Saturday, March 10, 2018

Ultima Underworld: Let Me Level with You (Part 1)

The Avatar arrives on a brand new level.
         
I don't normally do this, but this entry will be a complete description of Level 4 and all of my actions and decisions within it. I think that doing this once per long game offers a better sense of gameplay than the summaries I usually provide. I'm going to split this into two parts, but with only a short delay between them. There's a brief summary at the end.

I arrive from the southeast corner of Level 3 in good health but way overloaded. Because it has been a couple days since I played, I forget that I haven't eaten for a while. This has consequences in a bit. I am fighting with an excellent short sword and wearing a mixture of chain and plate armor.

The narrow stone corridor gives me few options but to press forward to a sturdy door. Unlocked, it opens into an area with tall walls and multiple exits. A skeleton comes out of the darkness menacingly but dies in a few hits. He leaves a worn shortsword and a leather cap, neither of which I need.
        
By this point in the game, these guys are pretty easy.
        
I tend to adopt a "follow the right wall" approach as I explore dungeons, at least initially. Because the automap is so good in Ultima Underworld, I've been less pathological about this than I am in other games where you need a system to avoid missing anything. Still, I tend to keep the general tendency.

A short corridor ends in another sturdy door, also unlocked. I pass a dead rotworm in the passage beyond before coming to a door with an ankh banner atop it. Such doors occur throughout the game and signify civilized areas beyond.
      
Here, I'm hoping I'll be able to unload some of these coins in the area beyond.
         
The door opens into a huge room full of bones and debris, with wide steps ascending to the right. Non-hostile trolls wander the room freely. Trolls first show up in the Ultima series in Ultima III, and they're often companions of orcs in III and IV. Origin ditched orcs after IV but kept trolls, and of course triggering bridge troll attacks is one of the easiest ways to grind in V. I believe that prior to Ultima Underworld, there has been only one NPC troll in the series--Brigant in Buccaneer's Den in IV--and even he's pretty hostile. Nonetheless, the Underworld manual explains that trolls live under bridges, wield human weapons, and wear human clothes in a desire to be more civilized, and enough civilized examples were found by Sir Cabirus to make a colony in the Abyss.
           
Someone who hadn't read the manual would be freaking out right now.
       
I pick a random troll and start speaking to him, but he's a "generic," unnamed NPC. Most civilized areas have a few of these, and not only do they share the same dialogue, they'll share the same memories. The next time I speak to one, even a different one, he'll say something like, "Gideon! You're back!"

He "greets" me with "what are you doing here?" My potential responses are: "Canst thou tell me any news?"; "I am searching for trolls to kill"; and "I am merely exploring." Obviously, the second one is going to provoke a fight and I'll probably end up slaying all the trolls. The game is probably technically winnable even if I do but it's bad role-playing. I ask him for news, but he doesn't tell me anything useful.

The next troll I speak to introduces himself as "Rawstag," leader of the trolls, and asks who I am. Again, I have a hostile option--"I am your doom!"--along with two interchangeable ones: "I am Gideon" and "I am an adventurer." I tell him my name, but he insists on calling me "Rodriguez" for some reason that I can only assume is an in-joke at Origin. My dialogue options give me a chance to object, but I don't.

This dialogue doesn't really go over so well when you're using the brown-skinned PC.
          
There's a flexible dialogue option ("Other...") where I can type keywords, but I don't really have anything to ask him, so I ask him to open the door behind him. He wants a gift. I try ale and gold nuggets to no avail. Eventually, I give up and continue talking to other troll NPCs.

The next one is named Lakshi Longtooth, and he speaks in a more genteel way than any troll so far. He doesn't have anything in response to TALISMAN or ARIAL or PRINCESS, but in response to RAWSTAG, he tells me that the king likes red gems. I happen to have one! I return to the king and give it to him, and he opens the door in a corner behind him.
           
Isn't "Lakshi" an Indian name?
          
The door opens into an ankh chamber. I have a couple of increases to allocate, but I'm waiting to find the mantras for "Sword" and "Lore" specifically so I don't have to use the generic ones and hope those skills are favored. The chamber also holds a piece of paper in which someone named "Lorne" talks about the importance of working together. I keep it but soon forget about it.

"Yo dawg, I heard you like ankhs."
          
I leave the troll area through an unlocked northern door, which leads into a long corridor. The first chamber off this corridor is empty. The second opens to reveal three giant spiders. They take forever to kill--much longer than the ones on previous levels--and they leave me poisoned and my short sword and helmet degraded to "serviceable."

A few things occur to me relative to combat. First, I tend to fight with a mix of chop, slash, and thrust, even though I suspect that each attack is independent and that the enemy AI doesn't respond to patterns or anything. Second, it's really hard to gauge the effective range on attacks. Enemies constantly dart in and out of the range, whatever it is. Third, I think this is the first game to offer the experience of seeing your weapon clearly make contact with an enemy and yet somehow still "miss" because of the underlying statistics. This is a common criticism of Morrowind, but the discontinuity exists every time you blend action combat with underlying probability rolls.
         
Are any of you capable of shape-changing into gorgeous women?
         
I have no way to cure poison, so I have to tough it out. I boost my hit points with a few castings of In Bet Mani and hope the poison fades before it kills me. About this time, I notice that my character is "famished," having apparently forgotten to eat after he woke up on the previous level. I'm relying on catching fish and In Mani Ylem for food these days, but I just spent all my spell points and I'm nowhere near any water that I know of.

I search the spiders' room. It contains a mandolin, several cauldrons, a bowl, and a scrap of paper with "music and lyrics to a popular troll fight song." I already have a mandolin in my inventory, and for the first time I try to "use" it and find, delightedly, that just like the harpsichords in Ultima V, you can actually play it with the 0-9 keys. I fool with it for a while to avoid dealing with my inventory problem.
       
