Game 575: Arena of Death (1991), Game 576: Darkhold (1987), and BRIEF: Buio! (1984)

 

Why does my sword have a blue tip?

      

Arena of Death

United Kingdom

Hibbs Creations Limited (developer and publisher) 

Released 1991 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 1 May 2026

Date Ended: 1 May 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)     

     

Arena of Death is so simple that it's barely a game. You start it.

      

You allocate 100 points among three attributes: strength (damage done), stamina (health), and skill (accuracy).

            

You select the best weapon that your strength will support, plus a backup weapon in case you fumble it.

      

I can take a broadsword or anything below.

     

You select armor if you want. Different types of armor have different protective values but also subtract form your skill.

      

Those rings aren't available to the player, but you encounter enemies who have them.

      

You enter the arena. The game tells you what kind of enemy you're fighting, what kind of weapon he wields, and what kind of armor he has.

      

Prepare to die, salamander!

      

Each round, the game rolls for initiative. If you get the initiative, you can charge, swing, thrust, change weapons, surrender, or check your status.

  

If the enemy gets the initiative, you can parry, dodge, retreat, change weapons, counter-attack, or check your status. 

    

Defense options.

        

Once one of you has taken sufficient wounds, the battle is over. If you win, you get between 0 and 2 points added to your three ability scores, your character heals, and you return to the main menu, where you can select different weapons and armor or, absurdly, save the game.

 

Win 5 times, and the game tells you that you win the match "and your freedom." At that point, saving the game (which is absurd) becomes possible. 

   

Win 10 times and you win the game and get listed in the Hall of Fame.

           

This was unexpected.

      

For my first character, I chose 40 strength, 40 stamina, and 20 skill. I equipped a broadsword. I won every match and had won the game 20 minutes later. My opponents, in order, were a lizard man, a "Chester," a centaur, a lizard man, a kobold, a goblin, a centaur, a dwarf, a bugbear, and another Chester.

   

Since what happens during battle is invisible, I have no idea which attacks and defenses work best, or whether the best strategy changes for different opponents or different opponents' weapons and armor. I similarly don't know whether certain weapons work better against certain opponents or certain armor.

        

The character status screen.

      

The points you get for each victory aren't really sufficient to have achieved a new weapon level by the end of the game, so the "development" isn't worth much.

   

Enemies I encountered in subsequent passes through the game include gnolls, warlocks, and warriors.  

        

"Like, I was fighting myself . . . or . . . something?"

     

In the rare case that you die, there's a chance of a resurrection. 

      

It's a good thing I didn't die or surrender often, because if either thing happens, the game asks for a disk (I don't know whether it wants the main disk or a save disk) and then refuses to accept anything that you insert. 

     

The game is sort of an all-text Darkwood (1992) but without the inventory upgrades that game offered in between matches. It gets a 9 on the GIMLET, nothing rising higher than a 2, 0s in "Game World," "NPCs," and "Economy."

    

Arena was created by Patrick Hibbs of Hibbs Creations Limited. No other games seem to be associated with him. I don't know if it's the same company, but a company by that name has four free apps on the Amazon app store, all from 2021: Different Types of Tea, History of Lifted Jeep Wrangler, How to Renovate Your Bathroom, and Advantages of Swimming. All appear to be text only; none have any reviews.

    

***** 

     

     

Darkhold

United States
Softdisk (developer and publisher); published in Loadstar magazine

Released 1987 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 1 May 2026 

Date Ended: 1 May 2026

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)     

    

Darkhold is an action game in which one or two players joystick their characters (a warrior and/or a wizard) around a dungeon, kill enemies, and collect treasures. It was created by frequent Loadstar contributor John Mattson, whose work we saw previously in Questwriter (1990), Labyrinth (1991), and Knight's Quest (1991).

    

The dungeon has four levels. Each level has rooms arranged in an 8 x 8 grid, wrapping, for a total of 64 rooms on each level and 256 levels in the dungeon. The characters navigate the larger dungeon corridors and then poke their heads into the individual rooms. Each room can contain some combination of:

   

• Stairs up or down.
• A monster (specters, basilisks, manticores, trolls, harpies, fire newts, dragons).
• A treasure chest.
• A healing fountain.

       

A basilisk blocks the way to a treasure chest.

    

Despite their names, both characters are pretty much the same in combat. They both have missile attacks activated by the joystick button, but enemies close the distance fast. As soon as a character touches an enemy, they're presumed to be in melee combat. It's over fast.

      

The wizard melees with a troll.

       

The goal of the game is to find four pieces to a medallion. They are stored on the four levels in random treasure chests. Treasure chests otherwise contain gold, which adds to each character's score. Collecting chests in rooms that have them is the only way to "clear" those rooms. If the room only has an enemy, with no chest, there's no reason to fight him, as you get no special benefits from killing enemies. If you pop into a room, see only an enemy, and immediately leave, the room is considered "cleared."

