Betrayal at Krondor: Prison Break

     

Hey, I'm role-playing a recidivist.

     

Before moving on to Chapter 4, I reloaded and returned to Dabeh's Fanciful Trinkets to buy all the spell scrolls they sold that Owyn didn't already know. These turned out to be Dragon's Breath, Skyfire, The Unseen, Nacre Ciatrix, and Unfortunate Flux. I also restocked restoratives for all party members.

    

On another note, I was reminded by Georges that the spyglass isn't just a plot item; it's something that you can use. It highlights encounters and treasures on the map with red dots, making it faster to find them rather than just bouncing around looking for them. That sure would have come in handy for those two "Right to Roam" entries.

     

Much later, the spyglass helps us avoid enemies on the road.

     

When I was ready, I returned to Cavall Run, opened the Nighthawk chest, learned about the Moredhel plans to attack Northwatch, and transitioned to Chapter 4: "Marked for Death." It begins with a conversation between the Moredhel leader, Delekhan, and his lieutenant, Narab. Narab, who's somehow out of favor with Delekhan, tells his general that he's captured Owyn and Gorath. Expecting praise, he's astonished when Delekhan strikes him and yells at him: "You've wrecked everything, you dog!" Confused, Narab asks about his own life. "It is forfeit!" Delekhan screams.

    

Owyn, meanwhile, awakens in a prison cell to Delekhan's interrogation. He demands to know where we were going with the Moredhel plans and the meaning of the notes James scribbled on them: "What does Gabot's Folly mean? Who are Arthur and Jimmy the Hand?" Owyn bravely plays stupid, pretending to be just a thief. Delekhan commits a classic villain's blunder and gives the note back to Owyn. "It will do you little good in your grave."

     

Another one to add to the evil overlord list.

    

Delekhan then goes and kneels over Gorath's unconscious, beaten body. Owyn hears him whisper something like, "Plans unfulfilled." He strikes Gorath one more time, then strides away, telling Owyn and Gorath to "enjoy your deaths." Meanwhile, Owyn becomes aware of someone working a magic spell in the area--a spell that suddenly causes his cell door to pop open.

    

Wasting no time, Owyn helps Gorath to his feet and the two companions limp to the door of the jail, finding it curiously unlocked and unguarded. The chapter then starts letting me play in one of the dungeon rooms.

   

"I don't get it."

      

Fair warning: If the titular "betrayal" turns out that Gorath was secretly working for Delekhan, I'm going to ragequit the game.

   

Gorath, for all the narration about him being beaten and drugged, isn't in bad shape. He has 69/69 health and 46/74 stamina. Owyn fares about the same. Neither has any equipment except (handily) a single torch, but we find a chest with Gorath's stuff right in front of me. I panic a bit when I can't find Owyn's items--he had the spyglass and most of the food--but I soon find it in another corner of the room. Neither of the chests have any of our (considerable) gold, but two Moredhel lie dead on the floor, and they have a little, along with some lockpicks (James had all of ours).

   

There are exits from the room in all directions. I go east. The door is locked, but Gorath has all the keys that we ended Chapter 3 with, and one of them opens it.

    

We manage to surprise four Moredhel in the next corridor. They go down quickly to a "Flamecast" and Gorath's melee attacks. They have some excellent swords, though not quite as good as Gorath's Griefmaker. Still, if I knew there were a shop nearby, I'd take them for sale. They also have some poisoned and flaming quarrels. Gorath has quite a selection of quarrels (elven, fire, Tsurani, poisoned, poisoned Tsurani) that he'll probably never use. Melee combat is simply too powerful in comparison.

    

From here, following the right wall, we find:

 

• A monument to the location where Delekhan united the clans of the north.

• An attack by two "sentinel ogres." That's a new enemy. They're quite thin and small; they don't look much like "ogres." They stand up to a couple of hits from Gorath, though (Moredhel go down in one), so they're reasonably tough.

      

This is an "ogre"?

      

• Four goblins. Embarrassingly, they kill us. As unwise as it seems to rest in the Moredhel dungeon, I'm probably going to have to rest between battles. I win on a rematch.

• Two corridors that have pits and end in dead ends on the other side of the pits. At least, I think they're dead ends. I click around and try walking through them, but I can't find any secret or illusory doors. I don't even know if the game has secret or illusory doors. Is it just trying to get me to waste rope? 

