Game 557: C.U.: Computer Underground (1993)

 

        

C.U.: Computer Underground

Canada 

Haxoft (developer and publisher)

Released as freeware in 1993 for DOS 

Date Started: 26 July 2025

Date Ended: 26 July 2025

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Very Easy-Easy (1.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

Whether a CRPG requires combat is an age-old debate, and into it wades C.U.: Computer Underground from Toronto-based author Jeff Marlow. No one dies in this game, but their computer systems do get trashed. The character has a skill level and uncorrupted megabytes of storage space instead of hit points. He battles corporate servers and other hackers.

    

The game might be fun, and it might be an interesting entry into this debate, if it offered any strategy or gave any insight into actual hacking. But it's far too trite and simple, and its use of technical terms makes little sense.

       

The font makes me think that C.U. was originally a different kind of game.

      

"Character creation" consists only of a hacker handle. Right away, the game misses some opportunities to explore different types of hackers and give them different goals and skills, or at least to offer a tradeoff between skill and money for a new character.

   

The character starts at experience level 1 (and therefore a hard drive capacity of 10 megabytes), $150 cash, a communications program called BiteComm v. 0.28, no hacking program, no virus shield, a generic virus, a programmable calculator, and backup media by abacus.

             

My items and options at Level 7.

      

The player's options each round are to:

   

• Go to "Wired World" to buy or sell computers, backup media, virus shields, hack programs, or communications programs. Each item has an intrinsic level. The computer determines what level of software you can run. 

• Crack a BBS, corporate system, or government system.

• Battle with another cracker and try to crash his machine.

• Attempt to hack a bank and steal money.

• Download a new virus.

• Restore lost megabytes of hard disk space (i.e., heal).

• Spend $100 to gather intelligence about another cracker.

         

I hope when the time comes, I can overcome his programmable calculator.

        

Without much effort, you can mentally plug in the analogs for a fantasy RPG. As you successfully crash systems and defeat other hackers, you (somehow) earn money, which lets you buy better equipment, which lets you try the next level. 

        

The list of computers riffs on real machines.

        

The game is a little tough at the beginning. Your $150 won't buy even the cheapest hacking program, so the only things you can do that are effective are: a) Battle with the worst cracker, Space Cadet, and earn a few hundred dollars crashing his system, or b) sell your backup program to earn enough to buy the worst hacking program (Trial & Error for $175), then hack the lowest-level entity (Lamer Lounge).

   

Alternatively, you could try to hack the bank. You have a 1 in 3 chance of getting $999 or less, a 1 in 6 chance of getting $1,000 to $1,999, and a 1 in 8 chance of getting more than $2,000. You have to choose which option you're going for. None of the odds are very good, and if you lose, you often lose your computer, which effectively ends the game. The odds never change. It's not worth the risk for higher-level characters, but a Level 1 player might as well take the chance and start afresh if he loses.

       

The odds, while poor, are probably better than in real life.

      

Hacking corporate and government systems is a little fun. You have options like a Dungeon BBS, the power grid, the local pizza shop, a hospital's I.C.U., YBM Computers, and a couple of federal agencies. Your hacking program level has to be equal to the security system of the target computer. If it is, you end up playing a little game of Concentration in which you have to match 8 pairs of cards: user lists, texts, top secret, public files, data files, private files, system files, and system logs. You click on two cards, and if they match, they turn into smiley faces. If not, they turn back over, and you have to try again, remembering where you saw the various options. You're doing all of this against a clock that starts at a generous 90 seconds for Lamer Lounge and goes down to 15 seconds for the federal mainframe. (Failure means getting caught, paying a fine, and perhaps losing your computer or hacking program.) Fortunately, I'm very good at Concentration. 

       

In order to trash file types, I apparently have to find them two at a time.

       

Battles with other hackers are less interesting. Your "megs" are paired against his, and you can do a direct attack with "trash megs" or send a virus over (i.e., cast a spell). Either option gives him the chance to retaliate (his level and your communications and antivirus programs determine these odds). You can try to restore megs from your backup media in the middle of battle, with success dependent upon its quality.

             

I send a virus to Myssing Lynk.

      

Any person ignorant of computers would get some weird ideas from C.U.:

   

• Your skill with computers determines your hard drive storage capacity.

• When you transmit a virus to another computer, you lose it from your own machine and have to buy a new one.

