Guest BRIEF: Zone (1988)

      

Zone

France
Loriciels (developer and publisher)

Released 1988 for DOS

Rejected For: Insufficient character development.

     

Longtime CRPG Addict readers will remember my experience with Tera: La Cité des Crânes (1986), a very odd French title that seemed to draw themes from British science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. After a false start during my first year of blogging, I revisited it in 2017 and eventually won, finding it an interesting experience, if sometimes a confusing one. 

    

Tera was credited to the pseudonyms "Ulysses" (in some contexts given as just "Ulysse") and "Lout." "Ulysses" has been identified as now-retired physicist François Gervais, professor emeritus at the University of Tours. (Thanks to Busca for originally alerting me to this.) "Lout" is likely graphic artist Yves Koskas, credited as such on Gervais's later titles in which the artwork is clearly by the same person.

By the time I won, readers had alerted me to a follow-up by Ulysses called Karma (1987). I tried it and couldn't really figure it out, but I admired the unusual Japanese-influenced art style. Then, this past May, our resident Wargaming Scribe alerted me that Ulysses was credited on several additional games: Zone (1988), Kristor (1988), and Starvega (1990). The latter two are both space-trading games. Zone begins the author's transition away from RPGs, featuring too few elements to meet my definitions, though it is still notably in the Tera style. The latter two both fit TWS's mission, and by the time he had played enough of Zone to realize that it didn't, he figured he might as well push through to the end. [Ed. I apparently made some mistakes here. Forget my commentary and just read the entry below.] He then offered his experience to us as a guest post--eight months ago. I needed to edit it for this blog's format, and at some point, I just forgot about it. I apologize that this took so long, man.

    

Below is The Wargaming Scribe's review of Zone. Watch his blog for upcoming coverage on Kristor and Starvega to complete our analysis of the oeuvre of these unconventional developers.

    

*****

    

The plot of Zone occupies less than half a page in the manual. After a Great Conflict, humankind has regrouped into small tribes which resorted to looting what's left of the past to survive between radioactive clouds and mutant creatures--including humans. And then, our MacGuffin: "A priest-doctor found a biological formula that could save humanity, but a powerful group of depraved individuals have taken the secret for themselves and killed the good man. That's where your story begins." Well, a search-but-too-late-to-rescue it is, then.

    
The game starts with character creation, and 3 stars to allocate between 6 "traits", although they read more like archetypes:

     

One of these things is not like the others.

       

• The brute,  "hit first and talk later."
• The negotiator, "whose preferred weapon is his charm."
• The handyman, "who can build an entire vehicle from junk."
• The biker, "must-have for fast recon and very efficient in combat."
• The tank driver, "who can transport a small group at a slow speed."
• The psy, "telepathic and mysterious mutant, overall non-violent . . . or is he ?"

        

The manual does not tell you the purpose of the various traits. I put 2 stars in "Negotiator"; I suppose that will be useful as the leader of my tribe. I put the last star in "Psy." I have no idea what it does at that point, but I like to think it will allow me to mind-read my team.

      

The buttons combine, with no logical order, game controls and settings like sound on/off.

    

The game jumps straight to my base of operation, which will not move during the game, and from which I have all sorts of management options. Of course, the first thing I do is check the rest of my tribe:

    

Some of the default names have been replaced by the names of commenters on my own blog.

    

I lead a tribe of 12 people, some of them in less than perfect health, as indicated by the arrows on the left: two arrows up is the maximum possible, two arrows down means critical condition. We have a bunch of sweet talkers and some people with psychic powers, but few people can do something useful with their hands except punching.

   
I also check our inventory; we have two motorcycles (attributed by the game by default to the two best bikers: Strange and BG) and one "tank" attributed to Gubison. We also have 58 days of food and 1650 liters of fuel, which the game translates as 22 days of tank or 68 days of motorcycle. If I want more, I need to explore the world map, find more fuel, and then carry it home; the only efficient way to do it is by using the tank which has a large transport capacity. I have only one of them at the moment, and no "spare parts" to build more, so I need to be careful.

     
The world map is divided into 32 regions. Our home base is Mordua and the rest of the map is for now unexplored. A dedicated menu shows for each region the distance in days to walk from Mordua (a maximum of 28 days for Tagh), the tank moves roughly twice as fast and the motorcycles roughly 5 times faster.
    

The world map. The green area in the southeast is a radioactive cloud that slowly moves with the wind.

        

Time to explore to find fuel, spare parts and the body of that doctor-priest! 

    
I send some scouts on foot toward the closest regions, and the bikers a bit further away. I then skip time for a few days until I hear back from them. Some regions are empty, but my scouts found fuel in Cazan, spare parts in Moya and the base of the Blackrobes in Kintor. The Blackrobes are a friendly faction willing to train anyone in being a better Psy and I send Tanith to leverage the opportunity. It will take her 15 days to train and 9 days of walking there and back so she is out for a while.

