Game 145: Galactic Adventures (1983)

With all of its features crammed into two disks, Galactic Adventures wasn't going to waste space on introductory screen art.

Galactic Adventures

Tom Reamy (developer), Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II and Atari 8-bit

Date Started: 5 May 2014
Date Ended: 20 May 2014

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 33
Ranking at Time of Posting: 90/142 (63%)

Galactic Adventures is a game of impressive ambition and complexity, beating against the cage of the limitations imposed by disk size and computing power. Taking perhaps some inspiration from Space or Empire I, it offers an open-ended science-fiction campaign setting, where you create a character, assemble a team, and perform a variety of both space missions and "dungeon" explorations that collectively increase your experience, skills, inventory, and finances. The gameplay experience, at least in 2014 terms, isn't as good as its ambitions, but the result is still impressive.

The game is a sequel to SSI's 1982 wargame, Galactic Gladiators, one of over two dozen strategy and simulation games the company published during an extremely prolific period from 1980-1983. It is part of the company's "RapidFire" line, which was a series of games published by the company but developed and programmed by third-party authors. In this case, the author is Tom Reamy, who programmed these two games before going into other pursuits.

The visitor's area of an opening planet.

The setting is a 7-planet alliance called the Interstellar Community of Intelligent Species, which has some limited government "but the emphasis is on the autonomy of the individual." This and the fact that it takes place in 2918 are the only background the game gives you, but the manual offers that "you don't need to read [the background]" and that the player "should also feel free to make up [his] own" history and lore for the setting.

The player begins by creating a character from one of seven races. Humans are there, of course, as are a genetic offshoot from humans called "Wodanites" (large, strong, have horns, modeled on Vikings). Other races are based on birds, amphibians, and even four-legged beasts. Each race has attributes in strength, dexterity, endurance, speed, intelligence, and "sensitivity" (which is the probability of successfully using certain artifacts). These attributes are immutable throughout the game except the very rare increase by 1 point by using a very rare artifact.

The player races of Galactic Adventures.

Each character also has a selection of weapon skills and "advanced" skills, the latter group drawn from a list of 7 object skills (star pilot, engineer, gunnery, cyborg jockey, physics, lock pick, and linguistics) and 7 people skills (transvaluation, noetic logic, holistic logic, bio transform, mind cloud, atomic wand, and medical). A character could have all of these skills, but it makes more sense to specialize from the outset, since unlike attributes, the skills are advanceable through both practice and purchasing something called an "RNA tab."

Creating a new character.

You only create one character, but you can recruit others from the streets of the planets, or even from the survivors of defeated enemies (a mechanism I can recall in no other game), which includes 8 additional species. The party can be as large as the lead character's "leadership" rating, which goes up through successful adventuring and can get as high as 20. Unfortunately, party members cost up to $1,000 per day depending on their levels, so you have to balance power with economics. Players also have the option to spend $10,000 to clone the lead character once or twice. Clones never cost any money and can take over if the lead character dies.

The game begins in the "Visitor's Area" of the character's home planet, from which the party can purchase equipment at the market, visit guilds to get assignments, go to the space port to blast off into space, or just wander the streets looking for encounters. The player starts with 30,000 "frilbees" (the game's currency) and a generic vehicle called a "transport."

My party (right) encountering another party (left) on the streets of Valhalla.

I found that wandering the streets was the best way to develop in the early game. As you roam, you encounter a variety of parties that you can fight, talk with, trade with, or ask for work. Fighting is risky, since occasionally you'll get arrested for disorderly conduct and made to pay half your money. A better approach is to recruit individuals with needed skills and look for "jobs." The "jobs" concept is one of the game's interesting innovations. They draw from the various object skills and have a defined complexity level, so you might get an "engineering job at level 7" or a "lockpicking job at level 5." To complete it successfully, you need to have the appropriate tools for the trade plus adequate level in the related skill.

If you select a job, you have the option to play a mini-game to simulate performing it or go with "abstract resolution" in which a random roll is made against a base probability of success. (The base probability is 50% if the character's intelligence plus skill level equal the job level.) The mini-game is essentially a variation on Mastermind with alien races instead of colored pegs. You have to figure out a random selection of 7 races in 4 positions with between 1 and 10 guesses dependent on the variance between your skill level and the job level. After each guess, the game tells you how many correct positions you guessed and how many races were correct, but in the wrong positions. You deduce from there. I've played a lot of Mastermind and I find it very difficult to beat in less than 7 guesses, so I lost the game a lot. If you fail at a job, you get fined; if you succeed, you get paid and your skill level has a chance of increasing.

Fortunately, my skill level here is high and I get 10 guesses. In guess 4, I was correct about three of the positions.

Space travel is the least complicated of the game's primary mechanisms, but first you have to save up $200,000 to buy your own spacecraft. Once you have it, you can transport cargo or passengers between planets for reasonably good rewards and fairly low risk. Navigating space is a matter of selecting a destination and then moving the space ship to a "hyper-gate" and hitting the SPACE bar. The trick is that the hyper-gate moves randomly around the screen, you have a limited amount of fuel, and your ship's thrusters obey the real laws of physics. If you're already accelerating by 1 unit to the "east" and you turn to the "south" and accelerate by 1 unit, you don't immediately turn south; you end up accelerating by 1 unit to the southeast. Frantically trying to thrust in the direction of the gate will just deplete your fuel and send you careening on an unintended tangent. You have to carefully plot the use of both forward and reverse thrusters to get the bearing right, while simultaneously trying to anticipate where the gate is going to go. The process isn't easy, but fortunately the main menu offers practice in both hyper-gate navigation and combat.