      

It looks like there could be a t-junction over there, but it's just a dead end.

       

• A fairy chest at the end of a corridor: "Though blind as well, can lead the blind well." I don't get it from the clue alone, but it's only four letters (CANE). It just has 3 herb packs and a couple of crossbows I don't have room for.

• Behind another pit and another locked door (Gorath is able to pick it), three Moredhel warriors and a new enemy--a curiously redundant "witch hag"--guarding a couple of treasure chests. She turns out to be immune to "Flamecast," and she devastates us with some kind of spell that saps our stamina, leaving Owyn unable to cast and Gorath unable to fight, except feebly. On a reload, it turns out she's not immune to "Fetters of Rime." I don't know why, but Gorath's hits don't seem to do much damage to the Moredhel warriors, but we manage to get through it.

• The chest is trapped, and although Owyn senses it, we do not successfully disarm it. It explodes, and we take a bunch of damage. Fortunately, the witch hag had 20 restoratives, so we gulp a bunch down. The chest has some gold, rope, a whetstone, and a spell called "Evil Seek," which Owyn doesn't have.

• Another chest on the far side of the room opens to a Guildis Thorn and contains an Interdictor Key, "the only way to open locks that have been blessed by the Dark Goddess."

   

At this point, we've exhausted all the paths from the original room that led east, so we have to return and go north. We soon meet a single witch hag in a hallway; she blasts Owyn with a spell that halves his health, but she soon falls to Gorath's sword. She has 7 restoratives and 3 herb packs. It's nice of these witch hags to carry the medicines we need to undo their damage. Beyond her, two goblins are guarding a room with a chest containing a Guildis Thorn, a crossbow, and some rope. After that, the northern options are exhausted.

   

We return to the starting room and head west but soon meet a dead-end. This leaves south as the only viable option. Funny how it was the last one; I promise I didn't engineer that. It turns out we need the Interdictor Key to open the door, so we wouldn't have been able to go this way first.

      

Using the new key, which cleverly has a skull on it.

     

The corridor goes to the southern edge of the dungeon and then splits into east and west routes, the former wrapping counter-clockwise along the south wall and then halfway up the east wall; the latter wrapping clockwise south, north, east, and south to almost meet the former. I take the longer western route first, after a long rest.

    

A bit of the dungeon.

    

• Our first encounter is with five Moredhel warriors. I have Owyn try the new "Evil Seek" spell. It takes a minimum of 20 points, but it's pretty awesome. It flies from enemy to enemy like a "Chain Lightning" spell, doing a reduced amount to every new enemy it strikes. This one kills the first two immediately and softens up the rest for Gorath's sword. It does more damage than "Flamecast" and the enemies don't have to be close together. I can't imagine ever casting "Flamecast" again.

• Four Moredhel and a witch hag slaughter us around the next bend. I can't imagine how hard this would have been if we hadn't spent all that time roaming. On a reload, I have to rest for two days and buff to defeat them. 

• A chest with some gold, four more Moredhel warriors.

     

After a long corridor and some dead ends, we come to what looks like the exit. A fairy chest in front of it asks: "This kingdom fool has married many women. Yet he has never been married." That's an obvious one (PRIEST). It's got a suit of Euliliko Armor, which I don't have room for, some Killlian's Root Oil (enhances a weapon for one battle), a ruby, and some Aventurine (fixes bowstrings). 

    

The exit.

    

Rather than leave, I turn around and picked up some things I missed in the other direction, which turns out to be four battles (three goblins; three goblins and a witch hag; three Moredhel and two goblins; three goblins) and a couple of chests with gold and usable items. After the third battle, Owyn fumbles opening a trapped chest and it blows up in our faces, leaving Owyn at near-death. Gorath is able to take care of the final battle himself. I pump Owyn full of herbs and restoratives and make my way back to the exit, resting frequently.

     

This can be tedious.

       

At the exit, the companions steel themselves for the possibility of guards at the top of the stairs. Expecting to find ourselves outdoors, we are dismayed to find another level, and some Moredhel right in front of us. Sighing, I head back downstairs, feed Owyn just about every restorative we have, and rest for two days. Logically, it's absurd that Delekhan didn't find us. But when we emerge again, we're ready to take on the challenges of what turns out to be a much smaller upper level:

     

• Two Moredhel warriors and a witch hag.

