Game 212: The Adventure - Only the Fittest Shall Survive (1985)

 

The Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive
Green Valley Publishing (developer and publisher)

Released 1985 for Apple II

Date Started: 9 February 2016
Date Ended: 9 February 2016

Total Hours: 3

Reload Count: 0

Difficulty: Easy (2/5), at least for the first scenario

Final Rating: 21

Ranking at Time of Posting: 72/223 (32%)

Green Valley Publishing only seems to have been around for about two years between 1985 and 1987, but during that time they managed to produce at least half a dozen games, including A PACAaLIPS Now, a ripoff of Pac-Man; Atomic Handball, a ripoff of Breakout; a C64 adaptation of a chess game that someone else made; a re-release of Sierra's The Wizard and the Princess; and The Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive, a breathtakingly blatant ripoff of Eamon (1980). This was not a publisher with a lot of ambition towards originality.

   

I feel like we've seen this dragon before...

   

As you may recall from my March 2013 review, Eamon is an open-source adventure construction set from Donald Brown. Any number of adventures spin off from a central adventurer's hall where you start and end each quest. There, you can buy weapons, armor, and spells and perform a few other aspects of character management. The adventures are all text, but unlike the Infocom adventures of the time, they are proper RPGs, with a complex set of statistics to determine accuracy and damage in combat, including a system of critical hits and fumbles. Skills for weapon, armor, and spell use increase as you successfully use them, which I think is the first time this method of character development appears in RPG history.

Different weapon types adjust accuracy and damage formulas but are mitigated by developing skill.

Donald Brown wrote half a dozen adventures to go with the core program, then made it available to the world. Today, the Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online has cataloged 255 Eamon adventures, including several made within the last few years.

Brown apparently has a chip on his shoulder about his game, and he has refused to respond to requests for interviews, including mine. But he did try to commercialize Eamon as SwordThrust (1981), a variant I liked so much that I wrote my first walkthrough based on it. The engine has also been adapted to graphic platforms several times.

Unless Brown had some relationship with Green Valley Publishing that history has yet to be uncovered, The Adventure is a staggeringly unethical commercialization, in express violation of the Eamon license. It adopts the Eamon engine in its entirety and makes only the most superficial changes. The Hall of the Guild of Free Adventurers becomes the Guildhall of the Free Adventurers. The primary attributes of hardiness, agility, and charisma become strength, dexterity, and charisma. The skills of spear, bow, and axe become blunt, distance, and slashing. Idiotic word substitutions like this, fooling no one, permeate the game.
  

Chester fights a priest.

   

In almost all of its changes, The Adventure makes for blander text. For instance, when you first enter the guildhall and give the guildmaster your name (to load an old character or retrieve a new one), Eamon calls him a "burly Irishman," while The Adventure just calls him "a guard." When he can't find your name and wants to confirm that you want to create a new character, Eamon has him say, "Yer name's na in here. Have ye given it to me aright?" while The Adventure just notes, "the guard eyes you suspiciously and says he can't find you listed." Eamon's weapon shop owner is named Marcos Cavielli and says "well, as I live and breathe, if it isn't my old pal Chester!" when you enter. The Adventure just has a generic "weaponmaster" who "greets you warmly." I could go on for multiple paragraphs.

But the underlying engine--as well as major things like the main screen graphics--are entirely unchanged. This includes your amount of starting gold, weapon and armor prices, and spell names ("Blast," "Heal," "Speed," and "Power"). This also includes the name of the first adventure: "The Beginner's Cave." 

Beginning the first adventure in The Adventure...

...and in Eamon. Changing "entrance" to "mouth" really shows the former's originality.

  

Once you start the adventure, some changes in The Adventure interface become clear. The text is mostly the same--superficial replacements, I suspect designed to counter the most obvious charges of plagiarism--but The Adventure splits its screen so that the text occupies the right half and information about the character (which in Eamon you would need to return to the guildhall to see) occupies the left.

As with Eamon, exploring the adventure is done with simple commands, including the cardinal directions (unlike Eamon, The Adventure doesn't support abbreviations, so you have to type out NORTH and SOUTH), LOOK, TAKE, QUAFF, SAY, and ATTACK. The Adventure gets rid of some of the less-used but fun Eamon verbs, including SMILE and WAVE. Again, there are dumb substitutions: Eamon's GET, DRINK, and READY become TAKE, QUAFF, and PREPARE here.

