Ultima Underworld: Summary and Rating

         

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss

United States

Blue Sky Productions (developer); Origin Systems (publisher)

Released in 1992 for DOS; 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98; 1997 for PlayStation

Date Started: 15 February 2018

Date Ended: 24 March 2018 

Total Hours: 33

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating:62

Ranking at time of posting: 287/290 (99%)
Rakning at Game #576: 571/576 (99%)

Ultima Underworld is in many ways a typical Origin game: groundbreaking, innovative, well-produced, addictive, enormously fun to play--and at the same time a bit disappointing in what they did and didn't do with the story. This simply has no business being an Ultima title, and the protagonist has no business being the Avatar. Fusing the game with their hallmark series may have ensured sales, but it creates a confused continuity and subtracts from what otherwise might have been a compelling story designed specifically for this game. It also blunts any sense of role-playing: if you're supposed to be the Avatar, you can't very well run around choosing the "evil" options.

If they were going to insist on making it an Ultima game, they should have gone all-in. Make it clear that the three-part key is the same one the Avatar originally carried into the Abyss. Replace the ankh shrines with Ultima IV's altars. Replace Cabirus, Almric, Garamon, and Tyball with people we've heard of--Ultima IV, V, and VI had plenty of possibilities. Make it clear that the chamber in which the Slasher was trapped was the old Codex chamber, and make the player answer questions to get in. Toss in a gargoyle NPC or two. Blame the fall of the colony on one of the factions finding Mondain's skull, which the Avatar had last cast into the lava. Instead, they did everything to make it seem like the game was an apocryphal part of the Ultima universe.
          
I don't know what to think about the story that was told. The cluebook gives an entire history of Tyball and Garamon (reprinted here), and it makes the backstory much clearer than what was presented in the game: the brothers accidentally released the Slasher of Veils while researching interplanar travel. They created the Chamber of Virtue, imbuing it with "virtuous energies" to trap and weaken it until they could find a way to send it home. In the meantime, the Slasher corrupted Tyball and led him to arrange for Garamon's murder. To get into the Chamber of Virtue and free the demon, Tyball needed to find someone of great virtue and sacrifice her to "shatter the virtue of the chamber"; hence, he kidnapped the baron's daughter.

Aside from not making a lot of sense and reflecting extremely outdated views on virginity equaling virtue, the story has a feeling of being written after the game, to explain the elements within it, rather than vice versa. For instance, consider this paragraph, which seems like a clumsy way of explaining why Garamon's bones were somehow found in a random part of the lower level instead of in the chamber.
          

Dying, Garamon was still not without great power. Yet if Britannia were to survive, he could not afford to use his power to defend himself. Instead, he cast a mighty spell which, despite Tyball's best efforts, drew closed the door to the Chamber of Virtue. The demon was bound in place, but Garamon was not. His act of sacrifice made him virtuous enough to leave the Chamber of Virtue, and so he did by magic; but he died immediately thereafter, and his remains were lost on the lowest level of the Abyss.

      
Whether this supposition is true or not, I don't think this overall backstory is discoverable within the game itself. Sure, there are scraps of it here and there, and it's possible that the developers meant it to be something of a mystery, but I just feel it was poor story-telling--and, again, not well-integrated into the backstory of the Abyss presented in the game materials, let alone the rest of Ultima canon.

Beyond that, and a couple of bugs, it's hard to think of a negative thing to say about it. Even the things that don't work have a spark of a good idea, and you can see how they might work. For instance, the "bartering" system is a bit under-developed and unrewarding, but it's not a bad idea on the surface. Of the three major character builds--fighter, mage, and explorer/ranger/rogue--the last one seems mostly untenable, and yet it's a valiant effort.

There are a lot of "firsts" in Ultima Underworld and even more "seconds"--meaning some other game technically did it first, but probably not as well, and even if it did, it's not coming to mind right now. My list, on which I invite you to expand or correct, includes:

          

• First RPG with the ability to look and move up and down

• First continuous movement in a 3D RPG.

• First 3D RPG that doesn't use straight lines and right angles for all the dungeon walls and has complex textures. Without that last bit, Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1987) is technically first. 

• First 3D RPG in which each corridor and room is uniquely designed with wall details, ground details, and furniture instead of just repeating textures.

• First RPG with a realistic dungeon ecosystem

• First 3D RPG with realistic item interactions, such as using a fishing pole to catch fish, making torches out of wood and oil, using a torch to light a candle.

• First RPG to allow direct bartering of goods without the need for intermediate currency (although that's possible, of course).

• First game with an automap of this level of detail, on which you can make your own annotations.

            

There are a lot of other areas in which it isn't first but still rare: full sentences for PC dialogue, for instance. A fully-voiced introduction. Contextual music. Flowing water. A realistic item identification and repair system. Dynamic lighting levels depending on the source.

Add to all of these things an overall approach that isn't offered here for the first time, but perhaps for the first fully-realized time: the ability to explore and solve puzzles from multiple perspectives. Take something as simple as opening a door. I'm hard-pressed to think of a game from even the last 10 years that takes as realistic (and yet still challenging) an approach as Ultima Underworld, where you can pick it, smash it (including with spells), cast an "Open" spell on it, or find the key. Just as in the real world, some doors are sturdier than others or harder to pick than others. Once opened, you can even close and lock them behind you. Meanwhile, in Fallout 4, 23 years later, just to preserve the integrity of their little lockpicking mini-game, I can't even nuke a door open.

Because of the multiple approaches it offers, I have an almost insurmountable desire to replay the game as a mage. Part is the reason is for penance: I didn't even test 80% of the game's spells. Some of them would have made life a lot easier; for instance, "Fly" would have cut an enormous amount of navigation time out of Levels 7 and 8. "Resist Fire" would have come in handy against all those elementals. Why did I keep casting In Lor once I was capable of Vas In Lor? I was almost always saving my mana for "Heal," "Create Food," and (later in the game) "Gate Travel" that I didn't experiment with many fun-sounding combat options like "Ally," "Paralyze," "Summon," and "Confusion." 

Such a replay would be a challenge because although I know the main quest steps, I didn't record, and I barely remember, where I found each rune. I'd have to take a nonlinear approach to exploration, avoiding combats I can't win, re-assessing my capabilities with each new rune. 