Trying to reach the hyper-gate.

Pirates occasionally intercept you in space, and combat takes place on the same kind of map but with the added difficulty of trying to face your enemy and fire lasers (with success dependent on the "gunnery" skill). You can channel fuel into your shields and even use a tractor beam to capture and board the enemy ship. Boarding ships and defeating pirates in tactical combat is the only way to recruit the valued "Gorsai" species into the party, who have near-maximum attributes in both strength and dexterity.

I've already described what sound like a lot of gameplay elements, but the heart of the game, like almost every SSI title, is really in tactical combat on complex battlefields. Once again, I find myself wishing I'd rejected the "DOS-only" rule the moment I thought of it in 2010. If I had, I would have played this game early, and would have seen what is probably SSI's first fusion of strategy game and role-playing game. I would have referred to it when analyzing the combats in Wizard's Crown, Shard of Spring, and Pool of Radiance, and I would have been giving Tom Reamy credit for introducing this kind of combat mechanic into the CRPG genre for the first time.

A tactical combat screen with numerous options.

You can get into these battles on the streets of planets or by boarding Gorsai ships, but for the most part, the tactical combats take place on a variety of planets and asteroids that you visit by accepting quests from one of the game's four guilds: the Agency (a massive intelligence service), Space Patrol, the Adventurer's Guild, and the Sensitive's Guild. These missions always whisk you to some other world, where you engage in a text-based dungeon crawl through multi-roomed structures and find combat in most of them.

The beginning of a guild mission.

The combat is difficult, complicated, and more than a little exhausting. I can easily see why SSI chose to add a quick combat option to Wizard's Crown, the next RPG to use this kind of interface. Assuming no one is ambushed, it begins by positioning the various party members on the map, and there are limitations in this process I can't quite figure out. The party and its foes then trade turns, during which the party has group options to surrender or flee, and individual options to move, attack, load weapons, use items, rest, and dodge. After each side makes its selections, they execute all at once. The speed of the actions, and the enemy's AI, are just fine in AppleWin with an accelerated processor, but at era-specific speeds they're an unmitigated nightmare, and winning even the simplest combats would have been a multi-hour process.

Combat takes place on a variety of terrains, each with their own logistical challenges.

As I said, combat is extremely difficult and deadly as well as long. I learned the hard way that characters with melee weapons have almost no chance of successfully reaching enemies before being killed or rendered unconscious by enemy phasors and explosives. Meanwhile, characters of low weapon skill (less than 10 or so) miss constantly. If I was really invested in this game, I'd probably spend a lot of time winning low-risk battles on planets before accepting any guild missions.

In this combat option, character "V" is going to move two spaces to the northwest, then attack "Y" with his laser sword. Note that the icons above each character indicate whether they have ranged or missile weapons.

The funny thing is, there's a way to cheat the entire thing. SSI built in the ability to change to two-player mode at the beginning of each round, just in case a friend happens to wander into the room or something. The friend can play the enemy while you play the regular party. Of course, you can exploit this mechanic to take control of both parties yourself and just have the enemies "rest" while the PCs pound on them.

You don't have to kill every enemy to win; they'll depart the battlefield if sufficiently wounded. After combat, you have the ability to recruit from among the survivors as well as "rob" the defeated party (I rather prefer "search" instead) of their money and equipment. You then can continue to explore the area by moving north, south, east, or west to the next sector.

A rare complete victory.

Very often, in between sectors, you'll encounter some kind of challenge that you need a skill to solve, like a locked door (requiring lock picking) or an especially dense swamp (requiring the "cyborg jockey" skill, or more effective use of the cyborg transport). When these occur, you engage in them the same way as the "jobs" back on the planets.

I guess the ultimate goal of each quest is to explore long enough to find the path off the planet, but at any point you can "give up" the mission. I'm not really sure what the difference is, since you get adventuring experience even if you "give up."

The game is full of things we haven't yet seen in 1983 and that I've never seen before at all. There's an extremely long list of weapons of different types and classes. There are special artifacts called "k-devices" spread throughout the galaxy (relics of an earlier civilization) that have a variety of powerful effects (a "k-reanimator" is the only way to resurrect a slain party member). Combat occasionally takes place in zero-gravity, which includes an additional "bounce phase" where characters careen backwards in proportion to their actions during the round. Certain weapons are illegal on certain planets, so they'll be confiscated by customs when you arrive. An "adventure construction" option lets you make your own quests and encounters.

Even the skill system, which certainly isn't unique to this game, has a few selections that I've never seen elsewhere, such as "atomic wand," the ability to duplicate small objects; and "bio transform," the ability to change the appearance of a living organism. The two "logic" skills sound extremely interesting. "Noetic logic" is the art of persuasion through highly-structured reasoning, and "holistic logic" is the ability to make intuitive leaps. Of the latter, the game manual says, "Some of its uses are gathering information (like tracking down a rumor through the back alleys of a space port city), or confirming if someone is telling the truth, or predicting the likely actions someone will take." Unfortunately, I never really found uses for these logic skills, but perhaps I needed to develop them more.

There is no main quest in the game; the manual encourages you to "set up a number of your own goals, like reaching a certain rank in the shortest elapsed time, or collecting all possible K-devices, or amassing a fortune in Frilbees." However, there is a general goal to reach the rank of "Independent Adventurer" before you die. In my time with the game, the best I ever got without dying was "Trial Adventurer," but I only played for 131 days of game time, and this is the sort of game that's meant to be cherished for years. If I had bought it when I was 10, I could see myself rushing home from school every day to fire it up and see if I could get through one of the adventures before dinner. Alas, I have too little time and too long a list these days.

