Hillsfar: Final Rating

 
Hillsfar

Westwood Associates (developer), Strategic Simulations (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1990 for PC-98; 1992 for NES

Date Started: 27 February 2013
Date Ended: 28 February 2013
Total Hours: 8
Difficulty: Moderate-Easy (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 31
Ranking at Time of Posting:  43/86 (50%)

I'm a little annoyed that I didn't play Hillsfar before Curse of the Azure Bonds. I had this idea that it was unrelated to the Gold Box games, but after playing it, I realize it was definitely meant to fall in between Pool of Radiance and Curse. I'm particularly upset by an anonymous reader's comment that completing this game produced a few more journal entries in Curse. I looked through the journal entries and found a few candidates.

Granted, these NPCs show up in these places regardless, but it still would have been nice to have this extra flavor.

Knowing all of this makes the game feel more like what it is: a brief diversion in between two superior games, providing some additional context to the region and some additional experience points. You could run your entire party through the guild quests, one by one, and end up with an exported Pool party a level higher when they start Curse.

A 2004 GameSpy article on the "history of D&D video games" encapsulates Hillsfar perfectly:

Neither fish nor fowl, Hillsfar was the first attempt at a Dungeons & Dragons game by then-unknown, Westwood Studios. Hillsfar was basically a series of mini games masquerading as a role-playing game. The story was simple enough; you played a wandering adventurer who came to the town of Hillsfar in search of wealth. When you arrive, you're stripped of your armor and equipment and need to use all your wits to escape from the town. In the process you'll go through many arcade game challenges, including riding on a racing horse over hurdles, an archery shooting gallery, one-on-one arena combat, and picking locks using a full set of lockpicks. While some of the games were fun, none of them could hold a player's interest that long and most ended up giving up on a failed experiment.

The game feels very much like an "experiment." What's all the more striking is that I don't think any of the innovations in Hillsfar lived beyond the game, which is too bad. It would have been fun to see the lockpicking mini-game, for instance, employed in the context of a true RPG. In the Gold Box games, when you want to pick a door or chest lock with a thief, you just choose "Pick Lock" from a menu, and a random roll determines success or failure; adding the mini-game as an option would have been a lot of fun; alas, we had to over a decade before we saw a lockpicking mini-game again (unless someone did it before Oblivion), and it wasn't as good.

The best part of the game. Fast-paced and challenging.

 
Or consider the way the game seamlessly blends action and attributes in the archery mini-game. You have to carefully control your aim by using keypad to nudge a constantly-agitating crosshair while simultaneously timing the firing. A character with high dexterity gets a crosshair that shakes much less than a character with low dexterity. A similar combination of action and attributes governs arena combat and lockpicking. I think that horseback riding is all action, though.

All classes have to prove themselves in the archery mini-game at some point.

The main interface is also a step up from the Gold Box series, supplying a top-down navigation map while still offering a first-person perspective. This is yet another element that wasn't transferred to later games. It really is too bad that these innovative elements weren't employed in the context of a better RPG.

I started a second game with a magic-user character because I wanted to see how the quests and games differ. They don't, really. Neither magic-users or clerics cast a single spell in the game (except goofy ones in taverns), and the only thing that varies among classes is that non-thieves don't have lockpicks. I think magic users can use the "Rod of Blasting" my thief kept finding to clear out obstacles on the horseback trails.

The one thing that changes for the classes are a few silly options in the taverns, none of which amount to much.

 
To compensate for the lack of lockpicks for non-thieves, such characters are frequently solicited by thief NPCs, who will join (and thus allow access to the lockpicking mini-game) for half the discovered gold. Although a good idea, the artifice simply conspires to ensure that every player has essentially the same game regardless of class, with the exception of the specific guild-based excuses for breaking into various buildings and riding to various places on horseback.

I thus didn't play very far with my magic-user, but I did take several minutes of annotated video to give you a sense of how the game and its mini-games operate. I'm curious about your reactions to this. I've moved into an office that produces an annoying echoing effect when I record things in it--at least until I get more stuff on the walls--so I thought I'd try an unnarrated video with more text annotations instead. It takes longer to make than voice-over recordings, but I imagine it might be easier for some of you to watch.

