BRIEF: King Kong 2: Yomigaeru Densetsu (1986)

 

This game was never released in English; only through a 2000 patch am I playing.

      

King Kong 2: Yomigaeru Densetsu

"King Kong 2: The Legend Returns"

Japan

Konami (developer and publisher)

Released 1986 for MSX (mostly unrelated to NES action game from same year, although both are from Konami)

   

Today, we're going to coin a new keyword: "hydlike." It describes, as you may guess, the sub-genre of RPGs embodied by Hydlide (1984). You can argue that Hydlide didn't do it first, but I don't really care. Rogue wasn't the first "roguelike," either. Hydlide works better for the portmanteau.

   

The sub-genre is characterized by the following:

        

• Action gameplay   

• A squat, childlike protagonist with a defined name and starting attributes. There is no meaningful character creation process.

• Simplistic combat, either by bumping into the enemy or by using a single attack button.
  

• "Character development" through increasing some kind of power statistic, often represented as a bar. 

• Limited attributes--either just health or maybe strength and health

• Gameplay across multiple screens in which multiple enemies of the same type move in a random or half-random manner.

• Limited inventories. You might have a few items (say, weapon, armor, shield) with a handful of obvious upgrades throughout the game. You might be able to carry a few potions that you can use at will.

     

I would consider these the core elements, although I'll take nominations for more. ("Relentless music that you cannot turn off independently of the rest of the sound" might be a good one; it certainly is for King Kong 2.) A game could miss maybe one of these and still get slapped with the label. More than one, and I might consider it at least a hybrid.

      

I kill an enemy while others lurk nearby.

      

Hydlikes tend to walk the razor's edge on my definition of an RPG. Sometimes they make it. Hydlide itself did. It had both a strength bar and a life bar, which increased in maximums as the character's experience did. Combat success was based partly on that strength bar, and it had a small inventory of items. Rambo, although similar, was a pure action game because the "Power" bar's improvement depended on finding food, not killing enemies or solving quests, and combat success was based entirely on the player's skill and the character's inventory (i.e., not on any underlying character attributes). (It gets confusing because I played Rambo to the end anyway, but that's because it was so short I made an exception.) Courageous Perseus had attack and defense scores that determined success in combat, and they increased with experience, but there was no inventory.

    

King Kong 2 is yet another hydlike. It is not a sequel to anything. Rather, it is based on the 1986 American film King Kong Lives, which was known in Japan as King Kong 2. (The film was a sequel to 1976's King Kong, not the original.) The setup follows the basic plot lines of the film. Although King Kong closed with the beast lying dead in the World Trade Center Plaza, we learn in the sequel that he didn't die; he was just badly injured. A government surgeon plans to replace his damaged heart with an artificial one, but he needs a blood transfusion to accompany the procedure, and since Kong is the only known member of his species, they're out of luck. An adventurer named Hank Mitchell agrees to search for another one in Borneo. For some reason, in the game, Mitchell's name is shortened by one l and "Borneo" becomes "Golneo."

         

"Mitchel" arrives in "Golneo" at the beginning of the game.

      

Really, the entire Kong thing is a framing story. In his quest to find Kong, Mitchel fights so many fantastic creatures that the game makes more sense as a fantasy, particularly with the use of "magic points." Gameplay is what you'd expect in a hydlike: you run around from screen to screen, fighting various creatures after you learn their movement patterns. There's one attack, using the SPACE bar, with maybe half a dozen weapons that you can find throughout the game. There are occasional huts that you can enter to find shops and clues.

        

I get a somewhat incomprehensible hint.

         

But King Kong 2 fails as an RPG in a couple of ways. There are no attributes to increase with leveling except maximum health, and I don't generally regard health alone as significant enough character development to meet my first criteria. (There are magic points, too, but these are "found" rather than achieved by leveling.) I don't believe character level influences attack power; only the type of weapon does that. (Every 10 levels, you can increase your movement speed, which has some effect on combat success, but . . . come on.) There is, however, a limited inventory of items, including spells that expend magic power and herbs you can eat to restore health.

The inventory is limited, but it does meet my qualifications under this point.

     

The game is quite hard. Your health doesn't regenerate on its own; you have to find herbs or pay for healing, and both options involve fighting monsters, which could easily leave you worse than when you started. I've seen other sites call this game "grindy," but grinding only works when at least one resource (usually health) is inexhaustible as long as the player is willing to sacrifice time. That's not King Kong 2.

  

The key problem with combat is that you have to be right up against an enemy to strike him. There is maybe a single pixel where you can strike him but he can't strike you. Otherwise, you have to be willing to take damage to deal damage. And then there are creatures that you can only strike from behind, or that only take damage from certain weapons, or that have erratic movement patterns. For instance, an early enemy called "wildboars" lumber along perpendicular to you, then turn to face you, then suddenly rush in a charge. "Grassworms" attack in arcs that seem like they ought to be foreseeable, yet almost always caught me off-guard.

       

I could never find the right pattern for these guys.

        

Enemy AI is also fairly diabolical. It would be impressive if it wasn't annoying. I'm not an expert in this type of action game by any means, but it seems to me that among others I've played, the best strategy is to usually study the enemies' movement patterns, anticipate them, and have the pointy end of your sword waiting when they show up. That doesn't work here. Enemies actively avoid your facing direction and will thus almost never walk into your swing. They know your strategy. If you desperately need them to go left, they will always go right. If you think you've figured out that pattern and thus plan for them going right, they'll somehow figure it out and go left.