• Different types of files can only be deleted in pairs. 

• Causing corporate systems to crash somehow transmits money to your bank account.

• "Hacking" is all about directly destroying hard drive capacity on the target machines. That is exclusively what viruses do.

• Computer programs exist on a strict hierarchy from bad to good rather than specializing in certain things. 

• Hacking programs are sold at commercial computer stores. 

       

I can't tell you how forward I'm looking to the various "well, actually" comments on each of these bullet points.

   

Seriously, though, the game is mostly a lot of missed opportunities. What if each target system was a bit different and needed different types of programs and strategies to overcome? What if you had roleplaying options involving things like transmitting money to either charities or your own account? What if instead of playing Concentration, you had to type some actual commands, maybe learn a bit about actual hacking? (Marlow says in the notes that he doesn't actually encourage hacking, so I suppose that's why everything is abstract.) What if you could pay for training? What if instead of getting dossiers on other hackers, you could get dossiers on targets and then use them to guess passwords? There are a lot of ways to expand upon this rather plain template to make it more interesting.

         

The price of failure.

       

But it is an example of an RPG-like game in which nothing dies, which is pretty rare for the genre. I don't think I've played a game that fit that description since SoccerStar (1989), and I rejected that one as an RPG.

       

. . . and a high-level position in DOGE.

       

Once you have the best computer (Moon Workstation) and the best hacking program (Code Jaws 8.0), you can try to hack the U.S. government mainframe. You only have 15 seconds to match the eight pairs of cards. If successful, the game proclaims you the "best hacker in the world," which qualifies you for a job at Haxoft.

        

It's a magical place.

      

A secondary goal would be to beat the best hacker, King Krasher, but that's not hard as long as you've leveled up enough to beat his "total megs" (200). You earn $2,000 for destroying his system.

    

The game uses a mostly-mouse interface, which I find a little annoying. There's no reason that every screen couldn't have numbered items. Obviously, the mouse is the right tool for the Concentration mini-game. There's no sound, and graphics are minimal. 

    

The equivalent of C.U. on the fantasy side would be an all-menu game in which you fight repeated battles and slowly upgrade equipment as you make money—something like Darkwood (1992) for the Mac, for instance. That's fitting, because I gave Darkwood an 18 on the GIMLET, and I give C.U. a 17. It's an interesting idea that needed a little more complexity. At least it's not a German Ultima clone.

        

****

   

Please note that I added a supplement to my last entry on The Ormus Saga II, wrapping up that game. 

Game 556: Magische Steine (1993)

 

       

Magische Steine

"Magic Stones" 

Germany 

Independently developed; published in the September 1993 issue of 64'er disk magazine for the Commodore 64

Date Started: 23 July 2025

Date Ended: 25 July 2025

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) once you figure it out
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

         

Magische Steine is the kind of game that makes you appreciate the complexities of other games. If I just described it in broad terms, taking only a single paragraph, you would think that it sounded like any other RPG. It's going to take a lot more paragraphs, and a deeper analysis, to understand why this game is so desperately unfun even compared to other titles at its technology level. 

   

But let's start with the simple paragraph: Magische Steine is a single-character, iconographic RPG in which the player is trying to save the land of Aldora from an evil wizard named Tenomy. Tenomy lives in a magic tower, and the player has to find nine magic stones scattered throughout the world in order to enter the tower. There are enemies like kobolds, werewolves, and dragons standing in the way. Towns serve as sources of weapons, armor, and healing.

         

The game begins, enemies everywhere. Fortunately, they stay where they are.

          

With no character creation process except for a name, the player is tossed into the middle of an 88 x 40 outdoor map swarming with enemies. At Level 1, he has 100 life points, 1,000 gold, 150 rations, and no weapons or armor. All input is with the joystick, but there aren't any complex commands, so I don't mind it as much as with The Ormus Saga II.

     

As I said, it sounds like a lot of RPGs. It looks like a lot of RPGs. And before I start tearing into it, I should note that the author, Ralf Prescher, was only 15 when he offered it to 64'er for publication. It's an impressive effort for such a young author, competently programmed, not in any way juvenile. The icons and tiles, though reminiscent of Ultima and other iconographic games, are different enough that I appreciate their novelty. But the game is simply dead on arrival, and it's worth taking some time to understand why.