It might be equally fun to try a stealth game: hardly fighting anyone, trying to sneak in and out of areas, reaching the endgame at a low level. (Are there any required fights other than the Chaos Knight?) I guess it depends on how well the "Sneak" skill works at high levels. Or to play as a fighter again but go for more of a "barbarian" build: high "Attack" and "Defense" but no weapons and armor; maximize "Unarmed," "Acrobat," and maybe "Swim." Or to try a ranged fighter.

Of course, I won't get to all of these. That's why I have you. Please tell me your experiences with these alternate character types. If you don't have any, get the game and give it a try. These comments will stay open indefinitely. Don't be afraid to set the game to "easy" mode if you choose a challenging character.

Here are some other miscellaneous notes:

      

• I played a tinker, but never once did I repair my own weapons and armor. Early in the game, my skill wasn't high enough; late in the game, they stopped degrading very fast. Also, I only ever found like two anvils.

• Apparently, the wisp on Level 4 is supposed to talk (I don't know why he wouldn't for me) and provide the rune sequence for "Armageddon." Why are those wisps always up to such mischief? 

• Casting "Armageddon" actually does destroy the Slasher of Veils, but it also wipes out every other creature in the dungeon, causes the stairways to collapse, and destroys your entire inventory, including the rune bag.

• If you go back up to Level 1 after rescuing the princess, nobody acknowledges you at the door.

• It appears that the only "undocumented" spells are discoverable within the game. You can't just string together logical sequences of runes to find new ones.

• Something pointed out in the reviews that I didn't notice: you can keep clicking "next page" on the automap after Level 8, and use the blank pages just to write random notes.

        

I don't generally buy the idea that consoles have "dumbed down" games, but it's probably true that the reason you can't do this in modern games is because of console compatibility.

          

• The record for a speedrun of the game seems to be 17 minutes and 25 seconds. Look at that guy go. He doesn't hesitate for a second. I don't know my way around my own bedroom as well as he knows that dungeon. At one point, he drops the moonstone while in mid-air, knowing that it will land where he wants it to be when he casts "Gate" later. 

• But there is a bit of an exploit: he has piles of ash that seem to be able to shoot fireballs and other spells. I guess there's a bug in the game by which turning a wand into a pile of ash keeps its abilities but prevents it from every running out and "breaking." I guess I'm glad I didn't know that. The game was easy enough.

          

Now, I don't want to jinx it, but having revised my opinion on the game's combat system (as per the last entry), it's entirely possible that Ultima Underworld might unseat Ultima V for the top spot. I'm not going to engineer it that way, but I'll bet it's at least close. It's thus with some excitement that I begin the GIMLET:

1. Game World. As per my concerns at the top of this entry, the backstory and in-game story may offer more detail than the typical RPG of the time, but they're still a bit clumsy, unsatisfying, and uncomfortably seated within Ultima canon. What little lore we got on the Abyss and the collapse of the colony was appreciated, but I still wish there were more. More in the game's favor, the world feels like a realistic environment. Days pass at a sensible rate. The dungeon is logically structured, has clear sources of food and water, and feels like a real place. The game experience is almost better if you ignore everything presented in the backstory and just piece together the scraps of information the game provides as you find them. Score: 6.

2. Character Creation and Development. The "classes" don't matter so much as the more basic "builds," but it's still a good system. The different choices create quite different approaches to playing the game. There's admirable flexibility in character creation, the skill system is mostly well-realized (minus some useless skills), and leveling is more rewarding than any previous Ultima title. My major quibble in this area is the artificially-low level cap. Score: 6.

3. NPCs. Fantastic. I love the importance of dialogue, the dialogue options, the fun use of classic "monsters" as NPCs. There could have been more dialogue options, or starker distinctions to accommodate different role-playing styles, but it's early in the era. I like that NPCs are vital to understanding the quest and game lore, but you still have some options, such as joining (or not) the knights. The barter system needed some work but was still fun and original. Score: 7.
         

Dialogue options are: 1) what I need to accomplish the quest; 2) unnecessarily cruel; and 3) a lie that will just prolong things. Some of the other conversations are better.

        

4. Encounters and Foes. The game has a small but effective menagerie, well described in the game manual, with an interesting set of strengths, weaknesses, special attacks, and special defenses. I like that some "enemies" are on the edge and can be tipped (or not) into hostility depending on your actions, and that expectations are inverted by making goblins, trolls, and lizardmen friendly. The game is full of non-combat encounters that aren't designated as such (i.e., no text box pops up with a menu of options) but that still call upon your creativity, knowledge, and skill. Score: 6.

5. Magic and Combat. Literally, there isn't much to combat--just a choice of weapons and attack types. But as I discussed last time, in any game where combat is integrated into the main exploration engine, anything possible in that engine becomes a combat tactic. If combat was a little harder, it would have made more sense to explore those various options. More than any game so far, however, you can truly "role-play" combat here, including avoiding it entirely.

I feel like a fraud even commenting on magic. I like the variety of spells, and that so many can be used to solve puzzles and explore rather than just engage in combat. Having to find the runes adds a fun twist. Score: 5.

6. Equipment. Also better here than any previous Ultima title. I always like when you have plenty of item "slots," so you're constantly getting upgraded. The variety of items is fantastic, accommodating just about any play style or set of skills. I didn't mind the wear-and-tear system, nor the identification system, and in both cases I appreciated that there were multiple approaches. I liked that so many items (poles, spikes, fishing poles, lockpicks, torches) could be duplicated by spells, or not, depending on your preference. The encumbrance system altered between challenging and annoying but at least wasn't annoying full-time. Lots of magic items. Lots of things to read. Lots of worthless items, but in the game for atmosphere. Lots of ways for items to interact with each other. My only real complaint is that I don't like fully deterministic games in which items are never varied nor vary locations. Score: 7.
          

Late in the game, I replaced my black longsword of Great Accuracy with a jeweled longsword of Unsurpassed Damage. It seemed to kill the enemies faster.

         
7. Economy. A lot of dungeon crawlers eschew an economy. This one not only offers one but also makes it somewhat realistic by allowing direct bartering rather than passing everything through a standard currency. Beyond that, however, the economy isn't very good. There's not enough interesting to buy, and thus hardly any reason to sell. I do like that the dwarven smith and the seer who identifies things provide a "money sink" if you don't have those skills--if only it didn't take so long to get to them when you need them. Score: 5.
        

All the treasure found on the lower levels is wasted.