My best attempt at a high adventure rating.

In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 2 points for the game world, which was deliberately left under-developed. The alien races are a bit goofy and the planets are essentially uniform.

Blasting off from spaceport.

• 4 points for character creation and development. The various mechanisms to develop skills, and the satisfying effect that this advancement has on gameplay, are almost unique to the era.

• 2 points for NPC interaction. There isn't much to the street encounters on the planets, which are essentially the only NPCs in the game, but you can role-play them to a limited extent.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. In this I'm rewarding both the "jobs"-based encounters as well as the variety of alien enemies and monsters that you fight, each with different strengths and weaknesses.

• 4 points for combat. A great early example of the tactical combats that would make SSI famous. Unfortunately, from a modern perspective, the battles are a little too long and difficult.

• 5 points for equipment. A great selection for such an early game, including weapons, armor, tools, and artifacts.

Some of the options in a weapon shop.

• 4 points for economy. Given the costs of maintaining a party, buying items, paying for botched jobs, buying ships, and--especially--keeping a full stock of fuel, money never goes out of style.

• 2 points for quests. There's no real main quest, just a general goal, but the guild quests are mildly interesting.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are (as usual for the era) relatively primitive, and there's no sound. The interface is mostly menu-driven and doesn't have any real problems.

• 4 points for gameplay for being completely non-linear and fairly replayable. Overall, though, I found it too difficult, and many of the mechanisms took too long even with a modern processor.

The final score of 33 is pretty high for the era, though perhaps a smidgen lower than the point at which I'd say "definitely check it out for yourself." In contemporary times, Computer Gaming World called it a "superb job," praising its combat mechanism in particular, and advising readers to "treat yourself to a great game system and role playing fantasy."

The game doesn't support female characters, but we must market those legs!

Galactic Adventures is little-remembered today. It has no entry on MobyGames or Wikipedia. I couldn't find the original manual (not even the MOCAGH has it), but thankfully someone named Dan Vernon translated it to HTML 12 years ago on an obscure site; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to play the game. One YouTube user has uploaded videos for both the Atari 8-bit and Apple II versions. Its obscurity is all the more notable given that it had a clear influence, in both combat and skills, on Wizard's Crown (1986), which in turn influenced Pool of Radiance. Unless he had an obvious inspiration that I'm missing, Tom Reamy is the grandfather of the combat system I love so much in the Gold Box games. I'm just glad that SSI simplified the system a bit and offered "quick combat" options in later games.

Unfortunately, according to Tom's own account, both Galactic Gladiators and Galactic Adventures "got better reviews than sales," and he went broke trying to make a living out of software programming. Ultimately, this forced him to transition to other fields. I've written to the last e-mail address I can find for him, and I hope he responds, but for now it's back to Middle Earth!

Moving Forward: The 1994 Game List

 

 

It's time to talk about some changes that I have in mind for the CRPG Addict as we continue to progress into the 1990s.

     

I wrote my last yearly transition post, "1992/1993," over four years ago. It has taken me that long to get through the roughly 65 games, not including BRIEFs, that made up my 1993 list. At that time, I noted that 1993 had 74 games, "more than any other year until 2012," but more were added and some were lost during the four years that I covered it. More were also added to later years, so now 1994 has 68 games and 1995 has 76.

     

I am no longer satisfied at the pace that I'm making through these years. I don't want to be 66 when I cover the original Fallout or 88 when I can finally replay Morrowind. So here's what I have in mind:

    

• During my first pass through each year, from now on, I will cover about 25 games. Specifically, I will hand-select about 10, randomly select another 10, and then hear your arguments for which other games deserve "landmark" status, choosing the best 5 (roughly). 

• If any of the 25 selected titles turns out to be the wrong year, or not an RPG (i.e., I BRIEF it), or otherwise disappears from the list, I'll replace it with another random selection from the same year. 

• I will continue to alternate "new" games with those from the backlist. So any game that I don't cover on my first pass through a year will have an equal chance of appearing later on from a random selection. If one of the random selections from the backlist turns out to be a sequel (literal or spiritual) of a game that I haven't covered, I'll go back and cover that game first.

• There will no longer be any "surprise" games. Everything I intend to play, including the occasional console game, will appear on my "upcoming" list and you'll have a chance to anticipate and discuss them.

    

In some ways, this system is what I've been doing all along. Because we keep finding old games, it has proven impossible to ever fully clear a year. 1992 was the last year that I completed, and yet it has half a dozen new findings since I "finished" the year. 1983 has 30. So under this new system, I'm simply relegating a lot of minor titles to the backlist at the outset instead of doing so after discovering them later.

     

Let's see how this would work for 1994. Looking over the list of 68 games on my master list, applying what I know about the genre, supplemented with a little time on Wikipedia, I would hand-select the following games as being particularly notable, fun, or important:

    

• Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse
• Ancient Domains of Mystery [turns out to be a 1996 game]
• Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager
• The Elder Scrolls: The Arena
• Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard  
• Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity
• Jagged Alliance [turns out to be a 1995 game]
• Menzoberranzan
• Pagan: Ultima VIII
• Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession
• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail  

  

Already that's 11, but that's fine. I don't need to be rigid. Now I take 10 random titles:

    

• Aethra Chronicles: Volume One - Celystra's Bane 
• Crystal Dragon 
• Darghul 
• Dark Designs IV: Passage to Oblivion 
• Darkmere: The Nightmare's Begun 
• Escape from Ragor 
• Jiji and the Mysteirous Forest: Chapter 1 
• Litil Divil
• Newcomer 
• Power of the Hired [seems like Wikipedia is wrong about a Windows port of this SNES game]
• Telnyr III [turns out to be a 1993 game]
• World of Arch 

    

Do these lists together give a decent idea of what 1994 has to offer? What else would you argue deserves to be covered now rather than waiting for a chance to be covered later? 

