The Black Gate: The Next Generators

We don't know it, but we're about to very significantly break the game.

          

When we wrapped up last time, our leads were growing thin. The gypsy fortune teller had told us to seek out the Time Lord--or specifically, to seek out the person in Empath Abbey who knows how to contact the wisps, who know how to contact the Time Lord. I had visited all the major locations except Skara Brae and Serpent's Hold (including the Fellowship Meditation Retreat, east of Serpent's Hold). I had repaired the ether and technically solved the murders, and while I knew where to find Hook (on the Isle of the Avatar) because of the note in his quarters, I also knew that I needed some other things before heading to the endgame. Throughout this process of playing the game "my own way," I hadn't been entirely sure whether I would be able to win without joining the Fellowship, or whether I would have to finally capitulate. I think this session cleared up that question, but it also introduced some new problems.

    

We begin in Jhelom, where I've just killed de Snel, the Fellowship conspirator whose dagger was found at the murder scene in Minoc. It's time to head to Empath Abbey, but I want to make a stop along the way. Since deciding to go my own way, I've been doing a few things while in the process of visiting each city, including restoring its rune to a worthy individual, visiting its shrine, and clearing out its associated dungeon. Because I started the game in Trinsic, I never got to those things there. I decide to head up the western continent, stopping by the Shrine of Honor, Trinsic, and the Dungeon Shame on the way to Empath Abbey.

    

The plan goes awry almost immediately. As we land the magic carpet near the Shrine of Honor, we're attacked by a group of harpies. We make short work of them and head to the shrine, where to our horror, we find a baby--a living baby--on the altar. Jaana, apparently exhibiting some psychic or precognitive ability, suddenly blurts, "Praise All! The child is still alive. He must be returned to Lady Tory immediately!"

     

As religiously-neutral exclamations go, "Praise All!" is pretty lame.

         

Now, "Tory" is the name of one of my best friends, so I'd remember if I'd encountered an NPC by that name. I'm sure I haven't. That means she's either in Skara Brae, Serpent's Hold, or some random hut somewhere. Skara Brae seems unlikely, given that it's supposed to be (literally) a ghost town, and the "Lady" part makes me think she's probably not some peasant living in a stick hut on an island. I can't keep a baby in my backpack while I reach Serpent's Hold organically, so I decide to head there right now.

    

Along the way, we do find a stick hut on one of the smaller items in the island chain that holds Serpent's Hold. It turns out to be occupied by a pirate and mage, both of whom attack. The mage kills me with an unlikely casting of "Death Bolt" or some similar spell, and when I reload back in Jhelom, I consider skipping the inconvenient baby--but leaving him out there, exposed to the elements, with a bunch of harpies flying around doesn't seem like the virtuous thing to do. We repeat the events and this time manage to kill the pirate and mage. Their hut contains crates full of blackrock and various other ores, weapons, sextants, lab equipment, weapons, and food. Gods know what they were prepping for.

         

These two seem to know that some world-ending event is coming.

        

Another island has a cave entrance, so I stop to check it out. There are caltrops lining the entry, and apparently they have an ownership flag attached because my party starts complaining about unvirtuous behavior when I move them out of the way. The small cave beyond has a dead pirate, a stack of gold bars, and chests and bags with even more gold and glass swords. This game has an awful lot of weird caches like this, where you find game-breaking levels of equipment and wealth, while simultaneously not rewarding you much for major dungeons (Destard excepted).

     

A pirate's cache.

            

Serpent's Hold has the same martial focus as the previous games; it's the seat of courage, after all, although that word never comes up. It is the only one of the three original keeps that retains an independent identity, Empath Abbey and the Lycaeum having merged with Yew and Moonglow. The ruler is Lord John-Paul, which is not a homage to the Pope or the better half of the Beatles, but rather Jean-Luc Picard. (As we'll see, nearly everyone in Serpent's Hold has a name derived from Star Trek: The Next Generation.) He wants me to solve another dastardly crime--no, not a murder, but rather the defacing of a statue of Lord British.

     

Lady Tory is one of John-Paul's advisors. A druid and amateur empath (cf. her namesake, Deanna Troi), she is mildly upset over the kidnapping of her baby, Riky, by a group of harpies. When we produce the baby from Gideon's backpack, she's grateful, but she asks us to put the infant in its crib, which is in a room on the other side of the Hold, and then she doesn't accompany us to the room. In fact, she never leaves the tavern during our entire visit. I would think that most mothers, reunited with their kidnapped infant, would grab the child and not let it out of their sight. My headcanon is thus that she herself meant to sacrifice the child to the harpies for some boon, which I've probably just ruined by bringing the baby back to her.

         

Because of pixel snapping, I can't quite get him into the cradle. I have to balance him on the edge. This kid is going to be messed up when he's older.

          

The statue vandalism is relatively easy to solve. One of the guards, Sir Pendaran (one of the few non-Star Trek names), has a grudge against Lord British. British and his advisors "have gone soft," the knight complains. "Brigands populate the land, disease overruns the towns, and corruption fills the councils," he goes on. Just as I find myself sympathizing with him, he starts to claim that the Fellowship is the solution to Britannia's ills.

          

You almost had me on your side.

         

Although it's clear that Pendaran is the culprit, I have to solve it the long way by talking to pretty much everyone else. Sir Denton (Data), the stiff bartender, suggests I speak to Sir Richter, who was first on the scene. Richter (Riker), the armorer, investigated the statue and recovered some stone chips. These chips have blood on them. Lady Leigh (Beverly Crusher) is the healer; she analyzes the chips and determines the blood belongs to a gargoyle. That leaves the sole suspect as Horffe (Worf), John-Paul's bodyguard, who was abandoned on the island and raised by two humans but still speaks in infinitives. He agrees that the blood is his, but claims that the injury happened while he was fighting the true vandal, whom he cannot identify (it was dark).

      

That might be just a slight over-statement, Richter.

Dun-dun-DUNNNN. Cue commercial break for Sunny Delight and Reebok Pumps.

            

Meanwhile, Sir Jordan (Geordi), a blind knight who runs Iolo's South (but doesn't believe that Iolo is Iolo), heard a woman scream the night of the vandalism. By process of elimination, we narrow it down to Lady Jehanne (no Star Trek connection), Pendaran's wife. (Lady Jehanne is also the provisioner of Serpent's Hold and sells ships. I cannot imagine a circumstance in which someone could arrive at Serpent's Hold and yet still need a ship.) Jehanne collapses under questioning and admits that he's changed since joining the Fellowship, becoming less individualistic and more critical of Lord British. She had screamed that night when she saw the blood on Pendaran's sword.

