Le Maitre des Ames: Trés Agréable

"Menu of the day: disgusting sheep, rancid peas" (?)

I admit I started playing Le Maitre des Ames with the idea that I would probably just put in the six hours, collect the bonus points for trying out a non-English game, and then move on. I was almost relieved when it seemed technical problems would keep me from playing. But with those problems solved and thus no excuse, I pushed forward, and I'll be damned if Le Maitre des Ames doesn't have a real charm about it. It contains several elements that I'm finding for the first time in a first-person CRPG; it's somewhat of an evolution from Dungeon Master on the way to Ultima Underworld.

Let's cover some of the ways this game distinguishes itself from its predecessors:

• Each room has its own character: different furniture, different wall-hangings, and a different look to the doors.

• The game (or, at least, this first level) is arranged in a logical manner. There's a dining room next to the kitchen, for instance, and an armory next to the barracks.

• Monsters are in logical places for logical reasons. Orc guards patrol passages, rats hang out in storerooms, a cook is working in a kitchen, and an exhausted fighter rests in a bedroom.

• You can talk to almost all sentient creatures (not the rats, obviously). Most have interesting things to say.

• You can pick up a lot of the things in the rooms. Unfortunately (see below), I don't know what many of them are.

Picking up a key.

• The game is full of secret doors activated with switches and chains on the walls.

• There are messages all over the walls. Some help me, some taunt me. Some I'm having trouble translating; one seems to say "Nothing will die, but you have to start somewhere." My favorite: "Your passage, only the dust will remember."

• You can split your party and have them explore separately. I found this out when it happened accidentally: one of my characters fell through a hole in the floor and ended up alone. Fortunately, I was able to reunite them.

My dwarf has fallen down a hole and is "absent."

I had several interesting encounters in today's gameplay. The first was with a cook in the kitchens. I'll offer my entire conversation:

 

• Me: Who are you?
• Cook: I am the cook of the royal high court of Vanir
• Me: What are you doing here?
• Cook: I'm making a vinaigrette dressing out of wood lice [I think]
• Me: Who is your king?
• Cook: My king was the greatest of all. He died.
• Me: Who is your master?
• Cook: The great Akkad, but he disappeared a long time ago.
• Me: Who is your god?
• Cook: Nilgar, patron of the traditional high cuisine.
• Me: Do you want to help us?
• Cook: I have no time, what with lunch and everything.
• Me: Give me a clue.
• Cook: Nothing is free in this world, you know?
• Me: Name your price.
• Cook: It will cost you 22 gold pieces.
• Me: Done.
• Cook: Beware of the singing howler mushrooms.

 

I ran into them later.

 

• Me: Come with us.
• Cook: Are you kidding? With all the bugs swarming around here?
• Me: Goodbye and good luck.
• Cook: Your destiny is down the road. Goodbye.

Later, an orc tells me he is a guard of the castle and he's there to keep out intruders like me, that his god is Gol Goroth, the incarnation of evil (and taken from Lovecraft's Cthulhu stories!), and I should "tremble as the demon lord arrives on earth." When I ask him to come with me, he says something like, "Over my dead body, sons of dogs!"

Moments later, we discovered his statement turned out to be quite prophetic.

I run into a man named Rockeux who says he's searching for his old master, Sir Maltorn. I ask him to join me--he seems an obvious candidate for the empty slot the game leaves you for NPCs--but he says he's too exhausted to follow in my footsteps.

Now, not everything is la vie en rose with this game. Obviously, the color sucks. You can't name your characters. Your characters get hungry and you have to eat the food you pick up. Unless I'm missing something, combat lacks the tactics of Dungeon Master and just consists of hitting "fight" repeatedly; when you hit your target, it says "Paf!"

The wimpiest combat sound ever.

Most important, I can't tell what most of the equipment I'm grabbing is, and since each character can only hold up to four items, this is a bit of a handicap. There are some things that look like potions, and weapons and armor that I can't find a way to evaluate against what I already have. And I've yet to figure out anything about the magic system.

Some of you (especially you, Georges) have been a lot of help in translations--if anyone feels like helping me a little more, can you take a look at the manual and see if you can tell me what it says, if anything, about a) the different types of items you can pick up, and how you can tell what they are; and b) casting spells? (I OCR'd the manual but the watermark screws up the text order and keeps me from translating it all at once.) [Later edit: one of my readers got a friend who speaks French to translate the entire manual for me. I can't thank them enough, but I don't know if they want to be mentioned by name on the blog. Suffice to say: merci beaucoup to EH and JVR!]

Pending that, I'm going to probably dip back into Legacy of the Ancients for a day.

A good day's work. A bientôt!

CRPG Tropes

By now, probably everyone is familiar with the glorious thief of time known as TVTropes.org, a self-described "catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction." The site cautions that tropes are "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations," but that they are not clichés. The catalog nonetheless has plenty of examples of clichés, too.