• Two Moredhel warriors, a witch hag, and a goblin. For a battle that isn't that tough on paper, it leaves us pretty beat up. They're guarding a fairy chest: "This marvelous thing, though it sounds absurd, contains all our letters, but is only a word." It takes a couple seconds to click (ALPHABET). Money, restoratives, various items.

• Four Moredhel warriors.

    

Yet more bodies lie before us.

     

• Three Moredhel warriors and a sentinel ogre. For not much reason other than I'm trying to use up stuff, I summon a couple of hounds to help me in this one.

• Several locked doors that the Interdictor Key opens. We're getting a lot of use out of that key.

• A room with a fairy chest: "Answers its caller without being asked. Responds in seconds, and speaks all languages with equal ease." I had it after the first sentence (ECHO). Sarig's Bane (counters enchanted blades), a Guilder's Passkey, some royals, a sword.

• A pit appears immediately around a corner, dropping us to our doom, requiring a reload.

• Blocking the exit, a final battle with three sentinel ogres and two Moredhel warriors. I hit them with a full-powered "Evil Seek" and kill four of them immediately. Gorath kills the fifth with a fire arrow. That was a satisfying battle.

        

Okay, this is my new favorite spell.

      

Finally, we come to the stairs and exit into Sar-Sargoth, a menu city with a shop and a tavern. We shrug and give them a try. We exited the dungeon with a respectable 805 sovereigns, and we have over 1,200 once we sell our gems to the shop (Scavenger's Meet). We replenish our herb packs and restoratives. The tavern looks like any human tavern and has only a few generic NPCs and a gambler.

      

Nice for the Moredhel not to notice the human among them.

       

We exit the city with no problem and find ourselves in a frosted land with paths to the east and west. A look at the map shows that either way goes to human lands, west to Tyr-Sog and east to Highcastle or Northwarden. I decide to head east for three reasons; first, if James didn't make it to Northwarden, we can warn them. Second, we can perhaps meet him again and travel to Arutha's camp together. Third, when last I checked, the pass to Tyr-Sog was blocked, whereas James just didn't want to take the passes north of Highcastle and Northwarden. Yeah, I'll miss a bunch of stuff that way, but I already did my roaming. I'm role-playing now.

      

We emerge into a new kind of landscape.

      

No sooner have we stepped on the path from the city than we meet a Moredhel named Liallan. Gorath clearly knows her. Their conversation reveals that she helped Gorath escape to the south at the beginning of the game, but she had nothing to do with our more recent escape from the dungeons. Her motives are otherwise complex and unclear. She won't help Gorath kill Delekhan, but she intends to rule the clans after Delekhan inevitably dies. Narab has fled and Delekhan has put a price on his head. Delekhan has been spreading rumors that Murmandamus (the general from A Darkness at Sethanon is still alive) and Delekhan intends to free him; it's uncertain whether he believes this or even whether it's true. Finally, she mentions that Delekhan's group of mages called The Six have gone to Harlech, which is fortunately in the opposite direction.

    

Damn. Why couldn't she join the party?

      

We run into four Moredhel warriors and then immediately five more. Owyn goes down, and we have to stop for a few days of restoratives, herb packs, and rest. The moment we start moving again, we hit two Moredhel warriors, two sentinel ogres, and a new enemy called a highland ogre (he's just as small as his cousins). That's three battles in the space of as many steps; clearly, we need to get off the road. We bumble into another party of two highland ogres and three sentinel ogres while trying to do so. Highland ogres are capable of spells, as one of them nails Gorath with "Fetters of Rime" in the first round and takes him out of the equation. Owyn is forced to spend all his health on "Evil Seek" to eliminate most of them, then use his lightning staff to kill the remaining two. It's a good moment for him. 

     

Blasting the highland ogre with a lightning staff.

      

We continue on, using the spyglass to avoid enemies, legitimately trying to lie low. In the city of Caern, we find a shop called Oeirdu and Company that sells armorer's hammers and restoratives, both of which we desperately need. We also pay a lot for a book called Acts of Shamata Garrison, which doesn't seem to do anything at all for us. It sounds like it's supposed to increase combat abilities. Maybe we already read it. The other houses in town were mostly empty, or had women and children alone, as the men had gone off to join Delekhan's army.