    

Finally, Pendaran (after attempting a little misogyny) confesses to the deed and agrees to apologize to his fellow knights, and Lord John Paul says he'll see Pendaran punished. It's a hollow victory since I wouldn't mind defacing a few statues of Lord British myself these days, a sentiment that only grows when I see the state in which he's left Skara Brae for nearly 200 years.

          

Oh, Pendaran. #DONTBEAYOHO.

      

We find nothing else important in Serpent's Hold, and thus are soon on our magic carpet heading east. While we're in the area, we might as well scout out the Fellowship's so-called "Meditation Retreat," where members are taught to hear "The Voice."

              

The facility turns out to be a walled compound, generally accessible only from the sea, with a locked front door. The director, Ian, stands inside the gate and will only let in Fellowship members, which of course we bypass by landing the magic carpet on the grass next to him.

      

"...which we then exploit for money and power," he might have continued.

            

The Retreat doesn't seem to have any meditating Fellowship members today. Inside the barrier is an empty Fellowship hall and a cave entrance. As we poke our heads into the cave, the Guardian's voice booms, "Avatar, you are not welcome here."

    

Inside the caves, we soon run into Gorn, hero of Dallas Snell's The Quest (1983) and Ring Quest (1985), who wandered through a moongate during the time of Ultima V and got himself thrown into Blackthorn's dungeon. We freed him from there in that game, then found him wandering around the same place--now belonging to Sutek--in Ultima VI. Here he is now, a couple islands away, trying to find the source of the voice in his head, which he thinks is his god, Brohm. Although skeptical of some of the things Brohm says, he nonetheless becomes hostile to us when "Brohm" apparently tells him that he can't trust us. We reluctantly leave him behind. I get the impression that trying to talk to him too many more times will result in a fight.

       

Gorn shows confusion at Brohm's second directive.

          

Further along, we find a female fighter named Iriale Silvermist, an interesting name to go with an interesting portrait. I'm curious about her, but we don't get much chance to delve into her backstory before she orders us to leave on pain of death. Naturally, the seven-to-one odds quell our fear, and Iriale is soon dead on the dirt floor of the cavern.

      

The game is called Ultima, lady, not Ultimatum.

          

In the caverns beyond Iriale, we soon spy a large, round object embedded in the cavern, its doorway swirling with magic. It is clearly made of blackrock, some sort of counterpart to the tetrahedron generator we destroyed back in the Dungeon Deceit. I suspect it somehow allows the Guardian to amplify his ability to project his Voice from wherever he is. Whatever it does, we must destroy it. Steeling ourselves, we stride forward. There's a red light, a lot of pain, and when my vision recovers, my six companions are all dead at my feet.

       

And my light went out.

            

I check my stats and the Avatar has 29 hit points. I suspect I know what's happened. We're supposed to have something that will protect us from the generator's attack, which causes just enough damage to kill anyone with the maximum number of hit points, normally 30. But the developers didn't take into account the bonuses from The Forge of Virtue, which gets the Avatar up to 60 hit points. Thus, although I know that I can cheat the game by reloading, dismissing my companions, and going alone, I decide to do it the "right" way and I reload from before we left Serpent's Isle. As we'll later see, I might as well have just dealt with it while I was there.

    

At this point, we return to our original intent to stop in Trinsic. Reviewing the notes of my previous visit, I can't say that any of the residents (aside from the dead ones) are notably more honorable than the others. However, I have a better idea for the Rune of Honor: I return it to the pedestal in the town square, where it resided in Ultima VI, daring anyone to dishonorably take it, reminding everyone of the city's founding virtue. 

         

It's as if the game expected this.

          

From here, it's on to Empath Abbey, after what I assume will be a brief stop in Shame. Going to Shame is really more for the sake of completeness than anything else. My characters are all Level 7 and 8 at this point (I get them trained in strength and dexterity on the way to Yew later). The Avatar has every spell in the book, plenty of reagents, and plenty of money. Almost everyone is dressed in magic armor and wielding deadly weapons like magic swords and lightning whips. We're well stocked with potions, glass swords (one-use weapons that basically kill anyone instantly), and powder kegs. There isn't much more we need in the way of character development or equipment.

      .

Anyone want to say "to hell with this" and head to Empath Abbey?

        

Shame is a large, maze-like dungeon with numerous traps and teleporters. We fight mongbats, skeletons, giant spiders, giant rats, and headless as we start to regret entering it in the first place.

           

Suddenly, we're in a large chamber with another generator. We had no clue that we'd find anything here. (I honestly didn't remember.) This one is round, and the opening to its chamber is blocked by a moongate--or so we think. I'm curious where the moongate will take us, so after taking a save, we stride through, and nothing happens.

                     

It's important to understand that at the time, I didn't know what had just happened. I figured that maybe something I'd found previously--like the prism from the other generator, or my destruction of the first generator--had kept the red moongate from working. Much later, I do some Googling and learn that the moongate was supposed to have worked, kicking the Avatar backwards. I just happen to have walked through the gate across the one set of pixels that are bugged, allowing me access to a place that I was supposed to have done a lot more things to reach.

    

At the time, I blithely continue through the door. As with the tetrahedron generator, my Avatar finds himself alone on the other side of the door, hovering in a void, on a platform with a red moongate to the north and a blue one to the south. Several similar platforms surround us. This is a moongate maze, the right one taking me closer to the platform with the spherical prism, the wrong one dumping me into a trap back in Shame. If I had not saved on the first platform, or if I had insisted on re-entering the sphere every time one of the gates teleported me back to Shame, I certainly would have figured out that the red moongate is supposed to repel visitors. Instead, I reloaded from the first platform whenever I entered the "wrong" moongate.

          

Is there an in-game clue that gets you through this, or trial-and-error for everyone?