   

A double-spread on the game with the author's photo.

       

The first element that differentiates Steine from similar titles is that the enemies are a) unrandomized, b) don't move, and c) with one exception, don't respawn. Every player begins the game with a stack of kobolds to his east, a stack of gnomes to his west, a stack of lions to his north, and a stack of soldiers to his southeast. When he enters the easternmost dungeon for the first time, he will always find a stack of undead warriors in the entry room followed by two stacks of goblins.

     

(There's a footnote to the above paragraph in that I found two versions of the game online. I'll talk more about that later, but the two versions did have different starting positions. It doesn't really matter in the longer analysis.) 

     

Essaying a party of lions. If I leave and come back, there might be 3, 5, or 9 lions.

       

Combat with enemies is not quite as deterministic as their placement, but neither is it as probabilistic as most RPGs. The number of enemies in each stack is randomized each time the player approaches. If you don't like it, you can back off and try again. That stack of kobolds to the east may vary between 4 and 10. An unarmed, unarmored character can take them no matter what. At 4 kobolds, he loses 10 life points; at 10 kobolds, he loses 28. He'll earn 12 gold pieces and 41 experience points per kobold.

        

As I said, when you first approach a stack, you have the option to fight or flee. Fighting commits you to the battle until the end. There are no tactics, choices, or interrupt keys. You watch as the enemies' hit points decrease alongside your own. If yours deplete first, you lose the game, but that's only a concern for the first few levels. After that, as long as you heal up regularly, you're not in much danger as long as you keep an eye on your total hit points and return to town when they get too low.

        

Combat is just watching.

        

This setup is at least playable, if unconventional. It's a great game for a data collector. Expending the lives of a couple dozen doomed introductory characters, you slowly learn which enemies you can take and which you cannot, and you start clearing the land by nuzzling up to each enemy party, assessing it, and either taking it or moving on. By Level 10 or so, though, you can take just about any enemy, and it becomes less necessary to pick your battles and thus record data.

                        

A hypothetical starting data table.

                        

Towns offer four services: guilds for healing and leveling up, armor shops, weapon shops, and rations shops. Each town, for some unfathomable reason, only offers three of these services. In a game with a small land area (88 x 40), about a dozen towns, and no danger when walking between them, the lack of a specific service is only a momentary annoyance, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.

   

Rations are an afterthought. You might have to worry about them a bit at the start of the game, but you get them from combat, so you rarely have to buy them.

    

There are five types of armor: cape, leather, banded, chain, and plate. There are nine types of weapons: stick, knife, club, battle axe, war axe, short sword, long sword, broadsword, and two-handed sword.

       

Armor is expensive.

       

You earn enough experience points to level up at 500, then 1,500, then 3,000, then 5,000, and so forth. Each new level requires 500 experience points more than the last one. Each new level gives you a handful of extra hit points, increasing throughout the game. I don't believe you get anything else from leveling, meaning I could have rejected this as an RPG and saved a few hours.

   

Mostly, you use towns for healing, which costs between 4 and 7 gold pieces per hit point. This amount is randomized every time you visit the guild, and you definitely want to pay attention to it.

          

Oh, and ratcheting up the number of LPs you want to heal, 10 at a time, gets very old very fast.

      

All right. Let's work from that setup. You begin the game. You spend your 1,000 gold pieces on a cape (500) and a club (200), saving 300 for healing. You move around the land, looking for low-level enemies to fight, like gnomes, kobolds, and witches. You learn to avoid "swamp guys" (sumpfkerle) and yetis, which use the same icon. You look forward to upgrading to better weapons and armor so you can kill harder enemies, but you start to notice a problem: you're not making any money. In fact, you're losing it. With almost no exceptions, it costs more money in healing to make up for battle, even if you wait for a 4-gold-piece-per-hit-point offer, than you earn during battle. The 1,000-gold piece purse you need for a suit of leather armor is awfully far away, and you're running out of gnomes and kobolds.