    

You could argue that the game is still quite "easy" despite all of this because if you die, you simply have to hit "Continue" to resurrect on the same screen with a full health total and no loss of experience or items. But even here, the game has a final screw to twist.

     

If I had bought this game without knowing anything about it, I'd have been rather unhappy that, except for a few statues, King Kong himself only makes a brief appearance in the endgame sequence. To get to the end, you have to collect clues, solve inventory puzzles, and win at least 15 boss battles to finally find Lady Kong and lure her with some fruit. You bring her to a helicopter pad and radio the helicopter for the winning sequence. (All screen shots after this point are from YouTube videos, not my own experience.)

        

The few moments in which you lead Lady Kong are the only time a Kong appears in-game.

     

If you reach the end having taken fewer than 365 game days and used less than 33 lives, you get the "good" ending in which Lady Kong's transfusion saves King Kong's life, and both Kongs are returned to Golneo to romp around with their new baby. (This ending is quite a bit rosier than the film's.) If you met the deadline but used more than 33 lives, you get the same basic ending but with no mention of Baby Kong. If you used more than 365 days, you return from your adventures to find that King Kong has died.

         

If you take too long.

A shot from the "good" ending.

     

If I played this one honestly, there's no doubt that I would use more than 365 days and more than 33 lives. But then, I'm not great at action games, which is why I play RPGs instead, which this isn't, which is why you got a BRIEF.

Orb Quest, Part 1: The Search for Seven Wards: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

  

In CRPGs, whoever succeeds at one task always gets the burden of the next task.

        

Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards

United States

QWare (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Macintosh

Date Started: 9 May 2021

Date Ended: 14 May 2021
Total Hours: 19 (including about 10 hours of probably-unnecessary mapping)
Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 24
Ranking at Time of Posting: 171/417 (41%)          

      

Summary:

The first Macintosh-native RPG has an Ultima basis in its top-down open-world exploration, its interchangeable towns, and its fairly basic approach to combat. But it also has a few surprises during its "Disassembulet of Yendor" questline that make it worth playing.

     

**** 

     

In the first entry, I had explored the land and found the first of the seven wards. The seven wards were all found within pyramids, but at the beginning of the game, you can only find one. It locks the rest of the pyramids after you find it, with the message that you have to be judged on the Island of the Mystics. The first trick was getting to the island, because there aren't any boats in this game.

   

It turns out that while every weapon, armor, and spell store has the same inventory, the towns’ magic stores each sells a different list. Because the economy in the game is so tight, I was never able to experiment and find out exactly what they all do. You can only have five or six magic items in your inventory at once. Some of them are "always on" and serve as supplemental armor, like the magic helm, magic shield, and steel gauntlets. Some seemed to duplicate the game's spells, like "Staff of Curing" and "Wand of Missiles." There are various potions and items that boost attributes, including restoring attributes lost to various creatures (more below). A "Change Potion" changes your sex, along with the related attributes.

         

Only Three Rivers sells these items.

       

But there are also a lot of mysteries. I purchased a "Black Box," but it was empty. A "Book of Lists" just seems to repeat the words "Book of Lists" repeatedly. I can't imagine what an "Amulet of Truth" does. An "Endure Fire Potion" seems like a good idea until you realize there's no fire in the game—except for that caused by the "Matchbook," which simply burned me.

        

Well, that was useful.

    

Three Rivers sells a "Ring of Water," a limited-duration item that lets you cross water. Unfortunately, every second you spend on the waves carries a chance of causing the ring to rust. This gives you about eight squares' warning to find dry land. The duration that the ring lasts seems to shorten as the game goes by. I spent a lot of time just exploring with my first one, but my last one barely got me to the Island of Mystics. I used the first one to confirm that the world does wrap, but I had already mapped all but a couple of islands.

          

The Orb's "World View" ability later confirmed the geography.

            

The Island of the Mystics was one of these. After I reached and mapped it, I entered the fortress on it. To prove myself "worthy," I had to pass a challenge. It turned out that I needed to do this six times. That is, after every ward found, I had to buy a Ring of Water, return to the Island of the Mystics, and pass a new challenge before I could get in to the next pyramid. The challenges added a fun dimension to what would have otherwise been a standard "Disassembulet of Yendor" quest. In order, they were:

 

1. Solve a logic puzzle to determine which door a throne is behind.

  

2. Play a little mini-game in which monster icons flashed randomly and quickly on the screen. You have to click on the same icon that's highlighted in the row at the bottom without clicking on a bouncing orb. This game was a bit unfair. I think it was designed for a much slower Mac. I had to cheat it a bit by clicking out of the emulator window, freezing the action, so I could study the pattern of icons and click in the right place.

     

It doesn't look hard, but each icon is up for less than a second.

       

3. Navigate a black maze. This one is solved with a clue that tells you the exact path to take. All those clues were not otherwise very helpful. You might be able to solve it just by mapping.

     

This is not a box with four lines sticking out, as I originally thought.