           

Eventually, I find myself on the final platform, where I smash the box surrounding the spherical prism. I am teleported outside the generator and re-united with the party as the generator explodes, leaving the prism behind. Suddenly, the person I assume is the Time Lord contacts me telepathically:

      

Congratulations, Avatar, on destroying the Sphere. I am free from my celestial prison. I thank thee. But I regret to inform thee that the Guardian engineered the Sphere such that its destruction has permanently disabled the Moongates, and thy Orb of Moons as well. Thou canst not return to thine home by way of a red Moongate. Thine only hope of leaving Britannia at the conclusion of thy quest is to use the Guardian's own vehicle for entering the land--the Black Gate. The Guardian's followers are building The Black Gate of blackrock and will be using magic and natural elements to activate it. The Guardian plans to enter Britannia during the upcoming Astronomical Alignment, which is imminent. That is the only time when the elements will work well enough for the Black Gate to be permeable and active. Thou wilt need a device which has the ability to vanquish blackrock. If thou hast not already encountered such a device, thou canst find something to help thee in the workshop of Rudyom the Mage, in Cove. Before thou canst locate the Black Gate, there is one more generator which must be destroyed. It is the device used to transmit the Guardian's voice to his followers and charm them into obeying his wishes. Look in the area near Serpent's Hold for a dungeon containing this generator. It is most likely shaped like a cube. It could very well be on the Fellowship island east of Serpent's Hold. When thou hast completed this task, concentrate thine efforts in Buccaneer's Den. Thou mayest find clues there as to the location of the Black Gate. Shouldst thou wish to speak with me again, simply use the hourglass. Goodbye.

           

Thanks. That will help us distinguish it from all the other blackrock generators in the area.

           

Wow. Where has the Time Lord been this entire game? He's more useful than a walkthrough--although he didn't tell me anything I didn't already know except the one thing that should have given me pause. "What hourglass?" the Avatar asks as the voice fades and disappears.

          

At this point, I kind of get that I've broken the order of things, but I've been doing that the entire game. I already woke up Penumbra before I apparently was supposed to know to do that. I looted Hook's quarters long before I was supposed to know to even go there. I saw a hit list marking Alagner dead before he had died. I found Lady Tory's baby before I got the quest from her. And except for walking through the red moongate, which was an honest bug, all of these things should and could have been completely predictable. It would have taken mere minutes of programming--in the original game or any number of patches--to set a flag so that Hook's key and "hit list" doesn't show up until after the associated murders, so that the baby doesn't appear on the Shrine of Honor until the quest is given, and to stop Penumbra from asking who sent you until someone actually sent you.

        

So I don't reload. But I do try to mitigate things somewhat by continuing to head to Empath Abbey, even though I suspect I no longer need to deliberately seek the Time Lord. In Empath Abbey, Julian tells me that he doesn't believe in the wisps, but the Emps are known to be able to speak to them. This links up with my previous experience with the Emps, in which there was an inexplicable push to get one of them to join the party. I remember the contract in my backpack, still waiting to be signed by the mysterious woodsman.

     

I don't know where he is, but I start exploring systematically from the northwest corner of the land, going as far south as the road to Skara Brae, slowly working my way east. I soon find a hut in the Great Forest that I had missed on my first pass, and it turns out to belong to a woodcutter named Ben. He's even written a book called Trees, and Then Some. He freely admits to chopping down Silverleaf trees--his own logbook shows a growing demand for the wood--but he quickly agrees to stop once he learns that the Emps depend on them. Shortly thereafter, I'm heading back to the Emps with a signed contract.

       

If only everyone were this helpful.

             

Back in the Emp village, Salamon is delighted to have the signed contract, but Trellek's wife, Saralek, reneges on her promise to let Trellek join the party. When she hears we want him to speak with wisps, she has an alternate solution: he can make us a whistle, just like the one he uses to talk with them.

    

I steel myself for a trip to Minoc to get wood for the whistle, but it turns out I'm thinking of the wrong game. Trellek just makes it in front of us. With the whistle in hand, we set off looking for wisps. On the way back to Ben's hut, where we recently saw one, we come across a small keep, overlooked before, that seems to belong to the wisps. There's no one else in it, in any event, and each chamber has an information-dense book of the kind the wisps desire, including The Book of Lost Mantras, which I recovered for them back in Ultima VI.

         

       

The wisp once again introduces himself as a representative of the Xornite dimension and offers to make an exchange with us: The Undrian Council (wherever they are) is seeking information from Alagner's notebook. If we bring it to the wisp, it will give us information about the Time Lord.

           

We fly back to Alagner in New Magincia. He agrees to let us borrow his notebook, but only if we "offer proof of [our] eagerness to learn the true knowledge of the world." For such a test, he asks us to consult the Tortured One, a spirit in Skara Brae, about the "answers to the questions of Life and Death."

       

What questions, specifically?

           

I'm certainly willing to go to Skara Brae. It's the one town I haven't visited; it's important to the lore of the setting; and I know there's a quest to solve there. Beyond that, I don't know. It occurs to me that nothing's stopping me from heading to the endgame right now. I know how to survive the last generator and get the third prism. I've already learned that the Black Gate is on the Isle of the Avatar. Most important, if I don't finish this quest line the "right" way, I can prevent Alagner's murder. I'm also a little worried that I can't finish the official quest line, as I suspect it involves using my Orb of Moons to visit the Time Lord in his prison, and the Orb is now a paperweight and the Time Lord isn't in the prison.

     

On the other hand, I have saved games going back a while, and there's probably no point in the game from which you can't get to the ending within a few hours if you've already gone through all the dialogue, so I'll continue on and see what happens. It's more exciting this way, right?

          

Time so far: 66 hours

     

Game 372: Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord (1986)

On the one hand, I appreciate the non-anime influence. On the other hand, this looks like the members of a 1980s pop band.

            

Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord

Japan

Kogado Studios (developer and Japanese publisher); SEGA of America (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1986 for PC-88, FM-7, and Sharp X; 1987 for NES and Sega Master System

Date Started: 16 July 2020

              

I thought that while I was feeling positively about consoles, I ought to have a brand new experience. While I had the rare session with the Nintendo as a child, I've never touched anything by Sega at all. I barely knew anything about the company before I started writing this entry, which is too bad, because at least in its early days, I might have taken to some Sega games more naturally than their contemporary Nintendo titles. Not this one so much, it turns out, but some.

         

Sega has an interesting history. It goes back to World War II (specifically, 1940) Hawaii, where four Americans created Standard Games to supply slot machines and other coin-operated amusements to military bases. After the war, the founders sold Standard Games and created Service Games, now based in Tokyo to avoid running afoul of American gambling laws. Although the new name reflected the founders' history, the company expanded its offerings to private businesses and homes. The abbreviation "Sega" first appeared in 1954, and it became the official name of the company after it merged with a photo booth company created by another American in 1965. Sega created arguably the first "arcade" game--more mechanical than electronic--in 1966, called Periscope. Sega's first fully-electronic arcade game was 1973's Hockey TV, which I might have actually played at a bar in Texas in the late 1970s with my dad. I definitely remember playing some kind of primitive hockey game with him.