       

But I did say "almost no exceptions" above. There is one repeating encounter in the game, one enemy that will not clear from the map, and this one enemy reliably offers—for at least a modestly armed and armored character—more gold than it takes to heal the damage it causes. This enemy is a stack of rats, found in the far northwest corner. Until you find this enemy, you are doomed. Once you find him, all challenge is removed from the game. You just put the emulator in warp mode and grind against them every time you need money; and trust me, you will return to this well until the final minutes of the game, because the hit point/money ratio problem never goes away. My Level 77 character, marching through the dungeons with the best weapon and armor, might lose 200 hit points against a hydra and earn 600 gold pieces. It takes 800 gold pieces to heal 200 points of damage. There are no other ways to heal—no potions, no resting. Dungeons offer chests with gold occasionally, but not enough to make up the shortfall. Every 10 minutes or so, it was back to the rats.

         

Another batch falls.

     

The shortfall issue is the final nail in the coffin, but honestly, the game would be boring even if you made plenty of money from regular battles. It would still be a joyless, deterministic affair of fighting and healing, fighting and healing, with no other resources to manage, no random encounters, and no tactics or strategies. And while it feels like you could reduce a lot of games to this kind of statement, there is something in their randomness, resource management, and player agency (if only illusory) that makes them interesting. The mathematician in me wants to deny it, to say that a + b = c and (x(a+b)^n)/q = c are functionally the same thing, but there is something in those variables, operators, exponents, and vectors that makes a huge difference. 

    

Anyway, the rest of the game. Because of the rats, there's no particular reason to clear the enemies on the overland map, except the few in your way, but I did so anyway. What else are you going to do while bustling from place to place? The experience does feel a bit genocidal, though, given that the enemies don't respawn. Standing in one place, they aren't even a threat.

        

The game world, courtesy of DecafSlurper's entry in the German C64 wiki (see below).

       

The world has a couple of lakes, and if you want to cross them (the larger one blocks the entire eastern part of the world), you have to buy a boat for 5,000 gold pieces at a dock. Once you have it, it appears any time you enter the water—a mechanic that would be welcome in The Ormus Saga II instead of forcing me to open the command wheel and choose "Board Boat." There are a couple of mountain ranges for which you have to feel your way through invisible passages. 

         

Navigating to those enemies and that chest requires testing the mountain range for invisible passages.

       

The map has seven dungeons, most guarded by an old wizard who wants you to do something before he'll step aside and let you in. Most of them want you to free another old wizard from somewhere else, some of them on the overworld map, a couple in other dungeons. One of them wants you to kill an ogre on the map.

        

An old man guards a dungeon . . .

. . . and wants me to do something before he'll get out of my way.

      

The dungeons are the worst. They're only one level each, but the smallest is around 20 x 20 (worm tunnel) and the largest is around 34 x 34. They only let you see a one-square radius around you; there's no "Light" spell here. Dungeons are jam-packed with monsters, which, unlike the ones on the surface, you cannot avoid. Even high-level characters cannot completely clear most dungeons in a single try; you inevitably have to back out one or two times to refresh your hit points. In addition to monsters, dungeons have treasure chests that earn you both cash and experience. Most of them also have chests with one of the Magic Stones.

         

Exploring a dungeon. There's an old man to my right and a stack of lions or something to the north.

      

I mapped one of the dungeons just to show you, but I don't think it's necessary to map them. Using my normal "follow the right wall" approach, I found all the Magic Stones, even if I didn't find every other chest or encounter.

        

The one map I was willing to make. "GA" are giant ant stacks; "GS" are giant spiders. "$$" is treasure. The treasure square with the magic stone is guarded by a demon.

      

Two of the stones are in the hands of dragons on the overworld. I didn't even notice when I obtained them. I just mowed through the critters and noticed them in my inventory later. 

           

Approaching Tenomy's tower.

         

Once you have nine stones, you can enter Tenomy's Tower, which is four (comparatively) small levels. As with the dungeons, I had to back out a few times to heal in the middle of my explorations. The tower has a lot of hydras, the game's toughest enemies, plus Tenomy himself. No individual enemy is hard when you have enough hit points, though.

      

Approaching Tenomy, with a Hydra to my northeast.

            

When Tenomy is dead, you get the endgame text: 

            

With his last ounce of strength, Tenomy tells them: "I will return with even more monsters, and then I will be the victor!" Then there's a loud bang, and he disappears. You pick up the last and largest magic stone and leave the tower. When you reach the [base of the] tower, it collapses.
   
When you arrive at a nearby village, you are greeted with a joyful welcome, and for the next five days, celebrations take place throughout Aldora. And you will forever be remembered as Aldora's hero. The end. 