     
My top priority is to build a spare tank, so Dayyalu, Meat and Karbon take Gubison's tank and ride to Moya to pick up the parts. Every time I am sending someone, their picture appears on the screen, but for the first time I also get a look at the "tank": 

Departure of Dayyalu + 3 others for Moya.

            

I have played enough wargames to recognize any armored vehicle. And I know this one: it is of course a Hasbro Triple-T!

           

In the game's defense, you can probably fit 4 people on a Triple-T.

       

Meanwhile, I also send most of the rest of the tribe to scout, only leaving Valero, Argyraspide and myself in the base. Of course, that's when a tribe called “the Skinheads” decides to attack!

    
Combats where my character is physically present are resolved with an arcade mini-game where I must rotate a turret to destroy one car and one flying bike--always the same pair. The mini-game is initially a bit tricky due to the combination of very slow rate of fire and input delay (your shot leaves the cannon around half a second after you press the key), but the difficulty of the mini-game never changes, so once you are trained, you can reliably ace it.

           

It is not fun in any shape or form, and I had to fight maybe 10 waves of two this time.

       

At this point I am not yet well-trained in turret combat, and I fail to intercept all attackers. This translates into damage to the "defenders"; Valero in particular is badly wounded, with two arrows down.

      
That's the only attack for now. Meanwhile, the Gubison-Dayyalu expedition comes back with enough spare parts to make more tanks, and I send them to collect fuel next. They bring more than 700 liters without exhausting the region.

     
As for the scouts, they find another friendly tribe (the Bulldozers, who can teach tank-driving) but also the home bases of two hostile gangs: the Skinheads whom we’ve already met and the Stinkers.
         

One of my scouts reports on the Skinheads' defenses.

        

I have enough spare parts for a new DIY tank, but it will take some time to get my novice handymen to do it--presumably the assembly manual is lost--so meanwhile I send Rambo to the Bulldozers to perfect his driving skill. Before tackling the gangs, I also decide to fill my stores with fuel and food by doing a round of all the regions with stuff to pick up. This time, I will personally lead the expedition. Personally being part of an expedition allows me to go from one region to another without having to return to base.

       

Loading 9 days of food and 480 liters of fuel while doing the round.

              

While I am outside the base, two things happen:

     

• First, I get a notification that the "strength" of my tribe declined. Every 15 days this event will trigger, draining some HP from my people.

• Worse, my base is attacked! Apparently I left my base with the keys to the defensive turrets, so the men and women I left behind have to get their hands dirty:

 

Combat is resolved automatically, no input from my side. It can last more than one minute.

      

Each character either receives an attack or attacks with what they are good with, which ranges from bare fists for Meat to mental attacks for Psy. There is even an hilarious moment where Dayyalu is said to be seducing the leader of the Skinheads in the middle of the combat while the game shows him using a shotgun. For the record, it failed:     

        

"The fastest way to a man's heart is through his sternum," quipped one of my commenters.

         

When the combat ends, I lose Valero and the rest of the defenders are wounded. This is not looking good.

    
I return to base. We have enough fuel and food for a long, long time. I also realized at that point that you cannot exhaust a region's natural resources. In other words, as long as you know one region has fuel, you effectively have infinite fuel. One of the key appeals of the game (resource management) is gone.

    
On the other hand, it looks like time does not heal anyone so the real rare resource is the health of my tribe! I need to find medicine or something similar, presumably in one of the enemy bases. Waiting will do me no good, so time to go on the offensive. I send the scouts scouting and then create a team with myself, Argyra to bring some psy power (whatever that means), Karbon to punch people in the face, Barbara for any potential talking that needs to happen and Gubison to carry all of us in his tank. Target: the Stinkers' base, according to my scouts the least defended of the enemy bases. After defeating them in boring arcade combat, I enter the base.

     

A door in the rampart. Do we risk it?

      

Finally, the game displays some CRPG credentials. 'Tis is good old dungeon-crawling!

    

First steps in the Stinkers' base.

   

Well "good" might be an overstatement. The Stinkers' base is a series of rooms with 1 to 4 doors each. Some rooms have chests that I can open, others one monster, never more. Combats in Zone don't offer a lot of options: I just pick one of my characters to attack, and that character may wound the monster. Whether he succeeds or not, the monster may also wound him or her. It looks like being a good psy or a good negotiator is useless, those characters still try to punch their targets. Characters with riding or tank driving skills on the other hand are shown using a firearm in their animation, but I am unsure whether it changes anything.
     