         
8. Quests. Decent main quest, although it could have been clearer, and a handful of side quests along the way that add flavor and role-playing. No options or alternate endings for the main quest. Score: 5.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics are state-of-the-art for the time, though obviously a bit blocky today. To allow continuous movement and views from multiple angles, they had to take an acceptable step back in some detail. I found the sounds adequate but not outstanding. The voice acting at the beginning of the game was just awful. The interface, on the other hand, couldn't have been better. The game supports intuitive, redundant use of both mouse and keyboard, and I didn't have to think about either after the first 10 minutes. The automap is the best we've seen so far. Score: 7.
          

This is what the dungeon looks like if you set the textures to "low detail."

         
10. Gameplay. Easily the best category. It's as non-linear as a multi-level dungeon game can get (although a central staircase with quicker access to earlier levels would have been appreciated), even in monster difficulty. The lowest levels still have plenty of rats, rotworms, and mongbats. The experiences of different character builds make it very replayable. It was perhaps just a tad too easy in combat, at least for a fighter-type character, but the puzzle difficulty was decent and the game lasted just a perfect amount of time. At no point did I say, "I'm ready for this to be over," but neither did it leave me wanting more. Score: 8.

That gives us a final score of . . . drum roll . . . 62. Ah, well. Not technically enough to unseat Ultima V (69), Ultima VI (68), or even Pool of Radiance (65). On the other hand I rated the "newest" of those games 4 years ago, and 62 is within the margin of error for how my rating approach may have evolved. I wouldn't fret too much about it. It's at least made the average for its year, as of now, the highest yearly average we've seen so far. Perhaps more telling, Ultima Underworld is one of only two games--the other is Ultima VI--in which every score is at least a 5. It could have done a few things a little better, but it didn't do anything truly bad.
         

Organizing those three enemies in that screenshot must have taken forever.

          
My opinion is hardly original. Ultima Underworld makes the "Best X games" list, even today, for every category that it qualifies for. In its day, Dragon magazine called it "the best dungeon game we've ever played," particularly praising its auto-mapping, controls, and simulation of a real environment. Having cheapened their rating system by awarding 5/5 for just about anything, they gave Underworld 6 stars on a 5-star scale. PC-Spiele gave it 100%; Pelit 98%; Play Time 95%; Power Play 94%. ACE, PC Joker, ASM, PC Format, and PC Review UK were all above 90%. The only truly negative review seems to have come from a Swedish magazine called Svenska Hemdatornytt, which gave it 66%. I have't been able to get hold of that particular review.

The July 1992 Computer Gaming World, as was its tradition by the early 1990s, pairs Scorpia's "distinctive and often controversial perspective" with a review by Allen Greenberg. Greenberg's review isn't negative, exactly, but he seems to like the game more for what it portends than how it plays. Half his problem is declaring that the game "is best controlled using the mouse" and then spending several paragraphs explaining why the mouse doesn't work very well. If he'd used the WASD cluster to move like 90% of players, he'd have nothing to complain about. He praises the game as a "significant step" towards quasi-virtual reality and simulated environments but doesn't seem to have had much fun with the "murky and dim" graphics and "minimal" sound effects. He praises the automap but complains that you can't send it to the printer. A couple of complaints are just mystifying ("certain doorways that appear to be within reach remain frustratingly unapproachable"). Overall, though, he rates the game "an enjoyable challenge with a unique game-playing engine."

Scorpia's review is similarly mixed. With her historical perspective, she fully understands the major leap forward that the game represents, and it was fun to see that she had to spend an entire paragraph explaining what "continuous movement" actually means, because players wouldn't have encountered it before. She sees right through the less-useful skills like "Search" and "Appraise." She says the automap is the best she's ever seen but also complains that you can't print it (honestly, name one game in which you could). Her summary is that "the meticulous construction of a real-world dungeon environment is outstanding" and that the game represents "the dungeon trek of the future."

For "RPG of the Year" in 1992, it was up against Eye of the Beholder II, Might and Magic III, Planet's Edge, and Ultima VII, and it took the prize. It lost overall "Game of the Year" to Sid Meier's Civilization.
         

I just thought this was a fun shot of a goblin getting hit in the face.

          
To listen to the developers, Ultima Underworld was almost never published. You'll recall that it wasn't an in-house Origin product, but rather the brainchild of former Origin employee Paul Neurath, now running his own company in Salem, New Hampshire. Neurath's own account says that the project started off with enthusiastic support from Richard Garriott, but that otherwise Origin hardly communicated with Blue Sky during development. Two consecutive producers assigned to work with Blue Sky quit, and there were rumors that Origin was going to cancel the game, a horrifying prospect to Neurath as he had personally fronted most of the development costs. Fortunately, things changed when Blue Sky requested, and received, Warren Spector as their third producer. Spector took a much greater interest in the title, communicated regularly, and shepherded the project to completion. Even then, success wasn't assured. Although the game sold half a million copies, it took a while--and word-of-mouth from excited gamers--to build momentum. That it was released only a month before Ultima VII probably didn't help.

Thanks to the ultimate sales total, Origin commissioned Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993), which fits more solidly in the Ultima canon, featuring Lord British and the usual Ultima NPCs, and occurring between the two parts of Ultima VII. By then, Blue Sky had merged with Lerner Research to form Looking Glass Studios, and the company continued to specialize in 3D games like the System Shock series, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, and the Thief series. To some degree, of course, Ultima Underworld's influence is seen in nearly every first-person, continuous-movement title, including The Elder Scrolls and Deus Ex and even non-RPGs like Half-Life. Arkane Studios' Arx Fatalis (2002) was originally intended as Ultima Underworld III (Electronic Arts rejected it).

Looking Glass Studios closed in 2000, its employees scattering to companies like Ion Storm, Westwood, Valve, and Arkane. Paul Neurath formed Floodgate Entertainment in 2000 and co-developed Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide (2003, with BioWare) and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (2006, with Arkane). Floodgate closed in 2014, and Neurath almost immediately formed OtherSide Entertainment. Their first project? Underworld Ascendant. It achieved its $800,000 Kickstarter goal in 2015 and has an official license from Electronic Arts (albeit only for the Underworld setting, not the totality of Ultima canon). The graphics look very nice, but the project seems to have exceeded its anticipated delivery by a non-trivial margin.

In talking about this game's development and legacy, I could publish an article six times this length, but those articles have been published, and are out there, so I leave you to them. I'm grateful to have such a fun and fascinating start to 1992. How do you possibly follow that? Adventure Gamers, are we ready for Quest for Glory 3 yet?