   

The company went through several phases of acquisition and division by American and Japanese owners from the 1960s through the 1980s. As the arcade business declined in the early 1980s, Sega tried its hand at a computer (the SC-3000) before deciding to compete with Nintendo by developing their first console system, the SG-1000, in 1983. (It offered only one RPG: a port of The Black Onyx.) The Sega Master System succeeded in 1985. Other models (Mega Drive, Genesis, Sega CD, Game Gear, 32X, Saturn, Dreamcast) followed through the next 20 years before the company shifted fully to software in the early 2000s. 

     

Perhaps because of its American pedigree or perhaps just to find a different niche, Sega adopted a different aesthetic than Nintendo--and different rules. While Nintendo's graphics leaned towards the "cutesy," Sega's offered more classic western styles, as the title screen to Miracle Warriors shows. While there are some Goofy Cartoonish Little Men within their game icons, the static portraits of the early games show less of an anime influence. This seems to become less true as the years pass, but in the late 1980s, the graphical distinction between Nintendo and Sega is stark. More important, Sega aimed more for a market that, if not "adult," was at least adolescent. The American division didn't seem to care about whether its games were "family friendly," much less insist on striking the word "miracle" from its title because of religious connotations.
           

In the early days, Sega RPGs offered a more western aesthetic.

       

The Sega Master System (SMS) only had five RPGs during its run; two of them were released in 1987: Miracle Warriors and Phantasy Star. Although Phantasy Star was developed specifically for the SMS, Miracle Warriors pre-dates it, both in terms of its original Japanese PC release in 1986 and also its SMS release in October 1987 (Phantasy Star wasn't until December). Both hit the U.S. market at roughly the same time, in late 1988. But Phantasy Star was actually developed by Sega and didn't have a contemporary (Japanese-only) NES release the way that Miracle Warriors did, and thus probably would have been a better title for my first Sega experience. I researched the company after I started the game, alas.

      

The backstory concerns a "stumbling shepherd lad named Iason" who accidentally (the game is vague on how) opens the Pandora Passage, the gateway separating the Five Lands from the evil realm of the Dark Lord Terarin (who, because the name doesn't really convey it, is female). The opening allowed monsters to pour into the Five Lands and sow chaos. Feeling guilty, Iason trained with the White Monks and succeeded in his quest to reseal the passage. But he foresaw the eventual crumbling of the seal and prophesied that four brave warriors would need to face Terarin. That day has come. The PC is one of Iason's descendants, charged with replicating his ancestor's quest.
           

A four-character name is all we get for character creation.

          

If I found the Final Fantasy manual a bit puerile, at least some effort went into it. The manual for Warriors (at least, the U.S. release) is opposite and worse. While you won't hear me complain about the artwork, it offers virtually no help getting started except a one-page list of tips that any of us could have written without even seeing the game (e.g., save often, make maps). The screenshots are all low-resolution monochrome images that barely correspond to the game screens, and the text, full of ORIGIN-like "thees" and "thous," leaves more questions than it answers, such as why the party must endure the constant presence of a floating fairy named Ica. The game map is intimidatingly large and complex, with no clue about where you're starting.
             

The map that came with the game makes the land look a bit bigger than it actually is.

          

Game begins by giving the character a name, then dumping him onto a blank landscape with no guidance, although a nearby castle seems the place to start. The interface is a bit odd. Most of it is taken by a non-interactive window that, during exploration, really doesn't serve any purpose except to show the current terrain from a side-view. Real maneuvering is done in the small top-down window in the upper-right, while the lower-right shows current statistics for money, potions, fangs, and "character points," which are a kind of fame or karma meter. The lower-left shows a health bar and a bar indicating progress towards the next character level.
            

Starting the game. The largest window serves no purpose except to show your current terrain and remind you that an inexplicable fairy is accompanying you.

         
The Sega controller was pretty much the same as the NES: a directional pad and two main buttons. However, the original console lacked analogues to NES's "select" and "start" buttons, which games like Final Fantasy used to provide additional functionality. Thus, the game itself feels a little simpler and a little clumsier. Movement is by tiles and the game is turn-based.

   
At the castle, I learned that "fate calls" me to "bar evil's entry," and that I "must seek the seal of the Dark Lord." I eventually learned that there are several castles throughout the lands, but they all seem to just offer one conversation with the king. You can't actually explore them. Towns are different, including the nearby town of Garia. They have streets you can explore and shops and houses you can "enter" for a line of dialogue or a list of services. Garia had a weapon shop, a blacksmith (who repairs weapons and armor), a healer, and a mayor who demanded 500 guilders. I only started with 400, so I said no, and he demanded I leave. I later discovered that you get major hints for your guilders, but you otherwise don't have to pay.
           

Getting the main quest in the first castle.

       
Weapons and armor were hugely expensive--thousands of gold pieces each for knives, armor, and shields--and the items have a fixed number of uses before they break. I only started with 400 gold, and the most lucrative combats were only giving me about 300--offset by what I had to spend to periodically heal the character. Bestial enemies often leave no gold, just fangs, and while there's someone in Garia who will purchase fangs, I got the impression that you need to save them to prove your worth.

Thus--as almost always seems to be the case with these early JRPGs--I settled in for a long period of grinding. Encounters happen at an extremely variable rate. I counted as few as 3 steps and as many as 30 steps in between them; the average seems to be around 6. Combat, particularly in the beginning, lacks the tactical depth of Final Fantasy. You only ever face one enemy at a time, and for the first few hours (at least), there isn't much you can do other than trade physical attacks and try to retreat if your health gets too low. I mostly loitered outside of Garia and walked back and forth, retreating into the city to heal if my health fell below half. As you kill monsters, your fame and experience both increase, and every time your experience bar rolls over, your level increases, which causes a boost in the health bar.
        

Combat in the forest.