             
Unfortunately, that scrap of paper has put me over the top and I have to set aside some other things. Noting the bowl on the floor, I hit upon the idea of consolidating a few items by making the recipe for rotworm stew. I'm sure I'll need it eventually. I rush back to the entrance where I saw the dead rotworm, grab it, and mix it in the bowl with some port wine and a green mushroom, then "use" the recipe. Unfortunately, the weight of the bowl offsets the savings gained by losing the port wine, mushroom, and recipe.
           
Doesn't this require any cooking?
             
At this point, I'm more concerned with hunger than weight, so I head back to the trolls to see if I can barter for some beef flanks or something. On the way, I run into a troll that I missed the first time. His name is Sethar Strongarm. He immediately goes on about how his mother used to make rotworm stew and he'd really like a bowl. I swear to you, this was a coincidence. I knew someone would want the stew, but not that he was next door.
            
You're not going to believe this . . .
         
I give it to him, relieved to give up that bit of weight. In return, he gives me some dragon scales . . . which weigh more than the stew. Damn it. (I'm aware that both my encumbrance and food problems can be solved if I just take the time to go back up to Level 3 and my treasure cache, but I stubbornly refuse to do it for some reason.) Finally, I deal with the weight issue by trading a few gold nuggets to trolls for food, then eating the food. Even after a couple of portions, I'm still "famished." Food hasn't been a problem all game, and now I suddenly can't get enough.

A troll thinks four gold nuggets for some meat on a stick is a bad deal. In the real world, four gold nuggets of 3 ounces each would be worth over $5,000.
      
Moving on, I open the next door off the hallway. It leads to a dropoff. I can see a skeleton milling about below. My general rule is that as I'm following the rightmost path, I don't take any path I can't return from, like jumping off a ledge. I leave this area alone for now.

The next door opens into a room with four headless. I kill them, but I have to quaff a potion in the middle of the battle. Now I'm in bad shape--hardly any health, no magic, and starving. I need my few regenerating spell points for In Lor ("Light"). Adding insult to injury, the headless' room has nothing of value except gold coins I don't need and can't spare the weight to carry.
        
One of these guys isn't so bad.
          
A northern corridor bends west towards the top of the map and puts me on a raised platform. A mongbat attacks me, but he dances away when I try to retaliate, and I just run past him rather than dealing with him for now. (Why do I always want to call them "mobats"? Is there a game in which giant bats are called "mobats"?)

Without incident, the long corridor turns and starts moving down the west side of the level. I soon encounter a warrior named, amusingly, "Biden." Using friendly replies, I elicit from him a long story. He is a member of the Order of the Knights of the Crux Ansata. (If you're curious, crux ansata means "handled cross" in Latin, and it's been applied to the ankh in various writings since at least the eighteenth century.) Another member of the order, Sir Rodrick, went crazy, began calling himself the "Chaos Knight," and has taken over the northern area. (It turns out I literally ran over his head on the way here.) Biden went to defeat him but was wounded and lost his sword. He's hanging out in the hallway because he's too ashamed to go back and face his brethren. I tell him I'll try to succeed where he failed, and I move on.
              
We have to give credit to Origin, not Bioware, for the system of 1) friendly option; 2) less friendly option that still gets the job done; 3) "go away" option. The only thing Bioware would have added is a 4) needlessly psychotic option.
             
The corridor soon announced my arrival in another civilized area with ankh banners flanking a sturdy door. I'm going to summarize a little here. The stronghold of the Knights of the Crux Ansata takes up most of the southwest region, or about half of the western wall and half of the southern wall. It consists of several large rooms. The commander, Dorna Ironfist, hangs out in a room with a couple of pools of water. Nearby is the door to an "armory" that no lockpicking will open.
        
Announcing the entrance to the knights' area.
         
The first set of rooms has a couple of gravestones commemorating Sir Lionir and Sir Avirill. These become important later.
       
Aaaargh! Why do they show regular crosses instead of ankh crosses!?
           
One room seems to be a library and holds a bunch of scrolls. All of them offer important hints. They say:

  • The maze conceals many chambers. One is said to lead to a chamber once used by the knights.
  • Lorne went to the homeland of the Trolls in the hope of building a shrine.
  • To pass into the unseen, jump through the seen.
  • The maze is locked with a key that is now thought to be lost.
  • The heights of the north have a hidden counterpart.
  • The bullfrog puzzle has a simple solution, but there is more than meets the eye in that place.
There is a lot of dialogue in this area--more than twice the amount in the game so far. None of the knights is "generic." These are summaries of my conversations.

Ree tells me that things were pretty cool when Cabirus was alive but fell apart when he died. The Knights try to maintain order and restore glory by sending knights on quests, but they're fighting a losing battle. On some level below, there's a golem on an island surrounded by lava, and knights used to test themselves against the golem. He's indestructible, but he'd give a reward if you fought well. She suggests I speak to Dorna Ironfist if I want to join the order.

Feznor fills me in on some of the puzzles alluded in the above scrolls: The Puzzle of the Bullfrog, the Maze of Silas (with the Door of Precious Levers), and a watery area to the west "of the Abyss' volcanic core"--this latter term making its appearance in the game for the first time. He offers detailed descriptions and hints for the puzzles.

  • The Puzzle of the Bullfrog is an area in the northeast surrounded by water. I have to use levers and buttons to create a "safe path" to the other side. There's a wand that will reset the puzzle if I screw it up.
  • The Maze of Silas is strewn with creatures and bones and has a bunch of hidden chambers.
  • The Puzzle of Precious Levers is at the end of the maze. The order in which to pull the levers "can be gleaned through careful examination of the artifacts of our order."

He also warned me about hostile trolls living outside the friendly, civilized area.
      
And now the worst trolls have to be "dark" trolls. Man, the Abyss is so racist.
         
Trisch laments the downfall of Cabirus's vision and says things are getting worse. Just recently, some madman burgled a bunch of torches and lanterns, including the Taper of Sacrifice. I know immediately that she must be talking about Zak from Level 3, who is afraid of the dark.

Derek, in a room marked "treasurer," says that he doesn't go adventuring. Instead, he carves gems and works metals, but he needs a proper tool. I immediately give him the gem cutter that Goldthirst gave to me. (Maddeningly, it didn't reduce my weight at all.) In return, he tells me that the Ring of Humility is in a room on the next level, and he gives me the order in which to flip various switches to get to it.
        