Some doors require bashing through, which may succeed or fail. I am not sure whether failing costs health points: in the second room I find a bazooka, which is surprisingly not used in combat but used by whoever I assign to bash a door. Sometimes that person blows themselves up and loses health, but I find out that my trucker Gubison is great with it, and almost no door resists him. He is now my point man, opening passages for the rest of us.
      
Apart from that, the dungeon is HARD! Karbon is the only character who can reliably hit monsters, but I have no way to heal him and he eventually has one then two arrows down in health. I also sustain party wipes after drinking from an unidentified flask that turned out to be poison. Twice, because I don't learn. Poison damages the entire team and kills the weakest characters! I reload the game.
    

Still, I finally find some purpose for my psy character: he can identify flasks.

         

Argyra yells "No!" after the game asks me whether I meant to drink an unidentified flask.

         

Argyra can also "meditate", displaying me a map of the rooms around me and the total number of enemies in those rooms. I don't find that useful because he does not tell me where the enemies or the chests are, and I can't play it like Minesweeper either because those "meditations" somehow wound him.
      
This talent is made redundant anyway by a map I find shortly thereafter while exploring the top-left of the hide-out. It also shows the "blocked" doors, white for the easy ones, red for the hard ones:

 

I made sure to bump my head against all sides of those squares in the top-left corner, but there are no secret rooms there.

         

I am intrigued by the small room a bit at the top left, enclosed between two red doors. I try to access it by the top and what do you know, the door cannot be bashed and I need to type a code. I then try the door at the bottom and find the same situation.
     
I carry on exploring a bit, and even drink a non-poisonous flask. Its effects are not immediately apparent. After some more exploration, I engage in one combat too many against a "gigantic mutant feline." Karbon is wounded twice even though he had already had two arrows down so it is not looking good for him.

With so many wild animals in their base, it's not a surprise that the enemy gang is called "The Stinkers."

            

I press the key to "retreat", and I find myself at the entrance of the base. Alas, it gives the monster one last attack, and Barbara is killed.

        

Adieu, Barbara. So much for your incredible "negotiating" skills.

        

We all hop in the Triple-T and head home. I have the feeling that the Stinkers' base was not the first one we were supposed to raid. I am worried that I am in a walking dead scenario given my only good fighter is on the brink of death, but then something happens: on every step of my return trip I am informed that my team is healing using "antibiotics". I don't remember plundering antibiotics, so it has to be the flask. I test a bit further: the healing effect only triggers when I travel (skipping time does not work), and weirdly affects everyone with me in the tank, even if they were not part of our little trip in the Stinkers' zoo.
     
I spend the following days touring my most wounded people around and sending scouts. I am also ambushed once by Skinheads, but the game tells me that they are not numerous enough and they break before the combat even starts. Meanwhile, my scouts find two more friendly tribes (the Mecanos and the Babacools, I let you guess which skill they can train you in) and critically the base of another "enemy" tribe: the Killers. It is in Tagh and there are apparently 107 of them, but "not very aggressive". Tanith and Rambo also come back from their training.

Tanith dressed for a fantasy RPG.

        

The effect of the healing flask eventually wears out, but it worked well enough that my tribe is ready for another expedition. No one is below "one arrow up" in health, and Rambo can both drive us to an enemy base and add some significant punching power!

 

 

BG is somewhere scouting and not displayed here.

        

I take more than half of the tribe (Meat and Karbon for combat, Rambo to drive the tank and fight, BG because maybe having scouts in a dungeon is useful, Tanith to detect poison and of course myself) and we move toward the base of the Skinheads. After yet another long arcade combat, we get inside... and it looks exactly like the Stinkers base.

     
The content is a bit different though. We initially meet only one monster (killing it gives Rambo a third star in "punching"), but on the other hand, we encounter way too many "storages of radioactive products". Every time we enter a room with one, they wound everyone in the team, and there is no way to solve that problem with punching.

         

I can understand the giant pets, but who stores radioactive waste in a corridor?

      

Happily enough, I still have the bazooka from the Stinkers’ base, so I don't lose time trying to open the door to exit the radioactive rooms. Furthermore, I also find "dynamite", which... helps open doors. Not really necessary, but apparently some characters are better with the bazooka and other characters better with dynamite.

     
On the other hand, no map, so I have to use Tanith's psychic powers to orient myself:
          

We started in the bottom left corner and visited all the rooms with a dot.

        

It was a good call. A room to my left looks "special" given it is surrounded by four red doors. I bash the door. Inside, a magic mouth hologram gives me a code of plot progression:

 

A hologram lights up. A priest-doctor whispers: "In my laboratory of Hawk, the WOON formula will save you."

