The Dark Queen of Krynn: Summary and Rating

 

Why does she dress like that? There's no one to see her but Raistlin and a bunch of monsters.

        

The Dark Queen of Krynn
United States
MicroMagic (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released in 1992 for Amiga, DOS, and Macintosh
Date Started: 21 September 2020

Date Finished: 26 October 2020
Total Hours: 36
Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 52
Ranking at Time of Posting: 372/392 (95%)

    

Summary:

 

The final game in the Dungeons and Dragons-licensed Gold Box series (except the Unlimited Adventures construction kit), Dark Queen satisfactorily wraps up the Krynn trilogy. The game uses the same "engine" that has supported a dozen games since Pool of Radiance (1988) with only a couple of minor interface and graphics improvements. The meandering story takes the experienced party from Death Knights of Krynn and brings them to a new continent, Taladas, where they must thwart the machinations of the evil queen Takhisis and her followers. The story is nothing great, but the game manages to offer challenging tactical, turn-based combat even for high-level characters, and without resorting to cheap tricks like wiping the characters' spells. There were times that it got a little long and frustrating, but nothing that a short break wouldn't cure. A good end to a good game series.

    

**********

     

The Gold Box goes out neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with something in between: a solid, well-crafted, challenging entry that nonetheless fails to break any significant ground. It leaves the player looking forward to the next new thing rather than wanting more of the old. While I was generally happy with Dark Queen, I couldn't help but contrast it with Icewind Dale II, the last Infinity Engine game, arguably the best of its series in mechanical terms, which kicked gameplay to a new level at the very time that its creators announced it would be the last game.

    

I am writing this before rating Dark Queen, but I know there's no chance it will unseat Pool of Radiance (1988), the first Gold Box title, as the best of the series. I know that some readers will disagree, but I suspect they are prizing what I consider rather trivial improvements--better graphics, better sound effects, the introduction of paladins and rangers, and the "Fix" command among them. (This game allowed loading from within the game for the first time, something I didn't realize until I read Scorpia's review.) I prioritize quality game content, and to me the series never improved upon what Pool of Radiance offered. Some examples:

    

• The most meaningful character development. Pool is the only Gold Box game in which characters start at Level 1. They can make it to roughly Level 8, right at the point that they start to feel overpowered. Every level brings awesome new resources to all classes.

• The most meaningful role-playing choices. Pool is the only Gold Box game in which you can really role-play an evil party, right up to the end where you can join with Tyranthraxus. Every map offers numerous encounters with several role-playing options that fundamentally change the nature of the challenge. Some later games approached this encounter complexity but rarely exceeded it.

          

This early role-playing choice set a standard that the Gold Box series rarely met.

         

• The most challenging battles. To me, the five most memorable battles in the Gold Box series are: 1) the troll battle in the ruined tavern in Old Phlan; 2) the hobgoblin battle in Sokol Keep; 3) the sequence of three battles against kobolds in the kobold caves; 4) the beholder corps; 5) the final battle of Pools of Darkness. Three of these are in Pool of Radiance. It never gets better than when you have a tight group of adventurers against a mass of mostly-physical enemies, and every asset--every "Cure Light Wounds," every "Hold Person," every "Sleep," every shot of a Wand of Magic Missiles--can make all the difference.

       

These were the days when one "Bless" spell made all the difference.

          

• The most non-linear plot. The world of Pool of Radiance opened up fast, and you could do most of the quests in almost any order.

• The most interesting plot. No world-threatening events ever improved upon reclaiming the city of Phlan block by block.

• The best quest system. Sidle up to the quest board outside City Hall and write 'em down, then later return to the clerk for your reward.

• The best use of NPCs. As with all the games, there were some named NPCs who would join you, but Pool gave you the only chance to hire mercenaries.

• Lots of random encounters on the world map. Pools of Darkness was the only other game to do this well.

• A fixed number of random encounters. Beat enough wandering parties, and you cleared the maps.

• Best use of the journal. Later games tended to use the journal for just long paragraphs of text. Pool had a few of these, but it tended to use the journal to offer things that you would actually find on paper in the game: maps, notes, scraps.

      

There were definite improvements in some of the later games, but none of them ever solved any of the original engine's most significant issues, including boring environments, little warning about impending encounters, and a horribly broken economy. Even the vaunted "Fix" command isn't much of an improvement when you realize how much it trivialized the resting-and-healing process. In short, the series did not improve in enough ways after Pool of Radiance to make up for what it left behind.

   

Nor did the engine incorporate any of the better elements of its competitors, many of whom were innovating past the Gold Box by the early 1990s. I still haven't encountered a game with you-wouldn't-even-think-of-taking-off-the-headphones sound design, but some of the best titles of the era were at least experimenting with ambient sound and more realistic effects. It would have also been nice to see more in the way of puzzles in the Gold Box--not like Dungeon Master, but more a combination of inventory and logic, like some of those in the later Wizardry games. It would have been nice to see some actual dialogue options with NPCs, and even more encounters with role-playing options, not fewer. Other games were doing these things.

       

I thought I'd play a little longer and at least get my characters leveled up. But I inadvertently found out that they're racist.

    

But one way in which no title has exceeded the Gold Box--and I'm tempted to add "even until today" in this superlative--is in combat. I will never stop loving the series' turn-based tactical battles, even if I like some individual elements better in other games (e.g., the point-based movement system of Wizard's Crown and Disciples of Steel or the sheer number of options in Nethack).

