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