       

Gorath apparently stops long enough for a tryst with a woman he knows.

      

The path south is mercifully free of encounters for a while. When we do come across an enemy, it's another new one: two "tor giants" led by a witch hag. The giants like to toss boulders across the battlefield, and their accuracy is unnerving. Fortunately, with only three opponents, "Fetters of Rime" does its job.

      

Four enemies is apparently too many for Gorath.

     

Shortly after the battle, the road branches to the south and east, south going to Highcastle via Wyke, east going to Northwarden via Raglam. We head east. But we soon see a mass of soldiers guarding a bridge, and the game won't even let us try to take them on. So we turn south and try the Highcastle route, almost immediately tripping a battle with two Moredhel, a highland ogre, and a witch hag. I take some time to consider my other combat spells.

   

"Skyfire" blasts a single enemy. Since I still have 37 uses of my lighting staff, which does the same thing, it doesn't seem like a good choice. Plus, they have to be carrying metal, and I don't know how you ensure that. "Fetters of Rime," "Evil Seek," and "Flamecast" we're all aware of. "Bane of the Black Slayers" only works on them (supposedly; I forgot about it and never tried it). "Thoughts Like Clouds" confuses enemy spellcasters, but for the stamina cost, I think I'd rather just freeze them. "Unfortunate Flux" summons sprites to assist you; I'll try that eventually. It really is difficult not to just blast out with a maximum "Evil Seek" and just rest between battles, which is what I do here.

   

A tor giant tosses a boulder.

      

We get blasted by a trap I can't solve; we cross a bridge over a frozen river; we pass quickly through the village of Wyke, which just has some empty houses and an armorer. But once again, as we near the border of the Kingdom of the Isles, we see a host of Moredhel too great to attack. Clearly, the game wants us to go all the way back to Sar-Sargoth, take the western road, and ultimately take the Inclindel Pass to Tyr-Sog. I had hoped I could finish Chapter 4 in one entry, but I guess it will be at least one more.

     

Bah. Two castings of "Evil Seek" and we're clear.

     

This was a combat-heavy entry, all the more notable given that the party has become a duo. I like moments of tension like this, but I also like when they swiftly resolve.

Time so far: 46 hours.

Game 533: Medical Center (1979)

 

        

Medical Center

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1979 for PLATO educational mainframe

Date Started: 1 December 2024

Date Ended: 2 December 2024

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

     

Medical Center is one of two games written for PLATO that took the mechanics of The Game of Dungeons (1975) and put them in a hospital. Bugs and Drugs (1978) beat it by a year, and there are enough similarities that Center was probably influenced by Bugs, but Bugs may have no longer been available when Center was written.

     

The game puts your character in a 20-floor hospital, each floor specializing in an area of medicine, each crawling with diseases related to that specialty. As you wander the corridors, you encounter these diseases and have to decide whether to treat them with medication, fight them with your innate constitution, rely on a limited pool of immunizations, or refer the patient to surgery. You get experience points and money for diseases successfully fought and eradicated, but if you fail, the disease affects you, weakening one of your systems. The goal is to climb the medical hierarchy as far as possible, from intern to professor emeritus while simultaneously climbing the hospital to the twentieth floor.

     

I wonder how accurate this list is in its depiction of the hierarchy of medical positions.

     

Where Bugs and Drugs had a standard set of RPG character attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.), your character in Medical Center just has a series of percentages associated with his 11 systems. Eight of them are considered "vital": cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, liver, urinary, central nervous system, blood, and skin. If any of your percentages drop below 0%, you die. Vision, hearing, muscular-skeletal, and reproductive systems are "non-vital," but 0% in any of them means that you functionally cannot play the game.

      

Nothing suspends disbelief more than an intern with a perfect liver and a positive bank balance.

      

The moment you enter Level 1, you start meeting gonorrhea, impetigo, nonspecific urethritis, acute cystitis, and a host of other conditions. If you can identify the right medicine, it's almost always successful. Sometimes the right choice is unsuccessful, just like in real life, but in such cases you lose, say, 0-3% of health in your related system. If you choose the wrong medication, you lose in the double digits.

       

My first encounter. Yesterday, I didn't know what "impetigo" was.

