Sword of Glass: Addendum (and Vacation Announcement)

Well, I learned my lesson this week about scheduling postings. Knowing that I was going to be on the road for the latter part of the week, I spent most of last Sunday playing Swords of Glass and writing four postings (including my final Starflight reckoning), scheduling them for automatic posting each night, Monday-Thursday. Then, in a series of great comments, readers noted some errors in my first and second Swords of Glass notes. But because I wasn't technically "around," my subsequent postings got published with no acknowledgment, as if I was just ignoring everyone.

The unseen-by-me "utilities" menu.

For the record, it turns out there was an entire sub-menu to Swords of Glass that I missed. Commands on this menu allow you to: 1. Wait out the effects of paralysis and sleep--I guess. Since readers told me this, I wandered around a bit trying to get paralyzed or slept again, but, wouldn't you know it, there were suddenly no traps. In my belief that paralysis and sleep were akin to permanent death, I was relying on some info from the fan pages I mentioned, but perhaps I misunderstood them. 2. Force a second party member to follow the main character, thus allowing you to bring a healer into the dungeon without having to control the second character on the keyboard. (But you have to split experience with that person so you level up more slowly.) 3. Death is not permanent. When your character dies, a grave stone appears in the dungeon. Another character can buy a resurrection potion and bring it to the dead character. Functionally, this is very difficult because resurrection potions cost a lot of money and you have to survive in the dungeon long enough to reach the dead character. Just like in Wizardry, by the time your new character is advanced enough to do this, you might as well just keep playing with him. I suppose there are ways around this by leaving new characters expensive goods in the vault, though. The second option is pretty advanced for the era, but then so is cooperative multiplayer. At this point, though, I've already viewed spoilers for the game, and I think I've played my fill of Swords of Glass even if it's a little easier than I thought. Unfortunately, my attempts to get ahead of the game will not save me for the rest of this month. Hence, the bad news: I will not be posting again until after October 4. I will be on the road for most of this period, and the time that I'm not on the road I'll be satisfying other professional obligations that Starflight had me neglecting. I'm sorry for such a long hiatus, but it's the only way to keep my CRPG addiction from completely ruining my career. When I get back, I have to figure out the oddity that is Tera: La Cité des Crânes ("the city of skulls"). In the meantime, I hope new visitors enjoy the older postings. Talk to you in the fall!

Only my shaky 10th-grade French is keeping me from skipping on to Wizardry IV.

Swords of Glass: Final Reckoning

Right after this, a screen popped up and said "You Won!" You're going to have to trust me.

On Wayne Schmidt's tribute page to Swords of Glass, he says:

My interest in Swords of Glass began in 1987 when I purchased and played it with my son. I can still feel the thrill of excitement when, after two months of painstaking effort, we finally surmounted the last obstacle and captured the Sword of Glass.

I applaud this kind of nostalgia. This is really what CRPGs should be about. If I had a son--or, indeed, anyone in this household who even remotely enjoyed playing computer games--yeah, I'm looking at you, Irene--I think we could have a ball with Swords of Glass. She could map while I explore. She could play a wizard to my fighter. She could ensure that no game playing had to stop due to desperate need for a vodka gimlet. Oh, and she could wake up my f%&*#$ character when a trap puts him to sleep! I'll bet your son did that for you, didn't he, Wayne? Otherwise, I don't see how you could have won the game in only two months. [Later edit: turned out I was wrong about the permanency of sleep and paralysis. See this posting. Sorry, Wayne; sorry, everyone.]

I had mapped most of Level 2 when this happened and had my fighter character--who could suddenly cast spells after finding a spellbook (another nice innovation, allowing me to heal myself without returning to the town)--up to level 11. Frankly, I was already annoyed with the game when I tripped over a rock and somehow dropped my sword forever; plus, I had to abandon a bunch of my other hard-earned equipment when I fell into quicksand (in a dungeon, keep in mind.) On the plus side, there was a neat mapping puzzle having to do with appearing and disappearing walls, and the game provided the first battles with rhinoceroses and "land sharks" that I've ever experienced in a CRPG.

Reading through Wayne's walkthrough, it looks like by ending my game early, I missed out on:

• Some Wizardry-style dungeon features like spinners and pits with poisoned spikes.
• A large variety of brain teasers.
• A randomly-generated dungeon on Level 8 that changes every time you enter. (I am again impressed.)
• A menagerie of creatures that include jelly fish and squids, giant ants and mosquitoes and spiders, killer rabbits, giant amoebas, jack-o-lanterns, walking trees, storm clouds, friggin' giraffes, pterodactyls...Jesus Christ...kangaroos, "teste" flies (not a good spelling error there), elephants, tyrannosaurus, "furballs with teeth," (I'm not making this up but Wayne might be) "raunchy giraffes," and of course demons.

