Game 530: Swords and Serpents (1990)

"Dear graphics department: Not that kind of serpent."

        

Swords and Serpents

United States

Interplay (developer); Acclaim (publisher)

Released 1990 for NES

Date Started: 8 October 2024

    

Commenters have been on me to try this one for years. It is a rare console game, and even rarer NES game, from a western developer. It clearly draws upon Interplay's experience with The Bard's Tale and other games of its ilk; indeed, its original lead designer, Paul O'Connor, also led the creation of Dragon Wars the same year. It benefited from slick marketing, which included cover art by Boris Vallejo and a rare (for the genre) television commercial. [Ed. To clarify, I didn't play it because commenters have been on me for years. It was the product of a random roll.]

       

Given all of this, the game is surprisingly lame. I've taken plenty of shots at console games of the era, but I know that the platform was capable of better than this dumbed-down Bard's Tale in which every mechanic is more limited than any multi-character CRPG from five or six years earlier. I think I might have enjoyed the unrelated 1982 Intellivision game more. Nonetheless, I had a little fun with it, particularly when I started mapping. I'm never completely dissatisfied when I'm mapping. 

      

The party fights what I guess is a zombie.

      

The developers wasted no time on the story. Four adventurers have entered a dungeon on a quest to find and kill a serpent who has made "the crops go bad, the milk turn sour, and the earth heave with foul indignation." One wonders if the serpent isn't being scapegoated here, as I don't remember any setting that gives dragons the power to disease crops or sour milk. The default party--the one described in the manual--includes one warrior (Ajax), a thief (Mask), and two magicians (Iago and Erin). You can create your own, rolling for strength, intelligence, and agility on a scale of 2-14. I decided to go with a less magical party and played two warriors, a thief, and a magician. A few hours into it, and I think I'm going to regret not having two magicians.

    

An NPC--whose survival in this dungeon is unexplained--gives us the main quest.

     

I should mention that the game supports campaigns with two or four players--two with both game controllers and four with a four-player adapter. One player has to be designated the "lead"; he can move the entire party while the others can just control their character actions and inventories. This system strikes me as so pointless and annoying in a blobber that I can't imagine that anyone ever did it.

       

Rolling a new character.

     

The game begins in the top level of a dungeon of what I guess is 16 levels, since the blank maps provided in the manual go up to 16. Each level is 16 x 16 squares. In the tradition of other gridded blobbers, the dungeon is peppered with messages and encounters, including plenty of battles. The graphics offer only the most basic textures, and you don't see anything in the environment. The most banal, repetitive tune plays on an endless loop, and the game offers no ability to turn it off. I had to mute sound entirely.

    

Enemies respawn continually, with a chance of attack every time you move or turn. The game cycles through your characters in order of their appearance on the screen, and if you just mash the "A" button, you'll execute a default attack and get the battle over quickly. Health meters for the enemies monitor your progress. You theoretically can target the enemy's head or legs by holding the up or down directional buttons while hitting "A." Maybe this becomes important later, but I didn't notice any difference in the zombies, spiders, guards, and bats that I encountered on Level 1.

 

I imagine this is some kind of ogre.

     

Mages can naturally cast spells by hitting the "B" button during their turn. They start with only "Flash Fire" and "Heal," but I found "Sting" fairly early on Level 1. ("The ways of magic are scattered through the maze," a message offers.) The manual indicates that the game offers 16 possible spells, and that I'll eventually find mass-damage spells like "Phalanx" and "Thunder." For now, "Flash Fire" and "Sting" don't seem to do much more than physical attacks, so I've been saving my points for "Heal."

    

Late in the session, Kirk goes to cast a spell.

     

Despite the need to cast an occasional spell, I found combat exceedingly boring even holding down the TAB key in Nestopia to speed it up. If I weren't mapping at the same time, I'm not sure I'd put up with the relentless repetitiveness of this one.

    

Slain enemies reward the party with gold and experience and occasionally an item. The party gains experience and levels as a unit rather than as individual characters. Gold can be spent at an armory on Level 1. I assume that armories are found on other levels, but I'm not sure. I mostly used the armory to sell things, but it offers Swords +2 worth grinding for.

     

Leveling up.

       

Levels 1, 5, and 10 (according to a message) also offer temples, which heal you for free. These are the only places to raise dead characters. I imagine they're good places to grind, since you can just mash "A" with abandon and then turn around and get healed. I got the party up to Level 4 doing this, while earning enough money to buy one of those +2 swords.

        

My primary fighter's equipment late in this session.

       

On Level 1, I learned that to slay the dragon, I would need to collect seven "ruby treasures" which had belonged to a previous adventurer. One of them is apparently a ruby sword, which lies "at the point of the sword." An NPC in a 1 x 1 room asked for the "black crystal," but I never found it on the level, so I guess I'll be coming back here later.

