Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen: Summary and Rating

 

With a title like this, you'd expect the game to be full of Star Wars references.

      

Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen

United States

New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS and PC-98, 1994 for FM Towns

Repackaged with Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen and released as World of Xeen in 1994

Date Started: 20 April 2021

Date Ended: 1 June 2021

Total Hours: 44
Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)
Final Rating: 42
Ranking at Time of Posting: 356/417 (85%)

    

Summary:

   

The flip side of Might and Magic: Clouds of Xeen, using the same tile-based, first-person, six-character engine that goes back to Might and Magic III. Darkside has the party foil the plans of Sheltem, the rogue AI from the first game in the series, again using the alias Alamar, again bent on returning to Terra. The main quest is not as notable as the hundred thousand side quests, puzzles, and encounters. Although packed with content and never boring, Darkside suffers from over-generosity in experience and a lack of significant character development, particularly for an experienced Clouds party with all the spells and skills. Its penchant for frivolity and its overall ease make it to me the least in the series so far.

    

*****

      

This is probably going to be one of those reviews where the game rates high but my prose makes it sound like I hated it. I feel that way every time I write about Ultima, too. So let me say at the outset, even if the rest of this entry seems to belie it, that the Might and Magic series is one of my favorite RPG series of all time. I have loved them since I played the first two as a child. Even then, I sensed that they offered something that no one else was offering. If I seem negative, it's only because of the game's performance against my own hopes for it.

    

The Might and Magic games have always been generous. Jon Van Caneghem clearly had a history with tabletop RPGs and early CRPGs, but he envisioned worlds of bounty where those titles were sparse and unyielding. In Wizardry, Might and Magic's most obvious forebear, a 16 x 16 map might only hold a couple of fixed combats and two textual encounters. Van Caneghem's strategy was to give you something in every row and column. I have maps from the first game in which I had to go into the double letters to annotate everything. A Dungeons and Dragons module might take you from Level 2 to 5 over the course of 30 hours of campaigning. Van Caneghem had no problem offering games in which you hit Level 100 or more. Where Dungeons and Dragons and Wizardry regarded attributes as closely policed within a 3-18 range, you might start at 15 strength in Might and Magic and end at 500.

        

All I did was open a barrel.

    

This generosity is key to the first two games, immediately distinguishing and elevating the series from Wizardry and The Bard's Tale (which I find hopelessly boring in contrast). Looking through my notes in on Secret of the Inner Sanctum and Gates to a New World, I see all kinds of messages and interleaves, prisoners you can torment or free, some kind of puzzle involving black and white checkerboard floor patterns, word games and riddles, a giant sudoku puzzle, a city where males take damage at every intersection but you can change sexes in the basement, an arbor in which you get rewarded for climbing every tree, and dozens of other encounters and side-quests--this in an era that otherwise showed no awareness of the concept of "side quests." Perhaps more important, each area offered a bit of lore, hinting at a large, complex story beneath the surface, one that occasionally (usually at the end) introduced elements of science fiction. Trying to figure out that story, filling in the gaps left by the materials, was a fun part of playing each game.

   

At the same time, the series has always offered a stupid side. You've heard me complain about it in every summary of every previous Might and Magic game. Wizardry acquired the same stupid side when David W. Bradley took over, and you've heard me complain about that. I've run out of original ways to complain about it. So I'll just say that Darkside of Xeen is a worthy successor to the previous games in the series in both the generosity of content and the stupidity of a lot of that content. If that doesn't bother you, you'll like the game a little more than I did. 

       

Is that pronounced the British way or the American way?

       

Beyond its thematic consistency, however, I thought Darkside was a lesser Might and Magic for a couple of other reasons. The first was also well-discussed during my last few entries: the game completely goes off the rails with the character leveling. It rewards the party with millions of experience points that no player would ever be able to redeem unless he engaged in some kind of optimizing financial strategy going back to Clouds of Xeen. At the same time, nearly everything you touch seems to bestow an extra 1, 3, or 5 levels. And it's not like these levels are ramping towards some major boss enemy or encounter. You could survive this game's toughest enemies at half the levels I achieved, which is only about two-thirds of the levels possible to achieve.

   

This gets into a second problem, which is that the game is simply too easy. Not only is the party over-leveled, but the proliferation of attribute-boosting fountains and altars exponentially increases the party's effectiveness in individual combats. As for accumulation of combats, they're hardly an issue when you can drop a "Lloyd's Beacon," ride a "Town Portal" to the nearest temple, and be back before anyone notices you're gone. Even if these easy teleportation puzzles didn't exist, the fact that you can sleep and fully restore health and magic--an issue that the series never solves--removes a lot of the challenge by itself. I'm anticipating lots of comments that say things like, "Well, if you find it too easy, just don't use those fountains/spells/whatever." Sure, but I don't think expecting the player to nerf himself is good game design.