         

The endgame screen.

         

I found two versions of the game online. Unless I have something set incorrectly, the one on the Internet Archive is broken. If you move to the southern part of the map, the graphics go all wonky, and when you enter dungeons, the walls are somehow made up of monsters.

    

The second version, I found on a site that I will not name, but I will say that for every game you download from the site, you have to deal with half a dozen re-directs and malware links hidden behind fake download buttons. I don't know why I keep using it. This one works okay, but it starts the character in a different location and some of the initial enemy encounters have hundreds of enemies in the stack. If you refuse to attack and re-engage, they then have the proper single-digit numbers. I could not get the game to successfully save and reload with either version.

          

I didn't have a place earlier for this image of my sailing the lake in my 5,000-gold-piece boat.

      

My GIMLET score for Magische Steine comes to 14. It earns 1s and 2s in most categories, but the final score, however low, can't really convey the almost despairingly monotonous gameplay. If the game only required you to find three stones in as many small dungeons, I'd regard it as a cute misfire, but 6 hours is almost offensively long, and that's with an emulator cranked to 200% most of the time and in "warp" mode while grinding. Thankfully, I'm still engaged in my Stephen King marathon.

    

But if I thought my time with the game was too long, my heart goes out to commenter DecafSlurper, who wrote an exhaustive article on Steine for the German C64 wiki. (He says he enjoyed the process, for what it's worth.) Although I didn't consult it until I had won the game, I was gratified to find my understanding of the mechanics confirmed. And whatever my opinion, the game must have been at least somewhat popular among early players, as 64'er continued to feature tips and hints throughout 1993 and 1994. Despite the setup in the endgame text, I cannot find any evidence of a sequel or any other game written by this author.

    

The Ormus Saga II: As Far as I Could Take It

Confronting the "big bad."

            

The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death

Germany

Mike Doran Software (developer); CP Verlag (publisher) 

Released 1993 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 5 July 2025  

Date Ended: 28 July 2025 

Total Hours: 23 (not won)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

       

I've told you before about the encyclopedia that I wrote in college. As I learned back then, there are two major approaches to writing an encyclopedia:

   

• Gather all your sources and start with a specific topic like MAGNA CARTA or MAGNESIUM. Write a full entry on that topic, synthesizing what every source has to say.

• Start with one of your sources rather than a topic. As you read the source, fill in the details of multiple topics at once as it delivers new information.

     

I'm just going to blather for a few paragraphs, so in the meantime, here I am finding the Mystic Helm in a bucket.

           

For instance, if I were writing an encyclopedia on characters in The Lord of the Rings, using the first method, I might start with BAGGINS, FRODO. I would read the entire book, taking notes specifically on Frodo, and summarizing his biography when I was finished. For subsequent characters, I might use an index or CTRL-F with an electronic version to skip between mentions of that character, but otherwise the process would be the same.

 

If I wrote such an encyclopedia using the second method, I'd start on the first page of the text. By the end of the epigram, I'd have entries on ELVES, DWARVES, DARK LORD, MORDOR, and ONE RING, but I wouldn't be able to say much about them. After the first page of Chapter 1, I'd have entries started for HOBBITS, RED BOOK OF WETMARCH, and BILBO. They'd just be skeletons, of course. I'd append new material as I read on, page by page, and when I finished a single reading of the text, I'd have a relatively complete draft of all the characters and places in it. I'd move on to secondary works and scholarly works and flesh out the entries even more.

      

A magic map shows a secret area in the mountains.

     

I wrote my encyclopedia using the second method. The difficulty it posed is that whenever my editor asked for an update, no part of the encyclopedia was ever "finished." Even when it had grown to 500 pages, every entry was still in progress, because I didn't know if my next source would deliver even more information about that topic. 

   

Writing about an open-world with only a main quest (no side quests) is a bit like writing an encyclopedia using the second method. There are no obvious stopping points, no complete stories to tell. Each hour fills in a bit of information here or there, but nothing is done until the entire thing is done. For this reason, I pressed hard this week to get the entire thing done. Even as I missed my target publication deadline on Wednesday, I continued to think that just another few hours would wrap it up.

        

But then you have to listen to a voice growling, "I see you . . . " everywhere you go.