Another comparison. This is Eamon...

...and this is The Adventure. Same rates, same treasure. By making its chamber "large" instead of "small," The Adventure corrected a glaring problem with the original.

I played a little of the game side-by-side with the Eamon version, and it appears that the map is identical, including the placement of monsters and treasures. The cave is basically just a long hall with rooms off to the side where you can fight monsters and pick up treasures. Charisma determines whether certain NPCs are enemies or allies. Again, the encounters are less interesting than in Eamon: a "grizzled old hermit who smells as if he hasn't taken a bath in forty years" is just "a hermit"; "a bottle with a strange potion inside" is just "a bottle."

Some of the changes make no sense. In Eamon, when the adventurer gets to the end of the hallway, the text says, "to your great shock are two doors on the east and west." This is a joke about the fact that the three preceding squares in the hallway have all had east-west doors, thus you are shocked--shocked!--to find the same configuration yet again. In its efforts to avoid tripping the alarms at TurnItIn.com or something, The Adventure missed the joke and changed the text to read, "you are mortified to see two sinister looking doors to the east and west."

The only thing The Adventure really adds is some nonsensical names. What was just a large chamber in Eamon is "The Hall of the Great Lord Gumby" in The Adventure. A jail cell has "Gumby hath no mercy" scrawled on the wall. A passage not found in Eamon leads down a hallway to the Temple of the Great Lord Galootie.

"Sir, we must put our own stamp on this adventure!" "Agreed! Just make sure it's stupid!"

   

There is one instant death if you read a book in a library: a giant fist crushes you. (In Eamon, you get turned into a fish.) If you can avoid that, the adventure culminates when the cave emerges onto a beach and you fight a pirate for some jewels. After that, you make your way back to the entrance, where the guildmaster converts your accumulated treasure to cash that you can spend on equipment and goods for the next adventure.

The final confrontation of the scenario.

   

Two other adventures were apparently released for The Adventure: Cave of the Mind and River Adventure, both "adapted" from Eamon adventures (Jim Jacobson's Cave of the Mind and The Zyphur Riverventure, respectively). I didn't find either, but I wasn't looking terribly hard.

The game poses a challenge for the GIMLET, because I ought to rank it almost the same as Eamon. The text changes don't make a huge difference. The interface is arguably a little better by having the "character sheet" on the left, although what it gains it loses via the inability to delete previously typed text, so if you accidentally type ATTAKC, you have no option but to hit ENTER, accept the error message, and try again.

Thusfar, I've avoided making adjustments to the GIMLET based on originality or moral judgments on the game development process (distinguished from moral judgements about content, I hasten to add), so I guess The Adventure gets a 21. But where Eamon has 252 more adventures to its name, there aren't many reasons to play this game over that one.

****

For more information on Green Valley and the potential authorship of The Adventure, see my later posting on The Realm of Angbar: Elfhelm's Bane.

Game 93: Eamon (1980)

      

Eamon

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1980 for Apple II

Date Started: 22 March 2013

Date Ended: 22 March 2013

Total Hours: 6

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: 26

Ranking at Time of Posting: 37/93 (40%)

Ranking at Game #455: 238/455 (52%)

    

The relative quality of freeware and commercial CRPGs often serves as a counter-argument to capitalism. We might naturally expect that games made for profit would out-perform games made just for the fun of it--and in certain areas, like graphics and sound, they unquestionably do. But in terms of overall gameplay, we need not look further than the entire roguelike genre--including the high-ranked NetHack and Omega--to see that commercial games don't always make for better games.

This axiom rings most true during Barton's Dark and Bronze Ages, when the earliest commercial RPGs significantly under-performed what university students created for their friends on mainframes in between classes. Few of the commercial RPGs from the late 1970s and early 1980s exceed the PLATO games like dnd, Oubliette, and Avatar. I would go so far as to say that only Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai comes close, and not until 1982 and 1983, with Wizardry and Ultima III, do commercial games clearly start to hold their own.
 