      

4. A crazy game in which you had to try to score points by clicking buttons under certain conditions. I read the instructions multiple times, and I'm still not sure what I was supposed to do. Unfortunately, it had the same problem as #2, even worse. The symbols came and went so fast there was absolutely no way to follow the instructions. I couldn't earn a single point no matter what I did. Fortunately, LanHawk had the same experience and sent me instructions for hex-editing my way past this obstacle. [Edit: Thanks to Mark's comment below, we now know that there was no speed issue; the entire point of the test is for the conditions to make no sense. Hitting "cancel" on the subsequent screen instead of starting the test leads to your designation as "worthy" and advances the plot, no hex editing necessary.]

         

I think I need a drink.

        

5. Answer three trivia questions related to monsters and items in the game.

       

Luckily, I'd been attacked by enough of them.

        

6. Solve a logic puzzle in which I indicated which of four towers held the orb. This one took me two tries. I didn't quite understand what some of the clues meant. Other than the fact that the Prison Tower has no windows (which makes anything else you say about it moot), why wouldn't you be able to see any of the towers from any of the others?

     

If you can get it in one, you did better than I did.

      

After solving each of these puzzles, I could go to a new pyramid and get another ward. Obtaining the wards, in contrast to the puzzles, was remarkably similar each time. There was a brief maze, then a 5 x 5 grid of squares with the ward in the center. Each square teleports to another square, and I just had to find the right pattern to end up next to the ward. A couple of the mazes had tricks like secret doors, or squares that did damage to the character, but nothing to get worked up about.

       

Finding the last piece.

       

Finding each ward piece increased my "Orb" statistic and provided a new orb power to use. In order, these were "Remove Curse," "Blessing," "World View," "Disintegrate," "Dispel Evil," "Flame Strike," and "Teleport." I only ever used the last one, plus a couple of "World Views."

    

Monsters were both annoying and negligible. They continued to scale with each "level" I made and with each new class of weapon or armor that I bought, so I'm not sure there was much point in doing either. At high levels, they started to get seriously bothersome in their special effects. Brain parasites sap intelligence permanently; IRS agents steal your gold; locust plagues decimate your food stores; and disenchanters drain spell points. (Beholders, oddly, often increased my hit points. I have no idea how that happened.) At the same time, you can just outrun a lot of them and reload when bad things happen. Combat was a constant part of the game and yet not a significant part of the game. I rarely felt my life was in danger, and yet at the same time, I don't think I ever reached my maximum hit points or spell points; monsters and "Cure Wounds" ate them up about as fast as they regenerated.

     

When I got the final ward, I got a message: "Congratulations!! The Seven are now one. The Orb is restored. Hustle ye now to the castle and place the Orb upon the Throne of the Ancient Kings." The castle is enclosed by mountains, but the Orb's final power, "Teleport," gets you there.

        

I enter a vast, empty castle that has no purpose except for the endgame message.

   

I expected a final battle, but there was nothing. The castle had some inert guards and was curiously large considering nothing actually happens there except the endgame. I walked up to the throne, dropped the Orb, and got the endgame message:

    

The Orb opens a gateway to the realm of Trigoth, the source of all the evil that invades your land. As restorer of the Orb, you must now travel to the Dark side to destroy the Black Monarch and banish Evil for all time . . . The quest will be fraught with peril and will lead into deep caverns guarded by vile creatures. Be brave and be sure to catch this next adventure coming soon to a store near you!

      

Alas, it did not come soon to a store near anyone. As far as I can tell, Qware (do you supposed they pronounced it "cue-ware" or "kware"?) of Richardson, Texas, never produced another game, and neither did the two authors, Edward Schultz and Michael Mayer. I tried to track them down, but messages had not been returned at the time of this entry.

   

On a GIMLET, I give the game:

   

• 1 point for a bare-bones game world.

• 2 points for character creation and development. You have a few options for advancement, but as I mentioned, it doesn't really matter.

• 1 point for no NPCs, but I'll give it a point for the lore bits that serve as a kind of placeholder for NPCs. They'd be worth more if the hints were useful. I only understood about half of them, and all but one of those were unnecessary.

         

I assume this is because if you fail the tests, you get kicked back to the mainland with only 5 hit points.

       

• 3 points for encounters and foes. I'm giving most of that to the puzzles that surround collecting the ward pieces. Monsters themselves were unmemorable except in bad ways.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Perhaps the other classes have a different experience, but for me it was just attack and heal.

• 3 points for equipment. There's some potentially interesting stuff in the list, and I'm going to be charitable and assume that some of it is useful.

• 4 points for the economy. It was very tight. I never felt that I had enough money. I had to really think about what to buy, when to splurge on an upgrade. Only a lack of complexity keeps it from scoring any higher.

• 3 points for a main quest of seven stages. There were no side-quests or role-playing options, but there were some interesting steps and interludes.

• 1 point for graphics, sound, and interface. The icons are functional, but the sound is horribly annoying and you can't even turn it off. Requiring a mouse for movement is simply inexcusable, and this is compounded by requiring the player to hit the special Mac "command" button along with every key. Honestly, why is "A" itself not good enough for "Attack"?

      

Only on a Mac would a gelatinous cube have a face.

       

• 4 points for gameplay. It's open-world geographically but not narratively. It's only a bit too easy and lasts only a bit too long (even if you cut out the mapping).