****
    

Previous entry in this series 

    

For further reading:

   

My reviews of the entire Ultima series:

• Akalabeth: World of Doom (1980) 
• Ultima (1981)
• Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress (1982)  
• Exodus: Ultima III (1983)
• Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)  
• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988)
• Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)
• Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire (1990) 
• Martian Dreams (1991)
• Ultima VII: The Black Gate (1992)
• Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds (1993) 
• Ultima VII: Part Two - Serpent Isle (1993) 

 

Also:

  

• "The Digital Antiquarian" articles on the making of this game.
• The Elder Scrolls: Arena (1994), a game clearly inspired by this one. 

 05/06/2026

Game 265: The Kingdom of Krell (1987)

Developer Steven Screech might want to re-think his little personal logo.

    

The Kingdom of Krell

United Kingdom

Anco (developer and publisher)

Released in 1987 for ZX Spectrum

Date Started: 8 October 2017
Date Ended: 14 October 2017

Total Hours: 26

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 16

Ranking at Time of Posting: 36/265 (14%)

British ZX Spectrum games occupy a weird little sub-genre that I'll have to fully analyze after I reach the last one in 1989. This is my eighth, after The Ring of Darkness (1982), Lone Wolf: Flight from the Dark (1984), Out of the Shadows (1984), City of Death (1985), Heavy on the Magick (1986), and The Wizard of Tallyron (1986). Five others--The Valley (1982), The Citadel of Chaos (1984), The Forest of Doom (1984), The Master of Magic (1985), and Seas of Blood (1985)--I played on Commodore 64 ports but were originally written for the Spectrum.

The Ring of Darkness is the odd-one-out, being mostly plagiarized from Ultima. The rest are highly original, lacking clear progenitors in their styles and conventions, not only avoiding American RPG tropes but almost consciously shunning them. More unexpected, however, is how oddly foreign they feel, coming from an English-speaking nation that manages to churn out perfectly comprehensible (from an American perspective) books, films, and television shows. In some ways, they're as bizarre as French RPGs.

As the popularity of the ZX Spectrum wanes in the late 1980s and the Amiga begins to dominate British RPG development, we see the same stark originality (with both good and bad consequences) in games like Galdregon's Domain (1989), Lords of Chaos (1990), Heimdall (1991), and Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight (1991), but the sense of the bizarre fades, which makes me wonder how much of it is due to the platform. With its extremely limited keyboard, stunted default memory, and cassettes as the primary distribution media, the platform was never going to support games with the same speed, complexity, and ease of play as U.S. players were getting on, say, the Commodore 64.

The Kingdom of Krell is the first ZX Spectrum RPG to require the 128 model (issued in 1985). With all this extra memory, the developer could have offered a more complex engine, more tactical combat, or better graphics, but instead what he did was to make the physical game world ridiculously large. The box boasts "more than 2,500 locations." I only mapped a little over 1,900, but either figure is far too large when the number of those locations with an item, NPC, or other plot-driven need to be there is around 60.

The backstory is amusing in its lack of epic ambition. The game is set in a "remote part of Britain" in the "misty past." The custom of these people is that when a young man reaches his 18th birthday, he has to spend a month in the wilderness alone before he's welcomed back to the tribe as a man. The tribe throws a party for the protagonist; he gets drunk; and he awakens the next day "alone in the vast wilderness."
    

Part of the vast wilderness.

     
Character creation is nothing more than a name, from which the game procedurally generates your six attributes: strength, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, and charisma. This is the first game that I know of in which attributes are derived from the chosen name; Captive (1990) would later use the same method. Anyway, I lost patience trying different names and ended up adventuring with a sub-par character; I would recommend anyone else playing the game hold out for at least 15s in strength, dexterity, and intelligence and 10s in everything else, lest their reload counts hit the astronomically high levels that mine did.

As the game begins, you're on a "barren grassy plain" with a sling at your feet. The image shows a bridge, which is one of the game's oddities. As you turn different directions, the screen changes to show the terrain in the next square, not the one you're currently in.
         

Sure looks like notable features to me.

      
That bridge is probably the most complex graphic that you get in the game. Among the c. 2,000 "locations" in the game are about 12 different terrain types, including "barren, grassy plains," "dense, dark forests," and "long, dark tunnels." The author wastes precious descriptive text space saying things like "well, here you are" and "I don't know what else to tell you," with at least one misspelling on every screen. I didn't find a single "unique" location in the game.
      

A decent percentage of the game's many vaunted locations.

     
You interface with the game not with a keyboard, which would make sense given that the game was developed for a PC, but with a joystick. You cycle through the various icons and use the button to execute an action or move to a sub-menu. This is true even of movement. Main actions include move, sleep, fight, cast a spell, take or drop an object, speak, handle various disk operations, and "other," the latter including eat and check the time. To move, you have to activate the "shoe" icon then the appropriate directional arrow. If you're not already facing a particular direction, your first move turns you in that direction and then your second and subsequent moves actually walk you in that direction.
  

A typical Krell location. A zombie is waiting as I arrive. The scene shows more icy wastes to my north. "Crevasses" is misspelled.

      
Krell is such a deadly place, I can't believe how irresponsible I was to get drunk and pass out here. You can't even sleep in a hut without getting interrupted by a monster 50% of the time. Foes are D&D standard--giant rats, hobgoblins, ogres, skeletons, trolls, orcs, and the like--and there's around a one-in-four chance that one will be waiting for you in every new square. If you managed to kill it, there's a decent chance another monster will be waiting just behind, sometimes two or three more.
     

I only encountered one dragon in the game. He wasn't significantly harder than the other monsters.

      
The game doesn't throw easy monsters at you early and harder ones late. You're just as likely to face a "cyclopse" in the opening area as a giant rat. There are some contextual encounters; the graveyard area produces almost exclusively undead, for instance, and the only dragon I encountered was deep in a cavern. For the most part, they don't have any special strengths or weaknesses except that some have more hit points than others.
 
For combat, you select your sword icon and then decide whether to aim it at the enemy's head, torso, or legs. I managed to hit the enemy's head maybe twice in my 15-hour game. Torso is almost always the best bet. After your attack, the enemy gets a swing at you. There is a variety of messages indicating damage--"sliced through your flesh," "took a chunk out of you," mercilessly rips into you"--but basically you just take either 1 or 2 hit points damage for each attack (if the enemy doesn't miss).
           

Exchanging blows with a dwarf.