Eamon is one of the best examples of a "freeware" game that has inspired affection and devotion well beyond any commercial game of the era. Programmer Don Brown specifically designed the game as an engine for an infinite number of modules--it's the earliest "construction set" for CRPGs--and people still write them today. The Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online regularly reviews new adventures and blogs about other Eamon news. I'm hard-pressed to think of many other games that have an active community after 33 years.
 

Fighting a pirate in Eamon.

 
Eamon is a cross between an RPG and a text adventure. Aside from the opening-screen graphic, the entire interface, including all commands, is text. Each module, or "adventure," is a self-contained story that takes maybe 10-30 minutes to play. Each features a variety of monsters, items, and special encounters, but the items aren't portable from one adventure to the next, so what you don't use in the adventure itself, you sell upon return to the adventurer's hall (the nexus among all the adventures). Although there are some common commands (e.g., NORTH, SOUTH, GET, LOOK, ATTACK, OPEN), the specific inputs can change from adventure to adventure.
 

At first glance, Eamon seems like a very simple game. There are only five weapon types (mace, spear, axe, sword, and bow), only three attributes (hardiness, agility, and charisma), only four armor types (leather, chain, plate, and shield), and only four spells (blast, heal, speed, and power). But these limited elements come together in unique ways to create adventuring scenarios extremely advanced for the time. For example:
 

1. Each weapon has an associated level of complexity with it, and an associated level of ability. Maces are the least complex, and any character can wield one with a reasonably good chance of striking a blow. Bows are the most complex, with a default -10% ability level, meaning beginning characters need extraordinary luck to hit anything with one. This makes a lot of sense to me: any fool could pick up a mace and start swinging it, but you need finesse and skill to successfully use a bow or sword. Your chance of hitting with a weapon is the weapon complexity plus your ability with the weapon plus twice the agility. My character here...

...will hit with Trollsfire 25 + 10 + (18*2) = 71% of the time. Not bad, but...
 

2. Armor has a complex effect on both damage reduction and chances to hit. Leather reduces your "to hit" chance by 10%, chain by 20%, plate by 60%, and a shield by 5%. So Chester will have that 71% reduced by 25% because of his chain and shield. However, Chester's armor expertise ("AE" on the sheet) mitigates that reduction by 10%. Meanwhile, each suit of armor deflects a certain amount of damage. My chain and shield together will deflect 3 points, meaning I have a 50% chance to resist all damage if my enemy has a weapon that does 1d6.

3. Weapon and armor expertise increase in increments of 2% as you successfully score hits in combat. It seems to happen with about 30-40% of hits. Chester, above, started with 0% ability with a sword but managed to hit enemies about 25 times in his first adventure, and among those hits, his sword ability went up 5 times to 10%. This is pretty cool stuff for a 1980 CRPG, and I'm pretty sure we have to award Eamon the recognition of the first game where skills increase with use.

4. The three attributes (rolled randomly during character creation) are quite important and significantly change the nature of the game for each character. Hardiness affects hit points and how much you can carry. Charisma affects buying power, significantly enough that the difference between an 18 and a 10 is the difference between a character who can afford any armor for his first adventure or not. Charisma also affects whether certain "monsters" you meet in the dungeons like your or not. If they don't like you, they'll attack you; if they do, they'll join you and help against other enemies. My first character, with a charisma of 17, was joined by a hermit and a fighter named Heinrich, who together helped compensate for his horrible agility of 9. My second character had those attributes reversed and had to kill both the hermit and Heinrich, leaving him too weak for the final battle. My hypothesis is that any character can be successful, but each requires a slightly different strategy.

5. You can fumble (drop) weapons in combat, and they can break. There are also critical hits. I'm not sure exactly how the statistics affect these probabilities, but I think they're mostly random.

To illustrate the gameplay, let me go through the first scenario that came with the game: "Beginner's Cave." The game begins when you enter the adventurer's hall. There's a sign pointing to a desk that says "register here or else!" If you ignore it and go to drink with the other adventurers, the game immediately shows you the penalty for not following instructions.