    

That gives us a final score of 24--certainly not epic, not even "recommended," but better than a lot of the other Ultima clones during the period. At least this one had me looking forward to each new puzzle. If I'd had a Mac during the period, I would have found it an acceptable diversion for a few hours.

Darkside of Xeen: We Know Your First Name is Sheltem

Here we go again.

          

Big things to talk about this time, starting with the spaceship we found in Area B1. After a little exploration, we discovered that it's Sheltem's--not that this party has any idea who Sheltem is. The other one, which we cannot enter, might be Corak's, or it might be . . . well, read on.

    

The ship is specifically an escape shuttle from the much larger ship that Sheltem flew away from Terra at the end of Might and Magic III. It has some giant stone heads in it that don't do much. Most of the computers are powered down. There's an option to fire weapons at the two forward nacelles, but we don't do it.

      

This probably destroys a town.

     

One computer that is active contains a log written by Sheltem, and it contains massive spoilers, plot twists, and reinterpretations of previous events. It begins with Sheltem on Terra, prior to the beginning of the series. Two agents of the Ancients, one of them clearly Corak, have arrived on Terra to disable Sheltem and take him off-world for some kind of repair. Yes, Sheltem is some kind of construct--a robot, android, or artificial intelligence--created by the Ancients to protect the young world. Their reasoning for removing him from this post isn't explicitly given, but he seems to have been conducting unauthorized "experiments." 

   

After his rendition, Sheltem thinks about the two directives the Ancients have given him: 1) obey the orders of the Ancients; and 2) protect Terra. He reasons that although the Ancients haven't given him any orders, if they do give him orders, it will almost certainly be to shut down, which would impede him from following the second directive. Thus, he cannot accept any orders from the Ancients. He shuts off his "auditory sensors" to avoid hearing orders, then overpowers the two agents and locks them in a stasis field. With them out of the way, he has the time to "remove the obedience directives" from his programming.

        

Sheltem relates events from the first game.

         

Lacking the fuel to get back to Terra, Sheltem lands on the VARN of Might and Magic, one of four worlds attached to the central CRON. He's upset to find no fuel, but since the CRON is headed to Terra anyway, he just needs to wait a few years. In that time, he starts to get up to some mischief, including plugging into CRON's network (the "Wire") and launching one of the VARNs into a star. Curiously, this one is "not intended for Terra," giving the impression that the CRON roams the galaxy, dropping off the various VARNs at different locations. I guess that makes sense; otherwise, why not have just one? Anyway, Sheltem plans to launch the CRON and the rest of the VARNs into Terra's sun when he reaches the planet.

   

Corak, one of the agents originally sent to capture Sheltem, escapes from his confinement. Sheltem hides by impersonating King Alamar, using the role for evil: "Today . . . I ordered my men to release the monsters in my dungeon upon the land and begin cutting down trees in a nearby forest. I have also issued a decree doubling taxes on my peasants." But "some natives" (i.e., the party from Might and Magic) foil Sheltem's plans and force him to flee to the central CRON.

      

The Might and Magic II party sails off into the sunset. Maybe they'll return in XI.

      

In CRON, between the first two games, Sheltem ambushes Corak and "separates his memory module from his body." The "natives" of course interpret the resulting quest as reuniting Corak's "spirit" with his body. The version of Sheltem that the party fights at the end of Might and Magic II is revealed to be a copy of Sheltem's personality, left on CRON while Sheltem made his escape to Terra. As you recall, the party foiled the copy's plans to drive CRON and the remaining VARNs into the sun. Here's where it gets interesting. This entire time, I assumed that the CRON successfully made it to Terra, but now I realize that was never confirmed (although at the end of II, it's suggested that's going to happen). Instead, according to Corak's logbook, the CRON was last seen "on a course to exit the system in three months." Thus, the original CRON and at least three VARNs are still out there, as is the party from the original two games. That clears up my confusion about where they went between II and III.

    

Sheltem's entries go on to describe the invasion of his ship by Corak and "natives of Terra" (i.e., the party from III). Sheltem flees Terra, Corak and the "natives" in pursuit, and lands on the "X.E.E.N. project." Okay, XEEN is another acronym. Xeno-something, I bet. Anyway, here's where it gets really interesting: Corak's escape pod landed in lava "and is stuck there," and the Terran natives' ship burned up in the atmosphere, "but not before safely beaming the Terran natives to the surface." What the . . . this entire time, we've known that the default party from III ends up on Enroth in time to influence events in VII. I just assumed their ship went off course after III and wound up there. But now it turns out that they did make it to Xeen--specifically, the Clouds side, according to Sheltem. Where are they? How do they get from here to Enroth? 

       

A plot twist!

       

Sheltem's last log entries show him leaving the ship to go conquer Xeen, bringing us to the present. Of course, my Xeen-native party has no idea what to make of any of this.

   

With 10 maps left to explore, the party rolled the dice and headed for C2, a pure desert square in the center of the map. Soon after arriving, we found an altar that temporarily provides a 15-level boost, better than the well in Nightshadow but less accessible. There were several genie lamps that offered a choice between 500,000 experience, 10,000 gold, and 500 gems. We chose the experience each time. I know that gold is going to be the bigger problem, but I'm making well over 10,000 per day on interest. I don't think that much is going to help.