I don't think giving you the gem cutter demonstrates "humility" exactly, but I'll still take the hint.
      
Meredith gives me the mantra to improve the "Missile" skill; Cecil does the same for the "Mace" skill; Kyle for the "Axe" skill; and, at last, Doris gives me the mantra for the "Sword" skill.
     
Finally, I meet Dorna Ironfist, who turns out to be a man, in his chambers. When I tell him I want to join the Order, he puts me through a little test. The first is simply who I am. I have options to answer "A valiant warrior, skilled in combat and magic"; "A noble of Britannia, worthy of knighthood," and "the poor son of my mother."
           
Notably, "The goddamned Avatar" is not an option.
           
Let's think about this. "Valiant" is too much. It lacks humility. The second option is just a lie. The lord of Questron made me a baron, but Lord British never extended such courtesy. He just yanks me through the moongate when he needs me and tosses me back when he's done. Thus, we go with the third, even though I'm more upper middle class.

After asking if I'll submit to their justice, he orders me to drink a cup of poison that he says will kill me. I obey, and it turns out he meant figuratively: "He who drank from the cup is now dead. In his place stands Gideon, Esquire of the Order of the Crux Ansata." He asks if I was afraid, and I say yes, because I was worried the cup was going to end up in my inventory, but in any event, that's enough.

As an Esquire, he gives me my first quest: to find the Writ of Lorne, one of the first knights to settle in the abyss. As it happens, I have the damned writ in my backpack. I found it in the trolls' ankh shrine. But I've forgotten by this point, so I make a note to head to the troll area and ask about it.

Dorna tells me about the various artifacts of virtue and says that in addition to the stolen Taper of Sacrifice, he knows of the Standard of Honor, which will be given to someone who accomplishes "a sufficiently honorable deed." I assume I could also kill him for it, but I'll leave that to a different sort of role-player.

During this process, I have been casting In Mani Ylem as frequently as possible, and my hunger goes from "famished" to "hungry" to "peckish." As I finish with the knights, In Lor runs out, and I have no other way to make light. Since I'm almost back to the stairway, I decide to feel my way through the dark. On the way, I find a silver ring in a pile of debris.

My map of Level 4 so far.
         
Only a battle with a skeleton stands between me and the stairs to Level 3. Returning to the previous level, I find the river, fish, and eat fish until my stomach is stuffed, then go to sleep in my secret chamber. When I wake up, I eat more fish until I'm full again and, for the first time in several hours, march off with full vitality and mana jars.

Continued in Part 2 tomorrow evening.

Summary: Arrived on Level 4, visited the troll area, traded rotworm stew for some dragon scales, visited the Knights of the Crux Ansata and joined their order, got a bunch of hints as to the various puzzles remaining on the level. Got beads on the Taper of Sacrifice, the Ring of Humility, and the Standard of Honor. Struggled with food and encumbrance the whole time.

Time so far: 14 hours

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Nippon: The Inscrutable Orient

A colleague of mine once tried to organize a symposium in Bad Waltersdorf, Austria. It didn't get enough registrants and had to be canceled. I told him he should have held it across the river in Good Waltersdorf. He didn't think it was funny.
                 
Well, I bumbled around Nippon for another four hours, and I can't say that I'm any closer to understanding the story or main quest. In a modern game, that wouldn't be such a problem because the dungeons would be atmospheric and the character development robust and the gameplay enjoyable, but--as I keep stressing--1980s RPG development just wasn't there yet. It was too soon for games with the scope of Deathlord, Fate, Nippon, and many of the others with epic ambitions--particularly when they don't offer mechanics as complex as the best RPGs of the period. I would have cautioned a developer of the time to at least make sure they could replicate Ultima V's combat system, inventory complexity, and depth of NPC interaction before setting out to make a game four times its size.

The Nippon Museum offers a map that came with the game, but it's too stylized for my tastes and gets the geography of the smaller landmasses and islands all wrong. I've been unapologetically using another one from the site that is more geographically accurate, but still manages to avoid spoilers such as the locations of towns. Normally, I'd consider that cheating, but I'll allow it to offset my language disadvantage. Anyway, extrapolating from a measurement I took on the starting island, I suspect the game world is close to 720 x 400.
          
What I love about this map is how it's so clearly Japan.
      
The towns vary in size but the largest so far have been around 70 x 70, which would be really hard to navigate except that each one has a map hidden somewhere. When I arrive in a new town, my first priority is to find the map and use it to plot a basic navigation path.
           
Without this map, I never would have known about a "hermit" living in the southwest.
         
As I wrapped up last time, I was entering a large city on the coast called Watashibune. NPCs throughout the town talked about boats and sailing, and pretty soon I discovered both boat sales and boat repair locations. Boats sold for 1,500 gold pieces--out of my reach but not outrageously so. I could have gone outside and grinded for it. Instead, I let my finances grow naturally as I explored other parts of the starting continent.

A little town on an oasis called Tokoro-Chian offered more lore and potential quest advice than any town so far. I had previously found a door in the mountains that took me to an indoor area with a huge lake of fire. In Tokoro-Chian, I learned that to survive the fire, I need the Amulet of Hi, which I can find in some place called Fujokawa. An NPC named Yosutebito told me that I'll need to find the Wheel of Time in the north to return to my own world. Shoka-no suggested what may be a side quest: the "sun horse" of the goddess Amaterasu has been stolen by the god of war, Hachiman, who lives in the castle of Atatakami in the south. I learned from Ta-is Tagre that I'll need some flying mechanism to reach locations in the mountains, including some important inscription.
             
A key piece of intelligence.
          
I returned to Akuji, the starting town, and trained to 100% with the shuriken. By this time, I had fought enough combats to have enough for the boat and then some, so I made my way back to Watashibune.

