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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
Maybe it's just me, but these last series of entries feel like that have been coming through with blazing rapidity. Thanks! And thus Betrayal at Krondor is coming up far more quickly than I expected -- I (like so many others here) remain extremely interested to see how it performs here on the blog; although these other 'minor' titles still remain quite interesting as well, for entirely different reasons.
ReplyDeleteMy goal is an entry every 2.5 days, and I've managed to keep to it since 1 January. I hope I can continue through the fall, which is always busy, and have a "perfect year."
DeleteThere have been more one-entry games than usual lately. That's just random luck.
You're going through a really fallow stretch. I haven't played any game you've been playing since Nethack 3.1 in March. Some of the games are interesting but most of them are blah like this one. Can't wait for you to get to Krondor. Looks like just one more game to finish before you do so...
DeleteI can sense another discussion of "I like these obscure games, they're covered nowhere else and it fulfills an important role, you can read about the classics in many other places already" vs "This is boring and drags on for too long, I want to read (Chet's views) about (better) games I know" coming up in 3, 2, 1, ... . Well, I guess it has been a while.
DeleteI've noticed how evenly the posts were distributed among the months this year. Good luck with keeping up the streak. Maybe spread out the (likely) upcoming BRIEFs to multiple posts to increase your buffer size.
DeleteWell, there are obscure games and then there are games that are obscure for a reason. There are games that are like hidden gems, or at least important in some way in the developement RPGs as a genre, and then there were games that were like "bad RPGMaker handiwork" of today, since personal computers availability was just as big a leap in availability of writing games as advent of RPGMaker was. There is a reason that 90% of RPGMaker games are obscure, but some are gems, but still obscure by the virtue of RPGMaker being not mainstream gaming (although more mainstream than NWN modules, still).
DeletePsionics is terrible and shouldn't take more than one post, so the "classics" crow should get their wish within next week or so.
Delete@Lorigulf: You're right. The thing is, until you play them for a bit, it's often not easy to know whether they're boring / annoying / just bad (and thus deservedly obscure) or a hidden gem or at least have some interesting elements worth exploring and experiencing.
DeleteDoes this apparently simple game from the early days contain another Monsters Lair or something like Futurewar? The next Ultima - style game might offer an enjoyable above-average Antepenult or just the 127th very inferior U3 clone. In the vast sea of less than mediocre shareware there are undiscovered islands like Defender of Boston (the title screen of which did not inspire Chet much confidence, so first impressions can be misleading). Is this flashy Amiga title all show and no substance or does it have interesting aspects like Perihelion? Etc.
Or take the recently (dis)covered Dungeon of Doom. Basically unknown, but it has a potential claim to several "firsts" in CRPG history. No way to know this until it was made available and played, analysed and described by Chet and El Explorador de RPG. So without delving into the discussion I mention above, even if one wanted Chet to somehow further limit the blog's coverage to "interesting" entries (a very subjective criterion), it's not that easy to separate the chaff from the wheat without putting some time into it - at which point you might as well document it.
When looking for diamonds in the rough, there is invariably more rough than diamonds. Nonetheless it's all entertaining.
DeleteRegarding BaK, my own estimate from a recent playthrough is that it will at least earn a high-enough GIMLET to make it onto the "Highest Rated So Far" list. We'll see!
As a guy who doesn't play the games except roguelikes, but enjoys reading about them, it seems like a pretty good run lately--Die Quelle von Naroth and Enchantasy look pretty good, Circuit's Edge looks very good of its kind which is not really an RPG, Local Area Dungeon was weird but kind of fun (I did play that a bit), and the 80s games were what they were. But Whale's Voyage was enough to drag the average down all by itself.
DeleteWell, I'm curious about Dracula in London, which I never heard of before, for my part.
DeleteIt will almost certainly be a BRIEF. I think it's an update of an 80s game that also wasn't an RPG.
DeleteI think if you think the last four months consistent entirely of obscure games you clearly haven't played as many as you think you have.
DeleteAnyway, complaining that non-popular titles aren't as interesting to read about feels odd considering the last two games that were slogs to read were the last Ultima game and Nethack. Something I suspect will only continue to pop up as games get longer and longer. Unless its something a lot of people played but few people actually finished like Whale's Voyage, you're just hoping Chet will confirm your opinion on a game. I'm not saying that just because I think Krondor is overhyped and boring, I'm sure that MM6-8 will be slogs to read through too. Not because the games or Chet bad, but because the nature of some longer games means that past a certain point, it can be hard to find interesting things to talk about.