A quick GIMLET, then:

• 3 points for the game world. The game basically "fits" in theme and setting between Pool and Curse, but although the manual sets up an intriguing story about a city under the grip of a tyrant, the gameplay makes essentially no use of the story. The iron-fisted rule of Maalthiir is simply an excuse to have no weapons or magic in the game.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Like the game's back story, character creation is just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Your character class determines only what guild you join; gameplay is otherwise the same. This means that dexterity and strength are going to be the two paramount attributes for any character, regardless of class: you need them to dodge traps, force locks, and perform well in arena combat. This is one of the few RPGs in which a magic-user with an intelligence of 5 could still succeed wildly. You get experience for quest completion and arena combats, but so little that my multi-class fighter/thief didn't rise a level during the game.

• 4 points for NPC interaction. There isn't much of it, but you do get wandering salesfolk, informers, guild masters, waitresses, and bar patrons. There are no dialogue options among them, nor many choices to make, but these interactions do help teach you about the game world and advance the plot.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. There are essentially neither in the game, with the exception of the arena combats. But the game does do one thing well by having bar patrons talk about the foes you'll be facing in the arena, offering tips to help you plan a combat strategy.

 

• 2 points for magic and combat. There's no magic. The limited combat in the arena is action-oriented: a series of feints, blocks, and attacks from the right, left, or forward. We've had action combat before--Drakkhen, Galdregon's Domain, and Times of Lore among them--and in general I've given these games low ratings for lack of tactics. The mini-game in Hillsfar is a little better than these, but overall this is one of the few RPGs in which combat doesn't play a major part in the gameplay.

• 2 points for equipment. One of the few RPGs in which your character doesn't carry weapons or armor. The equipment you do have is limited to healing potions, knock rings, lock picks, and Rods of Blasting--all designed to make the mini-games easier.

• 3 points for the economy. You get gold from chests and quest completion, and the gold is necessary to keep a good supply of your limited equipment items, plus buy bits of information from NPCs on the street or in taverns. There's a bank where you can store it to protect yourself from the occasional thief or guard that steals it all. I would say that the quest rewards provide too much, making it unnecessary to explore random houses for it, but if the game had forced me to do a lot of that, it would have just annoyed me.

• 3 points for the quests. I have to say, I'm a sucker for the "guild-based" quest system where you show up, get an assignment, complete it relatively quickly, and turn it in for the next quest. It takes even a boring game like this and propels it forward briskly. We've only seen such a system with a few other games, like Star Command. Unfortunately, there are no role-playing choices to make and no alternate outcomes. The game does a reasonable job mixing and matching its limited gameplay options in its quests.

If it was lying outside the chest, why did I have to open the chest to find it? This game's insistence on tying almost all quest-based progression to chests is a little absurd.

 

• 5 points for graphics, sound and interface. All okay. We've exited the "bloop" era for sounds, and effects like arena blows and galloping horses sound realistic, but there are very few of them in the game. The graphics are pretty and the limited controls are easy to master. I liked the map/first person split screen while navigating the town. The only place I really had any kind of problem was in the arena, and I'm willing to admit that I'm just not very good at that style of combat.

• 3 points for gameplay. Though boring, trite, linear, and repetitive, the gameplay has three things going for it: it's pitched at a good difficulty level, it offers some minimum amount of replayability for different classes (if you really care to see what all the guilds have to offer), and it doesn't last very long. When a game isn't very good, it can only be redeemed by not wearing out its welcome.

As you can see, Hillsfar doesn't excel in any area, and the final score comes to a measly 29, the lowest I've given a non-1970s game since Don't Go Alone. I'm going to us my "bonus" category to bump it up to 31, though, to recognize the innovations in the mini-games. I did enjoy the challenge that lockpicking and archery provided, at least, and I have a regard for games that show me something new.

Ads for the game emphasized it as a stopping point between Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds. I can't think of many other franchises that allow you to transfer characters in and out of such different games.

Computer Gaming World reviewed Hillsfar in the same September 1989 issue as Curse of the Azure Bonds. Reviewer Roe Adams also praised the lockpicking mini-game, noting that the game provided "the best simulation of thieving skills ever done in any medium," and that "the satisfaction of ripping through a 6-tumbler lock is unparalleled"--before stating that "alas, the rest of the game fails to even remotely come up to this caliber of design." He loathed having to return to camp--requiring at least two horseback rides--to save the game--and concluded the review with a sensible bit of incredulity: "Imagine the absurdity of doing mage or cleric quests without being able to cast any spells at all!"