     
A character might start with 10 hit points at maximum constitution, so as you can imagine, he doesn't last long in long battles. Fortunately, most enemies die within a couple of hits. Moreover, you can eat the corpse (or "carcus," as the game has it) of any slain enemy to regain one hit point. Unfortunately, you don't get any intrinsic attributes for doing so.
      

A skeleton appears right after I killed something else.

     
Your character gets experience from kills but doesn't gain anything from that experience. Despite promises made on the box, neither attributes nor hit points change as he levels up. Only his "rating" changes, which starts at "dung dweller" and progresses through at least 12 levels, including "scavenger," "dog-wrestler," "useful," and "dangerous." I spent so long at Level 10--"Schwarzenegger"--that I thought it was the highest level, but after a while the rating changed to "Psycho," as if it's my fault that monsters spawn practically every square, and finally to, nonsensically "Well Ard." Does that mean something in British?
       

My character at the 20th hour.

     
What does improve with leveling is access to spells. You start with only one: "Detect Magic," which as far as I can tell has no use anywhere in the game. But you soon acquire "Burning Hands," "Detect Evil" (also no use), and "Magic Missile," and both of the offensive spells in that list outperformed combat attacks for my character for the rest of the game. The last spell you acquire, "Disintegrate," reliably one-shots every single enemy, so there's no more reloading once you have it. I spent the entire second half of my playing time with that spell and didn't even bother to carry a weapon from the moment I acquired it.
       

Blasting an enemy with a "Magic Missile."

      
The list of spells includes "Cure Illness" and "Remove Curse," neither of which I experienced in the game. "Teleport" returns you to the starting area, which is handy because there's a one-way path that locks you out of the area. "Magic Mouth" warns you if an enemy approaches while you're sleeping.
      

The full list of spells at the end of the game.

   
There is absolutely no meter for spells. You can cast as many as you want as frequently as you want.

You don't have to fight every enemy that appears. You can try to just brush past them, which I did a lot of after I was already "well ard." Success seems to depend heavily on the enemy type. Sentient NPCs like dwarves and halflings almost always let you go; monsters like cyclopes and ogres catch you about half the time. Giant rats absolutely never let you pass. When it doesn't work, the enemy gets a free attack at you, so it's a bit of a risk.
      

Trust me, this absolutely is not going to work out for you.

      
As for equipment, there's some. Among the game's 1,500+ squares, I found around 40 items: a sling, two swords, two bolas, two spears, two axes, a dagger, two suits of armor, four scrolls, six potions, a shield, a crown, four bags of gold, two precious gems, a torch, and about eight quest items. They seem to be in the same places for every game.
       

My inventory early in the game.

      
There are a lot of mysteries among the inventory items, some of which I'll cover below. Five of the six potions improved attributes--the only other source of character development in the game. None of the weapons markedly outperformed the others. I'm not sure what the torch does, since you can enter caves and tunnels without it. The bags of gold are treated like inventory items, not an actual pool of gold pieces, and as far as I can tell there's no place to spend them. There is no command to equip the shield. As I'll cover below, none of the quest items did anything for me at all.
      

This potion increased my constitution.

     
NPCs are a big part of the game, but I didn't understand their importance until late. At first, I tried to talk with generic sentient creatures like dwarves and halflings but just got rude replies. The "Tongues" spell lets you get rude replies from even non-sentient creatures like cobras and skeletons. When you choose to speak, you can be friendly, neutral, or rude, but I never noticed a difference in the replies I got except once when a friendly overture elicited "GO AWAY" and a rude overture prompted "GO AWAY AND DON'T COME BACK." My comparatively low charisma might have had something to do with it.
      

Krell must have borrowed Sword & Sorcery's random insult generator.

     
Later, I realized that there are a few named NPCs in the world. Almost all of them say the same thing: "DAMIENNE STOLE THE SCROLLS." That's it. No other explanation or assistance. Because of that, I didn't bother noting their locations as I mapped. This would later come back to haunt me.
      

An NPC waits in a temple.

      
So what of any kind of quest? At first, I hoped that the main quest was just to wait out your 30 days and see what kind of score you'd achieved. The clock ticks forward even if you're just standing still, so I tried jacking the CPU speed to maximum and standing in one place for 30 days. Unfortunately, nothing happened, not even when I returned to the starting square.
       

At least the game uses a 24-hour clock.

      
For no reason that I can possibly justify except that I've recorded a loss on two consecutive games, I spent over 20 hours mapping the entire thing, one lethargic square at a time. The sections of the game basically correspond with a map in the manual, from forests to the southwest to ice wastes in the northeast.
    

The map of the land in the game manual.

And my Excel map.

    
I ran into several problems while mapping. As you can see from the map above, the terrain is blocked off into several sections with single-square passages or bridges between them. It's very easy, when you've hit 20 consecutive "barren grassy plains" in a row offering exits only to the north, west, and east, to miss the one that suddenly had a southern exit. This means that there were entire areas, including most of the tunnels at the bottom-right, that I didn't discover until late in the game.

Second, a few NPCs become important later in the game even if all they say is "DAMIENNE STOLE THE SCROLLS" when you first encounter them. I should have been noting their locations. Most of them are in huts or other buildings, and I did go back and re-investigate those, but a few are just standing in the wilderness, and who knows how many of them I overlooked.

Missing NPCs is compounded by another problem: if there are enemies in the same square, the enemy portraits appear on top of the NPCs. You have to kill them before the NPC shows up. I could have just brushed past any number of NPC squares while trying to avoid enemies.

A few NPCs do offer quests. For instance, a man named Graxx stands at the mouth of the cave to the northwest. He says he has a "magical shape" and wants me to collect the four sacred scrolls, presumably the ones that Damienne stole. In the southeast, "Davilla" wants me to kill "Habgoog," who she says is evil. "Megog" asks me to kill "Questilla," who has cursed him with stone skin. Some of these NPCs drop rings after you talk to them; picking them up makes them disappear but adds permanently to one of our attributes.

Some of the NPCs are clearly lying. Once I killed Questilla and returned to Megog, he called me a "foolish man" and said that I'd managed to kill the "chief do-gooder of Krell" and attacked me. I also have suspicions about Davilla, who seems to be using sex to get what she wants and asked me to kill another NPC named "Caldrix" after I was done with Habgoog.
    

Betrayal!

    
The bigger problem is that the NPCs don't always acknowledge what you've done. After I collected the four scrolls, Graxx had nothing to say, not even when I dumped them in his square. NPCs never seem to acknowledge items, not when I returned the Crown of Hod to Hod or the Eye of Graxx to Graxx. There's no "use" or "give" command for items, just pick up and drop, but still it's hard not to feel like I'm missing something.
      