When you do register at the desk, you enter a character name, and if it's an existing character, the game loads it; if not, it creates a new one. You specify the sex and the attributes are otherwise rolled randomly. The guildmaster gives new characters a quick on-screen manual to read.

Part of the in-game manual, which lasts about 8 screens.

In the adventurer's hall, you can buy and sell weapons and armor; learn spells from a wizard (these are very expensive; you need to successfully complete some adventures first); deposit or withdraw money from a bank; save and quit the game; and examine the character. The adventurer's hall is the only place where you can do the latter; in an adventure itself, you can only see the character's inventory. Even your current hardiness or "hit point" level is only alluded to through various qualitative measures ("you feel fine"; "you are sick"; "you are on death's door").

Since I'm playing with a character with a charisma of 18, I can count on getting some NPCs to join me in the first adventure. That means I'll have time to develop my weapon skill, without worrying about death, so I buy a good sword, a suit of leather, and a shield.

Heading out, I choose the only adventure on the main disk, "The Beginner's Cave," and after a "Knight Marshal" verifies that I've bothered to buy some equipment and I'm not too experienced to be here, he lets me into the titular cave.

You are at the entrance of a cave. To the south, over the tunnel entrance is a sign saying 'Beginners Only.' To the north is the road back to town.

I enter the cave and wander down a dimly-lit tunnel. Exploring a side-chamber, I find a bottle with a healing potion and a smelly hermit, who hops off his rock and follows me. (Unfortunately, this adventure doesn't let me interact with him.)

In another side chamber, three rats with sharp teeth scurry over a pile of diamonds. This affords me my first combat. As I attack, two of the rats flee out into the main chamber. I miss. The rat hits me, but the blow bounces off my leather armor. I keep missing my attacks, but fortunately the hermit compensates for my weakness and kills all of them. I grab the pile of diamonds.

Moving south, I come across two rooms bolted shut. One contains a human fighter named Heinrich who, grateful for his release, accompanies me. (Again, this is dependent on my high charisma; other adventurers have been attacked by Heinrich.) The other contains a hairy, angry gorilla which we successfully slay, looting 50 gold coins from the chamber.

Another side room contains a chest. As I go to open it, it sprouts tentacles and seizes us. A mimic! We attack it furiously and, again, my companions manage to kill it where I keep missing. Its body conceals a gold ring.

West from a t-junction, we find the remains of a library with a magic book. Knowing from my previous adventures that if I read it, I'll be turned into a fish, I simply pick it up. Moving along the caverns, we eventually come to an exit on a beach, where a pirate is in the process of burying a pile of jewels. I SMILE and WAVE at him, but he just attacks, forcing us to do the same.

From his body, I loot his magic sword, called "Trollsfire," and the pile of jewels. With nowhere else to go, we return triumphantly to the adventurer's hall, where I sell my accumulated loot for 3,020 gold pieces and use it to buy HEAL and BLAST spells from the wizard.

Other adventures require swapping of disks after first loading the character with the main Eamon disk. The Eamon Adventurer's Guild library has a master list of all the adventures, which you can download individually or all at once. For my second one, I decided to try The Death Star, one of eight written by Eamon's author, Don Brown. [Ed. As we later discovered, this adventure is based on a previous game by Brown called Role-Playing Starwars (1979). Despite its name, it's a pure text adventure. It seems to be an Eamon prototype.]

The game, predictably, takes place on the Death Star from Star Wars, and I'm warned right at the beginning that I'm entering a "parallel universe" where my old gear and spells won't work. Here's the setup:

I exit the Millennium Falcon, ready my light saber, and head down the corridors. I kill legions of soldiers (for some reason, the game avoids using "Stormtrooper") and follow signs for the tractor beam equipment, which I destroy. I also find my way to the "weapon control room" and destroy the equipment controlling the Death Star's big laser gun, which I guess means I've retconned the Star Wars universe and the Battle of Yavin doesn't need to happen.

I return to the ship, blast off, and "shift back into [my] normal reality, ready to do battle with simple things like dragons and ogres." Back at the adventurer's hall, I find that my sword skill has increased, but little else.
 

Finally, for my third adventure, I decided to try the highest rated of the early games on the guild's list, John Nelson's Death Trap. Nelson is a programmer who started the National Eamon Users' Club, which eventually became the Guild. He organized the adventures, gave them "official" numbers, and started an Eamon newsletter.