Money is a key component to any RPG, but it really makes the world go round here. So far, I haven't found anything like a dungeon full of treasure chests. One city had some gold that I could pick up. (The manual gives you a funny justification for this: "The gold lying in the chambers is mostly illegally acquired and can be used for your purposes.") Otherwise, all income comes from combat. Perhaps in recognition of this, combat is reasonably rewarding, offering around an average of 30 gold pieces for each enemy killed in outdoor combat.
              
Finding a rare "treasure room."
          
There are lots of things to spend money on, including many weapons and armor items that are well out of my reach. A lot of towns have healers that not only cure wounds but also grant you temporary strength or rejuvenate you (more on this in a bit); others cure conditions like blindness, curses, and paralysis, none of which I've yet experienced. Shops sell keys (every city has locked doors), incense, and sacks that increase your carrying capacity. You always have to replenish food. Weapons and armor can get damaged and require repair. You need training on weapons, and you can pay (theoretically) to increase your attributes. You can even pay for things that I think serve only role-playing purposes, such as nights at the inn with optional prostitutes, baths, and massages.
             
Soon.
           
I don't care for the game's dialogue "stance" system and I've mostly been subverting it. I don't know how to fix things if you choose the wrong approach. Almost all NPCs respond to "normal" or "friendly" approaches, but every once in a while, one of them wants you to be "religious" or "submissive" or even "superior." If you choose the wrong thing, they clam up. So I take a save before talking with them and reload if they respond negatively. The game is hard enough.
          
This NPC mentions some of her artifacts as coming from China.
          
I also wouldn't mind if I didn't have to stop and feed my character so often. If the developers were going to make him so hungry, the least they could have done was have him eat automatically. Sometimes I miss the "you are hungry" message--it doesn't re-appear after the first warning--and my character will suddenly die because I haven't been noticing his health bar go down.
           
No matter how much progress you're actually making, it always feels like you're getting somewhere when you buy a boat.
           
After I bought the boat, I sailed up north even though I hadn't finished exploring the main continent. I explored two more towns and decided to get back to Ultima Underworld. Here are a bunch of items from my explorations:
           
  • I bought a "gate icon" in one of the towns, which I guess allows me to use the teleporter system. I really haven't started exploring that yet. Some of the towns have teleporters that seem to go to central hubs or something.
  • The countryside is swarming with NPCs like priests and farmers as well as enemies. They don't typically attack you, but if they happen to be on the screen when you initiate combat with a monster, they'll join the battle against you. I don't know if there are any karmic implications from killing them.
  • Even though the game has a day/night cycle, with the screen going dark at night, shops remain open 24 hours and the NPCs stay where they are.
  • You can't take the day/night cycle too literally, though. Years pass as you wander around, and even more as you pay for training. My character started at 20, I think, and I suddenly noticed he was 50! I had to pay for "rejuvenation" to stop him from dying of old age. It's nice that feudal Japan had that option. I wish that the modern world had it. 
  • When I stopped at an inn for the night, I decided to try the "bed and a woman" option. The German word was weib, which Google Translate tells me can also mean "wife," so I might have made a big mistake. There was no special message, but I got 250 experience points! That means that there's a way to convert gold directly to experience in the unlikely event that you ever run out of things to buy.
  • Oddly, after waking up from the above encounter, I found an NPC in my room. He said his name was "Schoco la de," said he was a "murderer," and insisted that I was in his room.
  • There are a lot of jokes and puns in the NPC names. So far, for instance I've encountered Cha-in-ma-il, Skusi-san, Chingis-kan, Qwerty, and Razmataz. I'm sure there are dozens of others going over my head because they mean something in German. For instance, "Ta-tagre-is," which is clearly Tattergreis, or "doddering old man."
  • Purchasing a clock gave me a new menu option that tells me the time and date. 
          
It is 19:00 on Day 14 of Year 714 in the Month of the Kites.
          
  • I bought a slave! They were selling them in one of the northern island towns. I have no idea what they do for me. The manual doesn't mention them at all. There are also guard dogs for sale, but they cost more.
        
You may think this is poor role-playing, but I'll give him a better life than he had behind those bars.
          
  • The same shops will go by different names from city to city. The healer is arzt in one city, alchimist in a second, and doktor in a third. Sometimes, there's no shop name at all, so you have to check every building and talk to every NPC.
  • I spoke to a daimyo in one of the cities. I was hoping he'd give me a quest, but he just boasted about how much power he had, "second only to the shogun." 
  • I tried to visit that goddess's castle on the island in the starting continent, but the game wouldn't let me dock my boat alongside it. I think you have to have a grass square. 
            
I knew I was making progress when I was able to translate this without help. "You can your ship here not leave."
          
Entering the combat screen from the boat causes you to use the boat's cannons as the primary weapon. They're pretty devastating, but anything that can attack you at sea is equally tough and can damage both you and the boat. You can blast helpless enemies on shore, too, but you get only experience, not gold, from winning boat combats.
           
Naval combat.
          
Touching any land while sailing the boat causes it to become damaged. It's hard to avoid this in narrow rivers.

One thing that I still haven't experienced is any sense of character development. I think maybe I'm supposed to burn incense at Buddha statues to "level up," but each city that has such a statue also has a puzzle associated with getting to it, and I've come up short. In Ukosa, the statue was at the end of a maze of pillars with invisible walls between some of them, and I could't find a way through. An NPC said something about walking through the "central pillar," but none of the pillars that seemed to be "central" (no matter how I looked at it) would allow me to do any such thing.
            
Getting nowhere.
            
Meanwhile, in Ubamachi, a northern city ruled by Shujin, the Buddha is in the mountains. Supposedly, there's a secret path to get there, and an NPC directed me to a statue to ask about it. The statue told me to give it a "yari." I had no idea what this was, but I later found a weapon shop in a different town selling them for 3,450 gold. That'll have to wait.
        
Will I be able to get it back afterwards?
         
Thus, well past the six-hour mark, I'm still a bit clueless. My only consolation is that it sounds like German players of the time were, too. I'll give it another 3 or 4 hours, at least, before deciding whether to continue. I'd lean towards a premature ending, but the next game, Ranadinn, is also an Ultima-inspired title with epic ambitions. Please moongate me out of this era.