The developer of Hillsfar, Westwood Studios, has a spotty history with me. They were responsible for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, which infuriated me with its ending, and Questron II, which I felt was too linear and outdated. But all three games have a few things in common: an emphasis on graphics and not on gameplay; unimportance of combat; and a very short playing time. I'll run into them again later this year with The Mines of Titan and in coming years with Circuit's Edge, DragonStrike, and the Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore series. Here's hoping their approach improves.

Now, after a brief detour, it's on to a game that I've really been anticipating: Starflight II.

Game 91: Hillsfar (1989)

        

Hillsfar

United States

Westwood Associates (developer), Strategic Simulations (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1990 for PC-98; 1992 for NES

Date Started: 27 February 2013

     

Hillsfar feels like an experiment in which SSI, makers of the "Gold Box" games, tried to determine if they could create another game in the same campaign setting, but featuring none of the gameplay elements that made the Gold Box series popular. Instead of a party game, we have a single-player game. Instead of tactical combat, we have action combat (and not much of that). Instead of exploration and mapping, we have mini-games. The game isn't entirely irredeemable--some of the mini-games are actually fun--but the overall experience is a bit bizarre.

Set just after Pool of Radiance and contemporaneously with Curse of the Azure Bonds (you can transfer characters back and forth with Curse), Hillsfar has an interesting premise. The corrupt city council has just been overthrown by a merchant-mage named Maalthiir who has proclaimed himself First Lord of Hillsfar. He has outlawed weapons and magic and enforces his edicts with a mercenary company called the Red Plumes.

The limited game world.

The city has come up peripherally in the previous two games; my party embarked from Hillsfar before arriving in Phlan in Pool, and in Curse, I encountered Red Plumes in Yulash (though they were mostly allies, since they were fighting against the Zhentarim). Hillsfar was also a visitable menu town in Curse.

The game begins with the player in camp outside Hillsfar, where you create or import your character. It is the only place where you can save your progress. (This swiftly becomes annoying.) The standard set of D&D races (human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, and halfling) and classes (fighter, mage, thief, cleric, and multi-classes) are available. The manual hints that the focus of the game is on thievery (since magic and weapons are outlawed in Hillsfar, there's naught else to do), so I chose a half-elf fighter/thief. It didn't take me much rolling to get 18s in both strength and dexterity.

My first task was to ride from camp to Hillsfar. The moment the horse-riding screen appeared, it all came back to me: I've played this game before! All at once, I remembered buying it at a shopping mall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire back in 1989 or 1990. I remember asking the clerk if it was anything like Pool of Radiance, and I remember him saying no, but--and this is suddenly crystal clear in my memory even though I didn't remember the game until today--excitedly adding, "You get to ride a horse!" Even as I bought the game, I remember thinking, "What's the big deal about riding a horse?" and then thinking it doubly so after I started playing it and actually riding the horse. I must not have gotten very far after that, because I don't remember any of the other elements except vaguely the lockpicks. But I definitely remember the side-scrolling screen in which you have to jump over obstacles on your horse.

So right away we have the game's first minigame: horseback riding. The terrain flies by as you trot or gallop along the track, jumping over logs, puddles, and haystacks, and ducking when an arrow appears. There's not much to it, except that later you can trade the horse for an upgrade at the trading post. I traded my initial horse for one named "Jumper," thinking he'd be good at jumping. No, it turns out he got that name because he randomly jumps in the middle of riding, often forcing you to land on an object and falter. I swiftly traded back. If you fall more than four times on one path, you die. It can get pretty tough, with multiple objects in a row that force you to carefully time your leaps.

Wouldn't a smart horseman just steer off this trail and on to the smooth grassland to his left?

Once you make the initial ride and arrive in Hillsfar, you get the main city map. It feels like a combination of The Bard's Tale and the game I just completed, Tangled Tales. As you move in the 3D screen on the left, you see your icon move about the city map on the right. As in Skara Brae, there are numerous random houses to enter as well as several special locations: pubs, guilds for each of the four classes, an arena, an archery range, magic shops, healers, sewers, a haunted mansion, a mage's tower, a book store, a cemetery, a bank, and Lord Maalthiir's Castle.

Despite the setup, "Lord Maalthiir" appears to play no role in the game.

As you wander the city, you're approached by random strangers offering to sell knock rings, healing potions, and information (almost always worthless), as well as the odd magician offering to show you a trick. Sometimes the "trick" is that a pile of gold appears (yay!); other times he teleports you to the arena, where you have to fight a battle.