        

Sweet. If only this was near a town, or a mirror.

        

The map also had the last two magic boulders that I had discovered a couple of sessions ago in C3. The answer to their riddle was an obvious PALADIN. Getting it correct got us 1 million experience plus pieces of obsidian armor at each of the boulder locations.

    

The next few maps went down fast. I explored B3, A3, and A2 and didn't really demarcate the encounters well. I found a message in a bottle about witches in Lakeside--already solved that problem. Vesper the Wizard wanted us to find the handle for his staff; we already had it. He gave us the pass to Sandcaster. There were barbarians everywhere, and a couple of opportunities to destroy their camps. But we also came to a barbarian stronghold, where the chief, Yag, asked if we'd come to fight them. I said no, and he filled up our packs with food.

          

The Great Western Tower was locked as usual, but a nearby defrocked high priest of Mok, Dreyfus, said that I could get in from the top.

   

The whole area was dotted with more mines in the Gemstone range, each offering a few walls where I could try to mine rubies, emeralds, sapphires, or diamonds. There was a chance of those same veins "exploding" (I'm not sure the creators really have a handle on the dangers of mining) and doing a huge amount of damage to the party. The damage seems to be based on percentage rather than raw values, and a couple of hits were enough to not only knock some of my characters unconscious but to break their armor, which these days can cost tens of thousands of gold pieces to fix. 

         

I'm not sure rubies are worth the risk.

     

Nearby, a group of wagoners offered to make weapons and armor from the precious gems--at a cost of regular gems. Since I'd already found obsidian stuff by now, the weapons and armor they could make didn't really do much for me. Eventually, I got sick of reloading and stopped bothering with the mines. One of the mines had three sabretooths, the only time I've encountered those creatures in the game.

   

Kramer the Caravan Owner asked us to wipe out the ogres in Ogre Pass, which is the kind of quest I think I might refuse in a more sophisticated game. (Is it called "Caravan Owner Pass?") Ogre Pass is in D3, which happened to come up in my next random roll anyway. This central map transitions from desert in the north to forest in the south. The area was full of ogres and vulture rocs, which didn't seem affected by my vulture repellent. The Pass runs through a couple of mountain ranges in the middle, and here I found the ogre village, led by Chief Graalg. I had several options in speaking to him, one obsequious, one domineering, and one in which we simply asked him to upload his fealty to the Dragon Pharaoh. We chose that one, and he said Alamar is in charge now, and attacked. It did not go well for him. In the ruins of his fort, we found two energy disks.

        

Graalg opens negotiations with a faux pas.

      

With six energy disks, we went back to Ellinger, who was able to open the second level of Castle Kalindra. There--amid a bunch of safes with combination locks we couldn't open--we found Dimitri, former captain of the Queen's Guard, bitter and disillusioned over his failure to protect her. His daughter, Megan, said that he could probably come up with a decent plan to rescue the queen, but not while he was in this funk. She said that we might be able to restore his spirits with a magical songbird found in the dungeon of the Isle of Lost Souls, for which she gave us the key.

    

Can't we just beat some sense into him?

     

The dungeon was five levels deep. Each level required us to accomplish a task before moving on to the next one. On the first level, we had to turn a bunch of hourglasses. On the second, we had dials that we had to turn upwards before drinking from fountains, each of which gave a huge amount of experience to one character. Level 3 had us pull four levers. Level 4 had a series of slippery floors that kept dumping us back at the beginning of the level. We had to pull various levers to deactivate them and then follow a statue's instruction to pull another lever to open the way down. Some voice at the stairway down kept demanding increasing amounts of money to let us pass. It ultimately came to almost 300,000 gold. I had to cast "Lloyd's Beacon" to get to the bank and back.

    

Throughout all of these levels, we were attacked by copious minotaurs and gorgons, which in this game is just a more extreme version of minotaurs. My level 50 party was capable of pounding them pretty good, but they caused a few uncertain moments.

         

I just fought one of these in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. It was pretty epic.

         

The last level was full of birds waiting to be freed. A bunch of them were called things like Lark of Luck and Magpie of Might; freeing them resulted in a +6 boost in the associated attribute. There were Parrots of Prophecy, each of which had the same few lines about stopping Alamar from taking over. Four statues put together a message that seemed to be from Alamar himself:

       

 Long have I traveled through deep, dark space

    Only to land and take over this place

I am saying this now for all to hear

    None from this world shall I ever fear

The soul maze inside is dark, dreary, and vast

    The name found within is the clue to my past 

This dungeon stands as a tribute to me

    My name in walls for all to see

     

Yes, we're back to names in walls. And as in Might and Magic, the last level of the Lost Souls dungeon had a wall configuration that spelled out: MY NAME IS SHELTEM.

    

I never found the twisted monsters that the people of Lakeside supposedly became, but I did find the Songbird of Serenity. I brought it back to Dimitri, who roused from his stupor. He suggested that we retrieve Queen Kalindra's crown from a third-level wall safe and bring it to her. Only she has the combination to the safe, though, so we'll have to find our way into Blackfang first. Dimitri suggested we talk to Ambrose, the Queen's knight, who I had met in B1.