Monday, March 5, 2018

Ultima Underworld: Isili Thesh

Scenes like this--tables, weeds growing up through the dungeon floor--a clear space for sleeping--differentiate Ultima Underworld from any previous first-person game.
             
The moments I often like most in RPGs are when you set out with a plan, but something happens that sends you off in directions you didn't even know about, and you spend hours just trying to get your life back on track. The Skyrim quest "A Night to Remember" is a brilliant example of this, at least the first time it happens to you. From my experience so far, it appears that the new Kingdom Come: Deliverance is full of such moments.

This kind of adventure is only possible with a willingness to roll with the punches instead of reloading, damn the consequences, but this willingness only comes from trusting the game not to put you in an unwinnable situation. Despite Origin once putting me in a situation in which my characters had to burn themselves alive in a fire, the developers have generally avoided "walking dead" scenarios. So I decided to trust them when a few unusual situations emerged.
          
It was the last option that got me in trouble, but I wonder if calling her "sir" wouldn't have produced the same result.
           
The first was a simple one. I had only finished exploring a small fraction of Level 2 before I fell into some water, swam the wrong direction, and got sucked down into Level 3 by a drain. The game is nonlinear enough that this doesn't really matter. Later, I found stairs down to Level 4 before I found the way back up to Level 2, and I briefly considered pushing downward every time I found a stairway rather than insisting on "completing" a level first, and seeing how that turned out. I may still adopt that approach. (Wouldn't it be more in the spirit of "role-playing" if I was trying to rescue a princess?) Anyway, in the end this meant that I encountered the lizard men on Level 3 before the dwarves on Level 2. I also ended up killing a random gazer on Level 3 before killing the "quest gazer" on Level 2.

The second unexpected avenue came when I encountered a bandit on a bridge. She insulted me, I didn't take well to being insulted, and the encounter ended in violence. Unfortunately, it also turned every other bandit on the level hostile, and I seem to recall from previous experiences with the game that the bandits have some lore and trade goods to offer if you keep them friendly. For all I know, they're essential to completing the game. (If so, now would be a good time to tell me.) I hope not, as I really like the idea that Ultima Underworld gives you multiple paths.
          
The complete (I hope) Level 2. I didn't force my way into the dwarf king's vault in the west.
        
Level 2 was otherwise a fairly straightforward level. I'm not sure I found a single secret door. Friendly dwarves inhabited a large area to the south. They were ruled by a leader named Goldthirst, and true to his name, he was surrounded by little piles of gold. He asked me to kill a gazer that had invaded his mines.
            
Pretty girls, beware of his heart of gold.
        
The mines showed frequent walls with gold veins, and I thought I remembered there was some way to "mine" them, but I couldn't get anything to work and didn't really need the gold anyway. I found the gazer and killed it in a long battle.
              
I enjoyed the death animation.
         
Goldthirst's reward was a gem cutter, which I'm sure will help me solve some puzzle later.
           
Turning in the side quest.
           
An addled dwarf named Ironwit wanted me to recover his blueprints, which were on a high platform and only accessible by drinking a "Levitate" potion. It wasn't difficult, and I suspect the "puzzle" was only there so the player could get a sense of how vertical movement works for later, more complex puzzles. 

The northeast had an area sealed by a portcullis, but I was able to use a pole to trip the lever on the other side. It led to a large room with a couple of skeletons guarding an orb. Looking into the orb showed me a vision of a square room with perhaps some lava in the center and a round object in the middle of the lava. Some slimes were creeping about. I'm not sure what that was about.
     
I was proud of figuring out this solution.
            
A major "find" on Level 2 was a dwarven smith named Shak who has a forge at the end of a long cavernous passage. He not only had a lot of good items for sale but would repair my items as well, and for fairly cheap money. (The most I paid was 4 gold pieces for my breastplate.) When he first told me that repairing my axe would take 23 minutes, I figured I'd walk to the other side of the cavern and back, and he'd be done, but it turns out that he meant 23 minutes real time. I ended up getting most of my items repaired while writing this entry and letting my character stand there in the forge.
            
How about you charge me 5 pieces of gold and repair it in 4 minutes?
        
There's probably a danger in fetishizing pristine equipment. Condition of equipment ranges from "excellent" to "broken" and passes through "serviceable," "worn," and "badly worn" on the way. (I'm not really sure how much the condition affects its utility. Is a "serviceable" long sword worse than an "excellent" short sword? I don't know if there's any way to tell.) The amount of time it takes seems to be a rough bell curve. A few swings is enough for a weapon to go from "excellent" to "serviceable," but it will stay at the latter condition for a long time, as it will at "worn." Once you hit "badly worn," you're in danger of breaking with every swing. Anyway, the point is that if you march out of Shak's forge with everything in "excellent" condition, you get discouraged by how much damage everything seems to take in the very next battle.

Only late in the game did it occur to me to try to use Shak's anvil to repair things myself, but at my skill (11), I only seem to be capable of reliably going from "badly worn" to "serviceable"--never to "excellent." I haven't found any other anvils.
             
Level 3. Big area in the northwest has me concerned. I love the ability to take notes.
             
Level 3 was populated (or de-populated) by the aforementioned bandits plus enclaves of green and red lizardmen. I don't think the creatures have ever appeared in an Ultima before, although the player can turn himself into a lizardman in Akalabeth. The manual says that lizardmen were created by Mondain and were exterminated after his defeat--all except a clan hiding in the Abyss. Intelligent and friendly, most are capable of understanding human language but not speaking it.

Communicating with them meant solving an easy but enjoyable puzzle. Locked in a cell in the lizardmen's area was a human mage named Urgo, guarded by a lizardman jailer. The lizardman asked me questions in his own language when I spoke to him, but of course I didn't understand. Urgo, meanwhile, understood both common tongue and lizardman, but he was mute. I had to give him some food first and then have him pantomime the meanings to the various lizardman words, which I typed in.
             
Urgo helps me figure it out.
        