This cost me 42 gold pieces.

Buildings come in two types: "menu" buildings, where you select from a number of options, and explorable buildings, where you search for treasure and avoid guards. The former turns into the latter during times when they're closed (the game has a day/night cycle). Chief among the "menu" buildings are pubs, where you can buy drinks, listen to gossip, gamble, buy a round for the house, get drunk and rolled by pickpockets, and other assorted actions, some specific to your class, many of which are necessary to get intelligence at certain stages of the plot. Guilds have fewer options (talk to the master, rest), as do shops.

It's the explorable buildings--including dungeons, caves, and sewers--that form the core of the game. They all work the same way. From the moment you enter, you have a timed status bar indicating how long you can run around and open chests before the guards show up. Although every building has some graphical features beyond chests--tables, people sitting in chairs, beds, and some items I can't identify--the only items with which you can really interact are chests.

I have no idea what the things to my southeast and northwest are supposed to be.

When you approach a chest, sometimes you find that it's unlocked and immediately reveals its treasure. But this is rare. More commonly, you find a locked chest, at which point you have the option to a) pick it with lockpicks; b) force it with your strength; c) try to pick it with some random object (this has never worked for me); d) use a "knock ring" (a ring that casts the "knock" spell); or e) use a Chime of Opening (an artifact I have not found). Items b) through d) are all on the same sub-menu, but using lockpicks brings up the lockpicking mini-game.

I guess non-thieves can only try to force it open or use knock rings.

I confess that I like the mini-game even though I suck at it. I think it's superior to both Oblivion's and Skyrim's (the only other lockpicking mini-games I'm familiar with). You have to study the patterns on the lock carefully and then choose the right sequence of picks to press down on the tumblers, one at a time. You start with 10 picks, each of which can be rotated, so there are 20 total combinations.

I was well into the game before I realized you can just pause the mini-game, take your sweet time studying the pattern, and then un-pause it to choose the sequence of picks. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. (Doing it without pausing, I only completed the lockpicking four or five times out of several dozen trying.) But even with pausing, it's difficult; the time limit is extremely short.

A rare successful lockpicking.

Even as a thief, then, I've generally opened chests by forcing the lock or using expensive knock rings. This carries a risk of setitng off a poison, sleep, or dart trap, but forcing works about 75% of the time, and when it doesn't, you can just try again. Chests have gold, healing potions, knock rings, Rods of Blasting (I was never able to use them; I think they're only for mages), and occasionally quest items or information.

Sleep traps suck. Time is short as it is.

Once the status bar gets down to about 30%--well before you've finished exploring the oddly enormous interiors of the buildings--guards start to appear, chasing you all around the maze. Every time they touch you, the status bar accelerates its decline. If they touch you while the status bar is at 0, they'll take all the gold you found and throw you out of the building--and sometimes toss you into the arena, where you have to fight for your life. Fortunately, when the guards appear, so do scattered scrolls of paralysis which freeze the guards for a time. When the status bar gets down to around 20%, you get a message saying "You can now find the exit," at which point a set of previously-hidden stairs appears somewhere in the maze. If you can find it before the guards catch you, you get to keep whatever you found.

Two things mitigate this whole process: First, even if the guards catch you and evict you, you still get to keep any quest items or knowledge that you found in the maze. Second, many buildings have secret areas in which the guards can't follow. There, you can take your time opening the chests (which usually have more gold than the main areas) and mosey on to the exit when you're ready.

You just have to keep hitting walls until you find them.

But complicating exploration are random teleportation traps that throw you about the level; one of the chests in each building has a "lever" that turns these off.

The "buildings" dynamic above applies to all buildings in the game, from random houses to quest locations to sewers. Notice anything missing? Monsters, maybe? In most CRPGs, when you enter haunted mansions, mages towers, ruins, or sewers, you fight things, right? Not in Hillsfar. You don't even have a weapon or armor (remember, weapons are outlawed). The only place you fight in the game is in the arena, and barring getting thrown there by guards, I'm not sure that fighting in the arena is mandatory for all classes. This is a rare CRPG that you can "win" without fighting a single battle.