      

Naturally, Google helped a lot in identifying the right medicine, although not as much as you might think given that it's been 45 years. The search engine's most common answer was doxycycline, which isn't in the "formulary" list that you can bring up at any time. I learned that when doxycycline is indicated, tetracycline almost always works instead. Also, penicillin is a good default. Overall, this phase of the game is easier than in Bugs and Drugs because the earlier game put you on a time limit whereas Medical Center gives you all the time you need to search the Internet Archive for 1978 copies of The Physician's Desk Reference.

  

25%! This choice was definitely "wrong."

    

The non-medication options are iffier, and I didn't experiment with them much. Just "fighting" the disease hardly ever worked. Immunizations and surgery both seemed like traps; when I tried immunization, it inevitably turned out that there is no immunization for that disease. Surgery, when it works, costs so much that it can bankrupt you.

   

Yes, for some reason, when you order medication or surgery, the cost comes out of your balance. With medication, you generally recoup it with the amount billed to the patient, although the game is realistic in that there are separate "billed amounts" and "collected amounts." Your first couple of encounters can go poorly if you order a medication that's too expensive for your balance, since running out of money immediately ends the game.

    

This is a cutthroat hospital.

    

In addition to encounters with diseases, there are also lots of random encounters with letters, books, cabinets, medicines, and such. You might get a letter with payment for a past bill, or a check from some place for which you wrote an article or gave a lecture. You might find a medicine cabinet with a pair of glasses that increases your "Vision" or a pair of sunglasses that decreases it. You find bottles of medicine that boost your percentages.

       

That was a decent check for 1979.

       

You can find books that tell you outright what the answer is to the medication question--with the caveat that some of them are quite old and may reflect outdated practice. This is an in-game version of what I was going through with Google. Bugs and Drugs also featured such books (though without the possibility of them being wrong), one of the many similarities between the titles.

    

Each 20 x 20 floor also has a few fixed encounters, including stairs to the floors above and below, an elevator (which has restrictions based on your level), a pharmacy where you can buy immunizations, a lounge where you can rest, and the departmental offices, where you can get treatments specific to that floor. Your character has a specialty and receives "privileges" on the associated floor, including free treatments.

    

Family Practice is on the first floor, which is disturbing given the number of times I encountered gonorrhea and syphilis.

       

The goal is to achieve as high a rank as possible. No one has made professor emeritus since 1984. The current top scorer is only a chief resident (rank 6 out of 21). 

           

Everyone who has ever made professor emeritus.

    

In any event, I got my character up to "2nd year resident" (second highest on the current leaderboard) and probably would have been able to go higher except that I insisted on pushing upward in the hospital. I died on Level 6 when I ordered cephalosporin to treat bacteroides-peritonitis. For all I know, that was the right answer, but my GI system was at 0% from some earlier bad choices, so even a slight loss would have killed me.

       

That sounds like an unpleasant way to go. Not that there are any pleasant ones.

      

Medical Center was written by Dr. David E. Trachtenbarg, who attended the University of Illinois College of Medicine from 1971 to 1975. He is still practicing in Peoria, Illinois, and he has taught at the university since 1990. I'm not sure what his status was in 1979 when he wrote the game, but he presumably wrote it to help younger medical students. The title screen also credits Dr. Stephen C. Doughty as an "infectious disease consultant." I wrote to Dr. Trachtenbarg to see if he remembered anything about the game, but I hadn't heard from him at publication time.

    

These two medical games are some of the few truly educational RPGs that we've experienced, games where the player's knowledge (mostly) trumps random rolls and character attributes. I suppose this is not dissimilar to how the player's cleverness, not the characters', determines success or failure with the fairy chests in Betrayal at Krondor. There's a longer entry to be made here about the duality of player growth and character growth and what kind of balance a good RPG favors, but I wouldn't generally mind if occasionally an RPG rewarded a player's knowledge of history, geography, physics, physical sciences, humanities, or other knowledge sets, even if such rewards aren't the game's entire raison d'être.

       

One of the last diseases I eradicated.

       

However, purely as a game (rather than a teaching tool), Medical Center leans too far towards the player's knowledge to be an enjoyable RPG, as enjoyable as it was as a novelty. Bugs and Drugs had more nods to classic RPG tropes, such as being able to earn experience by finding money instead of just curing diseases. Medical Center was fun as a diversion, and to boost a little of my knowledge about diseases and drugs, but not something I'd want to play to the top level.