         

Hawk is the region where I found the Stinkers' base, so it has to be the room I could not open. I am eager to investigate, but first I need to make sure there is not another important room in this dungeon. I explore the dungeon, kill a few more monsters (they seem rarer than in the earlier dungeon), find a poison flask (properly identified by Tanith), then an unidentified flask (which turned out to be the same kind of "antibiotics" as I found earlier) and finally a map which shows that there is nothing more to see in this dungeon.

    
On the way to the exit I am attacked by a "hothead", easily killed by Rambo. Alas, the hothead managed to hit Rambo like a truck. He is now severely wounded. 

      

        

That's the last combat and I exit the base. No party wipe this time.

     
After another healing tour, I return to the Stinkers' base (and fight them again at the entrance in arcade combat), navigate through the corridors (and discover that monsters can occasionally respawn) and finally arrive in front of the door where the code needs to be typed and ..  nothing. Not the correct code. Frustrated, I explore the Stinkers' base, find more monsters, more hotheads and more flasks of all sorts. When I leave the Stinkers' base Meat has gained two more stars in "punching", for a total of 4 stars. He basically never misses, but he is still occasionally wounded. Unfortunately, the effect of the healing flask vanishes quickly this time so most of my fighters end up with mediocre health.
        

It is time to raid the Killers' base. After a long trip to Tagh, I eventually arrive at the Killers' base: a shipwrecked cargo ship. Surprisingly I don't have to fight the Killers, and I enter the ship without any opposition. This time, the look of the dungeon is different:
        

     

Alas, the few enemies are exactly the same as usual - big cats and other monsters. On the other hand, some doors required picklocking to be opened - probably using the "fixing" skill rather than the "punching" skill. I did not take any fixer, but the doors can also be blown up by the dynamite I found earlier on. Stealthy!

    
I don't spend that much time in the shipwreck. After 9 steps I find a chest with a map inside. The map shows that just north of me there is one of those special rooms surrounded by red doors. I get inside it and find some "letters written in blood" on a wall. The game has a [L]ire ("Read") command just for that, and what do you know that's actually four letters forming the code "OXEA".
        

I backtrack and make sure to avoid any useless combat, exit the Killers' base and head home - no antibiotics this time. Immediately after arriving, I create a new expedition (with only Gubisson, Meat and myself) heading for the Stinkers' base. No one defends it - I think I mopped up the last Stinkers last time - but we are hit by another "your tribe is sick" event and just like that I am informed that Rambo died back in the base. Sad.

     
In the Stinkers' base, I beeline for the locked door and type the code. This time, it works, and I enter a special room: the laboratory.

      

       

The game immediately asks me whether I want to synthesize a vaccine. "Sure, why not !" and it asks me for a formula that the "automatic laboratory will synthesize": WOQN of course.

     
The game then tells me that "this vaccine will save my tribe" and, just like that, it is game over. I won!

       

"May the men now rebuild the world." It probably says that because Barbara died.

        

The game then shows me a high score screen and the list of my casualties:

     

       

That's it for the game, it ends abruptly without delivering on any of its promises.  It took me hours to finish, but there are very few steps to win:

     

1. Send scouts until you find the 3 enemy bases
2. Raid base A to find Code #A
3. Raid base B to find Code #B
4. Raid base C to find the Laboratory and win.

             

The manual claims the game can be finished in two hours by a player who knows what he is doing, and I believe it. Alas, it makes most of the features irrelevant. You don't need much fuel, you start with enough food, and you don't really need any skill except "punching" and "poison detection" ["psy" in the game]. "Negotiation" proved totally useless, and since you don't really need extra vehicles "Fixing" is possibly only used to lockpick doors in the shipwreck if you didn't find the dynamite.

        
Ultimately, Zone tries to be a jack-of-all-trades, but possibly due to lack of time, budget or patience it is adequate at none. It tries to be a survival management game, but resources are a non-issue. It pretends to be a strategy game, but hostile tribes don't do anything besides sending some groups to random locations. It pretends to be an RPG and it does have some character development, but the experience is unsatisfactory, with its dull combat, repetitive dungeons and general lack of equipment (with the exception of tanks and motorcycles, all items are "party" items). And the less said about the arcade part, the better.
      

The game has some weird features. I mentioned the healing flasks only heal when in a tank, but I could also have mentioned that there is a risk that your gang members grow dissatisfied with you and leave... but only if you let the day pass by waiting rather than by skipping. Amusingly, according to one of the reviews, the deserters only leave in pairs, as (heterosexual) couples; I tested and it looks like it is true indeed. That's the French touch for you.

        

"Carolyn fled with Dop Max . . . Rascals . . . May they hang!"