   

The third level wasn't open yet, but Dimitri gave us the combination to the second floor safes. They all contained energy disks--six of them--so I was able to immediately return to Ellinger and get the basement of the castle opened. It had a few safes, a prisoner named Guido the Convict who gave me the combination to a couple of the safes, and a "maximum security" wing with three power liches and three dragon mummies. The power liches were simple enough, but I couldn't defeat the dragon mummies even with buffed characters. Their attacks were capable of killing one character per round outright. I left them for later.

       

The deadliest enemies so far.

      

Back in B1, Ambrose, the Queen's Knight, asked who sent us. When we answered Dimitri, he related that he'd captured a griffin to rescue Kalindra at Blackfang, but the griffin won't let him ride. He wanted us to take a bridle to be enchanted. I remembered that Natasha in Sandcaster was looking for something to enchant. 50,000 gold later, I was back at Ambrose with the bridle; he promptly rode off to Blackfang.

       

Is this why griffins hate my knight so much? This guy has been harassing them?

      

I encountered him again there, complaining that the vampires inside were too powerful for him, so we went in his stead. The castle was several small levels, with a linear path that took us from Level 1 to Level 3 and then back down into the basement. There were a lot of vampires--regular female vampires, male vampire lords, and female vampire royals--but they all died in one or two hits.

        

The attack animation on these ladies is particularly good.

      

After cleaving through some octopods, I found Queen Kalindra in a corner of the flooded basement. She said that she couldn't leave Blackfang because she was a vampire. She suggested that Dimitri might have a solution, but Dimitri just went on about retrieving the queen's crown, so it looks like I'm stuck there until I find three more disks.

      

I don't understand why she can't be a vampire back in her own castle.

      

I finished off this session with a couple more map squares. C3, being sort of in the middle of everything, had an amalgam of the squares around it. It had desert to the north, part of the Gemstone range in the middle, and forest to the south. There were ogres, dark wolves, and medusa sprites. There were two more Gemstone Mines, one of which had a "God of the Minerals" who offered to replenish all of the veins for 250,000 gold. Since they were pretty worthless to me, I declined. (I suppose if at some point, I find myself out of gold but having a surplus of gems, I could pay the wagoners gems to make weapons and then sell them, a very roundabout way of converting gems to gold.) I fell down a troll hole, which seems like a problem from seven games ago.

        

How about you pay us 250,000 gold pieces to put all the gems back?

        

I wrap up having just entered the Great Eastern Tower (the rest of F3 was just woods, gargoyles, and mantis ants), where I feel sure to find a couple more power disks. But I still have a ton of open quests:

    

• CL A2 11,9: Southern Sphinx (need key)
• CL B3 11,0: Tower for which I don't have the key
• CL D1 10, 5: Tower for which I don't have the key
• CL E3: Return to Dungeon of Death when have higher thief skill
• DS A3 4, 9: Great Western Tower (approach from top)
• DS A4 13, 15: Return to Luna with the three gold statuettes
• DS A4: Return to Castle Kalindra basement when stronger
• DS B2: Spaceship stuck in lava
• DS D2 0,5: Great Pyramid (need key)
• DS F2 6,10: Dungeon (need key)
• DS F3: Recover Jewel of Ages from Great Eastern Tower
• DS F4 6,7: Return Jewel of Ages to Thaddeus
• Find rest of energy disks for Castle Kalindra
• Get the pegasus statuette from the "head heretical cleric"
• Return to Dragon Cave with higher intelligence
• Return to Necropolis with higher intelligence
• Explore A1
• Explore C1
• Explore E2
• Explore sky road network

    

This game will probably take at least a couple more entries.

Time so far: 24 hours

Game 413: Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards (1986)

       

Orb Quest, Part I: The Search for Seven Wards

United States

QWare (developer and publisher)

Released in 1986 for Macintosh

Date Started: 9 May 2021

         

Orb Quest is not the first RPG that was available for the Macintosh, as there were 1985 ports of Wizardry and the second and third Ultimas. But if we accept that Quarterstaff isn't an RPG at all, but an adventure game, Orb Quest seems to be the first RPG designed natively for the Macintosh. That isn't always a good thing. There are times that the Mac seems too "cute" for its own good--and too in love with its mouse in particular--but nonetheless, it's a historically-important game. It was unavailable for years. In August last year, a copy showed up on eBay and ended up selling for $305. At around the same time, it became available on Macintosh Garden, but copy protection made it impossible to play until a number of dedicated users (including our own LanHawk) cracked it. LanHawk ended up finishing the game himself and sending me all the instructions necessary to get it going on my own.

   

The documentation is still lost, I believe, which creates a conundrum when it comes to the title. When there's a conflict, my policy is generally to go with the best two out of three between the game's title screen, box, and manual. With no manual, there's nothing to break the tie between whether the game has a space between "Orb" and "Quest" and whether it has a "Part I" in its title. I tend to favor the game's main screen and have done so here, but in contrast to what nearly every piece of documentation on the Internet says.

       

Some of the in-game backstory.