You can't fault the creators of Swords of Glass for unoriginality. Images courtesy of Wayne Schmidt.

I know I've been praising Swords of Glass for its scrappy innovations, but honestly, traps that effectively kill your character immediately with no chance of escape or save are a bit of a dealbreaker. So let's review and then get on to Tera: La Cité des Crânes or Wizardry IV depending on how taxing on my memories of high school French the former turns out to be.

1. Game world. None to speak of. It's possible the game came with a manual that told the back story, such as why you're seeking the Sword of Glass (or, you know, what it is), but neither of the two fan pages I've mentioned say anything about it, so I'm assuming it's just you and a dungeon. Score: 1.

2. Character creation and development. Character creation is about selecting a name, assigning some points to four statistics, and choosing between warrior and magician classes. Pretty basic. But leveling up is strangely satisfying, allowing you to channel more points into your attributes. Your character notably improves with each level. Nonetheless, there is no "role-playing" with characters; the game is basically a three-dimensional roguelike. Score: 3.


3. NPC Interaction. There are no NPCs that I could find, and the walkthrough didn't seem to give any indication that there are any at all. Score: 0.

4. Encounters & foes. There a quite a strange selection of creatures in Swords of Glass, but they are not described except by name. Many share the same image. There is no AI to speak of, and nothing to do in encounters except whack away. Score: 2.


5. Magic & combat. I love the magic system in which all of the spells are simply in Spanish. Other than that, it's a clone of Wizardry. Combat doesn't give you many options, but the ability to shoot arrows in multiple directions is innovative. Plus, the totality of combat in Swords of Glass is quite tactical, as you must carefully monitor your hit points and spell levels lest you get trapped too far from the surface. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. There's a decent variety: several types of main weapons and bows, five different pieces of armor you can wear (armor, helms, shields, greaves, and gauntlets), plus various potions and magic items (I really liked the magic map). The ability to increase their power through blessings is unusual to a CRPG. Score: 5.


7. Economy. You'd think with chests that respawn every time you re-enter the dungeon, it would be easy to get rich quick. I didn't find it easy. Healing, equipment, and blessings all cost enough money that you always need more. Score: 5.

8. Quests. You have but one quest, to find the Sword of Glass, and I gather its ending isn't particularly celebratory. No side quests. Score: 1.

9. Graphics, sound, inputs. Lousy, of course--you've seen the graphics, and I think there is only one sound in the game--but it's not like it pretends otherwise. Score: 1.

10. Gameplay. If it wasn't for that damned permanent paralysis and sleep [Later edit: wrong about this; see here], I'd rate the game pretty high. Although it's "linear" in the sense of being a single-dungeon, multi-level game, it doesn't restrict where you can go in the dungeon. It seemed to have a good balance in terms of monsters, you level at a good clip, and the cooperative multiplayer is quite impressive. It's not replayable except to the extent that any roguelike is replayable. Score: 5.

Final score: 27. That puts it on par with Rings of Zilfin and some of the roguelikes for enjoyability. It's worth a rainy afternoon but not a week.

Swords of Glass has a kind-of blue-collar charm, a certain nobility about its poverty. I'd still love to know who created it, but since Dean Tersigni's Glass Shrine has been entreating the author to write to him for eight years with no luck, I don't suppose we have much of a chance of solving the mystery here.

Swords of Glass: Large, Full Dungeon

This is the most difficult monster on Level 1. You can't hit him!

The more I play Swords of Glass, the more I see it as the little CRPG that could. I spent this evening mapping the first level of the dungeon, which at 25 x 25 is the largest of the square-area games I've played so far (Might & Magic was 15 x 15, Wizardry was 20 x 20, and The Bard's Tale was 22 x 22). The dungeon is chock full of monsters, treasure, and interesting encounters.

And death. I cycled through six first-level characters before I finally survived long enough to raise a few levels and thus stay alive. At each level increase, you get another pool of points that you can put into health, strength, dexterity, or intelligence. My current character has risen five times, so he's getting pretty strong. He could still die at any minute, though--see below.