    

Part of the genius behind the Gold Box combat system lies in its faithful adaptation of the very large variety of Dungeons and Dragons spells. We saw how their absence significantly reduced the engine's value in the two Buck Rogers games. But here, again, we see how things don't get much better than Pool of Radiance. Once you acquire "Fireball," nothing else seems awesome again. (Its seventh-level "Delayed Blast" counterpart increases the utility, of course.) The fourth-level "Ice Storm" does less damage in a smaller radius. Even spells that sound like they ought to be awesome, like "Meteor Swarm," turn out to be more of a pain than anything. The Gold Box has a significant problem with the utility of higher-level spells. At the eighth level, I'm supposed to get excited about "Power Word: Blind"?

    

This, then, is one area in which Dark Queen improves upon its earlier counterparts. By making so many enemies immune to various spells, the player has to experiment as he never did before. Desperate for something to deal with the dark wizards, I actually cast "Otto's Irresistible Dance," for gods' sake. And while "Monster Summoning" could have been targeted better, I have to hand it to the developers for including it at all. It wasn't there in Pools of Darkness.

   

I will probably have a longer retrospective on the Gold Box at a later date, so for now let's rate Dark Queen of Krynn. This is where the Gold Box stands right now on my ratings sheet:

Pool of Radiance (65)

Curse of the Azure Bonds (60)

Champions of Krynn (56)

Death Knights of Krynn (54)

Pools of Darkness (52)

Treasures of the Savage Frontier (51)

Secret of the Silver Blades (50)

Gateway to the Savage Frontier (49)

Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (46)

Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed (34)

    

In my mind, I was thinking that Dark Queen would fall in between Champions and Death Knights, apparently remembering the latter as being worse than it actually was. There's not a lot of room there. Well, I definitely thought Champions was the best of the Krynn series, and Dark Queen definitely was better than Silver Blades, so that leaves a range of about 50-55 in which I'd expect to see it fall. Let's see.

    

1. Game World. I'm never going to feel all that positively about the Dragonlance universe (it has always sounded like bad fan fiction to me), but the bigger issue is the way the games handle the universe. For the most part, they expect you to know it. This is particularly true of Dark Queen, where neither game book gives you any idea about the history of the world; woe to the player who steps in without playing the previous two Krynn titles. Even within the game, I don't think the story is very well told; the party is always just running to the next thing, the scope of things only becoming clear at the end. (You could design a good plot where these things were true, but Dark Queen doesn't feel like it did it by design.) Too many moments depended on a player with existing experience with Dragonlance gasping with delight or shock at the latest appearance of Tasslehoff or Raistlin or some other character from the novels. I care about them less than I do about Buck Rogers. I don't mean to suggest there's anything wrong with players who do care, of course, and I understand if you want to bump up the score. Score: 4.

2. Character Creation and Development. One way in which the Dragonlance universe arguably does improve over the Forgotten Realms is in character creation and development. There are more character classes and races, and more of them are interesting. I like the way the moons affect spell volume, too. On the other hand, the specific classes and races matter less here than in any previous game, and you don't even have the satisfaction of your knights being recognized as Knights of Solamnia. Character development is also about as rewarding as any Gold Box game. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. The Gold Box has always done a good job of having a character or two join the party, sometimes for a short stay, sometimes long. I generally like what they offer. Other NPCs are sometimes funny, sometimes boring, but you never get any serious dialogue options with them, just long dumps of text. The only two "romances" offered by the series are both bizarre, including the one that appears here. Score: 5.

4. Encounters and Foes. Dark Queen did a better job than any game since Pool of Radiance in offering numerous non-combat encounters that depended on role-playing, logic, or skill. And I will always appreciate the large and varied Dungeons and Dragons menagerie, each monster described in detail by the game manual, and with attendant strengths, weaknesses, and special attacks in-game. This game even introduced a bunch of new ones. There's room to do better, but so far few games have. Score: 7.

5. Magic and Combat. As you saw from my entries, I was continually challenged by the game's combats, but in a fair and satisfying way. I feel like I could use another round to really master some of the new spells introduced this time. (I particularly should have invested more in "Blade Barrier," since practically everyone in my party could have cast it.) If I could name one category in which I most wanted the series to go out strong, this is it. Score: 8.

   

6. Equipment. A bit disappointing. You hardly find anything new in this game that you didn't bring from Death Knights. The equipment system is good, but the actual items seem like an afterthought. Score: 3.

       

Except for the Ring of Free Action, Midsummer has nothing here that she didn't have at the end of Death Knights.

      

7. Economy. All I can say is that at least the last two Krynn games had a money sink. It wasn't completely useless to gather all those gems and jewels and appraise and sell them individually. But on the whole, this category goes out without any game ever reaching the halfway point. Score: 3.

8. Quests. Dark Queen has a meandering main quest as well as a couple of side areas with side quests. Again, we never returned to Pool of Radiance quality, but I could live with it. Score: 4.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The Gold Box games has always merited about a 6 in this category, and I don't see any reason to change it here. Small graphical, sound, and interface improvements really don't show up much on a 10-point scale. A 6 is about as good as any game is going to get before truly immersive graphics and sound. (I have given a few 7s for ambient effects). The interface couldn't be easier to use, though, with mice, joysticks, and keyboards supported redundantly and completely in themselves if that's what the player wants. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. In this ill-named category, I look at length, difficulty, linearity, and replayability. Dark Queen has just about the perfect length and difficulty, but it's quite linear and only mildly replayable, mostly to see how different party compositions fare. Score: 6.

    

That gives us a final score of 52, right in the range I expected it, equaling Pools of Darkness but under-performing Death Knights. Even that issue seems to be more one of memory; scanning my Death Knights postings now, I see that I praised it more than I remembered.