Despite the name, the wiki includes every form of media you can imagine: TV, movies, comic books, art, theater, music, and, of course, video games. Lately, I've taken to visiting the site after each game to see if any tropes are mentioned. There are far more tropes associated with more recent CRPGS, partly because more people know about them, but mostly because tropes require a certain level of storytelling, and the earliest CRPGs didn't have that.

Nonetheless, these are some of my favorite tropes from the games we've played so far:

"Always Chaotic Evil": Every orc that approaches you in Ultima II, every creature in the dungeon in Dungeon Master, everything that moves in Faery Tale Adventure, wants to kill you, and is thus naturally deserving of death themselves. Imagine if CRPGs forced you to treat every such creature as an individual? This trope, by the way, is wonderfully (if unintentionally) subverted in Wizardy, when you randomly encounter "friendly" versions of your foes. I thought one of my commenters had reported encountering a "friendly Werdna" upon achieving the final level of the game, but I can't find that comment.

"Gurrrrglrgug...How are you today?"

"Arbitrary Headcount Limit": Honestly, if I really want to defeat the Chaos Lord, why can't I resurrect every character in the hall of heroes and have them swarm the dungeon? In later games, like Baldur's Gate, I would play a paladin and pretend that he'd sworn an oath to never travel with more than five companions--it was the only way it made sense.

"Dude Where's My Respect": This happens in almost every CRPG. You've been tasked with saving the world, but the world can't spare enough money to outfit you with a decent suit of armor. In Ultima II, Lord British makes me pay him for hit points! I love the entries for Oblivion on this.

Or, you could just give me 9,999 hit points, and I'll go take care of Minax right now.

"Get Back Here Boss": Foes that make you chase them around. This was one of the most annoying parts of Ultima II--and also the thieves in Dungeon Master.

"Karma Meter": It shows up first in Ultima IV, as Hawkwind keeps track of your progress towards various virtues. It's also a key element of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, Baldur's Gate, and other games.

"Level Grinding": Love this quote from this one: "Only the hero ever has this advantage. It never occurs to townspeople to walk around their village and bash slimes until they're strong enough to face the pirate who's taken over."

"Nigh Invulnerability": Applies to Lord British in the Ultima series. Not even Mondain's skull or the Armageddon spell--which kills everything else in the entire world--kills him. I did defeat him with a cannon in Ultima III, but his death wasn't permanent.


"Order vs. Chaos": At the end of Dungeon Master, I questioned whether there was a deliberate connection between it and The Saga of Recluce. Well, apparently, there are about one billion examples of this.

"Science Fiction vs. Fantasy": This trope deals with the genre-blending that occurs in games like Might & Magic, Tera, and Legacy of the Ancients. I don't have a problem with it, exactly, but somehow spells and technology always seem to me like an uncomfortable fit.


"Sdrawkcab Name": We've joked about this a lot with Trebor/Robert, Werdna/Andrew, Yendor/Rodney, and so on. There are other examples in Ultima V, Baldur's Gate, and Might & Magic, among others.

I've made one contribution to the site, under the "Wild Mass Guessing" category, offering my theory that Mondain from Ultima I is a Sith Lord.

Exhibit A

A couple of weeks ago, an anonymous commenter said he was going to create an entry on "spellcrafting," but I haven't been able to find it yet.

For those of you who haven't discovered TVTropes until this posting, the rest of your evening is gone, so I'll leave you to it. But as the stories get more complex in the games I'm playing, I'm going to keep checking in to this site for fun references.

Game 36: Legacy of the Ancients (1987)

Those would be Doric columns.

        

Legacy of the Ancients

United States

Quest Software (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released in 1987 for Apple II and Commodore 64; 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 25 December 2010

            

Before I get in to Legacy of the Ancients, I should mention that I haven't moved on from Le Maitre des Ames yet. I'm just doing that thing you said you wouldn't mind where I play two games at once. I'm still in the midst of translating the manual for Maitre and getting used to the interface. I think the game has a lot of potential, but it seems a lot like work, and I'm feeling lazy this weekend.

Legacy of the Ancients is the opposite of "work": it is an uncomplicated, plain little game--almost a throwback, really. It uses the same game engine as Questron, the first CRPG I ever played, about 26 years ago. I didn't play it as part of this project because of my PC/DOS restriction--a restriction that has come to feel a bit foolish, since this is yet another game in which the DOS version offers the poorest graphics (you can see a comparison of the C64 and DOS graphics at the game's MobyGames site).

The game starts with the basest character creation possible: I simply name my character (I chose "Lailoken") and the action begins. I play a poor peasant in the land of Tarmalon who one day comes across a dead body on the side of the road. It belongs to a nameless previous adventurer who was in the middle of the quest to destroy a powerful and dangerous magic scroll called the Wizard's Compendium. I loot his body for the Compendium, two jade coins, and his magic bracelet and soon find myself transported to a mysterious building.