       

It's amazing how fast enemies go from "challenges to be overcome" to "annoyances to be swatted."

       

I'm particularly disappointed in the lesser importance of spells. In the earlier games--and, indeed, in the later ones--magic is crucial to your strategy. Here, it so blatantly under-performs physical attacks that there's almost no reason to cast offensive spells except during a very narrow window of time in which a) your characters can't reliably hit some enemies, and b) those same enemies can be defeated with spells before they wipe the floor with you. The problem is largely the multipliers that the game gives with level and strength on physical attacks. By mid-game, you're whomping most enemies away with one hit. Someone needed to rework that math.

    

The number of people reading this who will one day play the game but have not already must be small. But to those few, I implore you: when you do play, try something like an all-druid party or an all-barbarian party. Among the three major character focuses--melee combat, clerics' magic, and sorcerers' magic--create a party that entirely lacks one of them. Without any melee strength, you'll be forced to rely on spells, and combat will be more interesting. Without one of the magic types, you won't have as many buffing or transportation options (you'll be able to rely on limited charges from magic items in a pinch). I guarantee it will create a more exciting game.

      

A paladin and ranger set out to solve Xeen's problems alone.

      

In rating Darkside, I'm also including the World of Xeen content. I can't see any good way to separate them. I think the GIMLET will even out. It was partly because of the World of Xeen content that I felt leveling was too generous and the game was too easy, but it was also because of that content that I ended up feeling better about the game world and story. 

    

1. Game World. I don't know. A couple of weeks ago, I would have said that there is no new content here; that the game is just a rehash of the plot introduced in the first three games, a plot for which I have lost patience since the game seems more interested in making Star Trek references than exploring its own lore. But the ending of the World content, despite the questions it raises, was pretty cool. I felt less interested in either side of Xeen as a game world, though--there is no attempt at consistency whatsoever, and there are numerous unnecessary races added to the six character races, a few of which never make an appearance anywhere else in the game. The two Xeen titles suffered from a lack of the "Corak's Notes" feature of III. Score: 4.

        

At the end of the game, Prince Roland sticks his "staff" in the queen's "cube." Wait . . . that doesn't work.

      

2. Character Creation and Development. I generally like the number of ways that the characters develop, but as we discussed, Darkside is so generous that it stops mattering very early in the game, particularly if you brought a party from Clouds with all the spells and skills and a decent set of equipment. And it's always disappointing when a game fails to integrate character choices into the encounters and quests. These last few games should have included the alignments of the first two and offered more role-playing options based on those alignments. Score: 3.

3. NPC Interaction. I'm going to do here what I did in my rating for Clouds of Xeen and give it a couple of points for having something of the concept of NPCs, but most of what you'd call "NPCs" in this game are really "encounters" that happen to feature a portrait of someone. True NPCs exist in the environment independently of the party. Previous games were rated for hirelings in this category, and their loss is also unfortunate. Score: 2.

   

4. Encounters and Foes. The game's bestiary continues to be relatively original. I suppose the problem here is that combats are so short that you often don't find out about an enemy's strengths or weaknesses. The game also continues to benefit from a high quantity of non-combat contextual encounters and role-playing encounters, including--making their debut in the series--dialogue options. Add to this the dungeons' navigational puzzles, and we have probably the strongest category in the game. I just wish so many of the puzzles weren't so easy. Score: 6.

      

An important if clumsy step in the evolution of the genre.

      

5. Magic and Combat. I offered my thoughts above. There are a lot of options but not much reason to use anything but a mallet. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. A surprisingly disappointing category. I like how many slots the game offered, the item identification system, the use of magic items as backups for spells, and how easy it is to swap around and evaluate things. I didn't like that nothing seemed to matter. Your level multipliers matter so much more in combat than your equipment that I sometimes spent hours in which a character's equipment was broken and never noticed.

    

The game also does a bizarre thing by assigning either a material or an effect to equipment but not both. So you might have an Obsidian Long Sword or a Long Sword of Undead Slaying but not both. With weapons and armor, the material is so much more powerful than the effects that you wonder why they bothered with the effects at all. But with wearable items, an Obsidian Necklace does absolutely nothing despite being worth like 200,000 gold pieces, while a Necklace of Strength might only sell for 2,000. Madness. Score: 4.