        

"Achieve characters up to the 40th level!" That's double what most of my characters ended the game at. I wonder if some players did that much grinding.

         

Wow, did contemporary reviewers not agree with me. Scorpia couldn't have been harder on it. (She reviewed it in September 1992.) While acknowledging some interface improvements, she said, "There is little to like about Dark Queen of Krynn. Playability suffers from a couple of insidious bugs, poor design, and a great deal of gratuitous damage." I didn't experience the first bug she noted: the color of a multi-class character failing to change when he's ready for a level-up. She goes on for three paragraphs about this. I don't understand what the big deal is. You find training facilities often enough that you could just test everyone's ability to level up every time. Not having the color change would be mildly annoying at best. It seemed to bother her most because she actually went through the entire game without even trying to train those characters. I guess the difference between her and me is that I would never trust anything so fickle as color.

     

The other bug had to do with the book not showing up in the right place in Hawkbluff, and fortunately I didn't experience that. I agree it would have been worth a point or two.

    

She had some vitriol for the lighthouse, where you travel up 11 floors only to find the real way forward was in a secret room in the basement. This didn't bother me at all. The trek was hardly a waste of time; it was worth a ton of experience and some interesting encounters besides. Plus, you wouldn't have known the secret door was in the basement without making the trek. She didn't like the new draconians, but I appreciated the challenge they added to combat. (I still hated them, of course, but in a good way.) Finally, she made a good point about the useless economy, but that's been true since the first Gold Box game. Ultimately, she says that Dark Queen is the "nadir of the Gold Box games," which seems a bit harsh. She had played Matrix Cubed earlier that year, after all.

    

The review roundup on MobyGames shows no solace for the fan. The best review (82/100) came from the Swedish Datormagazin. An 80/100 from the German Play Time wasn't far behind, but after that, it drops like a rock, the median sitting at 68. The British Amiga Format gave both it and Treasures of the Savage Frontier 49s in the same issue, with no justification at all.

    

Dollars do the ultimate voting, of course, and Dark Queen was the third-worst selling Gold Box game, at 40,640 copies. (Champions of Krynn, in contrast sold 116,693.) The only ones that sold worse were Treasures of the Savage Frontier and Matrix Cubed, released the same year. According to Jimmy Maher's account, TSR had only extended its contract with SSI on the condition that the latter deprecate the Gold Box after 1992. These sales figures couldn't have helped any argument on SSI's part to keep it around. Unlimited Adventures, the Gold Box-based construction kit, was a kind of coda on the series, a way for fans to keep the adventure alive even if TSR wouldn't.

    

SSI's contract with TSR only lasted until mid-1994, and the developer spent the next 18 months developing or contracting as many Dungeons and Dragons titles, in as many possible formats, as it could possibly manage. The Gold Box may be done, but we still have a lot of titles from the partnership to explore: Dungeon Hack (1993), Eye of the Beholder III (1993), the two Dark Sun titles (1993-1994), Stronghold (1993), Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and three Ravenloft games (1994-1995). Not on my official list is Slayer (1994) for the 3DO. After the last one of these, it's only a year before Interplay starts showing what it can do with the license.

       

I'll look forward to a final turn with Unlimited Adventures, but one of the great things about the Gold Box is that no one can claim that it ended before its time or that it didn't leave enough games behind. If I weren't a CRPG addict facing a list of thousands of games that I'll probably never get a chance to play, I'd be happy to start over again with Pool of Radiance.

    

Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

There's little that's more cringy than people actually saying, "hip-hip-hooray."

          

Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed

United States
Strategic Simulations, Inc.

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 1 August 2020

Date Ended: 29 August 2020

Total Hours: 32

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 34

Ranking at time of posting: 255/379 (67%)

Summary:
Matrix Cubed is a sequel to Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday (1990). Both games are based on the Buck Rogers XXVC tabletop roleplaying game and use the "Gold Box" engine originally designed for Dungeons and Dragons games, which blends first-person exploration and axonometric, turn-based, tactical combat. The "exploration" half of the Gold Box engine was showing its age by 1992, with limited graphics and map configurations, and the combat portion is less interesting in a game that doesn't have magic. Matrix Cubed feels more rushed than Countdown, with a shorter, more linear plot and without Countdown's side-missions. Space combat is completely optional, the characters don't seem to grow very much, there's little purpose to the economy. It has some positive points, particularly at the beginning, but overall it feels like a superfluous game.
    
*****
    
How sad to see a franchise fail. Buck Rogers had a good run, from 1928 to . . . well, roughly this game. Attempts to revive the character over the last quarter-century have been mostly embarrassing, its copyright holder is in shambles, and the character seems destined to enter the public domain, if he hasn't already. The problem is a lack of interest even in a free version of the character. If you're going to make a fish-out-of-time story, why not just call the character "Chet Bolingbroke"? (I demand only 8% of the gross.) Other than being a swaggering American war hero, Buck Rogers isn't much of anything. Either is his setting. It has been updated and revised so often that besides Wilma Deering and a couple other named characters, there's barely enough information to inform a franchise. In my account, did anyone honestly find NEO, RAM, and PURGE that compelling?
    
Therein lies the problem with both Matrix and Countdown. The only thing interesting about Buck Rogers is Buck Rogers himself--the man out of time--and you don't get to play him. At best, you get to meet him a few times, and those moments aren't interesting enough to carry a franchise. Contrast this with Star Trek or Star Wars or most other franchises, where the settings themselves are compelling enough that you'd be happy to play a group of unknown soldiers who only occasionally meet the famous heroes.
          

A rare space combat.