        .       
If I were giving a GIMLET, the game would end up at 10, with 0 in NPC interaction and quests, and no more than 2 in any other category, so I took a bullet for Chet. Surprisingly, the game garnered lavish reviews in French magazines, including a stunning 16/20 by Tilt, which manages to call the strategic layer of the game "fascinating", while Amstrad Magazine gives the game 4 stars out of 5. Meanwhile, Joystick states that the game will "ravish the aficionados of AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, Rogue, Dungeon Master, and Phantasie." The only mixed rating comes from Jeux & Stratégie which specializes in tabletop games; I feel it says a lot about the quality of the French computer gaming press.

        
Ulysses coded one last game after Zone: Starvega. Starvega is even more ambitious than Zone (trade! crew management! tactical space combat!) but that's still Ulysses alone with Yves Koskas working on the art, so I am not sure it plays much better than Zone. Still, if time allows and Chet is willing I might return for another weird French "RPG".

Game 525: Monsters Lair (1980)

Grammatical errors in the main title are never a good sign.

       

Monsters Lair

United States

Independently developed; published via mail-order by Soft Sector Marketing, Inc.

Released 1980 for TRS-80

Date Started: 9 July 2024

Date Ended: 9 July 2024

Total Hours: 2

Difficulty: Completely user-definable, but fundamentally easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 8

Ranking at Time of Posting: 15/538 (3%)

     

Monsters Lair is one of those sad games to come out of the CRPG dark ages, as developers tried to figure out how to bring Dungeons & Dragons to the microcomputer and generally screwed it up. The best of this motley of games have a few interesting ideas amidst their flaws: from the same year as Monsters Lair, for instance, we have Black Sage's and Doom Cavern's attempts to emulate D&D modules, Crystalware's atmospheric House of Usher with its hidden mystery, and two attempts by the Maces and Magic series to unite RPGs and adventures. I tried hard to find any spark in Monsters Lair, anything positive to say about it, but it's about as bland an adaptation of D&D as you can get. It was comparatively cheap, at least, selling by mail order for $14.95.

    

The game offers a fixed map of 26 rooms, each containing a single monster. Into this structure goes a single adventurer, with attribute categories (but not values) drawn directly from Dungeons & Dragons. At the beginning of the game, you can choose to roll a random character or enter your own. If the game creates one for you, the attributes remain in the range of 10-18. If you enter your own character, on the other hand, you can enter values up to 99 (although the manual says that values above 18 are impossible). Most of the attributes must be unused; there really is no role for intelligence, wisdom, or charisma.

       

Rolling a new character.

       

The "hit point" value, which by default starts at 10, is a bit misleading. When the game actually begins, you find your hit points are multiplied by 8 to create your "vitality," which is the real hit point pool, as in it's the number that gets whittled away when monsters hit you.

      

The map of the level.

       

You start in the lower-right corner of the map. As gameplay begins, you're asked to set a difficulty value from 1-5. Supposedly, lower values are easier but give you fewer rewards. I frankly didn't notice a lot of difference.

  

Gameplay is very simple. You navigate your little cursor around the map, pop into the rooms, and fight the monsters. "Fighting" means just running up to them and then watching for a few minutes as the game says things like "You gave him a glancing blow," "Got you, boy that smarts," "Missed him by that much," "Crunch!! You are hit," and "You clobbered him." Eventually, one of you runs out of vitality and is dead. Each kill awards you with both vitality and gold, but these statistics are hidden until you return to the starting room, at which point you have the option to bail with your accumulated rewards or trade your won "vitality" for actual vitality (thus reducing your reward later) and continue the fight.

      

This looks to be some kind of classroom.

      

The only choice you get during combat--the only choice you get in the entire game, really--is to use a magic wand (SPACE) to instantly kill any enemy. You can do this three times per mission.

 

The various pieces of furniture in each room, all carefully detailed in the legend, play absolutely no role in the game whatsoever.  

    

Neither do apostrophes.

     

Maximum success is clearing out all 26 rooms before ending the mission, but the game doesn't acknowledge that you've done anything special. Ending the mission gives you a score and tells you what boosts you got to your character sheet during the game. Your level goes up if you got enough experience, and your armor class bonus goes up if you found any magic armor pieces. I don't think there's any mechanism for increasing attributes, which makes it all the more mysterious that you can create your own character of such high values.

    

You'll need to copy down these new values if you want to keep playing the same character across multiple missions. The game doesn't save him to disk or anything. The authors weren't magicians.

             

A character at the end of a session. That's a lot of magical ac pluses.

      

If there's anything that I enjoyed about the game, it was the descriptions of the monsters. They have a flavor of being randomly-generated, but I got some of them multiple times. They included:

    

• Large hairy man-shaped bugbear
• Filthy, decayed, greenish, manlike being
• Large beetle that smells very bad
• Mansized creature, horned, with skin of stone.
• Large black catlike creature
• Giant frog, big as a Saint Bernard
• Pointed eared elf
• Large beetle, with eyes that glow

     

I also fought a just-plain "Demon" but with asterisks on either side of the word. He wasn't any harder than the others.