           

"Only a poor peasant" strikes me as uncomfortably classist.

              

The building is the Museum of the Ancients, an edifice constructed in times of yore by a race of aliens. It is apparently one of many scattered on different worlds. The museums allow the Ancients to view life on different worlds, but they are forbidden from interfering with the worlds' developments (a video monitor warns me not to "feed the Tarmalon natives"); the caretaker of the museum on Tarmalon apparently decided to break this rule.

          

It's like Might & Magic crossed with Star Trek.

           

As I continue wandering the hallways, the bracelet begins speaking to me with the voice of the previous owner, charging me to "neutralize the evil Scroll of Spells before it destroys everything!" The rest of the museum is filled with similar monitors that take coins of various denominations. With the two jade coins found on the body, I view exhibits titled "Art of Weaponry," which allows me to take a dagger, and "Thornberry," which tells me about a typical Tarmalon town, in which rich and poor live separated by a stone wall. Having used my last coin on the latter exhibit, I take the exhibit's offer to transport me there.

        

             

And thus the game begins. Thornberry is a typical CRPG town, with a weapon and armor shop, a bank, and a transportation shop. Gameplay is isometric, with graphics on par with Ultima IV. Commands are all through the keyboard, with available actions listed on the left side of the screen.

           

          
At the food shop, I got a quest to deliver a bag of mail to the town of Big Rapids:
         

          
I also found a gambling parlor, where I indulged in a few rounds of blackjack featuring rules I would love to see on my next trip to Atlantic City.
           

"Natural blackjack pays double! I'm not leaving until--hey, let go of me!"

            

In the wilderness, I encountered creatures both hostile and friendly. So far, I have fought and killed pulp crawlers, bone dwellers, slash nettles, blistopods, scorpods, ventro flailers, carrion manglers, pit stalkers, venom floaters, and wind stalkers. All slain foes give up gold or items, and some of them can be converted to food--yes, this is another game in which you must maintain a rapidly-dwindling food supply.

            

Combat is, unfortunately, no more tactical than in Faery Tale Adventure. You just keep mashing "F" until you or the creature dies. There is a magic system in the game, but it reaches all the way back to Ultima I for its inspiration--you buy spells at shops and cast them until they run out, then buy more.

        

What, exactly, does "psycho strength" mean?

          

Not all encounters are hostile. I bought some food from a bandit, a museum coin from a farmer, and a potion from a merchant.

        

             

As I slay creatures, I don't have any idea if I am developing experience or anything. My level remains firmly fixed at 1. The game manual seems to suggest that the museum caretaker will be the one to level me up, but I haven't figured out how to get back to the museum yet. I did figure out how to develop at least one statistic, though: one of the towns has a neat mini-game in which you have to fend off fireballs.

           

          

You do it by simply turning in the direction they're coming from, which sounds easy, but it gets pretty dicey at high levels when multiple fireballs are coming at the same time from multiple directions at different speeds. I did okay my first time out.

            

             

I had hoped that each town would feature a different side quest, but apparently they all involve mail delivery to the other towns. Nonetheless, I get about 100 gold pieces for each delivery, and it's an easy way to make money while I explore and figure out my next move.

If it seems like an unexciting game, well it is, a bit. But the mini-games and gambling are a neat touch, and it's a good game to mess around with while I'm supposed to be watching It's a Wonderful Life with my family.

There's a big blizzard approaching New England, and I don't feel like dealing with it, so I managed to get a last-minute ticket to San Diego tomorrow morning. I know my blogging usually falls off when I'm traveling, but this time I don't have any particular business to do, and I'm actually looking forward to the idea of hanging out on my hotel balcony, playing games, and only leaving my room to restock my wet bar. If I have any readers in that city, I'll be glad to meet you for a drink at the Green Flash.

Tomorrow, we'll see what strikes my fancy the most: the interesting-but-difficult foreign game or the slightly-boring-but-simple Legacy of the Ancients.

Game 35: Le Maitre des Ames (1987)

"The Master of Souls," if anyone's curious.

As we saw, my first attempt to play a French CRPG wasn't exactly a rousing success. I didn't give up because it was a foreign game, and I didn't give up because I didn't have a manual. I gave up because of the combination of the two. Unfortunately, I'm facing the same issue with Le Maitre des Ames.


Translation isn't a huge problem. The game begins with several screens explaining the game's historique. It speaks of a forgotten time of heroes--warriors and wizards--in a realm of unicorns. A royal wizard named Kharram Akkad, on the verge of extraordinary discoveries, disappeared during a violent storm. The player's party of four heroes observed the destruction and has decided to assail the wizard's keep to...well, to figure out what happened, I guess. It's a basic setup to what looks like a standard dungeon crawl in the spirit of Dungeon Master--multiple-character, first-person, real-time.