            
Monsters are mostly original to the game, and include weasly wimps, smags, unmutaks, zirods, and sekisaigs, along with more common enemies like thieves. One enemy whose appearance I swiftly grew to love was the evil merchant, who is easy to kill and carries 2,000 gold pieces. Later, that love was transferred to great lions, which drop 3,000 guilders and 5 fangs. Fans of the game must still get a tingle when they see those images. The difficulty of level of enemies depends primarily on the terrain--open plains offering the easiest, forests slightly harder, and hills and mountains the hardest.
          

Sweet.

        
There are also regular merchants that you can't kill without a loss of reputation. These friendly NPCs offer hints, as do NPCs in some of the houses in the game. Some things I learned:
          

• The seal is guarded in the Gorkis Shrine.
• I need to find the ancient sage, Kosama. 
• Kosama dwells in a valley on the border.
• If one's fame decreases, the resulting quest will be "long and weary."

       

Some hints come from NPCs on the road...

         

• I should stick to open plains.
• I need to collect 300 fangs for some reason.
• I should find the Mask of the Beast before venturing into caverns.
• There are two towns in Marula.
• There are nine towns in the world. 

         

...and some come from NPCs in their houses.

         

• One town was lost to Terarin's army.
• To get my first companion, I'll need the sword of a warrior.

        
NPC hints seem to evolve as you solve quests and progress in the game, always remaining somewhat relevant to your current status.
         
In due course, around Level 6, I had a knife, shield, and armor, paid the town of Garia for its hint, and had a couple of herbs (of which you can only buy 5 maximum) to heal in between towns. I started to explore the rest of the world.
           

Purchasing equipment in a shop.

        
The game world consists mostly of a series of islands interconnected by bridges. The individual islands are somewhat small, making it possible to systematically explore without mapping. There's a comically unrealistic hard border around the edges of the world. I soon discovered that the game begins in the far northeast, and from there the only way to go is west.

I soon found Kosama's house and paid him a visit. He related that the Seal of the Dark Lord is guarded by General Terarin, and that to reach her I need to enlist three companions. Though of ancient lineage, these companions "do not realize their own power," and thus I will have to awaken them to their true calling with the "Awake, Giant!" spell, which he gave me. He said my first companion would be found in a city that prays to the god of the sea.
        

Note the world border above Kosama's house.

           
I found what I thought was my first companion in the city of Oruk, a couple of islands to the west. It had the same services as Garia except that the armory sold a sword and a mask, and the blacksmith had been fired or something. The blacksmith offered to accompany me for 12,000 guilders, which was way more than I had, so I spent another hour or so grinding. When I finally got the blacksmith in the party, I was surprised to see him among my "objects" rather than as a companion. I soon realized that the blacksmith prevents your weapons and armor from degrading, and thus you from having to buy a new set every few dozen turns. I also bought a sword and a Mask of the Beast.
        

I wonder if this is the first companion-object in RPGs.

          
The mask allowed me to explore a nearby dungeon (I don't know what happens if you try to explore without the mask), which was small enough that I could explore the whole thing by just following one wall. Amidst random combats, I found a helm that allows me to read writing in caves, and then some writing which advised me to "help [my] friends with Iason's Arms."
      

Exploring a cavern.

       
Because I had more than 300 fangs, a local king gave me the Axe of Iason, which he confusingly also called "Iris' Axe," which confusingly is just called "Iris" in my inventory.

Eventually, I came to the city of Kadia, where the first NPC told me they honored the god of the sea. I found my first companion, a warrior named Guy, in the healer's hut. (He might have actually been the healer, transformed by my spell; I was unclear about this.) When he joined, he gave me a portion of a scroll which shows the location of the Seal of the Dark Lord. He then suggested we seek our second companion in a town far to the south. Soon after, we visited a castle where the king gave him a magic sword called Turos.
          

"I am Dude! I got here as soon as I could!"

        
I was disappointed with the way that the game handles multi-character combat. Each round, you still select only a single character to perform an action that round, so the other character ends up being a meat shield to absorb some of the enemies' damage. Characters only get experience for attacks they make, so my leveling is now split. I suppose maybe later it will become clear that some characters are better at some actions than others, but right now there isn't much to distinguish Guy from Chet.

My combats options expanded slightly when I found some "sacred nuts" in a forest. These magic objects do a lot of damage when hurled at enemies. I still don't have any in-combat spells.

More accurately, your hurl it at an enemy instead of attacking.

       
Random observations:
             

• When you buy herbs, the healer asks, "Is 2000 guilders too steep?" But the subsequent "yes" and "no" options do the opposite of what you would expect, as if he had said "okay" instead of "steep."

            

Is this a trick question?

         

• The translators had problems with "i before e," instead offering "theives" and "sheilds." 

• I haven't been able to find a good scan of the cloth map that came with the game, so I'm allowing myself to use a fan-created map that probably has a few spoilers. I couldn't read anything on the cloth scans.

      

The party's status now that Guy has joined me.

       
I don't know if I'll continue with the game or not. Based on the percentage of the map I've already explored, it would seem I'm about one-third of the way through it, which wouldn't be so bad. On the other hand, for all I know, the dungeons get much bigger or there are multiple continents, and the map just helps you with the first one. The game is pretty dull and repetitive, and unless commenters suggest that it gets more interesting, I may wrap it up with a quick GIMLET. At the very least, it's shown that while I don't care for chibi graphics or anime, I much prefer them to an unstimulating game.
       
 Time so far: 3 hours

****

Before I played Miracle Warriors, I attempted to play Destiny, an interesting-looking 1985 adventure/RPG hybrid whose developer, Destiny Software, Ltd., is so obscure I don't even know for sure what country it came from. The "Ltd." makes me suspect the U.K., but I can't say for sure, and there's some flimsy evidence that it might be an Irish company.
         

In trying to find information about the developer, it doesn't help that "Jeff Pierce" is the real name of DC comics hero Black Lightning.

          
The game blends adventure-style commands and graphic screens with RPG-style combat, inventory, and statistics. It technically fails my character development test (a "strength" statistic is based entirely on inventory), but I was prepared to overlook it for at least a few hours. Maybe only a few hours because the game has a maddening control schema by which you move the joystick over to the command list, click on a command, and then move the cursor back to the screen to click on the object to which you want to apply the command.
         

Starting the game.

       
Unfortunately, I had trouble with both the Apple II and Commodore 64 versions. I started several games with the C64, but it repeatedly crashed at various points that required disk access, and nothing I could do would solve the problem. On the Apple II version, I found that the emulated mouse seems to snap to an underlying series of nodes instead of moving continuously. Unfortunately, the distance between the nodes was enough to render certain commands unclickable. Between the two issues, this one seems the most solvable, but I couldn't figure it out with any AppleWin option.
        