       

This all must weigh a ton.

      

7. Economy. Over the game, I think I probably spent about 30 million gold pieces, which is probably some kind of record. This hyper-inflation made most of the economy--shops, temples, spells--utterly insignificant, with the sole exception of training--for which you never have enough. It's broken however you look at it. Score: 3.

   

8. Quests. With the World of Xeen content, we had a couple of main quests. Neither had alternate endings or role-playing options, but they were modestly interesting. More important, as always for this series, are the copious side quests. When will these finally become standard? Score: 5. 

   

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics are perfectly nice; the sound is a bit overdone but otherwise fine; the interface has a number of excellent elements that I covered in the first entry. This is about as high as a game can score until graphics and sound get good enough that they're truly immersive. Score: 6.

       

I didn't notice this until late in the game: If you have sound turned off, you get subtitles.

        

10. Gameplay. Like its predecessors, Darkside gets a lot of credit for nonlinearity--to the point that I finished most of the World of Xeen content before finishing Darkside. Some of you didn't agree with my random exploration pattern, but you must agree that only in this series of games would such a pattern be possible. Everything else suffers a bit: it was a bit too easy; it's only slightly replayable (with different party compositions); and it lasted too long.

 

But to bring it full circle, I can't say that it was ever boring. I might have groaned or even shouted obscenities at much of the content, but at least I was having a reaction. I wasn't mapping miles of featureless corridor. Every few steps, there was a new hut on the horizon, a new alcove in a dungeon, a new book to read or box to open. The game may have been long, but it was easy to binge. Score: 6.

     

That gives us a final score of 42, one point lower than I gave to Clouds of Xeen and lowest for the series so far. I really do think the first and second games--particularly the first--were better games. I don't mean they were better "for their years"; I mean they were just better. Sure, the graphics were primitive, but a lot of the mechanics--including combat, equipment, and the economy--were significantly better. There were just as many encounters and side-quests, but fewer of them were so blatantly goofy. But 42 is still well into my "recommended" range, and Darkside is certainly superior to a lot of other games released in its year.  

     

The advertisement promised an interesting, gritty story. I wish the game had followed through.

       

Once again, my review aligns reasonably well with Scorpia's September 1993 coverage in Computer Gaming World. She covered the economic problem, though didn't seem quite as bothered about it. She was more upset about the ease of the puzzles--she called out the same one that I did, involving the Vowelless Knights. She also thought the crossword puzzle was "pointless and boring" and that the Dungeon of Death in general was ridiculous. (She agreed with the game that she was a "super goober" for having wasted her time with it.) She thought the cinematic ending was worth not having any kind of final battle, and I have to grant her that, since it was very well done for its year. She also thought the endgame to the Worlds content (which she completely spoils) was worth reaching, even if it involved so much pointless walking on the final level. "A satisfactory conclusion to the current Might and Magic saga," she concluded. Later, the magazine nominated it for "Game of the Year," but it lost to Betrayal at Krondor.

    

Dragon made some changes to its computer game reviewing in 1993. The "Role of Computers" section was re-titled "Eye of the Monitor," and a newer reviewer--Sandy Petersen--seems to have taken over. The over-inflated rating system seems to have gone with the previous title and reviewers, which I suppose is good, as I was running out of ways to make fun of that. Petersen makes it clear that three stars is "Good" and five is "Superb," and there's a new "X" rating for "Not recommended" that's even worse than one star ("Poor"). The combined World of Xeen gets only three stars. Mr. Petersen is himself a game designer, having written Call of Cthulhu and the third edition of RuneQuest for Chaosium. He also contributed to several computer RPGs, including Darklands (1992). It is thus too bad to see him bumble right out of the gate by calling the Might and Magic series "Eye of the Beholder-style games." His subsequent review makes it clear that he didn't get very far: he thinks the game is too generous with money and marvels at the 50,000 experience points he got for solving one puzzle. Most of the rest of the review is occupied with speed and loading issues. In summary, even though I agreed on the star rating, the review kind of annoyed me.

    

I'm mostly glad that for the next entry, we'll be moving on from this engine. I think the series has accomplished everything it can with tiled worlds. The graphics are getting sophisticated enough that we need a realism of content to match the realism of visuals. Magic and combat simply never worked well in this engine; it was so much better in the earlier games when you could face dozens or hundreds of enemies at once and choosing the right spells was a major tactical question. I'm also glad we'll be leaving the story of Sheltem being chased by the spectacularly inept Corak.