     

We've seen a number of math problems with early TRS-80 games. This one seems to be full of them. My first game, I went with a created character, and he did all right with a difficulty level of 2. I had to keep returning to the starting room to get vitality boosts, though. After that, everything went wonky. I played a computer-generated character on moderate difficulty (3) who never lost a vitality point. I then tried creating my own character with attributes all set to 1 and played him at a difficulty of 5. I mostly did this so he'd die quickly and I could get a death screenshot. Predictably, I couldn't get him to die at all. He wouldn't even take damage.

     

Back in the starting room.

         

Then there was the occasional room where the character would get locked into battle with a monster that he couldn't hit. Fortunately, the monster couldn't hit him in such situations, either. I took a long walk and came back to the two of them still swinging and missing round after round. I noticed that in such cases, no monster description appeared, but this doesn't appear to be a bug. The manual warns that in such cases, "it is up to you to figure out what the monster could be," as if the game gives any clues for such a deduction. I guess it was an iron statue that my character mistook for a monster.

    

El Explorador de RPG covered this one a couple of years ago. I agree with him that there's probably a relationship with the Dunjonquest games, which started in 1978. It doesn't much look like the versions that I covered, but there are definite graphical similarities with the TRS-80 version, and both games have the whole business about typing in your own character. Dunjonquest is of course otherwise much more advanced. There's also some similarity to Stuart Smith's Fracas (1980) in the way that combats are resolved, but Fracas came out the same year, and if Monsters Lair's title screen is to be believed, it was done by March.

      

I thought the second author's name was "Jinky" Jones when I first read it.

               

The authors are given as Allen G. Mehr and Jimmy D. Jones. Their manual (which comes on the disk) has an apostrophe in the title but makes it singular; it also adds a "The" to the title. They acknowledge the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on some aspects of the game (principally the attributes), but they also note that Lair does not offer "a strict interpretation of the rules." They make the somewhat hilarious suggestion--eight years before the Gold Box series did--that you might be able to bring tabletop D&D characters in and out of this game.

     

It gets a pretty miserable 8 on the GIMLET, offering no game world, NPCs, combat options, or equipment, and only the barest character development, encounters, economy, and quest. I thought the keyboard controls worked okay and at least it was short (2s in those categories).

  

Game 524: Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire (1993)

 

That's a nice title screen for a shareware game.

       

Enchantasy: The Quest for the Eternal Grimoire

United States

EGA Computing (developer); Orion Innovations (publisher) and/or Point of View Software (publisher) and/or published as shareware.
Versions released between 1993 (maybe 1992) and 1996 for DOS

Date Started: 8 July 2024

    

Enchantasy is yet another Ultima clone (with some Magic Candle influence), but at least it's an Ultima V clone. We don't see a lot of those. It doesn't fully replicate the Ultima V interface, but it has the keyword-based dialogue, the tactical combat, and a reasonable attempt at the graphics, including cute touches such as the character sitting in chairs when he walks over them. Commands are all called by a single letter. It doesn't have the object interactivity (e.g., moving things, playing pianos, working clocks) that Ultima V does, but you can't ask for everything.

         

The story begins with a letter.

         

The game is set in a somewhat generic fantasy kingdom called Savallia. The backstory is that you are a wizard's apprentice named Eradan (the name is changeable), abruptly summoned to the Mage Guild of Keldar by Rudimon, the Council Master. The game begins at the gates of the city, where most NPCs tell you that Rudimon is waiting for you. When you find him, he delivers the bad news: After a thousand years of peace (since the Darklord was defeated in the appropriately-named War of the Darklord), monsters and "evil humans" are suddenly roaming everywhere, searching for something, slaughtering innocents along the way, including two retired members of the Mage's Council. Rudimon thinks that they're searching for the Eternal Grimoire, an all-powerful, indestructible spellbook that was corrupted by the Darklord and buried after his defeat. Since the peaceful kingdom lacks any kind of military force, Rudimon instructs you to gather up to three of your friends and start the subtitular quest.

I just want to know if it's a herald of the winged exemplar.

         

There are several mysteries to the game's background:

      

• Author: The author is given on the title screens as "Rick Abel." The developer, "EGA Computing," stands for Eric G. Abel. I do not know whether "Rick" is a nickname for "Eric" or whether it is a separate person, almost certainly a family member. To add to the confusion, both "Richard Abel" and "Rick Abel" appear among the list of playtesters. [Ed. Mr. Abel spelled his name "Erick" and went by "Rick" or "Ricky." He died in 2022 at the age of 68. The Richard Abel listed as a playtester is his son.]
  