        

In the end, the scope of the game is rather impressive, particularly for a diskmag title. Released on four disks, The Ormus Saga II comprises 65,000 overworld squares and 39 locations, including 20 towns with around 120 NPCs. These numbers are considerably higher than the Ultima games (primarily I-III) that inspired it.  

    

I spent about 10 hours with the game after the last entry. I began by finishing my clockwise loop around the continent, logging cities, services, NPCs, and "to do" items. In the middle of this loop, I had enough money to buy a skiff, and shortly after the end, I had enough to buy a ship. Skiffs and ships work as they did in the first game, or a bit nonsensically. They're inventory items, and when you want to use them, you just board them wherever you happen to be. You don't have to worry about where you left them, as they disappear (and go back into your inventory) once you disembark. They degrade over time, and you have to periodically visit a boat shop to repair them.

       

Someday, I would like to visit (0,0) in real life.

                

With both skiff and ship in my possession, there was nowhere on the overworld that I couldn't go, save the rare high mountaintop inaccessible even with a climbing tool. I thus re-explored the overworld, this time in 9-square strips, ensuring that I found every location. I cleaned up items on my "to do" list as I did so. I learned that the game world is 255 x 255, wrapping.

   

There are multiple purposes of all of this exploration:

   

• To learn more about the game's backstory and, thus, the main mission.

• To level up, primarily so you can cast some of the more advanced spells needed for success. 

• To free each city from the presence of the Brotherhood (and defend the cities from attempts to re-take them).

• To find the locations of the 25 treasures buried in the game world.

        

Finding yet another treasure. The Death Sword is the best weapon in the game. It broke in the next battle.

      

• To find various artifacts needed to win the game.

• To learn the names of the 9 god-servants, each of whom has a task that must be completed to win the game.

• To learn the three words of power and the one "holy word."

     

Busca generously provided a translation of the German manual (which had existed up to this point only in an image format) to assist with the backstory. It concerns the Brotherhood of the White Rose, an organization founded 120 years ago by a good cleric named Sullivan. He intended that the Brotherhood serve altruistic purposes, but he realized too late that it had become too powerful and corrupted. Towards the end of his life, he tried to dissolve it, but seven members led by someone named Gulhaven assassinated him in Arbon Castle before he could accomplish the task. The public was told he died from an illness, and the order lived on. One of the priests present at the assassination wrote the truth in a book called Ulbore, then walled it up in the library of Arbon Castle. The assassins each mysteriously died. 

   

An earthquake recently exposed the book, which scholars spent nearly 40 years translating. It revealed the truth: Sullivan had been the personal protégé of the high god Carion, who was preparing a severe punishment for mankind's treachery. If some hero could not complete 9 tasks set out by Carion's servants within 1 year of the reading of Ulbore, the world would be destroyed.

        

As we'll discuss, Gorab is no longer "living" in Beryland.

      

I'm a little unclear about the relationship between the Brotherhood of the White Rose and the Ormus Cult from the first game. Any player who wins the first game kills Lord Marox, leader of the cult. In this game, Marox's castle, Magmar, is still around, and his successor, Lord Finning, is leading the cult. But Finning also claims to be a member of the Brotherhood. I guess it's kind of like the Fellowship and the followers of the Guardian in Ultima VII, with the cult using the ostensibly benevolent organization for nefarious purposes.

      

As for leveling up, I made it to Level 7 before ending this session. You periodically pray before the altars at the three temples to earn new levels, which come with additional strength, maximum hit points, and maximum spell points. You also get the ability to cast more spells. Having already found magic armor, a magic shield, and a magic axe while on Level 1, I didn't have much reason to try to upgrade to better weapons, but I was forced to regress a few times when my items broke. As I covered before, items break on a set schedule, so if you really want to keep one, you have to notice when it breaks, reload, switch to a different (lesser) item, let it break instead, then switch back to the one you want to keep. I confess I did this a few times.

         

"I'm a what? A 'player'? What does that even mean? What am I playing? Is this all a game to you!?" - my character

          

Monsters got a lot harder as I leveled up. By Level 3, I was already facing balrogs, sea dragons, and giants. I made combat harder for myself because I neglected my endurance statistic, upon which accuracy depends. Every time you rest at an inn (which takes one game day), it resets to 99, and you're healed to maximum hit points. But the latter also happens when you pay a healer, which is cheaper and doesn't cost you a precious day. Until I re-read the manual and realized the importance of endurance, I was suffering through long battles in which I hardly ever hit the enemy.