Character creation was also fairly easy to figure out. It uses a system reminiscent of Alternate Reality: the City in which you watch a rapidly-changing succession of numbers from 0-100 representing six characteristics: life, strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, and charisma. You hit the spacebar to "freeze" the numbers and take what you get.

"Thief"....something about having an eclectic selection of skills.

The game conflates classes and races, so you can choose your four characters from among warriors, magicians, clerics, thieves, dwarves, and elves. After making the selection, you spend a random amount of gold on some weapons and armor.

This is exactly where I would have expected to find a "glaive-guisarme" and a "bec-de-corbin."

After creating four of the characters, you find yourself in a badly-colored dungeon. These screenshots are easily familiar to players of American first-person CRPGs.


This is where I began to run into trouble. All commands are via the mouse, except for the number pad from which you can control movement. Right-clicking and left-clicking do different things depending what icon you have selected. As best as I can figure, from top to bottom, they are: move, look, listen, don't know because "talk" is below--maybe "eat?", sleep, pick up or trade items, open doors (usually doesn't work--maybe they need keys), talk, attack, and save/load the game. The problem is, I get inconsistent results when I click/right-click on various characters and objects.

The characters have little symbols next to them, too, and I think one indicates whether the character is in the party (it seems you can drop characters and have them wait at fixed positions) and the other indicates who is the "active" character.

Naturally, you encounter creatures. The first couple of times, I bumbled through combat with them:

The other options are "attempt to talk," "observe reactions," and "try to flee."

But later I tried talking to them and discovered something pretty neat: you can converse with monsters over all sorts of subjects: "Who are you?"; "Who is your master?"; "Where is your kingdom?" and so on. You can even ask them to join you!

At first, their responses were gibberish to me...


...but as a sly veteran of CRPGs, I realized that the intelligence of the active character made a difference. I switched to my wizard, and the foreign writing disappeared! Well...I mean, the in-game foreign writing disappeared. It was still in French.

Here, I'm asking him something about carrion, and he's telling me that I can't leave because of something to do with something reptilian. This is going to be hard.

By the way: "orc" in French is apparently orque. I probably could have figured that out.

Even though there's a lot I don't know yet, such as...

• Why can't I pass a lot of the doors?
• Why would I want to dislodge one of my characters from the party temporarily?
• How do I access my inventory?
• Can I do anything with the tables, shields-on-walls, and crates found in the game?
• Do killed monsters drop anything? How do I search?
• What is that face up above my game window? And what is the empty box next to it?
• Is there anything more to combat than just selecting "combattre" each round?
• How do I cast spells?
  

...I think I can figure it out, given time. The major problem I'm having is that the game won't save. Like many games of the era, it wants me to swap out the "game" disk with a "save" disk when I choose the save option, which of course doesn't make sense running it in an emulator. Most of the time I can find a way around this, but not with Le Maitre des Ames, yet.

My attempts to find a game manual--even in French--have failed, and my French definitely isn't good enough to peek around in message boards looking for solutions to the technical problem. (It doesn't help the Googling that there's a novel of the same name by an author named Irene Nemirovsky.) Georges, I'd be glad to take up your offer of assistance; likewise to any of my European readers. [Later Edit: Jason got me the manual, and I solved the save problem by mounting an A: drive in DOSBox. Looks like I have no excuse not to give this one a proper try!]

If I can get past the save issue and the gameplay mysteries, this might be a game worth playing. Certainly this depth of dialog is unusual in a first-person dungeon-crawler, and I really would like to explore it more.

I might take tomorrow off for family reasons, so Joyeux Noël, everyone!

First Expedition: A Quick Note

First Expedition sounded like an interesting game: a naval navigation simulator set, for some reason, on an alien world called Yorland. The detail that it provides on things like triangulation, firing cannons, and navigating stormy seas suggests that it is a cousin to Sid Meier's Pirates!, first released the same year.

But whoever wrote the MobyGames entry is on hallucinogens, because there's really no way you can justify this as a CRPG. Yes, the manual does start with the words, "You play the role of Braun at the helm of an explorer craft." But come on: in Half Life you "play the role" of Gordon Freeman, but no one would try to justify that as a CRPG.

Screenshot courtsey of MobyGames

In any event, even if I was interested in playing around with knots and fuel and trading goods, the question is a bit academic since I can't get the game to run on any of my DOS emulators. It crashes almost immediately after startup with an error about not being able to find some file or another. I've tried downloads from two sites and get the same thing.

And since it's not a CRPG anyway, on to...sacrebleu! Un autre jeu en français! Let's see if I do better at this one than Tera: La Cité des Crânes.