          
My last session began with a mission to find a RAM spy on NEO's Fortuna Base, which is on an asteroid. As usual, it was difficult to find a particular asteroid amidst the constantly-rotating ring. I fought a few space battles against RAM cruisers so that I could afford to re-fuel as I searched for Fortuna. Space battles are otherwise a completely superfluous part of the game, which makes it all the more ridiculous that they have a separate economy. 
  
When I finally found it, Fortuna Base was five small levels. As usual, the developers stretched things out by requiring the party to circle the area multiple times, first collecting a variety of passes and other items needed to access the full base, the second time clearing out attacking RAM forces. The spy turned out to be someone named Zachary Cebert, which we discovered too late to be of any good, since the overwhelming RAM invasion force forced us to evacuate and destroy the base.
         

Setting the base to explode.

         
Back at Salvation base, we learned that the Stormrider scientist we freed from PURGE, Dr. Makali, had already abandoned the project to help her people with some kind of revolution. The whole issue with the Stormriders was introduced very late in the game. From what I could gather from the materials, a group of humans established a colony on Jupiter's moon Amalthea, and from there created a race of genetically-modified creatures called Stormriders, which look like muscular humans with fish heads. The Stormriders live in "spherical cities that float above the high-pressure atmosphere" of Jupiter. The Amaltheans expect the Stormriders to serve as slaves for 100,000 years "in repayment" for their creation, but the Stormriders are naturally a bit unhappy about that, and the two sides are functionally at war.
   
Since we had unwisely decided to locate the Matrix project in Jupiter's orbit, the worsening tensions between the two societies were threatening the project. (It occurs to me as I type this that I'm explaining things far more eloquently than the game does.) My team had to head for Jupiter, but without a ship with enough fuel to get us there, we had to take a long route by sailing to a "fungus asteroid" near Juno, then transferring to a living ship operated by the Stormriders.
           

A ship--a living ship--full of strange alien life forms.

           
Despite some nice graphics, the "living ship" was never very well explained. As it approached the asteroid, it was clear that something was wrong. It eventually swallowed the asteroid with us on it, and we found ourselves in its guts.
           
It turned out the ship had been invaded by pirates. We had to run around the ship's six levels fighting them, freeing Stormriders, and fixing things. I have to be honest--I had largely checked out by this point, but I feel that the situation would have been confusing even if I hadn't. There were multiple places where it appeared I could facilitate some kind of truce between the pirates and Stormriders, but although I passed some of these encounters, it never seemed to affect anything. Similarly, there were numerous places where I found the ship wounded, or some of its equipment damaged, and had to pass a medical or technological skill check. Sometimes I passed, sometimes I failed, but I have no idea what the net result was.
              

This went nowhere.

         
All I know is that I kept circling the ship, and eventually I had killed all the pirates. By now, my party was relying on explosive weapons (rocket launchers, plasma launchers, grenade launchers) almost exclusively, but I never got to the point where I could just ALT-Q the combats and put them under computer control. This is because you not only have to win the combats, but do so in a good enough state that the doctor in the party can heal the damage afterwards. This means the doctor can't get knocked unconscious himself, and it's best if none of the other characters do, either.
          
After we were victorious, the Stormriders took us to one of their cities, and we met Dr. Makali. This was the last place we could train and restock ammo for our weapons. My characters were Level 8 when we started the game, and they ended at Level 11 or 12, which isn't a lot of development. My warrior only got to pick one new weapon specialization during the game, and my characters could only learn 4 new skills.
             

On my last level-up, I could choose a new weapon.

          
Dr. Makali refused to return to the Matrix Device project because the Amaltheans were planning to attack the Stormrider colony. Naturally, they attacked shortly after we arrived. We had to run around the map (a single-level 16 x 16), defeating parties of Amaltheans, defusing bombs, rescuing hostages, and putting out fires.
           

A typical encounter in this section of the game.

           
When the invasion was over, the Stormriders revealed a plan to end the Amalthean threat by releasing genetically-modified "wasphoppers" into the Genetics Foundation headquarters where the Stormriders had been created. We volunteered for the mission and were successful.
            

"Success."

          
With the Amalthean threat handled, Dr. Makali agreed to help finish the Matrix Device. We sailed with her to a "mining rig" in Jupiter's atmosphere, where Leander was overseeing the final touches for the project.

The mining rig map was the last map (except for a small shuttle). It wasn't even a full 16 x 16, but it was annoying as hell. We had multiple rounds of RAM forces arriving in the living ship (there was no information about how they had managed to commandeer it) and rappelling to the mining rig's platforms. Each round involved one battle on the platforms and then a search of the rest of the rig for additional RAM forces to clean up. Sometimes it was human troops, sometimes robots, sometimes gennies. At one point, we were overwhelmed (this was scripted) and had to retreat to a shuttle, from which we flooded the rig with efanite and lit it to burn out an infestation of gennies.
            

A typical enemy contingent on the rig's platform.

           
Dr. Makali suggested that one of the party members fly with her by jetpack to the living ship and free it from RAM control. Despite choosing a character with a skill level of 142 in "Use Jetpack," the attempt failed and, I guess as punishment, we had to fight a few more rounds of invading RAM forces.
   
Finally, we seemed to drive them away. But there was an explosion and the rig started sinking into the atmosphere. The only thing that would save it was the Matrix Device itself, which for some reason needed to be flown through Jupiter's high-pressure atmosphere at high speeds. My pilot had to do this, and I guess the game made a skill check for "Pilot Fixed Wing," a skill that was never needed before because there were no such aircraft in the game before (or the previous game). Fortunately, I'd been putting some skill points into all the pilot skills, and Starbuck must have passed. Reviews of the time are filled with stories of people who didn't, and at this point in the game had no recourse if they had failed to invest in that skill.
         