        

Trading blows with a balrog.

    

Freeing each city means attacking it with enough troops and weapons to defeat the enemy garrisons, then leaving enough troops behind to defend it when the enemy tries to re-take it. You have to periodically replenish troops lost in these battles. Fortunately, every town has a "troop shop" for this purpose. Every week, you get an income based on the number of cities you hold, but you have to pay any troops in your active army. This system keeps the economy relevant deep into the game, but even so, there was a point that I stopped bothering to sell accumulated jewels, nuggets, and other items because I had enough gold.

    

Perhaps the most interesting and fun part of the game is fully exploring each city, temple, dungeon, hut, and castle, talking to each NPC, and searching the city's furniture, trees, and other locations for the eight treasures located in each indoor area. If you can find all the treasures, you get a bonus of 75 experience points. More important, some of the treasures are unique or near so. Some cities are very easily explorable by a starting character, but most of them have some combination of:

   

• Locked or magically-locked doors that you need keys or magic keys to unlock. These are sold in a very small number of "special" stores or looted from furniture and creatures. 

• Rivers or other bodies of water that you need a skiff to cross. 

• Secret doors that you have to search the walls to uncover.

     

Getting to that ladder involved both a skiff and searching for a secret door.

      

• Mountainous squares that you need the climbing tool to cross.

• Squares of fire or lava that you need the Fire Cloak to survive.

     

The eighth treasure in this town, behind a secret door, was crucial to navigating the rest of the game.

     

• Places that are blocked by furniture that you need the AN PULVIS (Level 4) spell to remove.

      

I need to make this bookcase disappear to get to the secret door on the other side.

     

• Doorways blocked by force fields that you need the FOREMIS (Level 5) spell to remove.

   

Even when you have these tools, some of which come late in the game, it can be difficult to figure out the exact path you need to take to find hidden areas. There were also times I ran out of resources (e.g., keys, spell points) in the middle of the exploration and had to start over. As of now, I've only found the eighth treasure in about two-thirds of the locations visited. As we'll discuss, I clearly haven't found every NPC. 

        

Negating a force field.

     

Some notes on encounters and gameplay elements:

   

• Most NPCs just offer a few paragraphs of dialogue for which you have no input. There is one chain of about six NPCs who feed you keywords to tell the next person in the chain. (The last one gives coordinates to a treasure.) This and the occasional use of the YELL action are the only uses of the keyboard in the game.

      

The game features NPC names like "Vincent," "Larry," and other inventions from the realm of high fantasy.

       

• Several NPCs talk about the Black Dragon, the last survivor of the Dragon Wars, one of the most ancient creatures in Beryland. I encountered it while exploring the world and killed it in combat. The only thing I got was experience and gold. I don't know if killing it is required to win the game. 

      

"You are the Black Dragon . . . You possess the power of the glow."

      

• Several NPCs talk about Lord Thorn, a wizard who I guess died during the first game. Exploring his old hut, I found his ring, which turns me invisible. I never found a use for that.

      

Imagine how hard it must have been to find it in a tree.

      

• Each of the three temples has a brazier (behind the types of obstacles described above) containing an amulet. Together, these amulets are supposed to form the Trigonom, which allows entry to the Land of the Dead. I found all three amulets but not the spell necessary to enter the Land of the Dead.

        

 

The most important treasure in this temple was also the final one.

     

• To enter Castle Magmar, I had to show an Ormus Badge. The only way I could get one was to kill an NPC named Gorab, a member of the cult. Killing NPCs has a price: When the next week's payday rolls around, you lose 3 days (in jail) for every NPC you've killed in the meantime, plus some gold, plus a few hundred experience points. It's a rare game of this era that has a criminal justice system. 

   

A weird message to get while I'm at sea, fighting a serpent.

       

• Actually visiting the castle was freaky, just like visiting Blackthorn's Castle in Ultima V (which is the clear inspiration for the sequence). Some of the guards are demons. 

       

Do you think I'd have to go to jail for three days for killing him?

      

• I have found several Masks of Baal, and I have no idea what they are.

       

Finding a treasure deep in a dungeon.

      

• With most games like this, some kind of fast travel system eventually emerges. Not here. Getting from place to place is a real annoyance late in the game. 