     

Hey, I'll take the W.

        

Various notes:

   

• Some enemies have ranged attacks. Harpies are the worst enemy in the game, as they have some kind of "magic field" that damages you as you spend any time in their presence.

• Healing fountains heal 30 hit points with each visit, and they're good for multiple visits. At some point, the healing fountain will disappear and the room will become a standard monster room with no chest.

• When two players play at once, one of them controls the "party" as they move around the dungeon. Once inside a room, the players can operate independently. But battle is over quickly, and enemies are optimized for a single character, so I can only imagine it was a boring, frustrating experience. Both characters have to independently leave the room using the same exit to continue. 

     

The two characters together in a room with a healing field.

      

• If you use the "fire" button on the joystick while outside a room, the game thinks you want to drink a potion. I never found a potion anywhere in the dungeon. It's possible I missed some documentation.

• Similarly mysterious are the "items" section of the main screen, which never show more than one item (the character's weapon upgrade). 

• If you just stand around in the corridors, enemies "ambush" you and draw you into a temporary room, though you can just immediately duck out, the same way you can in regular rooms. 

• Both characters can upgrade their weapons on the first level. They make a minor difference in battle, and the task is accomplished quickly, so it's not a huge part of the game. 

           

Wandering the hallways between rooms. The checkerboard rooms are unexplored; the ones with the blue wavy lines have healing fountains.

     

It's not really an RPG—no character development—but it was over fast and it was diverting enough for an hour or so. The levels are generous enough with healing fountains that you're never in any serious danger. It only gets a 7 on the GIMLET, lacking any real RPG elements.

 

 ***** 

        

      

Buio!

"Darkness!"

Italy

Editoriale Video (developer and publisher)

Released 1984 for ZX Spectrum

Rejected for: Insufficient character development 

     

Until I found a few entries in a ZX Spectrum database, I thought that Time Horn: Il Corno del Tempo (1991) was the first Italian RPG. It may still be. Buio! is yet another adaptation of The Wizard's Castle (1980) or Monster Combat (1980), and a relatively uninspired one at that. The only relevant statistic is the character's forza ("strength," but more accurately, "hit points"), which goes up and down based on luck more than experience or skill.

   

There's no backstory. The character is cast into a 16-level tower, randomized for each new game—a process that seems to take forever even accounting for the year and platform. Each level has 10 x 10 squares. Each square offer some combination of monsters, treasures, and special encounters. To get to the next level, you have to accumulate 2500 x L gold pieces, where "L" is the level you're currently on, then find the "key," which automatically teleports you along. Why they didn't just make the key a stairway is one of the many mysteries of Buio!

      

Starting out on Level 1 with no gold, 8000 hit points.

       

Combat is with generic mostri; the game doesn't even bother to pull from a database of different monster names. As combat begins, you have to decide whether to go for a leg (G), body (C), or head (T) attack, and hold down the appropriate key. Some monsters are particularly resistant to some attacks and vulnerable to others, but unless I'm missing something, the only way to tell is to try one of the options and see how fast the monster's health depletes. Meanwhile, your own health is depleting quite rapidly, even at era-accurate speeds. I had a tough time making my initial 8,000 hit points last the level. The only other option in combat is to run (R).

   

The combat screen. Nothing to do here but hold down the key.

        

Special encounters include piles of treasure, weapons that add to your health (there is typically only one of these per level), merchants who will sell weapons, teleporters that take you to random places, and enchanted rooms that raise and lower your strength. 

    

An "enchanted place" saps my strength.

       

A map of the level can be accessed every time you defeat five monsters. It shows the locations of rooms with monsters (M), weapons (A), keys (+), and special encounters (#). Monsters can wander into any room, though, so the "M" isn't really helpful. Movement is with the 5678 keys. It's probably an emulator issue, but I found the game to be horribly unresponsive to my keypresses.

       

The level map. I guess there are 496 monsters remaining.

        

I made it to Level 2, but no way am I wading through 15 more levels of this just for the inevitably brief congratulazioni! at the end. 

    

As a side note, I've never had any formal lessons in Italian, but my general familiarity with the language from food, music, architecture, wine, and Dean Martin songs, coupled with my knowledge of French and Spanish, means that I can almost always "triangulate" the language. Like if you know "woods" is bosque in Spanish and bois in French, it seems inevitable that it's bosco in Italian. Given that, the translation of Buio! surprised l'inferno out of me. It was on my "upcoming" list for weeks, and I just assumed it meant "wow!" or something. It has no cognates that I know of in the other Romance languages. Google says that it comes from a Latin word for reddish-brown. Imagine if there was an English language game called Reddish-Brown!