the microcomputer and generally screwed it up. The best of this motley of games have a few interesting ideas amidst their flaws: from the same year as Monsters Lair, for instance, we have Black Sage's and Doom Cavern's attempts to emulate D&D modules, Crystalware's atmospheric House of Usher with its hidden mystery, and two attempts by the Maces and Magic series to unite RPGs and adventures. I tried hard to find any spark in Monsters Lair, anything positive to say about it, but it's about as bland an adaptation of D&D as you can get. It was comparatively cheap, at least, selling by mail order for $14.95.

    

The game offers a fixed map of 26 rooms, each containing a single monster. Into this structure goes a single adventurer, with attribute categories (but not values) drawn directly from Dungeons & Dragons. At the beginning of the game, you can choose to roll a random character or enter your own. If the game creates one for you, the attributes remain in the range of 10-18. If you enter your own character, on the other hand, you can enter values up to 99 (although the manual says that values above 18 are impossible). Most of the attributes must be unused; there really is no role for intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.

       

Rolling a new character.

       

The "hit point" value, which by default starts at 10, is a bit misleading. When the game actually begins, you find your hit points are multiplied by 8 to create your "vitality," which is the real hit point pool, as in it's the number that gets whittled away when monsters hit you.

      

The map of the level.

       

You start in the lower-right corner of the map. As gameplay begins, you're asked to set a difficulty value from 1-5. Supposedly, lower values are easier but give you fewer rewards. I frankly didn't notice a lot of difference.

  

Gameplay is very simple. You navigate your little cursor around the map, pop into the rooms, and fight the monsters. "Fighting" means just running up to them and then watching for a few minutes as the game says things like "You gave him a glancing blow," "Got you, boy that smarts," "Missed him by that much," "Crunch!! You are hit," and "You clobbered him." Eventually, one of you runs out of vitality and is dead. Each kill awards you with both vitality and gold, but these statistics are hidden until you return to the starting room, at which point you have the option to bail with your accumulated rewards or trade your won "vitality" for actual vitality (thus reducing your reward later) and continue the fight.

      

This looks to be some kind of classroom.

      

The only choice you get during combat--the only choice you get in the entire game, really--is to use a magic wand (SPACE) to instantly kill any enemy. You can do this three times per mission.

 

The various pieces of furniture in each room, all carefully detailed in the legend, play absolutely no role in the game whatsoever.  

    

Neither do apostrophes.

     

Maximum success is clearing out all 26 rooms before ending the mission, but the game doesn't acknowledge that you've done anything special. Ending the mission gives you a score and tells you what boosts you got to your character sheet during the game. Your level goes up if you got enough experience, and your armor class bonus goes up if you found any magic armor pieces. I don't think there's any mechanism for increasing attributes, which makes it all the more mysterious that you can create your own character of such high values.

    

You'll need to copy down these new values if you want to keep playing the same character across multiple missions. The game doesn't save him to disk or anything. The authors weren't magicians.

             

A character at the end of a session. That's a lot of magical ac pluses.

      

If there's anything that I enjoyed about the game, it was the descriptions of the monsters. They have a flavor of being randomly-generated, but I got some of them multiple times. They included:

    

• Large hairy man-shaped bugbear
• Filthy, decayed, greenish, manlike being
• Large beetle that smells very bad
• Mansized creature, horned, with skin of stone.
• Large black catlike creature
• Giant frog, big as a Saint Bernard
• Pointed eared elf
• Large beetle, with eyes that glow

     

I also fought a just-plain "Demon" but with asterisks on either side of the word. He wasn't any harder than the others.

     

We've seen a number of math problems with early TRS-80 games. This one seems to be full of them. My first game, I went with a created character, and he did all right with a difficulty level of 2. I had to keep returning to the starting room to get vitality boosts, though. After that, everything went wonky. I played a computer-generated character on moderate difficulty (3) who never lost a vitality point. I then tried creating my own character with attributes all set to 1 and played him at a difficulty of 5. I mostly did this so he'd die quickly and I could get a death screenshot. Predictably, I couldn't get him to die at all. He wouldn't even take damage.

     

Back in the starting room.

         

Then there was the occasional room where the character would get locked into battle with a monster that he couldn't hit. Fortunately, the monster couldn't hit him in such situations, either. I took a long walk and came back to the two of them still swinging and missing round after round. I noticed that in such cases, no monster description appeared, but this doesn't appear to be a bug. The manual warns that in such cases, "it is up to you to figure out what the monster could be," as if the game gives any clues for such a deduction. I guess it was an iron statue that my character mistook for a monster.

    

El Explorador de RPG covered this one a couple of years ago. I agree with him that there's probably a relationship with the Dunjonquest games, which started in 1978. It doesn't much look like the versions that I covered, but there are definite graphical similarities with the TRS-80 version, and both games have the whole business about typing in your own character. Dunjonquest is of course otherwise much more advanced. There's also some similarity to Stuart Smith's Fracas (1980) in the way that combats are resolved, but Fracas came out the same year, and if Monsters Lair's title screen is to be believed, it was done by March.

      

I thought the second author's name was "Jinky" Jones when I first read it.

               

The authors are given as Allen G. Mehr and Jimmy D. Jones. Their manual (which comes on the disk) has an apostrophe in the title but makes it singular; it also adds a "The" to the title. They acknowledge the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on some aspects of the game (principally the attributes), but they also note that Lair does not offer "a strict interpretation of the rules." They make the somewhat hilarious suggestion--eight years before the Gold Box series did--that you might be able to bring tabletop D&D characters in and out of this game.

     

It gets a pretty miserable 8 on the GIMLET, offering no game world, NPCs, combat options, or equipment, and only the barest character development, encounters, economy, and quest. I thought the keyboard controls worked okay and at least it was short (2s in those categories).