 

****

 

Edit: And with the nominations based on the question above, we have the rest of the games necessary to flesh out the chosen 25:

 

• Alien Logic
• Ironseed
• Istanbul Efsaneleri
• Nahalkh
• Realmz
• Robinson's Requiem
• Superhero League of Hoboken
• Yendorian Tales: Book 1

Game 338: SpellCraft: Aspects of Valor (1992)

         

SpellCraft: Aspects of Valor

United States

Tsunami Productions (developer), ASCII Entertainment Software (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 27 July 2019

I was recently reminded of a nine-year old entry in which I remarked on the considerable variances in spell systems between fantasy RPGs. A lot of the stuff I said in the first year of blogging was ignorant nonsense, but this entry holds up. My thesis was that while many CRPGs may offer near-identical experiences when it comes to character attributes, equipment, NPC interactions, and combat, their approaches to magic are so variable as to almost be a fingerprint. "Fully describe the magic system of any game," I said, "and there's a decent chance that your description applies only to that game, or at least only to games in that series." I then analyzed a number of categories in which spell systems varied.

             

The Ultima series was a good title to encapsulate the argument because it doesn't even maintain spell consistency within the series. Every entry is unique. I think the series reached its apex in Ultima V, which featured the "syllable" system as well as the reagent system. I call it the apex, but the system was also full of unrealized potential. There were a couple of unlisted spells that you could figure out if you understood the logic behind syllables and reagents, but otherwise the spells were mostly handed to you in a spellbook. I'd like to see the same system in which the player has to figure out almost every spell, and moreover can create some fantastic combinations. If in Ultima V, KAL XEN summoned a creature and VAS FLAM created a great ball of fire, I don't see why KAL VAS XEN FLAM wouldn't summon a great creature of fire.

          

I agree that neither "accomplishment" nor "danger" seem like this guy's strong suits.

           

One thing that never makes sense to me about spells in Dungeons and Dragons settings is how relentlessly predictable they are. It makes no sense that if a mage can summon a fireball, he can only summon an enormous fireball that covers a 69-square area and does deadly damage to everyone within it. Once you know how to pull fire out of thin air, you ought to be able to figure out how to halve or double the recipe. A lot of other games give you the ability to vary the intensity of a spell without having to change to a completely different spell. This was one area in which Disciples of Steel improved upon the Gold Box engine.

          

SpellCraft offers a little of what I'm looking for in both areas. Its spells are created like recipes--a combination of "aspect" items (not unlike Elvira II in this regard), ingredients, and magic words, some of which can be varied to produce different effects. I'm a little hesitant to call the system exactly what I'm looking for because I don't think there's a lot of logic to the aspects and ingredients. But it may be that I just haven't experienced the system long enough yet.

             

A few hours?! The tailwinds were kind this day.

           

SpellCraft was conceived by Joseph Ybarra, the Electronic Arts executive who had produced the first Bard's Tale games, Starflight, and Legacy of the Ancients (among others). In between presiding over the last days of Infocom (1988-1990) and taking a producer role at 3DO (1995), Ybarra ran his own company, drawing in Karl Buiter, creator of Sentinel Worlds and Hard Nova. Most references to Ybarra's company call it Ybarra Productions, and indeed that's the title the team used for Shadow of Yserbius (1993) and Alien Legacy (1994), but for a while at the beginning he must have flirted with "Tsunami Productions." Anyway, SpellCraft seems to be a completely original conception; I can find nothing like it in Ybarra's history nor the histories of any of the programmers.
        

The manual features one of the worst-written backstories that we've encountered in a long time. (The manual is otherwise okay.) I'd blame Karl Buiter of "You beat me?!...I am destroyed" fame, but he's not credited on the manual. I spent a few paragraphs trying to deconstruct how bad it is, and why it's bad, but it was taking so long I may actually save it for an entire entry. I invite you to click on that link, go to Page 6, and make any sense of it. This is the type of manual that could only have gotten past the production standards of a Japanese company running an American office.

          

Security tightened after it became a UNESCO site.

            

The upshot is that magic was around on Earth for a long time, but its abuses led some wizards to create (or move to) the separate realm of Valoria. While the use of magic in "Terra" dwindled to weak cantrips and soothsaying, in Valoria wizards wielded devastating power and warred among themselves for centuries. Eventually, they came together in a Council of the Wise and elected a Magister to lead them, and war settled down into healthy competitions instead of all-out slaughter.
       

Unfortunately, the testing of atomic bombs in the 1940s on Terra happened to coincide with some powerful magic rituals in Valoria, with the result that a major rift opened between the two worlds. Here, the manual transitions to the game's opening segments, though imperfectly because in-game screens say the rift is "tiny" and it was discovered recently. (Fortunately, the in-game text seems to have been penned by someone more competent than the manual backstory author.) The Magister, Garwayen, suggested that the council close the rift so that "our worlds would not come into conflict," but the rest of the council--six wizards aligned to different "colleges" of magic--voted to enlarge it so they could conquer Terra. As if this wasn't bad enough, Garwayen thinks that enlarging the rift will damage the "very fabric of reality" and thus potentially destroy both realms.

            

Yeah, we'll see how your "Fireball" spells perform against our ballistic missiles.