• The "Board" command is right next to the "Attack" command when scrolling through the commands with the joystick. Once selected, there's no way to back out of it. I was constantly boarding my skiff in the middle of battle. 

   

In the middle of battle, I decide to go for a little river ride. But there's no river in sight.

         

Once you have the names of the god-servants, you just YELL them from any location to summon them and get their quests. This is what six of them want:

 

• FERMON: To find three Black Jewels. I found two.

• LIVIUS: To find all 25 treasures. I only ever found the locations to 21, and three are in the Land of the Dead.

• MARCIUM: Wants the holy word. I tried giving it to him (RUNOGAR), and he said I was wrong, so I'm not sure what I did wrong there.

• NIKODEMUS. Wants five Mandor Roots. I've found four.

• URUK. Wanted me to complete a sequence of letters. Commenter Ken Brubaker was correct about the answer. 

    

Solving Uruk's rune puzzle.

      

• YKARUR. Wants 11 Stone Keys. I've found nine. 

     

After at least giving the entire land a cursory exploration, here's what I do not know or do not have:

   

• The sixth, seventh, or eighth treasures in a bunch of cities, some of which might be Black Jewels, Mandor Roots, and Stone Keys. I swear I've searched every tree and piece of furniture. On one map, I found a treasure in the middle of a lake, and on another, at the end of a path, so I suppose literally any square is free game. I don't really want to take the time to search every square. 

• How to combine the amulets to make the Trigonom. 

• Where to get the DOL GANDUR spell to enter the World of the Dead. I do not believe any of the magic shops have sold it.

• How to get the city pass necessary to enter Elvenstone, the only city I was unable to visit, where I suspect some of these other items might be cleared up.

• The names of the final three god-servants. (This problem can be solved on a spoiler site.)

• The locations of the final four treasures. (This problem can be solved on a spoiler site.)

• The "real" location of the treasure whose clue tells me to look at 54N, 173W, as we discussed last time. I did try searching 173N, 54 W to no avail. 

          

This is where the endgame will take place once I accomplish all the other quests.

       

That final item strikes me as a mistake by the author, and thus not something that is likely to be overcome with extra effort. The treasure could be literally anywhere. That, in turn, makes me question how much sense it makes to spend the effort on the other items. I'll let it sit for a couple of days, see if anyone has any ideas, maybe take a crack at some hacks, and then decide what to do.

    

Time so far: 19 hours 

     

***

   

Addendum: I spent a few more hours with the game after this entry. I verified with a spoiler list in an issue of 64'er that I had visited all the locations. I grabbed the treasures for which I had never found coordinates, but none of them had vital items. I still don't have the treasure that's supposed to be at 54/173 or the three in the underworld.

    

The last three god-servants are Xercon, Melchior, and Aralos. Xercon wanted me to answer a riddle whose answer is DARKNESS. Melchior wanted seven Lord Skulls, which I had. Aralos wanted four Masks of Bhaal. I had three. I'm not sure what the business regarding The Hobbit was about. The specific riddle asked by Xercon isn't in the book, although its answer is part of the chapter title and occurs several times in the chapter.

 

The Holy Word wanted by Marcium is indeed the one I deciphered backwards: RAGONUR. 

      

Satisfying another god-servant.

      

I think I was supposed to talk to the Black Dragon instead of killing him. This would have given me the "Raise Dead" spell, which I would have been able to use on several corpses, probably to get the key to entering Elvenstone and the DOR GALDUR spell to enter the underworld.

   

I tried criss-crossing the land several times to see if the Black Dragon respawned, but I never found him. This is a horribly unfair element, given that you meet no other NPCs outdoors, the Black Dragon is trying to kill you, and it would be easy to encounter him before you spoke to any NPCs who warn you that he might have information.

    

I appreciate all the suggestions, but some of them are unrealistic. I'm not willing to start over and do all that searching again. I'm not willing to search a couple dozen random locations just in case the last chest might be there. I'm not willing to expend any more effort beyond what I've already done to locate Mike Doran. I give the game a 27 on the GIMLET. It does best in the economy and nonlinear gameplay, worst in the interface, boring combat, and limited sense of character development.

   

So that's 0/2 on The Ormus Saga games. If it's possible to win them, I can't find any evidence that anyone has done so. Maybe The Ormus Saga III: The Final Chapter (1994) will be different.