At five locations on the first level, you come upon pairs of doors side-by-side with a sign in front of them posing a riddle. You have to choose which door to enter. If you choose the right one, you get a nice piece of treasure; the wrong one, you find yourself roasting alive in an inferno. Here are a couple of the riddles:


So one of the signs is true and the other is false. If the first sign is false (e.g., both rooms have treasure or both have fire), then the second can't be true, so the first sign must be true, which means it has the treasure. Now try this one:


It's been a while since I had to solve a cryptogram. Well, HIO is almost certainly THE. That means HIOQO is either THERE, THESE, or THEME. "Theme" seems unlikely, and if it's "these," that means that another word, HQAO, begins with a TS. I'm going with THERE. That means for the long word in the first and second sentences, I have TRE---RE, which can't be anything but TREASURE. And so on. The solved cryptogram reads:

THE LEFT SIGN IS TRUE IF AND ONLY IF THERE IS FIRE IN THE ROOM. THE RIGHT SIGN IS TRUE IF AND ONLY IF THERE IS TREASURE IN THE ROOM.

Left side: AT LEAST ONE ROOM HAS TREASURE

Right side: AT LEAST ONE ROOM HAS FIRE

It took me a while, but I got it, and a Bow +1 for my troubles. Guessing means instant death, so you have to be careful.

Other different encounters include several statues that clue you to the location of treasure and stairs, a teleporter, "dark" squares that you have to carefully navigate, gargoyles on the wall that attack you and you can't fight back, and a pit of quicksand in which you have to abandon some of your equipment to escape.

Alas, proper spelling does not.
(Note: making fun of someone else's spelling or grammar virtually guarantees that you will have a major embarrassing mistake in your own posting. I look forward to the first person who tells me what mine is.)

The monsters are difficult but not impossible, with the exception of a "wispy shape" that takes only one damage per hit, and you only hit him one out of every dozen times you try. The creatures re-spawn constantly, though, and attack you from all angles, so you have to keep turning around and making sure you're not being followed. If you espy a monster from a distance, you can try shooting it with your bow, which allows you to direct shots to the right and left, as well as straight ahead, depending on where your foe is coming from. Not even Might and Magic V, which won't come out for eight years, allows anything but straight-ahead archery.

One of many nice little touches in Swords of Glass.

You are helped in your explorations by potions and other treasure, including an enchanted map that gives you a little mini-plot of the area. Monsters don't drop treasure, but chests are plentiful and the dungeon resets when you leave, so you can keep picking up treasure from the same chests. This sounds like it's too easy, but wait a second and I'll tell you something.


All of these interesting and innovative features are balanced by a couple of frankly unforgivable design flaws having to do with traps. First, you encounter traps in the corridors with no option to search for or disarm them ahead of time. Whether you trigger the trap or not depends on your dexterity, but even if you trigger it, it remains active and waiting to snare you when you pass that way again.

Even worse, opening chests has a chance of triggering poison, paralyze, or sleep traps. Poison is annoying as usual, but you can treat it with a healing potion or a trip back to the surface. Paralysis and sleep, however, never wear off. They are the equivalent of instant death. If you trip one of these traps, you have to kill DOSBox, reload, and create a new character. [Later note: as several readers pointed out, I'm wrong about this.] If you were playing a multi-player game, your second character could heal the first, I guess, but to have such unavoidable traps in a single-player, permanent-death game is just absurd.

Kojak will be stuck here forever. Maybe that's where all the statues came from.

I never did find a manual for the game, so the only way I know anything about the main quest is from Dean Tersigni's "The Glass Shrine" page, which gives a brief summary. Apparently the ultimate goal is to get down to the eighth level and find...see if you can guess it...the Sword of Glass. Why you'd want to find this particular weapon--a weapon that sounds like it would be good for exactly one hit--I'm not sure. There's no back story about a tyrant or usurper or anything. Anyway, one of the dangers of getting your "manual" from a fan page is spoilers, and Dean's has a big one: when you finally get the Sword of Glass, the game gives you a simple "You Win!" and that's it. I wish I hadn't seen that, but now that I have, I have no problem simply envisioning such text appearing on my screen the next time my character gets paralyzed or put to sleep.

In the meantime, I'll start mapping Level 2 and see how it goes.

The massive Level 1.

Game 25: Swords of Glass (1986)

I'm not a weaponsmith or anything, but I wouldn't rush the patent application on these.

Swords of Glass is so cute you almost want to pat it on the head. While the age of CGA graphics is in full-swing, and gamers are enjoying titles with the narrative complexity and open-ended exploration of Ultima IV, Might & Magic, and Starflight, here comes a text-based game in which you guide one character through a single wire-frame dungeon.