I guess this means we passed the skill check.

           
We had to endure one last attack by Sid Refuge (I have accidentally typed "Sid Vicious" at least half a dozen times), even though it made no sense that he was there. The battle involved two back-to-back combats with no resting in between, but neither was particularly difficult using our "blow the living hell out of everything with rocket launchers" strategy.
        

I admire his spunk, but fighting him is like flogging a dead horse.

         
When we had defeated Refuge for like the fifth time, his cyborg skeleton crawled into the crucible of the Matrix Device. We locked him in there and used him as the necessary matter to fuel the device, which I admit was a fun turn of events and a genius solution to the problem, akin to Doc and Marty solving their problems by cramming Biff into the "Mr. Fusion" reactor. The rig got the power it needed to return to a stable part of the atmosphere.
   
The Living Ship appeared for what seemed like another attack, but the soldiers descending from it were NEO rather than RAM. No word on how NEO managed to take over the Living Ship from RAM in such a short time, nor indeed how they managed to get here at all when we had to go through a big rigmarole. In any event, two of the soldiers were Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering. When they found that the Matrix Device was working, Buck demanded "three cheers for these heroes!" I cringed as the assembled NPCs literally shouted, "hip-hip-hooray!" three times before the game dumped us unceremoniously to the DOS prompt. That hasn't happened in so long that it was literally startling.
             

Part of the short denouement.

         
In a GIMLET, I give Matrix Cubed:

• 4 points for the game world. I feel like I'm being generous. I couldn't have cared less about it, but I can't say it didn't have original elements or make the party's place clear. Too many of the story turns were just arbitrary, though.

• 3 points for character creation and development. It gets most of this for creation. The system of races and classes and skills isn't terrible, but the amount of development you get in the sequel is minimal. The number of skills should have been cut in half (at least) and made more meaningful.

            

This guy feels like he should have been able to fly a jetpack.

            

• 3 points for NPC interaction. There are some NPCs; you get journal entries from some of them.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. Humans were just humans; "gennies" just re-skinned Dungeons and Dragons monsters without even an interesting set of attacks and defenses. There were some decent non-combat encounters involving the use of skills or even a role-playing choice here and there.

• 4 points for combat. An engine designed with magic in mind just didn't transition well to science fiction battles. I was mostly bored with combat, which is something that I never thought I'd say about the Gold Box. I want to give it extra credit for the space combat, but it isn't any more interesting.

           

The robot enemies were generally the most difficult in the game.

          

• 3 points for equipment. The problem is that everything is standard. There's no place in this setting for unique artifact weapons and armor. Meanwhile, a few types of grenades don't make up for all of the potions, wands, scrolls, rings, and wearables that you'd find in a fantasy RPG. The developers had no imagination here.

• 2 points for the economy. It was useful for restocking ammunition.

• 3 points for quests. The game had one main quest, mostly linear, with no choices or alternate outcomes. It mostly lacked the side-quests and side-areas that Countdown offered, with a few small exceptions.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The best part of the game was the engine, which still works as smooth as butter. Both regular and cut scene graphics were nice. I could take or leave the sound.

            

Sid Refuge's appearance was narratively senseless but graphically okay.

            

• 3 points for gameplay. Matrix is far more linear than its predecessor. It's a bit too hard in some places, and it has no real replayability. The best I can say is that its length was right for its content.

        
That gives us a final score of 34, a dozen points lower than Countdown, and the first time that a Gold Box game has fallen below the "recommended" threshold. It mirrors how I feel, though. I tried to be positive about the game, even thinking that it might be good during my second or third session. But it just collapsed into a nonsensical narrative with boring mechanics.
             

If I knew nothing about the game, this cover would make me think that you play as Buck Rogers.

        
I knew Scorpia would be with me on this, and she was. In the May 1992 Computer Gaming World, she levies particular criticism at the way the game handled skill checks (the "Pilot Fixed Wing" issue getting a couple of paragraphs to itself), the uselessness of space combat, and the scripted moments when the party has no equipment. She had to do the same thing I did and lower the difficulty meter. She also found the final sequence repetitious and nonsensical. But her worst invective is reserved for the "three cheers" followed by the DOS prompt, which she compares to the end of Eye of the Beholder.

It was reading Scorpia's review that I was reminded that the whole business with the Sun King and his counselor De Sade never had any resolution, nor did the Mercurians attacking us on Venus. It's a measure of the game that such things happen and the player just shrugs them off.
     
Our opinions aren't universal, though. The editors of Dragon (June 1992) quite liked it, with a 4/5 star rating praising its character development, story, and combat system. I've had commenters tell me that it was better than Countdown, and I see passionate defenders of both games all over the Internet.

In my first entry on Matrix Cubed, I called it a "corporate game." The story that I've heard--without a lot of primary source references, you understand, so don't take this as gospel--is that Lorraine Williams forced SSI to make the Buck Rogers games as a condition of their Dungeons and Dragons license. (As we've covered, the source of Williams's fortune was the rights to Buck Rogers, which she inherited from her grandfather, and by in 1985, Williams gained a controlling share of TSR, owners of Dungeons and Dragons.) This strategy wasn't just to make a few bucks off the games. Rather, Williams hoped that a few successful Buck Rogers games might re-ignite interest in a film or television series, the last attempt having fizzled in 1981 after two low-rated seasons. Unfortunately for Williams and the Dille Family Trust, the two SSI games failed to serve as kindling for anything more significant.
    