The combat graphics actually show chunks taken out of the enemies as you hit them.

          
Thus, unless anyone has any solutions, Destiny goes to the "missing and mysteries" pile.
    

Amberstar: Words of Mouths

I always want to "talk" to magic mouths instead of "looking" at them. You have to "look" to actually activate them; "talk," which frankly makes more sense, gets you a mocking message.

         

I made a major push to finish Amberstar last week and fell short. The game will almost certainly top 50 hours, which I consider the upper threshold of decency even for a game that keeps things varied and interesting, as Amberstar does. My ideas about an ideal length are influenced, of course, by the fact that I have 1,000 of them waiting to play. But even in 1992, I probably would have found 40 hours to be just about right. To play a game to the end is to commit to a series of sessions of uninterrupted time. They don't have to be daily, but neither can you go too long without playing before you feel like you "stopped" at some point. The longer the game, the greater risk that you have to take a break that goes on too long.

    

But as I indicated, Amberstar is a bit better than some of the indecently-long titles that preceded it (e.g., Knights of Legend, Deathlord, Fate: Gates of Dawn). It does this mostly by avoiding the problem that I worried about at the beginning my Amberstar journey: being too predictable. When I learned that the Amberstar was split into 13 pieces, I inwardly groaned, assuming that I was in for 13 dungeons of 10 levels with the Amberstar piece in some chest on the last level, probably after a mini-boss. But Thalion did it right. They did it like Ultima VI. Some pieces are after a long dungeon crawl. Others are buried out back in the garden. Almost always, you find them while in the midst of some other quest. That said, 13 is perhaps still too many.

    

I began these sessions with a series of dead ends:

    

• I sailed to the Riddlemaster's island and attempted his tower, but it was full of creatures that caused status effects I couldn't cure. Until I was capable of countering the swamp rats' poison and the slimes' stunning, there was no point in continuing.

        

There's simply no way the entire party isn't getting poisoned here.

        

• I went to the Gral swamp but had the same problem with the rats' poison. I guess I should have assumed there would be poison effects in a swamp. At this point, my paladines were still having trouble reading "Neutralize Poison," and I couldn't afford stacks of potions.

• I went to the Dragon Keep, but to enter you need to answer a riddle that requires knowledge of translating runes, and commenter Vince alerted me that I wasn't supposed to know how to do that yet.

         

I know, but I have to pretend not to.

       

• I tried to sail to Sansri's Insel, but the island has a ring of mountains on the interior that I couldn't pass.

      

I finally found a way forward in the southeast desert. I had been told that the pharaoh's tomb might hold a special transportation disk, much like a flying carpet. The desert itself was the only place (other than bridges) where I encountered random battles with any frequency. They were all with skeletons, which offer modest experience, some valuable items to sell, and no status effects to worry about healing. This would be a good place to grind if someone wanted to do it.
         

Finding the entrance to the pharaoh's tomb.

         

The entrance to the pharaoh's tomb was in a mountain range at the north end of the desert. I had to give the pharaoh's name, RELANUKH, to enter, but I had gotten that from Jonathan's laboratory. Shortly after I entered, a stone block lowered behind me, sealing me in the tomb.

     

I killed a skeleton and got a key necessary to move forward. As I explored the passages, there were signs (e.g., bodies impaled by spears) that previous adventurers had set off the tomb's traps, including one long hallway that had such a gruesome scene just about every step. The episode had a strong Indiana Jones quality.
            

It was nice of these guys to precede me.

        

The main part of the tomb featured an area full of dead ends in which a voice asked me to "show the present" from a specific god. There were six gods in total: Gala, Harachte, Nut, Geb, Bala, and Sobek. I've heard some of them reference in other parts of the game's lore, although I don't know whether they gave their "presents" to mark the pharaoh's death or earlier in his life.
        

I'm not sure I want to know what Nut is the god of.

        
Elsewhere on the level were six teleporters leading to six sub-dungeons, each of which culminated in the finding of one of the six treasures. It was almost like what I feared the main game would be, just a bit shorter. Each area was crawling with skeletons. Collectively, they wore me down, but I had plenty of food for rest stops. Skeletons are otherwise probably the least objectionable enemy in the game: decent experience, decent treasure, no status effects. You can just plow through them by rote if you're too bored to strategize, which is good because there did come a threshold after which there were simply too many combats, I don't care how much experience my characters were earning.

    

Occasionally, there were a couple of mummies. Mummies can cause disease, which needs to be cured swiftly or you risk a loss of attributes. (Later, I got "Cure Sickness," but I didn't have it yet.) One of the more annoying parts about this game is that status effects that are clearly based on the creature's physical features are couched as "spells." Thus, rats don't poison you because they bite you and infect your flesh. They "cast a spell" that causes the poison effect. The problem is that, unlike most fantasy games, the creatures do not therefore first have to make a successful attack before inflicting their effects. They can just "cast," and since hardly anyone has any resistance from spells (and the Gray Wizard's "Anti-Magic" doesn't seem to help much), they're almost always successful. 

  

Mitigating this somewhat is that enemies rarely use their "spells" every round. They usually don't start until the second round, then will often occupy themselves with three rounds of physical attacks between the second and fifth rounds.
          

Setting the default combat formation. Leaving the two central squares blank enables the quickest movement from any other part of the board.

         

I'll thus use the mummy battle to illustrate the combat system as a whole. It starts with the characters positioned in their default positions. I keep my strongest fighters on the insides of the edges. I leave the middle two squares in the front rank blank because it's easiest to move people there. The weaker spellcasters start in the rear where enemies can't touch them with melee attacks. One of them has a ranged weapon and never needs to move anyway; I occasionally bring the other up into melee range against weaker enemies.

   

The enemy's front rank is all skeletons. The two mummies are in the second rank and will use their first round to move into the front rank. My characters are mostly healthy and the skeletons aren't very dangerous. I use the first round to spread out attacks on all four of the skeletons. I won't kill any during the first round, but the second round I intend to have Trasric use a group damage spell, so there's a chance that I can wipe them all out then if I soften each of them with some melee damage first.
        

The initial setup.

           

Satine casts "Anti-Magic 2" the first round. It doesn't do much good, but it's the only protection I can offer against the mummies' disease.