           

Garwayen, "old and feeble" and unable to stop his six colleagues, looked for someone "born under the same conjunction of stars" who could absorb his magic. He found the answer in Robert Garwin, an American with "a modest life of no great accomplishment and no great danger." Garwin unexpectedly receives a ticket to England from his "Uncle Gar" with the promise of an inheritance on the other end. Following "Gar's" instructions, Garwin flies to Heathrow, rents a car, drives to Stonehenge, gets teleported to Valoria, and soon finds himself Garwayen's apprentice.

             

The images are now in sync with the text.

            

The player's first choice is to pick a primary college of magic from among the classic four elements. Irene happened to be walking by as the choice was presented to me, and I decide to test the depth of my knowledge of my wife by giving the options to her. The issue was never what element she'd choose (fire), or how she'd make the choice ("Fire! Fire! Fire!" with a manic gleam in her eye) but whether she'd even let me finish reading the sentence before giving her answer. She had just come home from battling tourist traffic along the coast, so I'm proud to say that she did not.

            

          

The game eases you into its conventions with a few tutorials, starting with the creation of the first spell. In my case, it was "Fire Barrier," a defensive spell. Creating a spell requires first selecting its "aspect" from among 48 potential objects you can collect. You then have to choose how many of that aspect to use in the spell's creation, plus how many standard ingredients--powders, stones, candles, and jewels--will also go into it. Finally, you associate a "magic word" with the spell, which is really just a textual representation of the spell level. The first level of fire-based spells are all LUX, for instance.

         

Mixing a new spell.

       

You get these recipes from a variety of sources, including arcane hints in the manual and NPC dialogue, but in this case Garwayen just told me what ingredients to use.

             

Garwayen explains where to find information about spells.

         

Once the spell is created, you have to go to your spellbook to mix any number of iterations of the spell, capped by how many ingredients you have on-hand. You can also make modifications, by adding more of some ingredients, thus hoping to vary the spell's power or effects. Whether this works or not is governed by the "elasticity" of the ingredients, which you're told during the initial spell's creation.

         

A full description of the spell accompanies its creation.

        

A spellbook that came with the game seems to have blanks for all possible spells, plus partial information for a lot of them. I imagined that the player is meant to fill in these blanks as he discovers new spells, so that's what I started doing. I'm not sure that the "aspects" make any logical sense. Each is a physical object but has an "aspect of" something else. For instance, a fishook has an "aspect of pinpricks" which kind-of makes sense, but the domino mask has the "aspect of falling birds," which makes no sense at all.

           

God damn those shriners!

        

Garwayen then dropped a surprise in telling me that the various wizards won't be defeatable with magic. For that, I'll need a regular weapon. He gave me a Sword of Striking to use, then tossed me into the Earth Domain to check it out.

       

When you're on a mission in Valoria, the interface changes to an axonometric window with environmental objects, enemies, and treasure chests. The numberpad moves the character, the function keys select spells, and the ENTER key casts them. The SPACE bar cycles the bottom-left window through a couple of options, including character statistics and a map. All of these actions have mouse alternatives. I feel like the graphics, good in the rest of the game, degrade significantly in the exploration window.

             

Enemies--in this case, something that looks like an orc--head for you the moment that they see you. Unfortunately, physical combat is pretty pathetic. You simply adopt a combat posture with a single keystroke and the game fights for you. If you hit any other key while in combat, you return to a non-combat posture. A single "life" bar indicates both health and spell points. It recharges relatively quickly as you walk about the environment. An early-game character can't defeat more than one enemy on a single health bar, but you can defeat one, then run around before engaging the next. (In the early game, at least, the character moves faster than enemies.) 

            

I send a fireball streaking towards an orcish creature in the Earth Domain. A chest is available for pickup to my south.

         

Enemies drop bags of items (spell aspects and ingredients) when defeated. Chests scattered about the world deliver these in greater volume. When you've defeated all the enemies and collected all the chests, you return to your home base--a "Stone Circle" that has its own health bar for reasons that must become apparent later--via a keystroke.
          

I ran three practice missions fighting orcs before Garwayen decided we'd better move on. He had me create a "Fireball" spell (red fez aspect, three powders, six candles) and then sent me to fight more orcs. I used the spell for a couple of them, but I defeated most in combat to conserve ingredients.

          

Logging the "Star Healing" spell in the spellbook.

         

For the next spell, he wanted me to create something called "Star Heal," from the "ether" college, but he would only tell me that the "aspect grows naturally" and that the "proportions for the spell are one and three." I consulted the spellbook and found only one "personal modifier" spell with 1 of one thing (the aspect) and 3 of the other (stones). Of aspects that "grow naturally," I only had garlic and onions. Garlic and 3 stones turned out to be the answer.

          

A map of Terra shows me the magic hot spots. I guess Oceania doesn't have any.

        

At this point, the game took an odd turn, as Garwayen sent me back to Terra to purchase some more ingredients--particularly two vials of white liquid. I was presented with a world map, $20,000 cash, a pomegranate, and the ability to travel to Salem, Massachusetts (USA); Teotihuacan, Mexico; Pompeii, Italy; and back to Stonehenge. Each one-way ticket cost at least a few hundred dollars. At each location, I could talk to an NPC and buy or sell ingredients from him.

           

Trading ingredients.

        

Stonehenge's NPC was a hippie named David Greenbriar who wanted a magic pomegranate so much he was willing to pay $10,000, so that bolstered my initial funds. In Salem, I made contact with Selina, a guide at the Witch Museum (this was accompanied by what I can attest is a real photo of Salem's Washington Square), who told me to return if I ever found the Book of Witches. In Teotihuacan, a medicine woman promised to teach me a new magic word if I brought back an opal from the Fire Domain. Pompeii's NPC was an English tourist interested in ancient artifacts. In each location, I bought 5 of any ingredient they were selling that I didn't have. I still had over $27,000 when I returned to Stonehenge, so maybe I was a bit conservative on my first trip.