Matrix Cubed isn't technically the last Buck Rogers creation. In 1995, TSR tried again by creating something called High-Adventure Cliffhangers: Buck Rogers Adventure Game, a tabletop RPG that returned Buck Rogers to his original earthbound setting. It produced only a single module before it was discontinued. Since then, there have been a few comic books and action figures, but every attempt at something more substantial has failed. This includes a 2009 web series that was announced, then canceled, then subjected to a Kickstarter revival, then canceled again when it failed to meet its funding goals. A Frank Miller-written movie in the 2000s never went anywhere. More recently, Transformers producer Don Murphy announced plans to make a film based on the first Buck Rogers novella, which has since entered public domain, which led to a suit and counter-suit with the Dille Family Trust, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017.

The legal status of Buck Rogers remains in controversy, but I end as I began, wondering: why bother? Does Don Murphy or anyone think the name "Buck Rogers" is regarded so fondly that it's going to sell tickets on its own? If not, why not make the same type of movie and name the character something else? That's basically what Farscape did, and it did fine. I apologize to anyone who really loves Buck Rogers, but in general I'm happy that most RPGs do not feature licensed characters.

Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed: The Fourth Power

I like how the game offers this choice, as if saying "no" doesn't doom you to an inability to finish the game.

           

I ended the first session with two missions: find Dr. Chade on Earth and some gravitational expert in the Venusian lowlands. I decided to do the second first because it seemed more subversive to do the second one first. The setting describes Venus as having been partially terraformed. It's still ungodly hot, with clouds of dangerous gases. Venusians are human, but bio-engineered to handle the conditions. The planet has one spaceport, New Elysium, controlled by the theocratic Ishtarians. The lowlands are the domain of Aphroditian farmers and miners. A third Venusian population called Aerostators "float above the lands and make their living primarily as tradesmen and herders," a statement that raises far more questions than it answers. A non-human population of "gennies" (bio-engineered creatures) called Lowlanders live in an acid jungle and produce Gravitol, which is crucial to space travel. The human population is allied with Earth against RAM, but the Lowlanders will sell to anyone.
        

The party lands an entire map away from our destination.

        

As we landed, SCOT.DOS reported that his scans showed that Lowlanders had been digging extensive mines, which is a bit of a mystery since Venus has no minerals. He also intercepted a radio communication from someone on the planet to Mariposa Spaceport on Mercury, indicating they were also searching for the scientist.

    

Encouraged to move quickly—I don't know why we landed so far away—we made our way across the overland map towards the Lowlander village on the other side. The overland maps in the Buck Rogers series are much like those in Pool of Radiance, Pools of Darkness, and the two Krynn games, except I'm not sure there's much to discover if you were to explore systematically. On the way to the village, we were attacked by "Venusian dinosaurs" that look a lot like T-Rexes. Why anyone would "bio-engineer" such a creature is another mystery, but it reminded me that "gennies" are an easy way to inject Dungeons and Dragons-style monsters into a science fiction setting. On the Earth map later, for instance, we fought giant rats, giant grasshoppers, and something that looks a lot like demons.
      

Why would anybody make these things?

These aren't fantasy creatures clearly designed for a fantasy game. They're "gennies."

        
Anyway, the creatures were hugely dangerous except when encountered in forests, where the dense tree coverage meant that they couldn't really move. They were worth a lot of experience points—like ten times the experience points of random RAM soldier battles.

     

Soon after, a random battle with some Lowlanders (which look like lizard men), accompanied by acid frogs, left my party in tatters. I had to retreat to the ship and use the clinic before setting out again. On the next attempt, I found a Lowlander village that had been destroyed by PURGE, and I got slaughtered by PURGE forces. I didn't have the most remote chance.

The keys to success.

          
I thus reloaded and spent a few minutes circling the outer asteroid rim, visiting spaceports for equipment upgrades. It took a few false stops before I finally found a shop selling grenades. Although they didn't have any explosive grenades, they had plenty of other types, including stun grenades. I bought about 25 of those for each character, running through most of my funds.
       
On the way back to Venus, I won my first battle against a light RAM cruiser. This was good because I was running out of "space funds" to pay for fuel.
        

This fighter has one-tenth the statistics of the RAM cruiser that beat me last time.

           
I found my time on Venus a bit easier with the grenades, but it wasn't at all easy. Matrix Cubed definitely kicked combat up a notch, and if you didn't experiment much with grenades in Countdown to Doomsday, you definitely feel it here. Grenades and other explosives, as we've discussed, are the one way that the authors introduced some spell-like abilities into the combat system. They use much of the same mechanics (and, I suspect, much of the same code) as "Fireball," "Stinking Cloud," and "Cloud Kill" spells from the Dungeons and Dragons titles. For instance, aerosol mist grenades create a cloud that diffuse laser fire and chaff grenades release a cloud of metallic pieces that intercept explosives and rounds from rocket pistols and rifles. You can throw these on top of your own party to prevent these things from getting in, although explosives will still detonate at the perimeter and potentially damage party members, so a slightly safer solution is to have multiple characters throw the grenades in such a way as to surround the party.

Dazzle grenades cause blindness; gas grenades incapacitate enemies for a couple of rounds; and stun grenades affect a 9 x 9 area with the "Stun" spell. There are three levels of explosive grenades—mini, regular, and efanite. The range of all grenades can be greatly improved with a grenade launcher, although you can only use it once every other turn.
          

Stun grenades are incredibly useful, when they work.