Graxx refuses to acknowledge the scrolls he asked me to bring him.

     
Meanwhile, Davilla acknowledged when I killed Habgoog but not Caldrix, so that quest is stuck in limbo.
       

But I killed Caldrix!

      
There are a lot of other mysteries. In an ancient sacred temple in the southwest, an Oracle. It sits on the ground like an object that you can pick up, although the game tells you it's too heavy. You can't speak to it or do anything useful with it. I never did find the Damienne who had stolen the scrolls. The most I ever got on something that sounded like a main quest was someone named Guntor, who said that I would need the "Staff of the Gods" to destroy "Vulcor," two things I'd otherwise never heard of.
     

Why is this here?

     
My lack of progress might also be related to a final issue: At the top of the map in the northeast, there's a square that says you can go north, but the game freezes every time I enter this area and go north. I'm not sure if this is an "exit" square for after you solve the quests or if it's a bug. If the latter, it would explain why the game manual counts 600 more squares than I do, and why I can't seem to find so many vital things.

Thus, after spending an absurd amount of time mapping such a limited game, I must unfortunately call a halt and declare it unwinnable unless someone comes forward with more information or the "hint sheet" that the manual promises.
      

In an odd innovation, the "B"-side of the cassette has a track of "ambient noises" to listen to while playing. It consists of chirping crickets, howling wind, animal noises, monstrous groans and snorts, the odd clanging of a church bell, distant thunder, screams, and the occasional hint offered by the developer in a Satanic voice. "Ancient Krellian proverbs say, 'Never let your heart rule your head,'" goes one. Another warns about bad potions. I listened to the whole half hour to see if it offered anything to assist with my predicament, but no luck. It's certainly an interesting approach to providing atmosphere to a game.
    

Something about that dragon behind the rock seems familiar.

     
Based on what I experienced, it earns a 16 on the GIMLET, with 1s and 2s for everything except "economy" (0) and "quests" (3); I'm going out on a limb with the latter and assuming that at least one of the encounters is an alternate or side-quest.

I was glad to find a compatible opinion in the only review I could find, from the May 1987 Sinclair User. "My God, is it tedious," Graham Taylor writes, after offering a little praise for the graphics. He's not just talking about the repetitive banality of the areas but also the loading time of those areas; I was running the game at 4x normal speed, so I didn't experience that particular issue. He also thought the icon system was needlessly cumbersome. One aspect I didn't cover above, which I guess was fairly innovative at the time, was the use of RAM for quick-saving and quick-loading the game. This and the large game world were responsible for the title's 128k requirement.

The Kingdom of Krell was written by Steve Screech, who became relatively famous in subsequent years for his soccer games. His portfolio, up to the present day, is almost all sports titles. Neither he nor Anco ever developed or published another RPG, which makes one wonder why they were particularly motivated to create this one.

"The Kingdom of Krell," as a bit of trivia, appears in the 1971 sci-fi novel A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. It is also the name of an audio systems manufacturer in Connecticut and a vampire in the Warhammer universe.

It looks like I only have one more ZX Spectrum game, in 1989. I'll miss the emulator--Spectaculator is fantastically easy to use--if not the platform.

****

There's a TI-99 game called Legends coming up, but I can't get it to run. I think I'm doing something wrong with the emulator (Classic99), but I don't know what. I've got the Extended Basic cartridge activated, and from what I understand, it's supposed to just pick things up automatically, but it doesn't. If I try to load it manually, it comes up with "Legends Loading, Please Wait" and then crashes with an "I/O ERROR 07 IN 10." If anyone has successfully gotten this game running, I would appreciate help with the configuration.

Game 232: Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight (1991)

    

Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight

Canada

Anderson Gae Studios (developer); Mindscape (publisher)

Released in 1991 for Amiga, 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 19 October 2016
Date Ended: 22 October 2016

Total Hours: 9

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 32

Ranking at Time of Posting: 141/230 (57%)

Raking at Game #453: 304/453 (67%)

Moonstone took me a long time to get up and running, but once I did I had fun with it. It's an interesting fusion of light strategy, light action, and light RPG. A session can easily take 3-6 hours, and there's no saving. There won't be many more such "single session" RPGs on the list.

I ended up vacillating between the DOS and Amiga versions. I'm on an extended road trip, and I left my controller at home (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), so I needed some way to emulate the joystick-only requirement on the keyboard. After a lot of effort setting up the diagonal controls, the Amiga turned out to be the only platform on which I could fully emulate the joystick. However, I had trouble with video and screen captures with WinUAE. For some reason, every time I try to take video, it just makes a 0KB .avi file but doesn't actually record anything. It also puts huge thick black borders around every static screen capture and saves them as bitmaps (yes, I know I can edit both, but that's a pain). Because so much in this game is rapid and difficult to capture with my usual Amiga screenshot method (Windows 10's clipping tool), I used DOSBox for some screen shots and all video. The drawback with the DOS version was that I couldn't figure out how to emulate diagonal controls on the joystick, so I didn't have my full set of combat actions.
    

How most of my early combats ended.

    
Action-oriented combat is the most important feature of Moonstone. It's relentless, hard, confusing, and increases in difficulty throughout the game. It's the type of mechanic that I absolutely suck at, and I had to spend about 90 minutes reloading a save state at the first combat I tried before I felt I finally had the controls...well, not "mastered," but at least "learned." I soon discovered that every enemy type requires a different approach to combat, so even the lessons of that long practice session didn't carry me through the entire game.
     

"Character creation" is really just selecting a color.

     
On the surface, combat seems easy. When you aren't holding down the "fire" button, the joystick moves you around the screen. When you are holding it down, it executes various attack and defense moves--one for each of the 8 points of the joystick. Sounds easy, but the problem is that the combat options associated with each direction aren't necessarily intuitive, and they also swap sides depending on which way the character is facing. So when you're facing right, upper-left throws daggers, straight up executes a powerful overhand attack, upper-right does an upward thrust, left does a backward thrust, right does a swing, lower-left is a block, straight down is a special block that counters enemies' special attacks, and lower-right is a lunge. Turn and face left, and the top and bottom options are the same but everything else reverses.
    

Battling some spear-wielding jackass.