       

How many Rick Abels are there?

      

• Publisher: A lot of sites, plus one magazine article, give the publisher as Point of View Software of Irvine, California. The title screens give it as Orion Innovations, a name that belongs to several modern companies, none of which seem to have anything to do with video games. No publisher name appears in any of the files that accompany the game, and it's clear that this release, at least, was shareware. It seems likely that the game went through several publication strategies during its lifetime.

      

Nice logo. The company doesn't otherwise seem to have existed.

      

• Date: The archived AOL Members web site for the game says that it was first released in 1992. However, it is described as an "upcoming" game from Point of View Software in a January 1993 issue of a computer magazine. The copyright screen says 1991-1996. Whatever the date of the original release, this version is definitely a later one, with the files having modified dates as late as 1996.

• Character creation: The shareware version won't let you start a new game or create a new character. You have to use the default starting save. I don't know if the registered version allowed you to create a character other than a mage or one with different statistics.

    

The shareware version also comes with a limitation that allows you to save the game 5 times before you have to pay. Nine years ago, commenter VK (before he was "formerly" known as such) sent me instructions for hacking this up to over 32,000. That works, but the game still gives you a bunch of screens demanding that you register every time you save--and you only get one slot. 

        

This is going to get annoying.

      

The default character begins at Level 1 with a strength and dexterity (the only two traditional attributes) of 3, 12 hit points, and 10 magic points. Each character has six skills: weapons, bows, magic, lockpick, language, and first aid. Eradan is oddly proficient in weapons (3), less so in language (2), not so much in magic (1), and not at all in the others. His spellbook starts with "Minor Healing" and "Fireball"; I suspect the game is going to follow the Ultima tradition of conflating arcane and divine magic. The character starts with 95 gold, 3 keys, 10 arrows, and 3 lockpicks.

     

Rudimon has nothing to say except his long exposition, but there are many other NPCs in Keldar:

   

• Stanton, a visitor who has been to the town many times. 

• An unnamed woman who is sick and wants some healing ointment.

• An unnamed woman who wants me to find her little boy, Joey.

       

      

• Luke, a child and friend of Joey's who says the boy has been missing for about a week. He thinks Joey may have wandered into the dungeon, where monsters got him. He also tells me that a friend of mine said he'd meet me at the Royal Castle, just a little ways down the road.

• Martha, a woman who suffered an attempted robbery for food at the hands of Harry, a beggar. The game has me interrupt the event, which was kind of interesting. 

       

Ultima never did anything quite like this.

      

• The aforementioned Harry, who I chase into his house. He says to ask Joe about his story and claims that hunger will make a man do anything. After I hear from Joe, I return, and he says what he stole from Duke Hawthorne is a treasure map that Harry gave to his friend Boris in Tiernan, far to the south.

• Joe, another beggar hanging around the docks. (He is distinct from "Joey.") He says Harry is hiding out under an assumed name because he stole from Duke Hawthorne and is on the run.

• Jack, who has recently come back from digging for gold in Jack's Cave. No one in town believes him. I'll need a shovel from the general store if I want to be able to do the same.

• A guy reading in a library who just admonishes me to be quiet.

• Penelope, a babysitter for mages, is obsessed with an abandoned house in town. She wants to know where the family went. The house seems to be the one that Harry is squatting in, but I can't get anything out of him about the family.

• Rockley, who manages the little graveyard. He warns me not to dig.

• Bonner, who makes reference to a recent pirate raid.

• Witt, a man staying at the inn who is writing a book about a magical whale north of Kadaar. If you have a fog horn, you can summon the whale and travel to otherwise inaccessible places. Witt thinks the horn is in Udim, far to the south of Keldar, beyond the Forest of No Return. Only residents of Udim know the safe path through the forest.

              

Getting some information about the forest.

       

NPC dialogue works like Ultima IV and V. Everyone responds to NAME and JOB and keywords that they use. Each NPC has a stock response to anything you ask that isn't in their keyword list. It appears you have to type full keywords, not just the first four letters. They often ask yes/no questions or your name.

     

One feature unique to this game is the ability to call up a notes page in the middle of dialogue, either to write down something an NPC tells you or to reference it in another conversation. It saves the results in a file called "GAMENOTE.S" that you can open in a text editor. It's cute, but it takes a while to save each line, and I think I'll probably use an external notepad.

        

An innovative note-taking feature that I probably still won't use.

        

Unlike Ultima V, it doesn't appear that most NPCs go anywhere (in fact, there's no day/night cycle), but they can disappear and appear in other places. For instance, Harry isn't in his house until I foil the robbery.