Using the knowledge from Urgo, I was able to have a conversation with the jailer, whose first question was along the lines of, "Are you friendly or aggressive?" You don't want to get that one wrong. It transpired that Urgo was in jail for stealing food and assaulting lizardmen, but the jailer would let him go if I paid a "bounty" of food. I turned over several items and Urgo was able to go free. I wonder if I'll see him again among the "seers" on a lower level.
          
I'm now bilingual!
     
One lizardman named Iss'leek asked me to bring him a red ruby. He already had blue and green gems on a platform near him, so he must have been looking to complete a set. I cursed because I had just traded a ruby to Shak, so I had to go back up to Level 2 and buy it back. In return, Iss'leek gave me a scrap of paper with the formula for "Water Walk" on it.
            
Pleasing a gem collector.
        
A lizardman named Ishtass asked me to find out what happened to his former leader, Ossikka, who had gone exploring upriver. With the "Water Walk" spell assisting, I found Ossikka's remains in a nearby alcove along with a couple of runes and a clue about the location of Caliburn's blade (see below). In return for this news, Ishtass gave me a sack with some more runes and a wand.
               
No word on what killed the missing lizard man.
              
Other than the lizardmen and bandits, there was a single human on the level named Zak. He said that he was afraid of the darkness and sold torches and candles to protect against it.
           
You really chose the wrong place to live.
           
Encumbrance has been a constant struggle. In the space of a single entry, I went from picking up almost everything to keeping only the things I was too scared to discard, and I still have no extra room. I wasted a lot of time bartering during this session, trying to convert junk into gold pieces or to grab a few choice items from NPCs. Most of what I "bought" was a waste of time, as I would repeatedly spend 10 minutes trading for something like a chain coif only to find a steel helmet on the ground a few minutes later.
          
The kind of cache I would have picked over relentlessly on Level 1, I just leave behind now.
            
The bartering system is still interesting. When you start to trade, you can see up to four items in the NPC's inventory and load up to four items in your "barter" inventory. (If the NPC has more than four items, I think you get a random selection. You have to exit and re-enter to see different items.) You select what you want from the NPC and what you're willing to trade for it and see if he agrees. I find that most of the trades are enormously one-sided towards the NPC, but then again I don't have a high (or any) "Appraise" skill. I might start off by wanting an axe and offer a mace for it. He says no, so I add a shield. Still no. I add three cheese wheels and two gold nuggets. Finally, he says yes, having obtained three pieces of equipment and some gold for one weapon. Fortunately, the dungeon is so strewn with items that the imbalance doesn't really matter.
             
Exchanging two swords and a leather cap for a chain coif.
         
Trying to trade for gold is also interesting. You can only trade for an NPC's entire gold "pile," so if he has 15 and I'm trying to sell a stray short sword, I know he won't go for it. I have to offer the sword plus, say, 12 gold pieces from my own pile to effectively sell the sword for 3 gold pieces.

Anyway, the system is mostly wasted because NPCs rarely have anything you want (at least, so far) and the dungeon is already strewn with equipment and riches. I stopped once I started having inventory problems. First, I discarded my backup items, trusting that I could always find another sword or axe or return to a cache I'm keeping on Level 3. When that wasn't enough, I got rid of all my spare light sources--why waste space on candles, torches, lanterns, and oil when I have In Lor? When that wasn't enough, I stopped carrying extra food. I find edible plants every time I turn a corner, at some point I got a fishing pole that allows me to catch fish whenever I want in any river, and there's always the In Mani Ylem ("Create Food") spell.
           
I suspect this would be harder in real life.
          
But even with that, I'm at my maximum. I have half a dozen potions I'm worried I'll need later, eight keys that I'm afraid to throw away, a variety of tools (pole, fishing pole, rock hammer, gem cutter) that could turn out to be invaluable, and a huge number of things that I suspect are only good for trade value, but might be the object of a quest, including red and blue gems, a crown, two "resilient spheres," a scepter, a mandolin, a flute, and a bunch of gold nuggets.

I also have three wands and a ring that I can't identify. I don't understand the identification system in the game at all. I have a modest amount of points in "Lore," but it never tells me anything useful. If I pay Shak, he tells me only its value, not what it is.

After I cleared out the bandits on Level 3, I set up a room beyond a secret door as my equipment stash. It's convenient to stairways both up and down.

Finally, because I chaffed some readers by indicating that I played with it off, I'll mention the music. I agree that it is well done. There are several "exploration" compositions (or one with several themes) in a minor key that complement the ominousness of exploring a dungeon in the dark. One of the themes is notably sparse, evoking something more akin to background noises--drips, creaks, growls--than traditional "music." When combat arrives, the music shifts to a fast-paced theme that transitions seamlessly to a few cadence chords when the final blow is struck. This isn't the first "contextual music" we've seen in RPGs--among others, Quest for Glory has done it notably well, including leitmotifs for individual characters--but it is rare, and George "The Fat Man" Sanger and Dave Govett deserve the accolades that they have received. Unfortunately, I simply do not like background music whether I'm playing a game or answering my e-mail, and I have turned it off again.

Miscellaneous notes:
            
  • Once you pick up food, the game tracks how long you've had it. When you look at it, it will say "a day-old loaf of bread" or "a fresh fish." I think my character would be more interested in how old it was when I found it. How can an ear of corn be only a day old if it's in a dungeon?
  • If you look at items in the environment, the game notes if they belong to an NPC. If you mess with them or pick them up, the NPC's disposition will drop quickly.
  • Midway through this session, I decided to switch my primary weapon from an axe to a sword because I noted that swords swing faster. Also, I had this idea that when I finally find Caliburn, I'll be able to use it as a weapon instead of carrying a second weapon and adding to my encumbrance. Another factor was that I chanted SUMM RA at an ankh and got sword, sword, attack. 
  • I've found lots of slings, one bow, and one crossbow, but missile weapons just seem too cumbersome in this game to bother with. Any differing experiences?
  • If you eat a mushroom, the screen turns all psychedelic. It doesn't last very long.
  • A few times, I have been attacked by monsters in areas I already cleared, indicating some re-spawning is going on.
           