         

I think I might have met this NPC in real life.

           

(Aside: As a former resident of Salem who really got into the history of the city, I don't care for it when movies, television shows, books, and games suggest that the city was ever the site of any "real" magic and witchcraft. I have a particular distaste for the choice of the Salem Police Department to put a classic witch-on-a-broomstick on its departmental patch. Between 1692 and 1693, twenty residents of Salem were executed on false accusations of witchcraft, and I feel like it insults their memory to suggest that the accusations were anything but unfounded hysteria. I do appreciate, however, how the various museums of the city use the "witch" title to lure in tourists--but then give them a sober account of a tragic history.)

         

The session wrapped up with the creation of a new spell called "Steam Vapor" that required me to interpret a clue from a quote in the manual. After that, I got access to my workshop, where I can create and modify spells.

         

This is a pretty sweet pad.

        

Looking into the mirror in the workshop shows character statistics and inventory. It suggests among other things that I will eventually find other weapons and armor upgrades plus various magic "totems." My maximum health has doubled (from 50 to 100) since I started the game; I don't know if this is the result of solving missions, defeating enemies, or both. Either way, it counts as a sort-of character development that qualifies the game as an RPG. I assume my attack and defense scores can also increase.

          

The "character sheet."

           

Two subsequent missions took me to the Air Domain and the Fire Domain. The Air Domain looked like it was covered in snow, though it was supposed to be clouds, and stepping off the clouds results in instant death. The Fire Domain cracked me up because it's just like the Earth Domain except all the trees are on fire and the lakes and rivers have lava instead of water. How did the trees grow there in the first place? The Fire Domain had more orcish monsters, but the Air Domain gave me phantom-like air creatures. These enemies have been easy enough to defeat with my sword so far. I assume that changes.

        

The Fire Domain is serious about its theme.

         

Both of the areas had special large chests to find. One had the Teotihuacan woman's fire opal; the other had 12 bottles of green liquid and 14 jewels. The green liquid is apparently the base of a powerful mind magic spell, but Garwayen says I need someone on Earth to give me the magic word first.

           

Fighting ghostlike creatures in the Air Domain. The game notes that this mission has 3 enemies, 1 large chest, and 1 small chest left to find.

        

I like the spell creation system and the hub-and-mission approach. Jetting around the real world is weird but inoffensive. I look forward to seeing how SpellCraft develops. I'm glad I didn't reject it.

    

Time so far: 3 hours

Centauri Alliance: Black and Blue

 

The party finds a transporter. I guess that's a big deal in this universe.

        

To combat an insurrection or invasion, the agents of the Centauri Alliance have assembled the remnants of an ancient weapon called the Fractyr Fist (thus keeping it out of enemy hands), plus a suit of armor and a helmet. An Alliance officer sent us next to Tau Eridani for unknown reasons.

   

We got off the transport ship and entered the Alliance Headquarters on the planet. "Search the city for information or clues," the officer said, "and then travel to Veladron II and do the same. Enemy interest in that system has provoked great speculation."

      

I guess I'll start kicking down doors.

   

The spaceport itself was the typical 16 x 16 map with occasional battles. We left once to return to Lunabase for leveling. Other than the spaceport, the Alliance Headquarters, a medical bay, and an armory, there was nothing to find except an entrance to the Knave's Club [sic, probably], where my entry option was to S)eek Training.

   

What followed were the two best levels of the game so far. They were authentic fun, and I was glad I had pressed forward in a relatively (until now) blah game to experience them. The moment we entered, we got the instructions: We had to reach the end of the maze within a time limit, which turned out to be about eight minutes at 100%. If we failed, it said, we'd be returned to the entrance unharmed, but a character could only try 3 times and still receive the prize.

     

I took a save state at the beginning of the first level and returned to it every time the game timed out while mapping. It didn't occur to me at the time that I was cheating, but since I timed out way more than three times, I suppose I technically should have lost. This would have been very tough when the game was new. The first level requires you to navigate through a maze of teleporters and one-way walls to reach a specific teleporter. I don't know how you accomplish this without carefully mapping, but I timed out at least four times in this area alone.

       

The first level of the Knave's Club test, with a path through the teleporters.

       

Once you reach the correct teleporter, you find yourself in a long hallway with rooms off to the side. Entering any of these rooms triggers a riddle. This is the first one I got:

    

There are 3 ways of traveling between Lunabase and Kevner's World. By Passenger Carrier the trip takes 20 hours and costs 750 credits. A charter flight takes 10 hours and costs 1,000 credits plus 10 credits per passenger. Alliance starships are free but take 30 hours to get from Lunabase to Chronum, and 15 more hours to get from there to Kevner's World. If you are in a hurry to get to Chronum, your best bet is to begin your trip on:

1) Passenger Carrier

2) Charter flight

3) Alliance starship

    

I didn't really understand this riddle. The talk about credits must have been to confuse the player into thinking that the answer involved any variable other than time, but someone in "a hurry" just cares about time. Still, the game doesn't tell us how long it takes to get to Chronum by the first two options. I answered "Charter flight" assuming that if it's the fastest option to Kevner's World, it's probably the fastest option to Chronum. It also works if you have to travel using the methods listed here: the passenger carrier would be 20 hours to Kevner's World, then 15 from Kevner's World to Chronum, assuming the reverse trip is the same. The charter flight is only 10 + 15, which beats the 30 hours that it takes to go direct from Lunabase to Chronum on the Alliance starship.