        

World of Xeen advertises some of New World's other titles in its final area.

        

As for that next entry, despite the in-game promise of a new title in 1994, it wasn't until 1998 that we saw Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven, a game that I was absolutely addicted to before I started this blog. I must have played it at least once a year between its release year and 2010, and not since. I may never reach it again. Before then, we'll have Swords of Xeen (1995), an ascended mod that I've never played. We'll also have the first three Heroes of Might and Magic games and Anvil of Dawn (1995), which looks to me like a prototype of the Might and Magic VI engine.

     

As I just typed that last paragraph, I noted that however annoyed I got with Xeen, my desire to check out Heroes (which I've never played), whether they qualify as RPGs or not, purely for the lore, is undiminished. This will always be one of my favorite series despite the developers' tendencies to trivialize it with goofiness. Live long and prosper, New World. Live long and prosper.

 

MegaTraveller: Won! (with Final Rating)

 

MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy

United States

Paragon Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS; 1991 for Amiga, Atari ST
Date Started: 22 December 2014

Date Ended: 21 January 2015

Total Hours: 28

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 34
Ranking at Time of Posting: 109/169 (64%)
Ranking at Game #458: 320/458 (70%)

Well, what a weird little game. After spending about 20 hours on gambling, bounty-hunting, and trading to amass my "Jump 2" drive bank, I only had about 3 more game hours before winning. The plot and quests were staggeringly lame, consisting of 3 fetch quests and a final battle. Specifically, I had to:

• Finish exploring the base on Neaera to find Arik. Showing him Lenara's half of the Imperial Seal got me his half and a quest to get his "decoding key" from a friend on Yres.

His reaction if you approach him without the seal in the hands of the first character.

• Travel to Yres and show the full Imperial Seal to a hotel clerk to get the decoding key.

• Travel to Akarates to give the decoding key to Lenara (glad she made it out of the game-opening bar okay) and get the final quest to kill Konrad Kiefer, along with a passkey to the warehouse where he's hiding on Efate.

• Return to Efate, the opening planet, and storm the warehouse.

Getting the final mission.

None of these quests involved anything more interesting than landing on a planet and hunting around for the right nearby building. The backstory, which I described in the first post as "as intriguing as anything I can remember" turned into absolute nonsense--essentially just an easily-replaceable framing story for a game that's mostly about logistics and mechanics. Kiefer was hiding in a warehouse 10 steps from the opening screen, and the only thing stopping me from getting to him was a key? And why don't these agents just travel to each other? If Lenara knows where Kiefer is, why doesn't she just instruct Imperial forces to bomb it off the map? What does this group really need us for? Not to mention that the titular Zhodani don't show up in the game at all.

The final battle was difficult, and I suppose I could have done a better job preparing for it with side-quests to increase my funds, training, and armaments. There were about 8 thugs wandering around a large room, protecting the doorway to Kiefer. I took them out one-by-one, but with quite a bit of reloading and retreating for healing.

Carnage and destruction lie behind me as I blow apart the door with a demolition charge.

Kiefer himself wasn't very hard.

Tough talk from a guy facing 5-on-1 odds.

I beat him?! He is destroyed.

Once he was dead, the game immediately cut to an awards ceremony in which Strephon, the Emperor of the Third Imperium, gave the party an "Imperial Certificate of Achievement." Three screens of text awkwardly recapped the game's plot . . .

Do we really have to hear about the decoding keys again? I just did that 20 minutes ago!

. . . and the game mysteriously gave me a code to write down for no reason that I could discern.

For god's sake, someone tell me what this means.

If nothing else, the endgame gave me the pleasure of imagining my five characters leaving the awards ceremony clutching paper certificates printed on some template from OfficeDepot rather than the riches and titles they expected.

What's particularly staggering about MegaTraveller is how much of the game is simply unused. The main quest only takes you to 3 of the 8 systems. Some of the planets have caves--essentially the game's "dungeons"--none of which are necessary. This includes a long maze on the planet Sino, a planet I never visited in a system I never visited, which contains very deadly creatures guarding a bunch of treasures whose combined value is worth about 4 trade missions.

Wandering around an optional "dungeon."

Even in the systems that are used, most of the planets aren't, and even on the planets that are, most of the territory isn't. My visits to Yres and Akarates involved simply walking from the starport to a nearby building when there were screens and screens of the planet to explore. Some planets had areas only visitable by gravity vehicles or watercraft--just no incentive to actually visit those areas.