     

Rude!

     

The levels all have names, which you can check by going to the party status option. Level 1 is called "Destiny Awaits." Level 2's name is "Who's Zoomin' Who?," which refers to the first appearance of "zoom tubes," or fast transports from one level to another. A couple of early messages explained how they work. Late in the level, you step into one (after a couple of messages of warning), which takes you back up to Level 1, in a spot near the store and healer. The tube is only two steps away from the stairs to Level 3 in terms of coordinates, but it's 60 steps given the wall patterns. I assume that later, when I'm trying to transition levels quickly, I'll be expected to use the mage's "Passwall" spell.

        

There was nothing wrong when they were just "teleporters."

      

The return trip to Level 1 was welcome, as I needed to heal, and I had a lot of items to sell. When I was done, I had enough money for a second +2 sword. I also found various armor upgrades during my explorations--helms, shields, scale mail, and such. Watching your armor class slowly increase is an experience that never really gets old in any game.

    

Nintendo was capable of the "+" symbol, correct?

    

The northwest section of Level 2 was taken up with a maze of 1 x 1 rooms. I wish developers wouldn't do this. They offer no navigational challenge, yet they're a pain in the neck to map. The only things to find in the maze were a +1 sword and the "Shield" spell, which increases armor class by 1. It can be cast out of combat, which is useful, but it doesn't last all that long.

     

An oddly prophetic name.

      

Level 2 had a 2 x 2 area that I couldn't enter plus a door in the southeast corner locked with a gold key. This meant, as with the black crystal (and a 1 x 1 area) on Level 1, I'd have to come back at some point. I'm glad I'm mapping.

      

My map of Level 2.

     

Level 2 had the same spiders, bats, guards, and zombies as Level 1, though they seemed harder. It also had some warty-faced thing that was probably meant to be an ogre. There were four of these guarding the way to Level 3 in a fixed encounter, and it took me a couple of tries to beat them. The party rose to character Level 5 before we took the stairs down.

Level 3 ("The Threshold") began with a tough combat against a new enemy--some kind of sorcerer, I guess--which put us at character Level 6. A corridor brought us to a central room with four doors, but only the southwest one was unlocked. Each door led to a different quadrant, and the shtick of the level was that we needed to trip a switch in each section to unlock the door to the next one. (If we couldn't figure it out, an NPC helpfully offered, "Locked doors have remote triggers.") The southwest quadrant had a tube back to Level 1 and a horseshoe.

       

My map of Level 3.

      

The northwest section had a little maze and the "Deadeye" spell, which improves accuracy for one character in one battle. It hardly seems worth it. The southeast quadrant offered the laziest of all gridded dungeon designs: a spiral. I suppose in this case it served a purpose, as it ended in a blank wall, where 99% of players were bound to test for secret doors. If you hadn't already figured out how secret doors work, this section would teach you. As if to drive it home, an NPC on the other side says, "Ah . . . that was a secret door."

       

That David played and it pleased the Lord?

       

The northeast quadrant was full of traps, but a message in the southwest had warned, "To avoid the traps to the northwest [sic], stay near the walls." In addition to the stairs leading down to Level 4, the quadrant also held a fountain where mages could restore spell points and (behind a secret door) a gold key. I used it back on Level 2 and found the Ruby Glasses. 

     

The game makes it sound like Chet is doing something wrong.

        

The only new enemy I noticed on the level was some kind of skeletal thing. It seems too early for liches, but I don't know what else is skeletal and floats. As with Level 2, the bats, spiders, guards, and zombies seemed to hit extra hard.

     

I asked ChatGPT, "What is a good punchline to the riddle, 'What is skeletal and floats?'" It came up with: "A buoy-t." I don't know what it means, but that's what I'm calling this enemy from now on.

     

Let's talk about saving. As I usually do, I've tried to adhere to the game's intended difficulty by walking all the way back to the temple when a character dies, and by not otherwise using save states to undo bad luck or bad choices. I am not, however, adhering to the game's intended process for loading and reloading when I suffer a full-party death or end a session. Despite appearing three years after Zelda had no trouble with saving, Swords requires you to write down a 10- or 12-character code for each character, plus another 14-character code for the game itself. Remember, you have to re-enter all these codes by arrowing around an on-screen keyboard with the directional pad. "Reloading" must have taken half an hour. Even then, the code doesn't save the experience points you've earned towards the next character level, nor the auto maps, nor the exact dungeon level the party was on. Instead, when you reload, you return to the closest temple. Screw that.

    

I'm curious how players who encountered this game on the NES felt about it. I'm conscious these days that I look for a different experience with console RPGs than computer RPGs, and I'm not sure that paper maps and external notes are part of that experience. And surely the music lovers turned the music off for this one, right?

   

Time so far: 5 hours