    
Someone with better dexterity could figure it out, but I spent most of my practice sessions just bumbling around. It didn't get easier until I decided to just focus on movement and one or two attacks (primarily swings and overhead chops) that I could rely on. Enemies rarely stay far enough away to throw daggers and upward thrusts only work in a few places anyway.

Let's back up to the story. "The Druids sent their best knights to Stonehenge," the opening scenes of Moonstone tell us, "so they may be dubbed into the Quest for the MOONSTONE." I'm trying and failing to come up with a sentence of similar length that's even more guaranteed to send historians into fits of apoplexy. "When George Washington signed up to fight Nazis in the Boer War, he called upon every strategy he learned during the Crusades" might fit the bill. But it soon turns out that the "druids" and "Stonehenge" of Moonstone aren't meant to be in Britain. The terrain doesn't even come close to matching, and the closest cities are called "Highwood" and, oddly, "Waterdeep."
     

Visiting "Waterdeep," some distance from the Sword Coast.

    
Every thousand years, the manual tells us, the warriors of the realm have a special opportunity to win a "gift of ultimate power" from the gods. Fighting through "horrible demons of immense power and strength," the warrior must recover a Moonstone from the Valley of the Gods, then race to Stonehenge and present it to Danu, "the great Moon God."

The game supports up to 4 players. If playing alone, as I did, the other 3 players are computer-controlled. Each player explores the map in turn, trying to find 4 keys that will allow him to access the Valley of the Gods at the center of the map. There, if he defeats the Guardian, he'll be rewarded with a Moonstone. He takes the Moonstone back to Stonehenge to win the game.

A secondary goal during the player's exploration is to amass an inventory of magic items, experience, and gold, the latter of which he may use in the two towns to purchase equipment upgrades.
    

I and the other knights explore the map as a dragon swoops around menacingly.

    
Most of the exploration is done at a series of about 20 "lairs" that dot the map. Each has one or more monsters defending a chest, which may contain a combination of gold, magic items, and keys. As the knights acquire these items, the other knights might attack them hoping to acquire their spoils. Each knight starts with 5 lives and loses 1 life for each lost combat. Lives can be restored by paying healers in cities and by sacrificing magic items to Danu at Stonehenge. If you fall below 3 lives, you can get a couple more by returning to your "home village" (your starting location), but you can only do this three times.
    

After conquering one of the "lairs," I find one of the keys to the Valley of the Gods.

    
Playing with other human players would be an entirely different experience than playing with computer-controlled knights. The AI of the computer-controlled characters is pretty stupid. They basically just swarm the human player until you defeat them in enough combats that they lose their lives and die permanently, leaving little graves on the game map. They never return home to heal, nor visit towns to spend their money.

The role-playing elements of Moonstone are light but reasonably satisfying. You get 1 experience point for clearing a lair, 3 experience points for killing the dragon (below), and 3 for defeating the Guardian in the Valley of the Gods. Every time you amass 3 points, you can spend them on 1 point of strength (increases combat damage), endurance (increases movement per round), and constitution (increases hit points). Each of these attributes starts at 1 and might end the game at 3 or 4. Apparently, if you have 4 human players in the game, it only takes 1 experience point to increase an attribute, which again creates a very different game, with some players ending with minimal strength but a huge hit point reservoir and others favoring the opposite.
     

Raising my constitution with some of my experience. I've collected a few inventory items, including a claymore, a suit of chainmail, a healing potion, a Talisman of the Wyrm, and a key.

    
About half the ruins contain gold, which can be spent on healing and equipment upgrades, although the only one that you'd want to buy in a single-player game is "battle armor," since you can loot daggers from slain knights and you ultimately find a sword--the Sword of Sharpness--better than anything the shops sell. Other magic items include a Gem of Seeing, which lets you look in lairs and see what treasures they have, a Ring of Protection, and Talismans of the Wyrm, each of which halves the damage done to the character by the dragon.

There are a handful of delightfully devious items that, again, would only make sense in a game against other human players. Scrolls of Protection, for instance, allow you to avoid other players' attacks against you. A Scroll of Acquisition allows you to steal one item from any other player anywhere on the map. Scrolls of the Wyrm direct the dragon to attack another knight. Adding a twist, each of these items can be cursed. Thus, a player who accidentally reads a cursed Scroll of Protection will find that all the battle controls are backwards, and a cursed Scroll of the Wyrm naturally has the dragon attack the player who uses it.
  

In Waterdeep, you can supposedly donate your gold to Mythral the Mystic for a "chance" to increase your attributes. There's also a chance that visiting him will lower your attributes. I don't know what was going on with my game, but every time I visited Mythral, no matter how much I donated, my stats went down.
     

This cost me 100 gold pieces.

    
The game has a few other twists. After about half a dozen turns, a dragon appears and starts circling the map. If he passes over any knight, there's a chance he'll attack. In a game with other players, I'm not sure if I'd want the dragon attack or not. Chances of victory are low, but you do get 3 experience points and several magic items. The dragon breathes fire in combat, and it took me a long time to realize that the key to defeating him is to get under his head, so his fire goes over yours, and swipe at his neck from a close position.
      

     
There's also a mage's tower in the upper-right quadrant where the wizard Math might give you a magic item, or some gold, or an attribute increase, or might turn you into a toad for a few rounds.
    

One of the few special locations in the game.

     
But back to combat. The computer-controlled knights are pretty pathetic, so for a single player, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to defeat the other monsters in the game. Each has a different approach to regular attacks and special attacks. As a general strategy, darting north or south on the combat map, then executing an attack just in time for your opponent to walk into it, then darting away, works against almost everyone but takes a lot of patience.

Most lairs generally have more than one enemy. Towards the end, you might face upwards of a dozen. About mid-way through the game, they start attacking you 2 or 3 at a time, too. I don't know if the increased difficulty and numbers are based on how many lairs you've already cleared or on increases in your attributes, but either way the endgame combats are much, much harder.

The manual lists 5 monster types--troggs, ratmen, mudmen, baloks, and trolls--but I swear I faced more than that, and I can't quite reconcile any of the creatures on the screen with the descriptions in the manual. "Mudmen" are the most obvious--they're tall bastards who swing tree branches at you and have a much greater reach than you do, making it hard to hit them first.
     

Is this a trogg, a balok, or a troll? No idea.

     
But there are some undead-looking things that I can't match with any of the descriptions. As you kill one, a new one immediately comes erupting from the ground and kills you in one hit if you don't dart out of the way.
     

Does this look like anything in that list of foes?