The setup of Death Trap is that I've made a bet with an enemy for $20,000 that I can survive a cave called "Death Trap." The game warns me that there are dragons, giants, wizards, and demons in the cave, and I need to be a "supreme warrior" to survive. Suddenly, I'm thinking this isn't the best location for Chester's third adventure. This is borne out when the first chamber I come to is occupied by a dragon, and he kills me instantly. Because the game wipes your character from the disk every time you load him, death is permanent.

I tried a few others with a new character. I was doing well but some disk error dropped me to the prompt, and I lost my character. In fact, this happened several times. I think you could preserve the character by backing up the main disk, but I haven't tried it.

I wish I had time to try a lot of the other Eamon adventures. The system is flexible enough to support a wide variety of game scenarios, and I'm betting there are some with more interesting NPCs and even role-playing choices. The quality of the game depends, of course, on the quality and complexity of the particular adventure. To that end, it's hard to give the "game" a single rating.

In a recent comment, Amy suggested I should speak more about my experiences actually getting the games to run. Usually, I'm using DOSBox, and there's no big story. For this one, it was a bit of a pain. I'm using the AppleWin emulator and the disk images I downloaded from the Eamon Adventurer's Guild. Only the first disk (with the adventurer's hall) is bootable, so if I want to save my progress in any of the others and re-load, I have to first run a bootable disk, then "swap" disks, then load and run the program. I never owned an Apple II when I was younger, so I had to learn some of the basic Apple DOS commands to get the process to work. I had a lot of corruptions for some reason, and I had to keep restoring versions of the disk images from the downloaded .zip file. Ultimately, these various corruptions discouraged me from continuing with the game, and I'm not sure what to blame for them.
 

An updated version of Eamon for Windows exists, called Eamon Deluxe, created by Frank Black, last updated in 2012. It runs in DOSBox and provides a graphic interface, with icons and commands similar to Ultima I and II. In addition to the options from the original Eamon, there's a casino, weapons and armor trainers, an information desk, and a witch who you can pay to raise your abilities.

Wandering about the Eamon Deluxe remake.

The adventures are otherwise text-based and very much in the flavor of the original game, although with a slightly more tolerable font.

There have been other adaptations over the years, including PC conversions by Jon Walker in 1985, Paul Gilbert in 1995, and John Nelson in 2000. (The EAG has comparison screen shots.) There was a graphic version called Super Eamon in 1985 and an Atari ST version in 1987. It was commercialized (apparently with more options and puzzles) for the Apple II, with six adventures, as SwordThrust (1981), and John Nelson updated the Eamon engine as KnightQuest in 1983. In 2010, a developer created a game called Leadlight, a gothic horror set at a girl's boarding school in Australia, using the Eamon engine and running in a browser with an Apple II emulator.
 

Creator Don Brown published the code, along with an interesting article about the game mechanics, in the same issue of Recreational Computing (July 1980) in which The Wizard's Castle appeared. Brown is a bit of a mystery. According to the EAG's history of the game, he "wrote the main hall, a few dungeon designer utilities, two manuals, and 8 adventures before completely dropping out of sight in the Eamon world, never to be heard from again." This can't be the whole story, because he was behind the attempt to commercialize it as SwordThrust, but in any event, a later note to the site indicates that Mr. Brown "is not interested in any sort of Eamon-related correspondence" and hasn't responded to anyone's messages in over 15 years. He has apparently remained in the software business, working for several companies.

Two more notes:
 

1. There's currently an active contest to develop new adventures for Eamon. It's running until June 1. If any of you develops one, I'll play it!

2. Nothing I can find helps me figure out the origin of the name. "Eamon" or "Eamonn" is a common male Irish personal name, equivalent to the English "Edmund," but I can't find any obvious candidates to have inspired this game.

I'd be happy to hear of any of your Eamon experiences. For me, it's back to the "present" with Knights of Legend.

****

Further reading: Check out my later experiences with Don Brown's commercial adaptation, SwordThrust, and a blatant ripoff, The Adventure: Only the Fittest Shall Survive.