   

A correct answer dumps you into an adjacent hallway, where you have to find another teleporter and then a stairway down to Level 2.

       

I have no idea what "turn at the third" meant.

    

Level 2 starts with a long corridor that spills out to an area with alcoves, each with part of a poem. A message as you enter tells you to "give the ancient his numeric request." The poem reads:

Beyond the one
Of venture's gate
Respect the lie
And doubt the straight

What's past is done
Like sudden hate
You'd best be off
Before you're late!

The hand of death
And sudden fate
Upon your head
Rests like a weight

    

The "ancient" is a grumpy old man sitting in the final alcove who wants the "terminal rhyme." I tried the ends of all the stanzas and got it wrong before I realized that the initial message had said to give him a numeric response. All the stanzas rhyme with eight, which was the correct answer.

   

The answer opened a door to a huge maze of 1 x 1 rooms, most with one-way doors. Again, I timed out maybe 5 times trying to map it all, but I don't know how you find your way without doing that. You have to make your way to a teleporter in the middle of the maze to reach one towards the end.

  

After that, a few more long corridors lead you to your reward: a couple thousand experience points and the opportunity for one character to learn one of three skills: alien biology, battle logic, or starship piloting. I thought that was an awfully mean thing to make me choose without any knowledge of what they do or how they'd be useful, but it turned out I could repeat the maze and get all three. I gave "Battle Logic" to Morella, "Starship Piloting" to Vir, and "Alien Biology" to Turhan.

     

I feel like all of these would take a long time.

      

I faced different riddles on the second two tries. Both required me to interpret a set of syllogisms, and they were relatively easy, but like the first one, they had a lot of unnecessary details. For instance, the first one read:

     

All agents who pass the Test carry lasers. None of the agents in the Alliance carries a laser or works for Daynab. If Renfrew passed the test, Jack works for Daynab. If these things are true, which one of the following MUST also be true?

      

I didn't have to get past the first option ("None of the Alliance agents have passed the test"). The parts about Renfrew and Jack were unnecessary.

       

The potential answers.

     

There were no battles in the Knave's Club, so after getting my rewards, I moved on to Veladron II. The Alliance officer there had nothing for me but a welcome, so I started exploring. The port had no armory, so when I ran low on ammunition, I had to go to other planets.

   

The only special encounter in Veladron II was a shuttle bay.  A sign read: "Alliance Shipyards. CAUTION: Wear vacuum suits at all times." I didn't have any vacuum suits, so I had to again leave to go buy some. When I came back to take a shuttle, I had three choices: Old Human Freighter, Manstrak Troop Carrier, and Arcturian Space Ship. I tried them all in order.

      

Why do I want to visit any of them?

     

Each option took me to a separate map shaped like a ship, with a large rear engine section tapering to a nose cone and, ultimately, a cockpit. The human and Manstrak ships both had ruined engines, as messages conveyed. I tried using my Manstrak's technical abilities to repair them, but that didn't seem to be an option. The aft sections were also highly radioactive and killed my characters in a few steps if I insisted on staying within them. Neither ship could be started up. I didn't know that my goal was to try to start a derelict ship. I wasn't even sure why I was exploring derelict ships.

         

This is the first time in the game so far that the map wasn't exactly 16 x 16.

         

Both ships had lots of battles with rats, for which I was grateful because I needed the experience. As we've previously discussed, combat is almost identical to The Bard's Tale II or Wasteland except that it takes place on a map of hexes. There are several maps, but they don't have anything to do with the actual terrain.

   

About 50% of battles start with at least one enemy party in melee range, which I prefer, because my melee character is terrifying. My back 4 characters do maybe 5-7 points of damage per single shot with their weapons. (I still have them armed with Berettas because they're the only ranged weapon I've found that will hit up to four hexes away.) My human, skilled in sidearms, does about 15-20 points to a group with his Uzi (but only from 2 hexes away or less). But my Donsai warrior does about 60-80 points of damage with her Keenedge Sword. It's mostly wasted; no single enemy has that many hit points. I really wish melee attacks worked on a group. The few "boss" enemies who have had nearly that many points start so far away that you'll kill your party trying to get into melee range.

       

Why couldn't I have hit two creatures once each?

     

Moving in general is extremely unbalanced. If you decide to move your party closer to the enemy, that's the only action you can take that round. The enemy gets a free salvo of shots, and if there are more than a few of them with ranged attacks, that's instant death. Meanwhile, if an enemy decides to move in combat, and he goes before any of your characters, all subsequent attacks are wasted because when you attack, you attack a hex, not a specific enemy. Why don't enemies have that problem?

    

Oddly, what I just said isn't true about NPC monsters who join the party. They even get to attack after the party moves. Early in this session, a Braktalian joined the party and proved curiously long-lived despite having only 10 hit points. He pops off a group damage ranged attack at the end of every round, and more than once, it made the difference. Even better, very late in this session, a "Fractyr Mech" joined me. He gets to attack multiple groups of enemies each round. They're worth the experience points they take from the rest of the party.

   

I had mentioned at the end of the last session that combat was getting harder. It started to get easier again as my two psionics acquired spells that targeted groups of enemies rather than just single enemies. I also had enough money that I could buy multiple shield belts in between missions and pump everyone's "Shield" value up. That kept me alive until late in this session, when enemies took a huge leap forward.

      

Andra softens up the rats for the rest of the party.