A pack of goblins that wasn't here before.
          
  • There is more than one ankh per level. I think Level 3 had three.
  • I get poisoned a lot from bats, rats, spiders, and walking over some plants, but I long ran out of the leeches that cure it. I mostly just let it go away on its own. It's definitely not the killer here that it is in the surface-based Ultima games. 
  • Both Level 2 and Level 3 had an inaccessible area in the middle of the map with a circular grate looking into it. On both levels, clicking on the grate lets you look into this central shaft. I don't know if I'll ever enter that shaft, but it may have something to do with a note I found that read, "Go to the very base of the Abyss, then battle your way back up, to find the key to your fortitude."
             
Peering down the dark shaft.
          
My character ends this session at Level 11. I saved up most of my skill advancements (you get two per level) until nearly the end because I was still collecting the mantras. You find them on scraps of paper, books, inscriptions on walls, and from NPCs. In addition to the ones that choose a random selection of skills from a category, I have "Unarmed," "Attack," "Defense," "Tracking," "Charm," "Appraise," "Acrobat," "Repair," "Search," and "Swim." Honestly, I've been putting most of my points into weapons, "Attack," "Mana," and "Casting" with the occasional allocation to "Lore" (hoping it eventually does something), "Search," and "Picklock." I figure "Swim" is obviated by the "Water Walk" spell; I'm really lost on what "Tracking" does; and "Acrobat" (which reduces damage from falls) seems to be wasted if you're just careful.
         
I can't see wasting points on this, but let me know if I'm missing something.
         
My rune bag has Bet, Des, Hur, In, Jux, Lor, Mani, Ort, Por, Rel, Sanct, Uus, Wis, and Ylem. Almost all of my spellcasting has been In Lor ("Light") or In Bet Mani ("Lesser Heal"), with a few castings of Ylem Por ("Water Walk") after I got it. Looking through the list of spells I'm capable of casting, I don't see a lot of others that fit well with my gameplay style. It's too annoying to put the runes together to waste a lot of time alternating between attack and defense spells in combat, and I don't really see how you could effectively play Ultima Underworld as a stealth game. I haven't had to flee from any enemies so desperately that I need to spike doors (or cast "Strengthen Door") behind me. I guess Hur Por ("Levitate") could come in handy for some navigation--I used a potion to solve a puzzle. An Nox ("Cure Poison") will come in handy if I ever find Nox. Finding Flam will also open some useful offensive and defensive options. 
        
"Water Walk" sure made dealing with these lurkers easier.
       
Overall, I'm playing the game primarily as a fighter who uses the occasional spell to assist. I'm curious whether it's possible to play it completely the other way. Do spellcasting classes get enough points that you could cast more than a few "Lightning" spells before having to rest?

Towards the end of the session, I finally got a bead on one of the Talismans of Virtue. Shak had told me that the sword Caliburn had been broken into blade and pommel and that the Shield of Valor had once belonged to Blackthorn. A note on Ossikka's body said that I'd find the blade in the southeast, behind a wall, so I spent a long time searching walls before I found a secret door. It led to an alcove with a switch, which drained some of the water and opened the way to a hidden area.

I was surprised when the ghost fell to a non-magic weapon, but I guess not everyone uses Dungeons & Dragons rules.
        
A spider and a ghost guarded the passage, which led to an ankh and then a large room with the blade by itself on a platform. One-sixteenth done?

I'm guessing I'll need Shak to fix this once I find the pommel.
          
Whew. I think that's the last time I'll try to cover two levels in one entry, but the game is authentically a blast, and it's hard to make myself stop playing to write. As I said in the first entry, this game would have been remembered for its engine alone, but the developers coupled it with an engaging story and fantastic exploration, dialogue, and role-playing choices. It's going to be a tough act to follow.

Time so far: 12 hours (not counting time spent waiting for Shak to fix things)

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Game 283: Nippon (1988)

              
Nippon
Germany
Independently developed; published by Markt & Technik
Released in 1988 for Commodore 64
Date Started: 26 February 2018

Nippon is a strange little German game set in feudal Japan. Screenshots will make it look like an Ultima clone, but it plays much more like an era console game like Hydlide, particularly with the limited controls and lack of any character creation.

The backstory is mostly indecipherable. Commenters have pointed me to the Nippon Museum, created a few years ago by Nippon co-creator Thorsten Sommermann. The site offers four different versions of the story, each more elaborate (and confusing) than the last. I'm not sure which one was presented to original players of the game. In any event, it presents the main character as a modern wage slave (named Toshiro Tawamure in one version) who becomes obsessed with a pair of two life-size bronze statues at the Tokyo National Museum and/or their tragic story. Seifuku Subarashii Tenno (which I think is supposed to mean "Emperor Seifuku the Great") was told by an oracle to seek his true love. After multiple trials and battles, he found Princess Kikori Shiramoto and married her, realizing after their marriage that she was the wrong woman. The haunted faces of the statues reflect lives of sadness and betrayal.

As Toshiro is studying the statues one day, an old woman--who looks suspiciously like the statue of Kikori--grabs his arm and tells him that he must "go back" and "try again," emphasizing that he was "so close" last time. Toshiro suddenly finds himself hurled back in time to the feudal era, appearing on a deserted plain in a loincloth.
          
The time travel didn't strip his armor; he was only wearing a loincloth in the first place.
        
Gameplay actually begins in a side-view of modern Tokyo, but the character can't do anything except wander past the buildings until he reaches the museum and steps between the two (decidedly not bronze) statues. This warps him to ancient Nippon, where the game really begins.

There is thus no character creation. The character's name appears nowhere in-game, but he has meters for strength, flexibility, constitution, and hit points, as well as a value from 25-100 representing his skill with his currently-held weapon. He has 300 gold pieces and a few items of food. The town of Akuji lies nearby.
            
The opening area.
             