    

The first round executes. The skeletons do a little melee damage against the first rank; I do a little against them; the mummies advance; Satine's spell casts successfully. You get a lot of potential saves against melee damage. First, the enemies can miss. If they hit, you might successfully parry. If you don't parry, your armor might protect you from any damage.
              

The second round is the crucial point. The mummies are a bit slow, slower than everyone but Drobanir, so if I'm lucky with both melee attacks and spells, I can perhaps kill one or both of them before they have a chance to disease anyone, which they will 100% try to do in the second round. I shift all my melee attacks to the mummies; fortunately, because of the starting arrangement, they're in positions reachable by my four melee characters. Satine casts "Weapons Power 2" to give their attacks some extra punch, although it probably won't take effect until the third round. Trasric casts his most damaging "group" damage spell (a "group" in this game is a row), which is "Tornado," doing 32-64 damage per enemy.
      

Choosing a spell. The numbers are how many more I can cast with existing spell power.

           

The mummies go earlier in the round than I expected, unfortunately, and Gryban is made ill. Note that there's no symbol indicating this. For some status effects, like poison and illness, the symbol doesn't appear next to their names until after the combat. You have to watch the messages carefully instead. Drobanir resists the second mummy's attempt. After that, Trasric's spell goes off and kills one mummy and one skeleton.
       

Sometimes, I think I play RPGs solely to experience group-damage spells.

           

At this point, I'm sure I'll be able to kill the second mummy before Round 5, when disease becomes a danger again, so I'm not worried. What I have to decide is whether to continue combat or kill the emulator and reload. I have four "Cure Disease" potions, but who knows how many mummies I'm going to face in an Egyptian-style tomb. There may be later combats with 10 of them, where disease is absolutely guaranteed. I'm not sure I can afford to waste the potions on a combat where the dice could have gone the other way. This is a calculation I have to make a lot in this game.

    

While it's not as important a consideration since I have plenty of rations, wasting that "Tornado" spell is also a bit irksome if it wasn't going to do its job. Trasric can only cast three of those before his spell power is wiped. If the mummies were going to get a free "disease" round, I could have killed them by melee alone before Round 5. The spell was thus mostly wasted. I might need those points for a row of six mummies instead of just two.

    

There's only one skeleton left on the right side of the board, and Drobanir (my strongest fighter) kills it in Round 3, meaning the right side has nothing to do. I could just let the left side mop up the rest, which I often do when I'm just sick of things, or I can do what I do here, which is move Drobanir over one so he can attack that right-most skeleton. The paladines finally get the mummy in Round 4, and the skeletons fall swiftly after that.
        

I order Drobanir one square to the left.

      
The battle gives me 46 experience, 66 gold, and no food. The skeletons all drop chain mail and short swords, and the mummies drop flails. Those flails are worth over 1,000 gold pieces each and thus worth picking up even though they weigh a lot. The short swords are worth about 200 each and are also worth picking up if I have the room. Throughout this dungeon, I will leave hundreds of short swords behind. In later dungeons, my characters will get so over-encumbered by gold alone that I have to start leaving that behind, too. Piles and piles of it.

       

I definitely want those two flails. I'll take the short swords only if I have room.

         
Eventually, I found the seven gifts. Using them in their appropriate places opened seven sections of a wall, giving me access to a teleporter to the final area. I ran into a problem. One of the items is the Brooch of Gala, which improves the wearer's armor class. I had a character put it on. When it came time to "use" it to open the wall, I realized I couldn't take it off because it was cursed. After trying a bunch of things to no avail--the last backup of my save was outside the pyramid and before I'd killed about 500 skeletons--I reluctantly resorted to hex editing. The game has four save files, but after some experimentation, I found the right file, figured out where it stored the coordinates, and figured out how to interpret them. I moved the party through the wall to the teleporter and continued playing, but the issue wasted a couple of hours. Later, I discovered that I was an idiot and the entire thing had been unnecessary. I had mixed up my brooches. The cursed "gold brooch" is the one you can't remove. I had given the Brooch of Gala to a different character and it was entirely removable and usable.
         

Several of the gifts were quite useful aside from their puzzle-solving utility.

         
The pyramid culminated in a fight with risen Relanukh, which I either forgot to screenshot or he just looks like a regular mummy. I don't remember anything unique happening, so he must not have been that hard. Nearby, in a chest, I found a piece of the Amberstar and the Magic Disk.
           

I did not, apparently, feel his anger.

          
The Magic Disk isn't nearly as cool as I hoped. It's basically like having a skiff in your pocket so you don't have to swim when you get to rivers and calm ocean. It doesn't work over choppy ocean, mountains, or even trees, so there are times on land when it's worse than walking. It doesn't protect you from poison gasses in the swamp. I thought that maybe I could use it to reach the Tower of the Black Wizards without bringing my ship around, but it turns out that part of the continent has choppy ocean directly off the coast; there's no calm aureole the way there is elsewhere.
          

Sailing across the desert on my new disk.

         
Before I could exit the pyramid, I had to solve a puzzle. The exit was presented as three doors, two of which would lead to "certain death" (rooms from which there is no escape). I could just test them and reload, but what's the fun in that? The hallway with the doors had two magic mouths, and answering their respective riddles closed the two "wrong" doors. Anyway, I couldn't get one of the two riddles, and I can't remember which one it was. These are the riddles:
    

• "What does everyone want to become but no one want to be?"
• "Hole by hole, but still it holds."

      

          
I remember my best guesses to the two riddles (OLD and SPONGE), but I know I got one wrong and couldn't figure out the right answer. I just don't know which it was. Either way, I had to guess between two doors and luckily got it right.
   
We escaped. I spent a lot of time going around to the guilds and leveling up. I had so much money that I could buy enough scrolls that I could attempt to memorize them numerous times. I did this and eventually got both paladines trained in "Neutralize Poison," "Heal Stun," and "Heal Sickness." (Aside: a good name for an air freshener for RPG players would be "Neutralize Poisson.") I got some cool "damage everyone in all groups" spells for my black wizard, including "Hail Storm" and "Fire Cascade." Even then, I had time for a trip to Gemstone for some mithril mail and a few potions. I also bought some herbs and figured out what they do; they basically replicate spells and potions by healing status effects. I could have used them a lot earlier. Note that the potions and herbs are still pretty useful; although Viola and Gryban successfully memorized the spells above, they fail when casting them more than half the time.
         

This gets old fast.