        

There are also services, including an armory, a wholesaler who has nothing for sale, a training academy, a library (the only book I find is a retelling of "Jack & Jill" called Presley and Pauline), a healer, a temple, a tavern with slot machines, an inn, and ships that travel to the cities of Macino and Hazlett. I buy a staff and cloth robe at the armory and food at the general store; I actually start taking damage from starvation before I find it. I burn about 16 food total just running around town, and I can only afford about 50.

        

I'll have to analyze this more later.

      

I don't see anything that looks like a dungeon entrance within the town, but there are some locked doors. Having no lockpick skill, I can't pick them. Trying involves some sort of little minigame that I don't quite understand. But it appears keys can sometimes unlock doors when you can't pick them. You can also K)nock at locked doors, to which someone sometimes responds, asking for the name of the person you're looking for, a dynamic that had to have been inspired by The Magic Candle.

    

Eventually, I head outside. The iconographic map shows a 13 x 9 area, and I start to groan at the thought of creating my own map of the terrain. But then I notice a M)ap command in the V)iew menu, and--glory of glories!--it opens a clear, detailed map of the world. It appears that the game world consists of several islands. The starting island is called Thule (as opposed to Ultima--ha). If my own position is marked on the map, my colorblindness is preventing me from seeing it, but Keldar is labeled, and I can see a road heading west to what looks like a castle. Man, do I wish I could make contact with Rick Abel because I would double his shareware fee.

     

This is going to make it harder to ever map a top-down RPG again.

      

It's not long before combat comes upon me. You don't see enemies in the environment; you just suddenly get taken to the combat screen. In this case, I face a magician and a giant wasp. I cast "Fireball," and the game automatically has me target the mage, but I can cycle between all foes with the SPACE bar. It takes me two rounds to kill him, in between which he hits me with a spell of his own. The giant wasp starts closing in, and I run out of magic points on my third casting. I switch to my staff and manage to kill him. I gain 8 gold. More on combat next time.

       

Targeting the magician with a "Fireball" spell.

        

There's a useful "Assess" command in combat that shows you monster statistics. 

        

I just wish I could figure out how to switch between monsters.

      

I don't feel great about my continued survivability in combat, so I head south and then west along the road to the castle, hoping my friend is a fighter. Another battle, this time with a ghost and a magician, comes along as I travel. Unfortunately, my melee attacks fail to prevent my death at their hands, and I have to reload from within the town. On my second attempt, I win one battle with a skeleton and warrior bear and a second against a giant wasp and giant rat. I finally make it to the castle. Later, I note that my hit points seem to have regenerated on their own but my spell points have not.

   

A woman named Meredith greets me as I enter the castle. Her friend Jennifer asked her to watch for me. Jennifer would like to see me in the library. I meet Jennifer, who drops the news that the king has just died! She's concerned that his evil brother (the aforementioned Duke Hawthorne) will try to claim the throne, and she has further concerns about the prince that she won't voice in public; she asks me to meet her later in her rooms.

      

You really buried the lede there, Meredith.

      

In the same room, a guy named Naldo tells me that the king had the dungeon sealed, but there's a secret way through the conference room.

   

I meet Jennifer upstairs and she says the prince left her a note that concerned her. She tells me that it's in the plant. The game has a S)earch option that lets you search furniture and other features. I've already used it a couple of times to find extra keys. The note says that the prince has gone to "aid the Underground" at the request of his closest friend Jamal. I actually find Jamal's note in the prince's locked room next door (I unlock it with keys). It reads: "I'm afraid the situation has gotten worse. We have tried to solicit the help of the Mage Council but they have not taken our warnings seriously. Your help is needed. Meet me at the mountain."

    

The throne room is empty. In a study, the king's advisor, Uriah, tells me that the king's tiara is missing; they suspect it was stolen and taken to the dungeon. Guards have gone to look for it, but they report being blocked by magical fire. He asks if I'll help and I say yes. 

        

Why not me?

      

A book on the table clarifies the land's succession laws, which favor the prince unless he is unwilling or unable to take the crown, at which point it passes to the Duke.

   

The secret door is identifiable by a break in the normal wall pattern. Before I go exploring the dungeon, I'd really like to get someone else in my party. I find him in the kitchens: my "best friend," Jared. He does turn out to be a fighter, and he comes equipped with a short sword. He mentions that Rodell (a third friend, it seems) will meet us in Macino, but he doesn't know where Shyra is.

       

I think the game is more excited than I am.

       

We enter the dungeon. Dungeons in the game are top-down, not first-person. But the guards weren't lying. Two steps into the place is a whole sea of magic fire, and we have no way to get past it for now. 

       

Well, we did our best.

        

This seems like a good place to wrap up the first entry. I'll move on to other cities next time and try to round out the party. It seems promising so far--it doesn't have everything that Ultima V had, but it has a few surprises of its own to compensate.

Time so far: 2 hours