       

We also have to piece together the backstory from the game's brief introductory screen plus what contemporary reviews of the time said. It seems to be simple: Evil threatened the land. King Cricken assembled the seven parts ("wards") of an ancient orb that had the power to banish evil. But something interfered with his spell and caused an explosion that annihilated him and scattered the orb. Evil was pushed back temporarily but now has returned. It is up to the hero to find the seven wards and reunite the orb. I hate to start off with a criticism, but is an orb really the best object to use in a "Disassembulet of Yendor" quest? How do you get seven pieces out of an orb? Okay, sure you cut seven equal ungulae. But how do you put it back together?

    

Anyway, character creation has you choose from human, elf, dwarf, hobbit, and half-orc races; spellcaster, fighter, and thief classes; and female, male, and--in perhaps a "first"--other gender. [Ed.: As commenters reminded me, Ultima III had the same "other" option three years earlier.] Your attributes--strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma--are rolled on a scale of roughly 30 to 100, modified by race, class, and gender selection. For a "woke" game, the effects of gender selection on attributes is interesting. Males gain 10 points of strength and intelligence over women, plus 5 points of constitution, but lose 10 points of wisdom and dexterity and 5 points of charisma. "Others" have a male's intelligence, dexterity, and charisma, but a female's strength, wisdom, and constitution; in other words, they get two good attributes and four bad ones.

       

That low intelligence is going to come back to haunt me.

    

The character starts on a monochrome plain, near a castle and town, with a random amount of hit points, food, and gold. Already, the game and I have some problems, as while some actions have a keyboard shortcut, movement isn't one of them. Until this moment, there were only two things I found unforgivable in CRPG design. One is level caps that an average player would hit before the last 5% of the game. The other is forcing the player to click the mouse to move. Unfortunately, this game manages to find a third one that I didn't even known existed: playing a piercing tone with every move. You can turn sound off, but it doesn't seem fair to force the player to miss all sound effects just because there's one stupid one. Oh, and I would note that turning sound "off" doesn't prevent an error message from playing every time you bump into a wall or mountain.

          

Starting out.

        

The menus suggest there is a fixed equipment ladder, with armor starting at "Unprotected" and moving upwards through cloth, leather, ring mail, chain mail, and plate mail, and ending with a magic cloak. Weapons similarly start with "bare hands" and go upward through dagger, battle axe, short sword, bastard sword, and crossbow before ending with a magic wand. I assume some of these things won't be available to my thief character. Already we see a fusion of tropes common to Ultima, but tempered with a little Dungeons and Dragons (including the specific attribute order).

    

The castle is surrounded by mountains that I cannot yet cross, and the other structure--I assume it's a town--has some water between me and it, so I start heading north and east. Immediately, I'm attacked by a pair of buccaneers. Combat only has one action ("Attack"), plus spells. My thief gets a couple of spell points, but at the outset it's only enough for "Cure Wounds." I kill the buccaneers with my firsts, but it costs me almost half my hit points and nets me 11 gold. A few steps later, another buccaneer takes me down to 36 hit points. I cast "Cure Wounds" twice, but the first one only gets me 8 hit points back, and the second fails. Fortunately, it appears that both spell points and hit points regenerate every few steps, but food depletes fairly quickly, too.

          

Trading blows with a buccaneer.

      

As with the first Ultima, enemies pop up in the environment when they're a few steps away, and unlike a lot of games, they don't have some special ability to move faster than you do on the diagonal, so I'm able to outrun a couple of them on the way to the nearest town. This turns out to be called Barrowsmith. You can only save in towns, which is a difficulty setting that I enjoy provided that the game is otherwise fair. Hit point and spell point restoration stop while in town, but so does food loss.

The town is large but simple. It has a food shop, a weapon shop, an armor shop, and a tavern. I buy a dagger, cloth armor, some food, and a drink, which gives me a tip. I assume the higher orders of drinks, which are expensive, give additional tips. There's a large area in the center of town that's inaccessible. It doesn't look like there's anything there, and as far as I can tell, there's no secret door mechanic. The only commands are "Attack," "Enter," "Inventory," "Use," "Drop," and "Barter." That is, except for a mysterious, grayed-out command called "Global Thermonuclear War." This is obviously an allusion to WarGames (1983), but I have no idea what it means in the context of this game. Wow--Matthew Broderick is 59. I guess we're never getting that Ferris Bueller sequel.

    

Buying a weapon.

        

For some reason, I expected the game to be difficult and grindy, but it's not so bad. I found I could generally keep up with healing against the starting enemies (satyrs, killer moths, buccaneers, bad bats, floating eyes, pygmies), although it was a good idea to stay near a town and periodically save. Every once in a while, an enemy has a treasure chest, and you get a couple hundred gold pieces instead of the usual 0-10. These were the keys to acquiring better items quickly. The thief can also try to steal inventory, but the risk (loss of all your gold and whatever items you had in that category) is too high to be worth the risk.

        

The game has mostly normal enemies and then this really weird one.

      

The opening area has only a couple of towns. Mountains or sea block most ways out. Swamps don't serve as a barrier, but you don't want to walk through them because they sap hit points. To get out of the starting area, you have to cross one of two bridges, both of which are guarded by trolls who demand a 100-gold piece toll. There's no way to fight them instead, so the first task is earning that money.