Any intrigue that I felt about the game's premise disappeared in a rage when I was introduced to its interface, which consists solely of a joystick. The developers eschewed the perfectly serviceable Commodore 64 keyboard to require players to press a button to enter "menu mode" and cycle through the various icons to choose options: combat, movement, speak, swap equipment, character status, meditate, disk options, eat, collect gold, use, search, sleep, and open. Many of these options lead to further choices in a vertical menu, and if those choices involve a number, you have to scroll through the various number positions to set each of them from 0 to 9.
      
Setting the number of fish I'm buying by turning individual numbers in a counter.
     
I know from experience that some thundering fools will come out of the woodwork to defend this practice, talking about how cool and novel the joystick was in 1988, but it makes for a miserable gameplay experience. If there were honestly players with joystick cords long enough, and monitors big enough, that they could sit back from their computers in their easy chairs to play PC games away from the keyboard, the developers still should have offered the keyboard as an alternative.

There are a couple of features that make the problem even worse. First, the joystick scrolls the icons the wrong way. I mean, it's technically correct if you imagine that it's the icon "strip" that's moving, not the central window, but it still would have been more intuitive to do it the other way. Second, action doesn't stop in the game world when you enter icon mode. So the game will say you're hungry, and you press the button, scroll to the "eat" icon, scroll through your food options, select one, set the counter for how many, and execute--and in the meantime a vampire can come along and start pounding at you. Even worse is when you're trying to talk with an NPC and he wanders away before you can get to the "speak" icon. Gameplay doesn't even stop when you're trying to save or transition areas and the game asks you for another disk. If you were playing this back in 1988, you wouldn't want to sit back from the computer because you'd have to be ready to pounce the moment that the "insert Disk 1" screen came up.
        
Attacked while switching disks.
         
Nippon takes place in a large world with several large landmasses and hundreds of islands. The world is dotted with cities and castles offering the usual types of RPG services like weapon and armor shops, training, healing, food, and taverns. Food is a constant issue. You can only carry 20 meals at a time, and each meal satisfies you for about 3 minutes before the game tells you that you're hungry again. You can eat more than one meal at once, but the returns diminish so that eating 3 only shuts the game up for about 7 minutes instead of 9. A full game day requires at least half of your meals, so you can't be away from a city for too long.

The 300 gold with which I started the game was enough for me to purchase a tanto and a set of "armor" called bauernkluft, which I think means "peasant's outfit." After that, I went outside to try to earn some more gold for food and training.
        
The "armor" shop sells a "peasant's outfit" and a "monk's robe."
        
You can enter combat mode whenever there is at least one enemy on the screen. Once in combat mode, you're locked onto the current screen and can't wander off the edges. You fight by facing the enemy and hitting the joystick button. If you have a missile weapon like a shuriken, you can attack from a distance (and it apparently magically returns to you, because once you equip one, you don't run out). Later on, there are apparently scrolls you can purchase to cast spells in combat.
       
Fighting a giant at night.
      
As I mentioned, you have a separate "weapon skill" for every weapon, starting at 25% and going to 100%. You can pay 100 gold pieces to train in 25% increments at any city with a weapons trainer. Weapons and armor can break in combat and must be repaired at special shops.
         
With my shuriken, I can attack an enemy across the water (literally " a head") that can't retaliate.
         
Once all the enemies are dead, you exit combat and see your rewards in terms of gold and experience. Gold rewards are pretty decent. I'm not sure what experience does for you. In the first few hours, I didn't "level up" at all, and I didn't notice any changes to my attributes. There isn't even anywhere that you can check your experience total.
        
The spoils of combat.
      
Post-combat, hit points generate from walking around and sleeping. You can sleep manually, but otherwise, when the game decides you're tired, you hit the ground wherever you are no matter how inconvenient.
             
Hopefully, Buddha isn't insulted by this.
         
Cities are swarming with NPCs, many of whom, in the tradition of the early Ultimas, deliver only single lines. Guards say, "Show me your papers." Clerics: "Repent your sins, my sons." Ninjas: "Shall I kill someone for you?" Occasionally, you come across someone with more to say, and the game asks you what kind of attitude you want to adopt, including submissive, religious, normal, friendly, bribing, superior and threatening. So far, I've been defaulting to "friendly" and haven't noticed any major differences. Occasionally, an NPC will say something that gives you a choice of keywords for reply. For instance, a warrior who says, "I am on a quest for gold" might offer follow-up lines based on "quest" and "gold." So far, none of these options have delivered any significant hints or bits of lore, but to be fair having to translate all of the dialogue leaves me uneager to scour every town for every NPC.
        
A couple of keywords about testing his katana against trees.
       
But try I must, because I otherwise have no idea where to go or what to do in the game. Clearly, I need to get a boat at some point, and there's an interesting-looking castle in the middle of a lake that might house a king with a quest. There are features in the middle of uncrossable mountains, so somewhere there must be an object or spell that lets you cross them. Scanning through the notes on the museum site, it appears I have yet to experience the ability to purchase slaves and guard dogs, or to find a tavern with options between "a room" and "a room and a woman," or find one of several places where you can answer a riddle and get your attributes increased. I did find a "sensei" who offered to increase my endurance, but I didn't have enough money at the time. So far, I haven't found anything that looks like a "dungeon."
         
"Pain does not exist in this dojo, does it?"
                         
The title of the game got me thinking about endonyms and exonyms and why we tolerate the latter anymore. I mean, I have no problem with Los Estados Unidos or Les États Unis because they're literal translations, but I think I'd be pretty annoyed if I went to Italia and it turned out their official name for us was Terra Degli Asini. That's what exonyms often are, of course: the ancient equivalent of "those bozos on the other side of the river." Who am I to condescendingly tell someone from Maṣr that he's really "Egyptian," or to presume that a Magyarországian's ancestors were "Huns"? I mean, I get the traditional and historical reasons that exonyms developed in the first place, but by the twenty-first century, in a global community, shouldn't we be talking more about abandoning them? Germans, if you want to use "Deutschland" (despite the fact that it sounds like a guy with a Brooklyn accent saying "Durchland") instead of "Germany," I should honor that. And if "Japan" ever gets it together on how to correctly pronounce its own name, I'll use that, too.

Time so far: 3 hours