      

So the Human Freighter and Manstrak Troop Carrier were good only for that rat-based experience, but the Arcturian Space Ship--the smallest of them--had working engines. When I reached the helm, the game asked who I wanted to try to pilot it; I chose Vir, to whom I had given the piloting skills at the end of the Knave's Club test.

   

We started to move, but then Vir announced that there were no maneuvering thrusters. So all we did was move forward a bit, then crash land on Veladron's moon. 

Good thing we got those vacuum suits.

     

We exited the ship and poked around the moon until we found an entrance to "the airlock of what appears to be a room of ancient construction." We took an elevator down.

      

What if we hadn't ineptly crash-landed on this moon? That was a bit of serendipity.

      

The resulting four-level dungeon was easily the hardest in the game so far. The first level wasn't so bad. It just had a few teleporters. But starting on the second level, our psionic abilities didn't work. That meant no healing, no light (after the most recently-cast spell wore off), and no use of SPSEN to identify our location. 

       

The game knows damned well that it's not going to work later, either.

      

It wasn't long before I was mapping in the dark. Level 2 had a bunch of corridors in concentric rings that spilled out into a long north-south corridor with multiple squares that sapped psionics, then stunned the character if psionics got below 0. Even if I cast light spells just before going downstairs from Level 1 to Level 2, they ran out while I waited for my psionic points to regenerate in between those traps. Those traps have to be the worst aspect of the game.

   

To make it worse, enemies starting on this level were much harder than anything I faced so far. They were capable of as much melee damage as my own melee character, and they often killed my characters in a single round. I had to reload so many times it was shameful. The only good news is that the few battles that I won were worth a lot of experience.

     

I pushed forward on Level 3, mapping by sound alone (the game makes different tones when you move forward, go through a door, or run into a wall). There were a couple of squares on this level that auto-healed, which was nice. I reached a stairway down before I'd mapped more than 25% of the level, so I forced myself to finish it, which turned out to be a good thing. In the north-central area was a single square with a switch. It opened a door to a central area, ringed by psi-draining squares, in which I found "strange globes of power" hovering over " a table of seamless black metal."

     

Any character had an option to put all his items on the table. Most of them had all the items melt before their eyes. For some of them, "some of the items glow with a dull blue light, but nothing seems to happen." Those characters had pieces of the Fractyr Fist. I reloaded and moved all the pieces to Morealla, then had her use them on the table. It told me that "the fingers and palm are knit together in a fantastic interplay of pyrotechnic energy." When it cleared, only a Fractyr Fist remained.

      

I assume the fingers aren't knit together, or this is a Fractyr Mitten.

       

Eager to try it in combat, I gave it to Morella. Do you know what it turns out to be? A melee weapon. That's it. It still targets only one enemy, not at range, but now doing 120-130 points of damage, which is about 100 more than any enemy requires. It has no special abilities that I can find. This has caused an intergalactic war? A particularly powerful set of brass knuckles?

   

I went downstairs to Level 4, where my psi powers were still infuriatingly blocked. I did my best to feel out a map, but the level had teleporters, and without any way to determine where I'd ended up, I soon lost patience, broke down, and looked at a map in Shay Addams's Quest for Clues III. Somehow, looking at a hint in an era-specific hint guide feels less like cheating than using a modern one. It got me through the level, minus about a million reloads for battles that didn't go my way.

   

Eventually, I reached a holographic message from a long-dead alien race. They looked human but either wore blue racoon masking around their eyes and on the pates of their skulls or their skin had that natural color.

      

Long forgotten, our civilization has only left the barest traces of a once mighty people. Focused inward upon ourselves, we have learned that any true power must come from without. So we have left these places, in search of a Greater Being than ourselves. Our legacy to lesser civilizations is such outposts as this, and the knowledge that a greater truth does, in fact, exist. Oh, by the way, you are now given an item to facilitate your exit from this place. Well done, friends and fellow seekers.

     

I think your legacy is going to be that gimp mask you're wearing.

    

The item was a "Mattermit Pass."  The face popped up again later in the level:

    

Our greatest technology of all has been the ability to immediately transmit matter across vast distances of space. Using a special loophole in relativity theory, we have developed a method of instantaneous travel with little energy expenditure. While much of this technology has been stripped from this place, our mattermission facilities remain. Use them wisely, and one day, such technology will bring you to a great appreciation for the vastness of the created cosmos.

     

I'd do anything to get out of this darkness.

     

We had a chance to use the pass when we came upon an elevated platform and had options for blue, red, and yellow. I chose blue, and we found ourselves in an unfamiliar starport. The game also mentioned we had received experience bonuses. We explored nearly the entire starport map--which had no Alliance HQ, no armor, and no medical bay--before we found the starport and received indication that we were on Keppa Var, the forbidden planet. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to do there. The only special encounters were 1) an ancient shrine, where the only thing to do was to read the message, "You have apparently entered an ancient shrine"; and 2) a hatch in the floor that wanted a password I don't have.

          

I blasted off, took the shortest route back to Lunabase, leveled up, and refreshed my gear. At the Alliance HQ, I got an "INVASION ALERT!" and was ordered to go to Epsilon Indi, so I guess that's next.

      

At least I can punch whoever's invading!

       

Aside from mapping in the dark, I enjoyed this session. The game kicked it up a notch in quality and distinguished itself from its Bard's Tale roots with cool levels and memorable puzzles. I feel bad about calling it "sad" last time. It's an honest effort that succeeds more than it fails, and if it looks and feels a little old . . . well, when has that ever been a problem on this blog?

   

Time so far: 18 hours

Playing out of: Duty giving way to enjoyment.