Dark Designs IV: The Land of Beginning Again

 

Re-exploring the Old Quarter in a new version.

        

Not much of an update today, I'm afraid. I've been extremely busy with work, and I spent most of the block of time I allocated to games on Saturday to trying to figure out why my Apple II emulator wasn't working.

   

Commenters who perceived that the game looked more like an Apple II game than an Apple IIGS game were correct: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion released only for the Apple II. I was confused because the only download I could originally find was in .2mg format, which only a IIGS emulator can read. I still don't understand the provenance of that disk. Did someone convert it to the IIGS? How easy or hard is that with Apple programs?

      

This is just a random shot of battle to break up the text.

      

Either way, I eventually found the game in .dsk format for an Apple II emulator. Then I ran into my second, and still unsolved, problem: Every time I tried to run it, the emulator said: "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS." I figured, okay, the disk image isn't a boot image, so I'll load an Apple II master disk, switch disks, and load the program. But then my master disk said the same thing. So did every other disk I tried to feed into the emulator, including disks that I know worked (e.g., Centauri Alliance). I Googled and came up with nothing.

   

Eventually, I got the game to load by telling Windows 11 to open it in Windows 8 compatibility mode. But this only worked once. The next time I tried, I got the same error. I fiddled with some other things to no avail. I tried different versions of the AppleWin emulator. Finally, on some random reload, it suddenly worked again. (Anyone have a hypothesis about what's happening? Did some Windows 11 update break AppleWin?) I vowed not to close the emulator for the rest of the weekend. This will probably come back to bite me. I probably should have continued to play the IIGS version, but I wanted the ability to make save states so I could more easily document different choices. Also, AppleWin makes it easier to take screen shots than my IIGS emulator does.

       

As for those characters, there's been a bit of a change in the party. As I noted at the end of my first entry, as the party gains experience, the player unlocks various multi-classes. I didn't keep track of the precise thresholds, but it's tied to the accumulated experience levels of all characters in the game roster. The classes later on the list take longer to appear than those that are earlier on the list. I had them all by the time the accumulated levels were around 42 or 44.

        

The full list of available classes.

       

At first, I thought, great, I'll make all kinds of multi-classed characters so that everyone has multiple roles. I made a paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), yakuza (fighter-thief), and sorcerer (wizard-priest). I didn't create them all at once but rather one at a time, slowly introducing them to the existing party, sticking them in the back during combat until they gained a level or two. 

      

There are some oddities, such as a "ninja" being a fighter-thief-wizard combination and the ultimate hero, the combination of all four classes, being a . . . "thaumaturge." I agree that mingling Asian and western archetypes is a little jarring. Even if you disagree, you have to admit that "yakuza" is a stupid class. I like "swashbuckler" for fighter-thief combos. I think something like "operative" or "spy" (maybe the Elder Scrolls' "agent") works well for a thief-wizard.

     

The new party takes on a warehouse full of snakes.

     

It turns out that the character creation screen oversimplifies the relationship between classes. A paladin is not just a "fighter-priest," but a class who has his own spells, including "Hone" (improves weapon damage) and "Speed," neither of which are available to my regular priest, at least not at Level 8. "Cure Light Wounds" doesn't become available to the paladin for several levels, it's possible that some priest spells ("Turn Undead?") are never available. Finally, it takes him more spell points to cast some spells. "Cure Light Wounds" is four points for the paladin and only one for the priest. This is a pretty important spell, and only being able to cast five of them at Level 4 instead of twenty makes a big difference.

   

I assume the same is true of the other multi-classes, though I didn't get a chance to explore them much. I can tell you that the wizard's workhorse spell at early levels is "Missile," and it costs the ranger three points to cast it to the wizard's one.

       

"Turn Undead" performs well against some skeletons—the only undead we've faced so far.

       

Some multi-class options still made sense to me. The non-spellcasting classes don't seem diminished by their additional abilities, so there's hardly any reason for a pure fighter or thief. I replaced them with a paladin and a yakuza. Ultimately, though, I kept my original priest and wizard. My second foursome was originally going to be Geraldus, Karamar, Georgi, and Lainea, but I ended up with a bit of a mishmash. 

    

I did all the new character creation and party-reorganization before spending time on the Apple II/Apple IIGS issue. I used CiderPress to transfer the save files over to the regular Apple II version. When I loaded it, I realized that while the party saved okay, I hadn't brought over the map files. The game thought I hadn't explored an inch of its territory. I wavered for a minute then decided just to re-explore the parts of the Old Quarter I'd already explored. This ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would—most of the rest of this session, in fact.

     

Some advanced priest spells become available.

     

The Old Quarter is divided into two halves by a river. South of the river, where the game starts, has the shops and services. North of the river are a bunch of houses, hovels, and warehouses, some with treasure chests. Chests in this area only deliver about 300-400 gold, the same as a couple of regular battles, so they're not terribly lucrative.

   

There were a few notable fixed battles, one with a warehouse full of cottonmouths, one with another full of water spiders. I earned a silver sword in that latter one. There were many battles with fixed parties of the same character classes that the player can create. High level spellcasters are always tough.

   

Things got a bit easier when my wizard bought "Fireball," which damages all enemies in a single column, and then "Flame Strike," which damages all enemies in all columns. She can only cast either of them twice before she's out of spell points, but it was enough to get me past some of the more difficult fixed battles in the area.

      

The unapproachable palace.

        

South of the Old Quarter is the Palace Quarter, but barely any of it is explorable. The majority is taken up by Queen Victoria's Palace, and it is surrounded by a moat that we cannot cross (the game notes that the drawbridge is up). I don't know whether we'll later find a spell or item that lets us cross water. All we could do in this area was explore a couple of houses outside the moat and loot a few treasure chests.

   

The New Quarter lies west of the palace and southwest of the Old Quarter. It's here that I found the travel agency that offers the titular Passage to Oblivion, but only for 50,000 gold and the bones of a saint. I have the gold, but to get the bones, I will need to avail the agency of its less-expensive travel option to Crytus. There's also an "unavailable" ticket to "Paradise." 

      

Great, now I'll have Phil Collins in my head for two days.

            

Like the Palace Quarter, a lot of the Old Quarter is cut off by a river. I'm also having trouble fully exploring the maps because of locked doors that my yakuza cannot pick—one of the downsides to getting rid of the pure thief class. Behind a secret door, I found a stairway to the sewers, making the city at least four maps large.

   

As I wrap this up, my characters are all between 9 and 12. This is a very grindy game, not so much because it's necessary as because random encounters are extremely frequent. They can happen on every action, not just movement, so I frequently get strings of them when I'm just trying to turn around. Fleeing carries only a 50% (roughly) chance of success, and enemies get a free round of attacks when it fails, so you end up having to fight most battles.

       

My paladin character towards the end of this session . . .

           

I've only received a few equipment upgrades since the opening hours. There are four equipment slots: left hand, right hand, armor, and a ring. Rings increase an attribute; so far, I've only found strength and speed rings. There are a lot of healing potions, "Recall" scrolls that let you escape combat, antidotes, and thieves' tools. Perhaps the most valuable usable items are mana pills, as the only other way to restore mana is to return to the inn.

     

. . .. and his inventory.

      

The game isn't very exciting, but it's undemanding. It's a good game to have going when you're half-watching a television show or (in my case) the annual slate of human resources-required videos. The first Dark Design games knew enough to confine themselves to modest length, and I'm afraid this one is going to overstay its welcome.

    

Time so far: 9 hours