     

Thanks go to El Explorador de RPG for alerting me to the game along with a few others that history had mostly forgotten. I've since played all of them, so unless yet another one pops up, I have once again reached the end of the PLATO list. That feels sad to type. Even when they weren't superb, they delivered a level of competence above anything in the commercial CRPG market at the time, and Medical Center, although not the best of the RPGs on the platform, is no exception.

The Great Ultizurkian Underland: Volcanic Dungeon

 

Accessing the mysterious ninth level.

       

Dr. Dungeon's earlier games were so short that I had hopes of wrapping this one up in two, but it's clear that it's going to take a bit longer. That isn't a complaint, just an inevitable reality given an independent developer who learned as he went along. 

    

To recap, the protagonist of the game, the Grandmaster from the previous Zurk and Ultizurk games, has been summoned to a civilization living on the inside of a hollowed-out volcano. Trouble is brewing somewhere in this empire, and it's up to the Grandmaster to solve it. In the first session, I met with the ruler, Lord Baldwin, a Lord British-like figure who lays out the quest, resurrects the character upon death, heals him on request, and levels him up when he's accumulated enough experience.

    

I also met the famous wizard, Leomund, who told me that there are 12 spells in this world. Each requires a unique item to unlock. I had unlocked about half of them during the first session.

       

Talking with Lord Henry (of) the 8th (level). The houses on this level are much nicer.

       

The dungeon consists of nine levels. Lord Baldwin and the armory are on Level 1; Leomund and William, the treasurer, are on Level 2. Level 8, the ground level (which allows access to the outside world) is ruled by Lord Henry and hosts the Lycaeum, the empire's great library. Levels 6 and 7 are the domain of the sirens, ruled by Queen Melissa. All these levels are peaceful, full of NPCs. Only Levels 3-5 have enemies, and I hadn't explored them much during the first session.

      

I had talked about how the NPCs offered a series of keyword chains. For instance, Cara on Level 1 asks you to ask Hilda on Level 2 about NEEDLE; Hilda tells you to ask Krysty on Level 6 about THREAD; Krysty tells you to ask Claudia on Level 7 about SPOOL; and Claudia tells you to ask Marilyn on Level 8 about YARN. It turns out that the members of these chains all belong to the same "guilds," although they're not all named. There are 10 of these threads, and the result in all cases, from the final person in the chain, is information about a potion specific to that guild.

        

Learning about a potion's location . . .

. . . and finding it.

       

The potions are all located on Levels 3 and 4, based on certain landmarks. But they all require digging, and to do that, I had to get a shovel. To find one, I looped around the levels again until I found a secret cache of chests on Level 2, one of which had a shovel. 

      

There we go.

       

The next hard part was getting to the potion locations. Levels 3 and 4 are full of monsters. Level 3 has skeletons, bats, and snakes; Level 4 has ghosts, scorpions, and reapers. At character Level 1, you can basically kill one or two Level 3 monsters before your hit points are gone. The WU ZU spell restores your hit points, so you can cast that a couple of times, but once you're out, death is inevitable. Fortunately, dying just means getting resurrected in front of Lord Baldwin with no loss of anything, at which point you can just B)link back to the level on which you died. The monsters restock when you leave and return, alas.

     

For the next couple of hours, my approach was to move around Level 3 looking for the potion locations (and other interesting things), fighting monsters as I encountered them, and looting their bodies if I defeated them. When a monster dies, there's about a 1/3 chance it has nothing, a 1/3 chance it has a gold nugget, and a 1/3 chance it has food. (Amusingly, the "food," if it has it, is not the monster's own flesh but other food objects like cheese wedges, roast ducks, and bunches of grapes.) When my inventory had enough gold nuggets, I would return to Level 2, walk to William's office, sell the nuggets for gold, teleport to Level 1, and see if I could get a weapon or armor upgrade from Roy, the armorer. Of course, every time I ended up in front of Lord Baldwin, I'd see if I could ADVANCE.

     

Lord Baldwin levels me up.

      

It turns out that you gain a level for every 200 experience points, at least through Level 6, which takes a long time in the beginning but is quite swift later on. There are seven types of weapons available at the armory, and I love that the list is a bit non-standard: knife, awl pike, Lucern hammer, ranseur, elven sword, khopesh staff, and bill guisarme. (This may be the only RPG in which the strongest weapon is a polearm.) Some of them apparently do more damage to certain monsters (e.g., the Lucern hammer to skeletons), but it's too much trouble to swap them in and out. I just went with the overall best.