       
My next trip was to the twin islands of the Riddlemaster. He lives in a house on one island but has a tower on the other. We visited him in his house and learn that we could have Kelvin's harp if we solved the riddles in the tower.
   
The tower was about six levels, with different annoying enemies on each level, including swamp rats (harder than just giant rats; capable of poison), purpleslimes (capable of stunning), and many more skeletons. The more interesting part were the riddles, most of which I had never heard before in any form:
   

• "It flew featherless into a tree leafless. But who ate it?" I spent way too much time trying to think of a tree, real or metaphorical, with no leaves. If I had been thinking more about when a tree doesn't have leaves, the answer to what "few featherless" (SNOW) would have come faster, as would the answer to what "ate" it (SUN).

• "What has no body but is still visible?" A lot of things came to mind (GAS, LIGHT, SPACE, SHADOW); the last was correct.

• "Neither air nor wind are as fast as I. I travel through worlds never seen by a human eye. I am here and there in seconds." I tried (LIGHT) and (THOUGHT) and got it with the second.

• "Once white as snow, then green as clover, then red as blood--you know me well." I had to get Irene's help with this one. I was so sure the answer was (STRAWBERRY)  and thinking I was getting it wrong because the translators hadn't properly translated the term, as in the final one below. I can't remember if Irene said that I was wrong because strawberries are never white or because they're never green, but either way, she suggested something else, which worked, but I don't remember what it was. (I apologize for the poor record-keeping, but I did most of this playing more than two weeks ago.) I don't think it's fair that players have to have horticultural experience to pass this part of the game.

• "It is the most beautiful bridge. No man has crossed it. It is a wonderful sight because the waters hang over it." The only one I thought was very easy (RAINBOW).

    
Getting all of these correct got us into an iconographic part of the tower, where we found a chest with Kelvin's harp. We returned to the Riddlemaster, and he offered us some magic items if we could get one final riddle:
   

• "You do it all the time. It is nothing but it is everything. It is the greatest riddle of all in this universe." Without the final sentence, I would have thought the answer was (BREATHE). With the final sentence, I guessed it was (LIVE). And I was right--except the game said I wasn't. I was in the midst of trying alternatives when I realized that a verb works best for the first two sentences but a noun works best for the third. In English, these are usually different, but I realized that my original guess, translated back into German (LEBEN), is both the verb and noun form. In translating it, the translators could only pick one, and they picked the noun (LIFE) even though it doesn't go well with the first two sentences. This must have stumped a lot of other English players. It was worth it because one of the reward items was a "Sickle of Returning," which works like a boomerang and anyone can use.

          

Surely, a true "Riddlemaster" would realize he's switching from a literal definition of "riddle" to a metaphorical one.

        
The harp is an interesting artifact. When used, it allows you to pick from 19 songs composed for the game, most or all of which appear in various terrain or other circumstances. They include "Citywalk," "High Seas," "Gwen's Lament," and "Funky Dungeon." Two are labeled "Censored"; I don't know if they were censored in the original German. Not caring much about music, I returned the harp to Kelvin and got the next bit of the Amberstar.
             

German readers: if you know what the "censored" ones were in German, please share!

           
We wrapped up this session by returning to the Gral Swampstation, a very large, one-level dungeon full of swamp rats. Early on, we found the rune table that finally allows me to "officially" use the piece of paper that came with the game. We also found a scroll that immediately requires those runes and says things like "topaz -- blue circle" and "diamond -- white circle."
       

It would have been nicer if the game had just started translating runic automatically.

              
It eventually transpired that the dungeon had eight holes in the walls of different colors. I had to put the correct stone in each hole, which opened the way to a crank, which when turned opened the way to yet a deeper part of the dungeon. The problem was that not all of the necessary stones and crystals were found in the swampstation. Fortunately, I had a lot of them (e.g., diamond, topaz, ruby) from previous locations. I had been planning to cash them in but never needed the money. One of them, the "mountain crystal," which the scroll confusingly had as "quartz crystal," was found only in Jonathan's laboratory.
       

"Uh . . . Silk . . . I'm pretty sure it wants us to insert a stone."

        
Another, the amber stone (which the game left untranslated as bernstein), could only be purchased at the store in Twinlake. Fortunately, I had noticed it there while looking for things to spend money on. At first, I thought it was a piece of the Amberstar. I had to leave the swampstation to go back and buy it. On the way, I got to wondering why Bernstein is such a popular Germanic last name. I did some Googling and discovered that it belongs to a class of "ornamental" last names, including Morgenstern ("morning star") and Rosenthal ("rose valley") popular in German and Austria because in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Ashkenazi Jews were forced to adopt last names for the first time. Yet another thing CRPG playing as taught me about.
           

Anyone remember the Bernstein Bears?

           
I had hoped that the swampstation would have another Amberstar piece, but its only purpose was to allow me to find the corpse of the former foreman, around whose neck I found Jonathan's location device. Once used, a new part of the interface now shows my x and y coordinates.
         

Note the new interface component.

        
After leveling up, I took the ship to sea, visited the 0,0 location (the number of people to do that in real life must be a small club), and confirmed that the maximum coordinate is 400 x 400. Even though the map looks a little longer east-west than north-south, I think it depicts more blank ocean than actually exists
          
Miscellaneous notes:
    

• One of the benefits of the eagle is that I never have to see the screenshot below again. It happens when I board a ship but then forget to switch the button panel back to "navigation" mode and thus hit "Listen" when I think I'm hitting "forward."

          

If Amberstar were a AAA game from the 2010s, this screenshot would be a meme with the caption: "Every. #@#$*ing. Time."

         

• There is no way to tell the names of your enemies in combat until they attack and you see the "Whatever hits Viola for 5 hit points" message. This puts you at a disadvantage in the first round because a lot of enemies share the same icon and you don't know how tough these ones are.

• It would also be nice if there was an "attack closest" or similar option to speed up combat. 

• All the riddle answers persist, annoyingly, as keywords in later conversations. 

• I want to call attention again to the large and interesting amount of "flavor text" the game provides as you explore dungeons. I always like when games do this to compensate for repetitive textures.

          

I will like it more when graphics and sound make this unnecessary, of course.

         
This post is already pretty long, and yet it doesn't even depict half of what happened in the 15 hours since my last entry. I'll have to cover the rest next time. For the next entry, we'll have something different to break the monotony of Black Gate and Amberstar coverage.
   
Time so far: 30 hours