You can choose to fight in the arena for money, and there are quests in the fighter's and thief's tracks, at least, that require it. Combat is all action, with commands to block left, right, and forward; and to attack left, right, and down. You fight with quarterstaffs against a succession of foes, including orcs, minotaurs, and lizard men. I haven't been able to get very good at watching for attacks and effectively blocking them. Essentially, I've found that if I can hit my foe once, I can often trap him in a sequence of attacks that ultimately knocks him out. If you choose to fight in the arena and lose, you get tossed out with 1 hit point. If you're in the arena because the guards threw you there and you lose, you die. It's one of the few ways to die in the game.

Gold is really only necessary to keep up a stock of healing potions and knock rings, both of which cost around 250 apiece (you can buy them in stores or from random sellers on the street) and are the only real "inventory" items in the game. You get a reasonable amount of gold from chests but most of it from solving quests for your guild. Because of that, I haven't had to spend a lot of time looting random houses.

Once you understand horseback riding, town exploration, tavern options, building exploration, and arena combat, you essentially have everything you need to win the game. Quests are just combinations of running around buildings--some of them accessible only by horseback in the environs around the city--visiting taverns for intelligence, and walking around the city. Because of that, the game gets boring pretty quickly.

Plenty of people have questioned the game's CRPG credentials, and it's not hard to see why. It has barely any combat (and no equipping of weapons and armor) or inventory. It has experience and levels, but experience rises so little in the course of the game that you never really level up. You have hit points, but you deplete most of them on traps. At the same time, though, it's one of the few games to date in which the choice of class (if not race and sex) actually matters, which would make it very replayable if it wasn't so fundamentally boring.

As a fighter/thief, I could have joined either guild, but I chose the thieves' guild first. I'm pretty sure you can only get quests from one guild per character, as once I joined the thieves' guild, the fighters' guildmaster was never "in."

Note the misplaced apostrophe.

The thieves' guildmaster, Swipe, set me on a series of quests to join and advance in the guild. All of them were a mixture of collecting intelligence from stores or taverns and then exploring various buildings for quest items. For instance, my introductory quests steps were to:

1. Visit the magic shop and ask about poison fungus. The owner told me I could find it in the sewers.

2. Go into the sewers and open chests (everything appears in a chest, no matter how nonsensical) until I found the fungus.

3. Return the fungus to the guildmaster.

Some of his quests took me outside the city proper, to nearby buildings and ruins, but all indoor exploration in Hillsfar is essentially the same, so there's nothing uniquely exciting about any of the ruins. Some of them have different textures, but all have the same chests, traps, and guards, and none of them have any combats, NPCs, or special encounters.

The outdoor map. Each of the pathways requires a horseback journey.

After the introductory quests to get the fungus and a potion, I had a series of interrelated quests to ultimately obtain a magical amulet. I had to break into the clerics' guild and the castle to solve it, and again you'd think that such places would be interesting, but they're not. They're just like every other building in the game.

Collecting intelligence on the amulet's location from a bar.

And finding the next step on the scavenger hunt in the sewers.

After returning the amulet to the guildmaster, another series of quests had me infiltrating another group of thieves, the Grey Wolves, who were a little too ostentatious in their methods, and were thus attracting unwelcome attention from the Red Plumes. In order to get in, I had to find one of their members who had been arrested and made to fight in the arena. This required me to battle my way through the ranks until I faced him, which was one of the more difficult parts of the game for me, as I never got particularly good at arena combat. To preserve every victory, I had to take a horse out of Hillsfar and back to my camp to save.

I also had to prove myself on the archery range to attract the attention of the Grey Wolves' recruiter. This involved yet another minigame. You face several targets and have to control an agitated cursor while carefully timing your release to hit a swaying or rotating target. It took me a long time to score enough points to get the attention of the gang.

If you try to hit the woman on the right, she holds up a shield at the last minute and then sticks out her tongue at you.

Once I got recruited, I did a couple of jobs for the Grey Wolves, buying time for Swipe to gather his forces and raid their hideout and eliminate them. Once he did, he rewarded me with 20,000 gold pieces and used his Ring of Wishes to give me 9 more hit points. Then he gave me a heck of a surprise:

I thought I was just getting started, but apparently I already won! The game does let me keep playing after this--a rarity for the era--but there are no more quests from the thieves' guild, and it doesn't look like I can join any other guilds. I'm curious if his comment about the Harpers actually means anything if I were to bring this character into Curse of the Azure Bonds.

So...does that count as "winning," or do I need to play all four of the other classes first? Either way, I'm going to play a mage for a little while to see how gameplay differs and perhaps shoot a video. But you might see the GIMLET already in my next posting.