   

The armory also has three types of helms, three types of armor, and two types of shields. My upgrade sequence got a major boost when I discovered a Wand of Unlock Magic in a chest on Level 3. This allowed me to open two magically locked chests on Level 2 that had a great helm and a khopesh staff.

        

Technically, it's a khopesh staff when you buy it, but for some reason it becomes a khopesh hammer when you use it.

      

Eventually, I was strong enough to make my way through the enemies to the potions on Levels 3 and 4. Once I had all 10, I used them on an empty jar I'd found somewhere to make a "Rainbow Potion." This is going to be important somehow in the endgame.

    

The next major phase was to find Prince John on Level 5. As reported last time, John had led an expedition down to the secret ninth level but never made it back. Someone had spotted him on Level 5, wearing some mysterious glowing armor, leading a pack of spirit demons. Spirit demons are the only enemy on Level 5, and they are hard, though rendered a bit easier by a spell called SIL GOZ that halves the hit points of all spirit demons on the level when cast. I had to give Leomund an elven sword for that spell.

     

This spell is a life saver.

      

Eventually, I found John and managed to defeat him in combat (restoring my hit points with WU ZU twice), at which point he surrendered and thanked me for bringing him back to his senses. He said that his mind was seized by some great evil forming in a rainbow pool on Level 9, "an ancient magical creation of long dead druids." The cyclopes on Level 9 are also controlled by this great evil.

       

The Grandmaster defeats Macaulay Culkin.

       

He announced his plans to return to Lord Baldwin but said he'd give me his magic armor--although instead of just giving it to me, for some reason he strewed it around the dungeon level, so I had to go find it. The magic plate, helm, and shield took the place of the best stuff I'd gotten from the armory.

       

Is that supposed to be a swear? Because it literally is by the dungeon's walls.

       

I still had to solve the other half of Leomund's puzzles. Last entry, I was confused about what some of the spells did, but it turns out that you just have to ask Leomund about SPELL FOUR or SPELL SEVEN and get a full description. This is the full list.

      

No.	Command	Mana	Effects	Token
1	WU ZU	5	Full healing	Nightshade mushroom
2	VAL ZO	5	Create 5 arrows	Light blue berries
3	ZIL FLAS	10	Kill all skeletons on the level	Yellow berries
4	(UNKNOWN)	10	Kills all the ghosts on a level	Gossomar silk
5	SIL GOZ	15	Halves the HP of all spirit demons on the level	Elven sword
6	(UNKNOWN)	3	Magic map	Spirit jelly
7	RIM FA	15	Freezes time for a few seconds	Pocketwatch
8	JO BOZ	20	Weakens every enemy on the level	Great helm
9	POR VAS	5	Creates 5 gold pieces	Gold nugget
10	ZIL LUM	5	Lists the locations of monsters and NPCs	Good sextant
11	FO TI	30	Triples strength for 1 day	Skull of fallen hero
12	ZU FLIM LA	40	Gives you the key to a door on Level 9	Reach Level 7

          

Turning in items for spells.

     

Spells 3 and 4 don't provide experience for the kills, and I got both of them after the associated monsters were a problem. I haven't done anything with Spell 2 or with missile weapons in general. There's supposed to be a way to get a bow from the sirens. Spell 9 would ruin the economy if you just stood in front of Lord Baldwin getting restored after running through your points. I didn't do that. I didn't get Spell 11 until the end of this session, but man, that would have been nice.

    

Spell 12 theoretically "gives you what you most need," but apparently the key is the only thing you need.

      

If I had this spell in real life, it would just deliver an unending supply of gimlets.

      

I got Spells 5 and 8 when I gave up those inventory items for the next upgrade. Spell 12 came when I finally reached Level 7; it turns out that you can still earn three more levels, but a book indicates you'll be somewhat overpowered if you do that. Spell 11 was the last one I obtained because the fallen hero in question can only be found on Level 9. 

That skull thing was a bit of B.S., by the way. The game tells you that you need the skull of a fallen hero. At nighttime on Level 5, gravestones appear, and if you look at them, the stones say, "The script identifies it as that of a long dead hero." Any player would think that you need to dig at these stones to find the skull of a fallen hero. That doesn't work, though; you just find them on a couple of mangled bodies on Level 9. What is the purpose of the gravestones?