"Turn THIS lead into gold!" would be a great caption if I was using a gun.

The game doesn't appear on Wikipedia's chronology; it's only thanks to MobyGames that I found out about it at all. MobyGames lists it as "shovelware": a piece of software that wasn't offered individually but packaged with dozens of other titles and sold under the banner "100 FANTASTIC RPG ADVENTURES!" or something. The publisher was a now-defunct Minnesota company called "Keypunch Software," which apparently stripped the credits from the game, so no one now knows who created it.

Character creation is a text-based process of naming your character (you have up to 7 letters) and then rolling random values for hits, strength, dexterity, and IQ, and then supplementing them from a pool of six points. You need at least 9 strength to become a warrior and at least 9 IQ to become a wizard. Those are the only character class choices.

You have to love "possible kinds to be" instead of something more formal, like "potential character classes."

It's then a quick trip to the store for some basic equipment.

Note the first option. Hey, grind some of that up and throw it into a goblin's eyes and it stings, man!

In addition to the (s)tore, the town boasts a (h)otel and a (t)emple.

A town that literally leaves everything to the imagination.

When you choose to (b)egin your dungeon explorations, the game taunts you to "ENTER IF YOU DARE!" and then notes goofily, as you move away from the dungeon stairs, that "well, Toto, this doesn't look like Kansas anymore..." After that, it's all about exploring, mapping, killing monsters (so far, I've met "bruisers," alchemists, and rodents), finding treasure chests, and dealing with traps, and, you guessed it:

Every damned game has to have poison. Most spell it right.

So, right now you're thinking to yourself, "Ha! Sounds pretty lame! I bet this is a one-post game for The CRPG Addict!" (And yes, "The CRPG Addict" has a capital "The.") Well, sit back and hold on, kids, 'cause I'm about to pull the rug out from under you. Notice how much space is wasted--like half the screen--in the image above? Well, let's rectify that by heading back up to the town and adding a second person to my "party." Back to the dungeon we go and . . .

. . . what do we have here? Two sets of commands, two maps, and characters who appear to be looking at each other? That's right, you smug bastards, you're looking at cooperative multiplayer. Let me say that again: cooperative multiplayer--in a piece-of-junk, written-by-a-high-school-kid-in-his-basement, shovelware CRPG. As far as I know, this is the first multiplayer in a graphics-based CRPG (I'm sure I'm wrong; I just don't know of any others), and we don't see it again until...what?...Federation II?

As exciting as that is, I can't really make use of it because The CRPG Addict is a lone ranger, and not ambidextrous. But Swords of Glass has a few other surprises. Let's start with the spells, if you happen to choose a magician. As in Wizardry, you get a set number of spells per level, and as in Wizardry, which featured spells like HALITO and KATINO, the spells in Swords of Glass have strange, otherworldly names (bottom of the screen):

I'm looking forward to level 3, when I get "tumadre."

That's right: my four years of high-school Spanish has finally proven some value. For those uneducated, "pocofuego" means "little fire," and "mapa" means "map." Other spells in the game include "helio" (ice), "melaza" (molasses; it's a paralyze spell), and "infierno" (inferno). Brillante! Estoy muy impresionado!

What else? Remember that chalk I was making fun of? Well, it turns out it has a pretty useful purpose: you can mark marks on dungeon walls so you can track where you've been. In a game that features teleporters, this could be awfully useful. Quick, give me the name of any other CRPG in which you can make a mark without dropping some inventory on the ground. I can't think of one.

Graffiti!

You know how I'm always bitching about CRPGs that give you piles of money with nothing to spend it on? Well, not this game. In Swords of Glass, you can take any weapon or armor you want into the temple and ask the priest for a blessing. They get progressively more expensive as you add more +s to your equipment. I'm guessing you never run out of the need for cash.

It's these touches and others--like the little automap on the screen, or a "vault" where you can store good equipment for later characters--that explain why this otherwise-throwback game has a small but devoted online following, with sites like The Glass Shrine and Wayne Schmidt's Swords of Glass page. I owe both of these pages for helping me to figure out some basic game information, since I couldn't find a manual anywhere.

So I'm going to give this game it's full due. I can't say for sure that I'll play it until I win, because unfortunately it's a permanent-death game, and I suspect my patience will run out after the sixth time I lose a level 5 character to a wight. But the unnamed developer has certainly intrigued me enough for a few nights of dungeon crawling.