         
I like defensive grenades in theory, but they don't discriminate between enemy and friendly explosives, and they thus prevent me from firing out of the cloud as well as enemies firing in. Thus, I typically only use chaff grenades when I'm outclassed in the explosive department. I could stand to experiment more with aerosol mist grenades and dazzle grenades, but when I'm facing non-robot enemies, stun grenades are so useful that it's hard to justify using anything else. Three or four characters can incapacitate a huge party of enemies with them.
 
They were responsible for my victory in the Lowlander village, where I rescued a small child. The game made me take him in to my party, unarmed and with 8 hit points, just in time for a major combat against PURGE forces. We recognized the child as Zane, who we had saved from RAM forces during events in Countdown. What are the odds. After combat, Zane's father thankfully showed up to take him to safety. He related that the PURGE agents seem to be after the secret to mining Gravitol, but the morons attacked a food-producing farm rather than a Gravitol operation.
         

Do these kids ever grow up?

         

As if PURGE wasn't enough, we also ran into a party of Mercurian forces on the way to the Lowlanders' Gravitol village. Their conversation indicated that they weren't working with PURGE, but neither are they clearly RAM allies, so I guess maybe we have a four-way conflict brewing.

When we arrived, the Lowlander village was abandoned. As we explored the buildings, we saw lots of signs that the village had been deliberately set up to seem low-tech, but often with more advanced technology under the surface; for instance, a "primitive" cooker powered by a "lightweight atomic generator hidden under a hide blanket." Soon we blasted a door into a clearly more advanced part of the city, which contained manufacturing plants for the hide shields and crystal-tipped spears that the Lowlanders carry.
           

This whole village is a front.

         
Ultimately, we made our way to an elevator shaft to the mines below, a relatively linear map. We fought a couple of skirmishes with Lowlander parties before they ambushed us with stun grenades, disarmed us, and dragged us to their leader, Llorok. He had just ordered our execution when an earthquake struck, sending the Lowlanders scattering. Llorok fell down an open mine shaft.
        

I actually try to keep it painless when I kill cattle.

          
Another Lowlander begged us to save him, but we still had no equipment, which was a big problem for the two combats we had to fight at the bottom of the shaft with "Ursadders," some kind of monster that seems like a cross between a human and a slug. We had to fight two battles with these enemies, one against three and one against four, and in several tries I couldn't survive them both. Without any arms or equipment, there's not much you can do but concentrate your attacks and hope the dice go your way. They wouldn't go my way, and for probably the first time ever with a Gold Box game, I considered lowering the difficulty. (I probably should have replaced one of my engineers with a second warrior when the game started.) In a fifth try, I got out with Austin alive, but no one else, which was hardly enough to heal anyone after the battle. In the sixth try, I got lucky with a couple of "backstabs" (hard to do with fists, I imagine) and took my doctor out of the fighting before he could die, and we finally got past the obstacle without the ignominy of lowering the difficulty. I was close, though.
         

The idea of punching these things to death is pretty disgusting.

         
We rescued Llorok and brought him back to his people, who thereafter stopped attacking us. This was just in time for PURGE to invade the base, though.
 
The caverns led to a secret laboratory run by a Lowlander scientist named Leander, who was briefly an NPC companion in Countdown. Leander turned out to be the gravitational field expert we were searching for. The game made a big deal about how we were surprised the scientist making such waves was a Lowlander and not a human living among the Lowlanders, but I'd like to say for the record that I never assumed it would be anything but a Lowlander, so it's my party that's racist, not me.
         

That's mighty progressive of you, SCOT.DOS.

         
The two levels of the secret base consisted primarily of the party saving various Lowlander groups from PURGE forces. At one point, we found a "brochure" on a fallen PURGE soldier, explaining a bit more about the group.

LOOK around, friend! Genetic MONSTERS have taken over! They were made to serve us . . . but instead HAVE BECOME OUR MASTERS! We of PURGE are DEDICATED to ridding the Earth of the EVIL of GENETIC RESEARCH! Join us as we FIGHT TO SAVE HUMANITY FOR THE HUMANS!

The acronym means "Prevention of Unwanted Research and Genetic Engineering." Since I keep getting into battles with them—including freaking dinosaurs—I'm perfectly happy to admit that "gennies" are more trouble than they're worth. Where PURGE's logic breaks down for me is when they say that these creatures are our "masters." I don't recall taking any orders from acid frogs. Everyone associated with the NEO and RAM hierarchies so far have been human—except for the ones that are artificial intelligence. It would be as if some modern world group was not only against cloning sheep but also believed that Dolly was pulling the strings at the U.N.
       

PURGE soldiers trying to steal the secrets to Gravitol.

      
The maps culminated in a large battle against PURGE agents led by a cyborg—I guess they have no problem with that—named Sid Refuge. In a battle greatly assisted by our stun grenades, we killed Refuge and his forces and made the base safe for the Lowlanders again. (I was annoyed because during combat, Refuge had a plasma thrower, but it didn't show up in the post-combat loot.) Leander agreed to accompany us back to the NEO base and help in our efforts with the Matrix Device.
         

When did we tell you about our cause?

          
But just as we were backtracking to the surface, Mercurians invaded. Again, I don't know what their deal is. In the first mission, we had protected the new Sun King, who was supposed to be a NEO ally, but clearly Chancellor De Sade was up to something. The upshot is that instead of just NEO and PURGE to worry about, we have this uncertain fourth variable.

All of the battles against the Mercurians were random, but they were also much harder. They attacked with multiple combat robots, each of which can fire explosive missiles. We protected ourselves with chaff grenades, but this prevented us from using our best weapons against the robots. The battles were long and hard, but finally we made our way back to the surface.
        

I guess this guy isn't dead.