    
In the upper-left quadrant, there are some boar-like creatures that gallop back and forth across the combat screen. You have to make a quick attack the moment you see them at the edge of the screen, or they'll bowl you over before your strike finishes executing. Then there are these spearmen, who might make my "most annoying enemies" list in a more consequential game. Their reach is far longer than yours, but they dart too quickly to catch them with daggers. If you face one on either side, they can catch you in a neverending succession of rapid thrusts, and you have no choice but to watch and die.
     

Two spear dudes skewer me.

    
One highlight of combat, particularly for the 1991 player, is the "gore" setting, which ensures that every character death is accompanied by copious on-screen blood loss, dismemberment, and decapitation. Knights in combat always execute a decapitating coup de grâce on their defeated challengers. Almost every review or summary of the game mentions this aspect, but honestly it's pretty tame compared to what we're accustomed to in 2016.
     

My character is beheaded by another knight.

    
A few other notes:

• The game mentions wandering "Black Knights" that you have to watch for, but I never encountered any, or didn't know what they were when I did.

• This is the first game I can remember to offer hints on loading screens.

    

     

• There's a gambling game in cities, but I lost every time I played.

     

It's well-animated, anyway.

    

• Each knight can visit each "lair" only once, after which it disappears from the map. Sometimes, you fight an exhausting battle at a lair only to find that another knight has already been there and claimed the treasure.

• The game features nice animation in the opening and closing screens. But if you can perceive a difference between the Amiga and DOS versions of these screens, I think you're making it up.

• DOSBox either had problems emulating the sound, or the sound for the DOS version was just awful. But I didn't really experience the Amiga sound because I was mostly playing the game during a time when I had people around me and I was supposed to be working, so I had the sound off.

• Technically, I guess there are multiple "Moonstones" that you can obtain in the Valley of the Gods, and you need to wait until yours corresponds with the right phase of the moon (shown between turns) before you enter Stonehenge to win the game. In a multi-player game, this would give other players a chance to defeat your character while you wait. In a single-player game, everything else on the map is probably dead by then, so you just end up passing a few turns until the moon aligns.

   

If I have the "new moon" Moonstone, I have a lot of waiting to do.

   
It took me about 5 false starts to finally win the game, even against the pathetic computer AI. Once I had the four keys, I went to the Valley of the Gods, where the Guardian--a whirling genie-like creature, was probably the easiest enemy in the game. (At that point, I had been used to fighting 3 creatures at once and 15 creatures total.)

    

It killed me here, but only because I stopped to take a screenshot.

     

After defeating the Guardian, I returned to Stonehenge with the Moonstone and got the endgame. "You have completed the quest," the end titles informed me, before taking me to the "ceremony of the Moonstone." In said ceremony, my warrior stood triumphant on a platform in the middle of Stonehenge while scantily-clad girls danced around him.

     

      

Then a portal opened up in the heavens...

    

    

...and my knight was sucked up into the night sky to become a constellation. I'm not sure how much of a "reward" that is. But the game deserves credit for a series of victory screens more interesting and complex than the typical RPG that takes dozens of hours.

    

I suspect this would actually kind of suck.

        

As I said, I had fun with the game once I got the hang of combat. The process of exploring the ruins and finding items is satisfying and relatively quick, and character improvements from both equipment and attributes is immediately noticeable in combat. (Without the extra enemies towards the end, the game would be far too easy.) Let's see how it does on a GIMLET:

    

• 2 points for a fairly minimal game world.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Creation is nothing special--you just select a name and a color--but as above, development is swift and satisfying.

• 2 points for a couple of NPCs who help you out, but there's no interaction.

    

This guy just barely qualifies as an NPC.

     

• 3 points for foes that act differently depending on type, forcing you to adapt. Alas, no role-playing encounters, but it's not that sort of game.

• 3 points for an action-oriented combat that nonetheless makes you think and plan.

    

A "mudman" waits for me to recover.

     

• 3 points for a decent set of equipment.

     

Purchasing items in town.

      

• 4 points for an economy that never loses value (you always need to heal, if nothing else)

• 2 points for a main quest.

     

The game's final screen.

   

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are fun, and what I heard of the sound in the Amiga version was serviceable, but I have no patience for joystick-only interfaces.

• 6 points for gameplay. The game is meant to be replayed, and offers a slightly different game depending on what knight you choose (each knight has a different starting area). It's brisk and fun, and offers a satisfying challenge in its difficulty.

That gives us a final score of 32, which isn't too bad, particularly given that it's not really a classic RPG. Morever, it's the first British game to break the "weirdness" barrier that I talked about in my entry on Heavy on the Magick--although we have to note that the Brits still don't show any signs of understanding classic RPG conventions. [Ed. And as we learned in the comments, the game isn't British but rather Canadian.]

    

At least the tagline is accurate.

    

I had a feeling that our friends at the perpetually annoying Amiga Power would love this one. After all, it has virtually no RPG elements and spends nearly its entire wad on graphics and sound. So I was surprised to see reviewer Neil West rating it only a 73/100, basically saying that its not quite enough of an action game and not quite enough of an RPG. Overall, Moonstone was pretty controversial among reviewers, with ratings from a low of 48 (Power Play) to a high of 100 (Top Secret). American magazines tended to overlook this one.
    

An interview on a fan site credits Todd Prescott with the game's concept. He indicates he was inspired by "a combination of D&D and the board games Talisman and The Dark Tower." He approached a colleague, Rob Anderson, and Anderson handled most of the programming. For combat, the pair was heavily influenced by the action game Barbarian (1987). Prescott indicates that the game never had a U.S. release because Toys R Us thought it was too violent. The limited release unfortunately sank plans for a Moonstone 2. This was Prescott's only game; Anderson went on to a longer career at Mindscape, Electronic Arts, and Sega (among others), and currently lists himself as an independent video game developer. None are RPGs, so we won't be encountering him again.

Moonstone seems to have a lot of retro-fan love these days, and I understand why. It's not going to be part of my soul or anything, but it was a fun way to kill a couple of days in a hotel room. Let's see if the same can be said of another Mindscape title, Knightmare.

****

Alas, Fer & Flamme continues to give me trouble. A kind commenter sent along the French manual, which allowed me to advance through character creation. The problem is, when I get to the end of the creation process, the game insists on saving the party to disk. I insert a blank disk, give the party a name, and hit the "$" key as prompted, and then get this:

    

     

Unless there's an obvious workaround I'm missing, this game might not be playable after all.