     

There are no explicit levels, but I noticed I was gaining maximum hit points and spell points, the latter at a rate of 1 for every 100 experience points. I'm not sure if the experience points also serve as a kind of subtle multiplier on your attack rolls. Battles against low-level foes seem to get a bit easier as I earn more experience, but then again I also upgrade my weapon a couple of times. Unfortunately, as I gain more experience, the game starts throwing more difficult and numerous foes at me. The level scaling seems to only apply to the maximum level of each generated enemy, as I still get single buccaneers. But if the generated enemy is a "white knight" or an "iron ape," I might as well just kill the emulator and restart.   

        

The truth is, I was thinking about doing something worse than "crossing without paying."

    

In the wider world, I soon found a city called Petrburg that, in addition to the weapon, armor, and food shops, also had a healer and a shop selling magic items and spells. The spell shop seems to be how you acquire new spells, so I'm not sure what the "Tome of Magic" in the magic shop does. The "Ring of Wishes" is also a mystery.

    

Fighting battles around Petrburg, I discover that enemy chests sometimes contain clues. In fact, they seem to share the same "hint pool" with the taverns. So far, I've learned:

      

• Beware when the fat lady sings! 
• Beware the floating eye, for it brings bad luck.
• Many come back to town after meeting the cube.
• The swamps are known as the little death.
• The shape changer assumes more than just your form.
• Legend says that only the pure of spirit, the strong of arm, the swift of foot, and the keen of mind may enter the pyramids and succeed.
• Levels maybe make combat easier.
• Many fall upon hard times after meeting the evil eye.
• Only an adventurer with a keen mind will ever reach the center of the pyramids.
• There is protection from dragons to be had.
• Tarry not in thy quest. Evil grows stronger.
• In the temples, it is said that one receives more than what is bought.
• All can be cured within the temple.
• The Orb must be placed upon the throne of the ancient kings.
• Not all places may be reached by foot.
• Judge not and thou will still be judged.
• Few return who behold a beholder. Its powers are many.
• Only by appeasing the spirits may entrance to the pyramids be gained.
• When in darkness, go forward one, left two, left 'til you can go no more, right 'til you can go no more, and left for success.

       

I knew it!!!

         

Near Petrburg is a pyramid. Entering the pyramid, I found myself in a maze with hieroglyphics on the walls. There were no monsters. The maze led to a center, where I found the first ward. It was surrounded by plates that teleported me around the little room. I just had to keep testing plates until I found a sequence that brought me next to the ward. When I picked it up, I got 25 points in my "orb" statistic, and a new menu ("Special") with a "Remove Curse" option. 

       

Trying to approach the first ward.

     

What I do next is only understandable if you know a bit of context. During the period between roughly 7 May and 12 May, I had to grade over 100 papers and other assignments. I'm always looking for something mindless to do in between papers. It can't be too enjoyable, like actually playing an RPG, because I'll get sucked into it and never emerge. But something boring, like mapping a top-down RPG, is ideal. Like grading papers, it's something that you don't really want to be doing. The next paper serves as a break from mapping, and mapping serves as a break from papers. It's perfect.

    

I expect to have to make my own maps for first-person RPGs, but I think the developer should provide one for top-down games, even if it's just a rough sketch to help get your bearings. I don't know if QWare did that for Orb Quest, but I do know that the geography of the place is too complicated to navigate without one. The map probably took about 12 hours total. Dimensionally, it occupies 267 squares north-south and 219 squares east-west. As you can see, a lot of that is blank space, though. I don't know if boats or other methods of crossing water exist in the game--I never saw a hint about them as I visited the towns--but there looks to be at least one important island. There also has to be some way to cross mountains because there's a castle completely encircled by them.

My map of the Orb Quest world. Yes, it looks a bit like Africa and South America have switched places, and there's a land bridge from South America to Australia.

        

The red squares are the poisoned swamps, and as you can see, you have to cross through one huge one to get to the southeast continent. By the way, I want you to imagine me mapping that area, going one row of 13 tiles at a time, figuring confidently that based on the dimensions of the rest of the map, the southern tip of the red area is going to be the end. Only it never ends. There's this trail of single red squares that seems to last forever and ever, and then suddenly it opens up into new, huge continent. There was more than a little swearing that evening.

    

During this mapping, I found seven pyramids. All of them are named after a precious gem, metal, or other material: Emerald, Ivory, Bronze, and so forth. I don't think I tried to enter all of them, but the ones I did try to enter (other than the first, Azure), refused to let me in because I have "yet to be judged at the Island of Mystics." There are 11 cities and towns with names like Cape West, Clearview, New Talos, Three Rivers, Susetta, and Eventide. I didn't exhaustively explore all of them, but none seemed to offer any NPCs or services that I haven't already discussed. 

      

Any chance the "powerful guardian" could give me a lift?

           

I gained a lot of experience during the mapping process, but not as much as you might expect, since well over half my expeditions ended in death and reloading at the previous town. I discovered that chests sometimes contain additional pieces of armor, like steel gauntlets and a magic shield, that you equip and use automatically. I found a Wand of Death at one point, but that character didn't last.

      

Now that I have the map and I'm done grading papers, I suppose the next step is to figure out how to get to that Island of the Mystics. I hope it doesn't linger more than one more entry, because I'm thoroughly sick of the movement system already: If not for that, this would be a perfectly pleasant if somewhat bland Ultima clone.

    

Time so far: 14 hours