        

A bit of annoying misdirection. Not that you can see any of this.

       

So far, my description of the game sounds relatively favorable, and I suppose my impression is mostly the same. It's a bit derivative, but it's certainly competent. It provides the core RPG experience of leveling up and getting stronger while solving mysteries and puzzles. But we have to talk about the worst parts of the game:

    

• The night/day system. Easily the worst part of the game, this is explained in-game by a book that says someone cast a spell so that the dwellers of the Underland would keep in sync with the surface world. The problem is that you can't see anything at night. The entire color palette changes. Dark blue text becomes invisible on a black background and none of the icons mean anything. When this happens while exploring a safe area, I've just been putting the emulator in warp mode and running myself against a wall until it's daytime again. But it's infuriating when it happens on a combat level because I can't see my hit points or even what kind of monster I'm fighting. There are no light objects or spells in the game that I can find.

       

The same area at night . . .

. . . and during the day.

           

• The graphics. I don't mean the character portraits. They're so bad they're almost endearing. I'm talking about the iconography, which is too small and attempts too much detail. Part of it may be my colorblindness, but I've missed entire NPCs because they were sitting in chairs and looked like blobs.

• The spelling. Dr. Dungeon needed a proofreader. Among other things, you have to buy and sell SHEILDS and LUCERN hammers.

• The movement. Getting the right balance of CPU cycles and NPC speed has been difficult, but even with the right balance, the game is just janky. The controls are unresponsive and buffer your inputs forever, so that when you run into an enemy, odds are you'll spend the next seven rounds literally running into him, since the game reads your inputs from before the encounter. The rest is hard to explain without playing, but it's just slow and annoying.

       

But I pushed through and tried to win. Level 9 isn't hard to find: the ladder is on a small island accessible from the mainland on Level 8. Once you get down there, there are cyclopes everywhere. A magic mirror on the wall lets you talk to their leader. He pleads for you not to kill any of the cyclopes, and the "rainbow man" is controlling them. The rainbow man is deep, "behind iron door." The legends say that only a potion will cure the situation, and "only he with great weapon, armor [can] enter."

       

The cyclops king expresses his sorrow and outrage.

      

You can't even attack the cyclopes; the game just tells you that they're too strong. I skirted around them, occasionally taking damage if I happened to get next to one, and found a grappling hook and the skull of a fallen hero. 

  

What kind of hero am I?

     

The iron door is in the northern part of the dungeon, but you can't enter with the key unless you also hold "the greatest in offense and defense." This is where I'm stuck. I have the greatest in defense, but not offense.

       

I guess I'd better go find a copy of the National Review.

     

The Lycaeum has a potential solution. There are a couple of dozen books in the building, most of them recaps of Dr. Dungeon's other games. There's a book called The Dungeon Master's Book of Tips that gives you a few hints for the game. Levels of Advancement describes the level cap as being 10, "but if you pass 7 or 8, you're probably lost and failed to find something." King Eldor's Morons pokes fun at the monsters in the first Ultizurk, who couldn't move. The Dungeon Master: Man or Myth? is about Dr. Dungeon himself. There are books on the rainbow pool that I'll discuss when I get there.

        

Man, this guy wrote a lot of games.

      

Legend of Soulsbane tells of a powerful weapon, also called the Diamond Sword, that can be made with "a large chunk of diamond ice, found in the polar regions." The grappling hook is necessary to reach the "higher polar lands." The problem is that I haven't found any part of the dungeon that seems "polar." I have no idea where to go for that. The map legend supposedly shows white for "snow," but I don't see that on any of the maps.

    

What is "diamond ice," even?

      

I still have two spell quests to solve, although finding the "gossomar" silk to get a spell that kills ghosts seems moot at this point. I have no idea where to get it anyway. However, the spell that creates a magic map sounds like it could be useful. I still need to find spirit jelly, which is only found in wet places at night; I guess I should have spent more time in the dark on Level 4.

   

So I'll try that, but I've otherwise been all over this dungeon looking for the place I need to use the grappling hook, and I'm having no luck. I'd hate not to win this one, but there's also a limited amount of time it makes sense to spend on it.

   

Time so far: 9 hours