         
As we journeyed back to the ship—again, why did we park so far away?—we came upon Sid Refuge tangling with some Lowlanders as he made his own escape. Apparently, the cyborg can heal himself from near-fatal damage. We'll thus meet him again.
        

The next overland map. We can't visit the downtown buildings yet.

        
After healing, training, and restocking, we decided to head for "Losangelorg" and look for Dr. Chade. Like Venus, L.A. had a sprawling outdoor map with multiple random encounters. We couldn't yet visit most of the places in the city proper, but we spent some time in the "sprawls" (slums) to the north. I love the idea that Burbank and Pasadena somehow turned into slums. (FYI, if you get a quick chance, Google the actual city limits of Los Angeles. A lot of what people think is L.A. isn't L.A., and yet a lot of L.A. is in places most people don't think is L.A. San Diego is arguably even weirder.) At one point, we responded to the cries of some townsfolk and rescued some children from giant rats (called "ratwurst") in a sewer.
          

Even in the future, we can't avoid giant rats.

         
Most of the action took place in a four-story building in the far northeast of the outdoor map. It was a fun map, with a complexity to the encounter options that reminded me of Pool of Radiance. Basically, the area was controlled by three gangs: the Leeches, the Grotesques, and the White Monks. Rumors said that one of the gangs had him, but each gang claimed it was one of the others and wanted our help in battling the others and securing weapons to fight them. Meanwhile, a "social reformer" named Isha asked us to favor none of the gangs and to give the weapons to her instead. All of them promised Chade as a reward.
          

This guy turned out to be lying.

        
We started off favoring Isha, but later evidence exposed her as a RAM agent, so we killed her and instead threw in with the Leeches, led by Loa-Loa. I wish I could tell you I had a good reason, but it mostly came down to Loa-Loa being an attractive girl, while the leader of the Groteseques, "Gargoyle," was a "hideous skeletal boy" and the leader of the White Monks, Wink, was a weird old man. Also, rumors said that Gargoyle was on the verge of a RAM alliance.
            

Female privilege wins a round.

           
It turned out that the White Monks had imprisoned Chade and his daughter in their lair up on the building's roof. But when we finally defeated Wink and got into the place, it turned out that the father and daughter had escaped weeks earlier. Searching their former cell, the party found a device with a button and materials suggesting that Chade was heading for the desert. As we left, Loa-Loa promised to build a better life for the people in the slums.

A couple of minor encounters on the way out of town suggested that Chade's device was meant to disable holograms. Once in the desert, we headed for the one obvious feature, a large mesa, and found that it was a hologram concealing the old Museum of History.
      

That's an impressive hologram.

      
The building was another 16 x 16 map split into a main building and a mezzanine. RAM forces arrived about the same time we did, and they brought explosives with them. Every battle produced explosive grenades, rocket launchers, and plasma launchers, which we swiped greedily. I had intended to save them for battles in which I needed that kind of firepower, but pretty soon, we had so much that I just started using them in regular battles. Combats become a lot easier when you can "cast" the equivalent of six "Fireballs" every round.
           

The museum has a "Buck Rogers" exhibit.

         
We first met Dr. Chade's daughter, Stefi, who tried to convince us that Chade was dead. Then, we found Chade himself asleep in a closet. Chade led us around the museum erratically, searching for his "notes," while we fought a party of RAM soldiers in practically every room. After we saved Stefi from a group of them, he said he trusted us, but we still had to find his notes and destroy information about his experiments on the computers in the building.
         

At some point, "Dr. Chade's" fusion chamber, notes, and mission became Stefi's, and I'm not sure what happened.

           
Something happened at some point that I missed or misinterpreted. Chade disappeared or died after a climactic battle with RAM forces, and Stefi fled upstairs, barricading herself to avoid being captured while she destroyed Chade's research. Subsequent dialogue indicated that Stefi was just as knowledgeable as her father on fusion reaction, and indeed also seems to be a "Dr. Chade," and I'm not sure which of these three possibilities is the case:
        

• Stefi was always the "real" Dr. Chade, and people just assumed it was her father because he looked the part.

• Stefi was always the "real" Dr. Chade and her "father" was just a hologram.

• The father was the original Dr. Chade, but Stefi is also a physicist, and the father had taught enough of his science to Stefi that she can serve in his place.

          

Stefi shows some spine.

           
Whatever the case, we rescued her and got out of there. Buck Rogers congratulated us on our third successful mission and soon assigned us a fourth: the capture of Dr. Jerod Malcoln, a PURGE weapons scientist, who "has created an explosive gas with the radioactive properties that we need." Rogers asked that we go back to Losangelorg and infiltrate PURGE headquarters on Santa Catalina. Having been to Santa Catalina several times, it pains me to think of such a beautiful place in the hands of a group of extremists. Buck gave us a passcard to get into the central L.A. buildings and said we'd find an agent named Red Carrin in the "Newporg Archology."

I think you're just making up words.

    
Back on the base, I was surprised to find that the store allows you to purchase ammunition reloads for rocket launchers and plasma throwers. Was this true in the last game, too?! I remember never having enough of those weapons, but I also think I discarded them when they were empty. Being able to reload them would have made a huge difference and would have made me feel better about both the difficulty of the games and the economy.
          

Was this possible in the first game?

         
Matrix Cubed is a better game than I anticipated, and perhaps even better than the original game. I'm enjoying the challenging combats, even though grenades are no substitute for the variety of spells in the Gold Box system. I apologize for sounding so down about it last time. Arbitrating the gangs in the second mission was a lot of fun, and I hope that the game continues with this level of encounter quality.

Time so far: 12 hours