To each their own, I enjoyed all the Nethack posts, but that's in large part because Nethack is the game I've actually played and I could see which potholes Chet was stepping into (and give hopefully helpful advice).
DeleteI also enjoyed the Serpent's Isle posts, in the way that I enjoy Edgar Kennedy doing a slow burn as Chico and Harpo torment him. (Which, to be clear, is quite a lot. That is my favorite scene in the movies.)
I just went back and read the Nethack entry where Chet got an early fountain wish and found a wand of wishing in a store and then went down to his conference and his laptop went to sleep and crashed the game. As Oscar Wilde said, one must have a heart of stone to read that without laughing.
DeleteI agree with Morpheus on Serpent Isle. Ultima just has been covered and analyzed so much, with the longer games it's indeed challenging to write sth new and interesting for each entry.
DeleteAs for the length of games making this a general issue more and more: given the speed at which the blog advances through the years, the already present rise of shareware and the mix with 'catching up' on older games, unless Chet changes his modus operandi I don't think this will become too much of an issue yet for the foreseeable future.
(As an illustration re forward momentum regarding years, Chet reported rejecting the first Dracula in London of 1988 he refers to above above in March of 2011...).
Ah, too bad about the manual correcting the title. I was hoping it was named in deference to a guy named Richard Monsters or something.
ReplyDeleteI mean, with the apostrophe before the s, it still could be.
DeleteI don't remember why I chose to call the game Monster's Lair on my site instead of Monsters Lair. Probably upon seeing its title in the manual and in some advertisements of the time (although there are also those for Monsters Lair), I realized that it was really misspelled.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, in the first advertisement I found, from Level IV Products and not Soft Sector Marketing (they were not advertised yet, perhaps because the company did not exist yet), they give even another name to the game: Monsters Lair Adventure.
Your way probably makes more sense. For some reason, I have a pathological loyalty to title screens when it comes to setting the "official" title, but it probably makes more sense to choose the most appropriate way of rendering the title from a combination of the title screen, the game box, the manual, advertisements, and what the authors clearly intended.
DeleteHave you ever worked in a library? Title screens are the top of the priority list as a preferred source for all game titles.
DeleteIn other words, libraries that catalogue games -- or more accurately, the librarians that create the bibliographic records that everyone uses for those games -- are supposed to use the title screen as the definitive source for a game's title unless they have a good reason to do otherwise. (And if they can't run the game, that does constitute a "good reason" to use the packaging instead, typically the label on the physical disc.)
No, never. I think I took the idea from Ebert, who always insisted that the movie title on the screen was the official title.
DeleteI forgot the label on the disk as another potential source! Also, how the game is referred in the manual (regardless of what it says on the cover). We saw this with Shadow Caster, for instance, which is two words on the title screen, manual cover, and box cover, but one word in the text of the manual itself.
I try to do the same, with the idea that many times what accompanies the game (manual, box, label) is not created by the original author of the software, who is the one who really gave the title to his work.
DeleteThe bad thing is when there are different versions of the software with different titles, but in those cases it is a matter of looking for the first one that was published.
In this case I think I really thought there was a grammatical error, but I shouldn't have corrected it.
Ebert's standard is the one used by librarians for moving images too! There's an exception that allows them to use the label instead, in situations in which a library can't play the medium (or look at film stock). Their logic is clear for one-off things like videotape in weird encodings/formats from the archives of TV stations, but might be harder to imagine with an item sold at retail until you remember things like RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc format that basically no one can play anymore. (Few libraries would accept that donation, though.)
DeleteOf course people are reasonable: if something's a typo beyond question and is contradicted by every other aspect of the item -- disk label, box, manual -- they might reconsider. (Though patrons should never have to search for "Night of the Lviing Dead" to find the item anyway.) But otherwise I think the idea is that the essence of the object is contained in the thing you play back (or the program code you run), and the other stuff is secondary.
This brings to mind the debates about how to title the first season of Doctor Who serials (Which were produced as a single unit but aired in multiple parts, with titles only for the individual episodes), culminating in a joke in one of the books about the series that recently unearthed production documents proved that the first serial (Which the BBC had always marketed under the title of its first episode, "An Unearthly Child", but which fandom had often insisted was better titled "10,000 BC" or sometimes "The Tribe of Gum") should be canonically titled "Dear Verity, there's that thing you wanted about the cavemen. Love, Tony"
Delete