Space combat is also entirely unnecessary. It never comes up as a plot point. You only engage in it if you want to earn your money through pirating. I played around with it, but it seemed extraordinarily basic--switch between the two gun turret views, "target," and "fire."

Attacking an innocent ship.

Finally--and this is the most damning aspect of the game--skills seem unnecessary. Of the 82 skills, the manual explicitly says that 25 are unused in MegaTraveller 1, leaving 57 that are supposedly useful. As far as I can tell, I got use out of exactly two of them: "laser weapons" and "gambling." I grant that some of the other skills would have come in handy if I'd made different weapon and armor selections--skills like "assault rifle," "energy weapons," "brawling," and "sword"--and others would have come in handy if combat had been harder and I'd been less willing to reload (e.g., "battle dress," "tactics").

What mystifies me more is the host of skills that seem like they ought to have done something, but for which I couldn't detect anything. For instance, characters without the "pilot" or "navigation" skills are perfectly capable of flying the ship; characters with no "ATV" or "grav vehicle" skills don't seem to have any problem operating those vehicles; and characters with no "medical" or "communications" skills can still operate those stations on the ship. "Trader" doesn't seem to affect buying and selling prices, and none of the interpersonal skills seem to affect interaction with NPCs. If characters with those skills are somehow better at the tasks than the others (perhaps someone with "navigation" makes the ship use less fuel and "computer" makes the programs load faster?), it's extremely subtle and ultimately a non-issue in gameplay.

Skill seems to have no bearing on who can use a medkit or how much it heals.

Having said all of that, you can detect the foundations of a much better game beneath all of this rubble. That 5/8 of the systems are unused in the main quest isn't necessarily a bad thing; after all, most of the locations in Skyrim, Baldur's Gate, or Fallout 3 aren't really "necessary," either. If these planets had been more interesting, with more NPCs to talk to, more lore to discover, and side-quests that involved something more than finding an item in one place and selling it in another, the result would be a reasonably good sandbox game. If the main plot had required a different variety of skills and the combat had been harder and more interesting, and the rewards had been more balanced, the player would have had a reason to do all of the side-quests to pay for better equipment and skill-development. The developers spent a lot of time on mechanics but didn't integrate them into a sensible, cohesive, balanced game.

I expect it to perform in the low 30s in a GIMLET, but let's see:

1. Game World. The background of the universe, drawn from the pen-and-paper Traveller RPG, is complex and interesting. It just doesn't translate well to the CRPG itself. It acts primarily as a framing story for a set of mechanics that could have been transferred to just about any story. The titular Zhodani Conspiracy is pretty pathetic, and the Zhodani themselves never appear.

There are maddening hints at a better game if the developers had simply had more time and technology. Most of the lore in the game comes not from NPC discussions but rather nuggets of information that you buy for $2,000 each at special shops. For instance, one discussed a civil war in progress on Yres, which explained why I kept getting randomly shelled as I wandered around the city. This could have been more interesting if there was anything to do with it. Score: 4.

There is an explanation for these craters and bodies; it's just not very interesting or helpful.

2. Character Creation and Development. A great creation system--one of the best I've ever experienced--undermined by almost no character development after creation and a lack of use of the skills, making all the development a waste of time. The only way to increase skills after the character creation process is to pay around $40,000 per point. Again, it's an issue of balance. If skills were more useful, training cost a bit less, and rewards from miscellaneous side quests were a bit higher, there would be more incentive to spend time on skill development. As it is, you can pretty much win the game with the starting party.

Aside from skills, none of the other aspects of the character's background--in particular, branch of service and rank--seem to affect the game at all. Score: 4.

3. NPC Interaction. For all the random NPCs wandering around, interaction is pretty pathetic. Most of them just say, "Greetings, Traveller!" Others tell you to bring them various items for a reward. Only a couple have anything to say relative to the plot or game world, and none of them offer dialogue options. I found maybe two opportunities to use the "bribe" skill and no place to use all the other interpersonal skills--"leadership," "carousing," "interview"--that the manual insists are important. Score: 3.

I forgot to mention this. On some planets, you get stopped for an "illegal weapons" search. What's "illegal" differs from place to place; sometimes my laser weapons were confiscated; sometimes they weren't. But I never saw any negative consequence to just saying "no" to the search. Imagine if the TSA worked that way.

4. Encounters & Foes. There are really no non-combat encounters, and the selection of enemies is limited and boring, mostly consisting of interchangeable thugs in gray combat suits. None of them seem to have particular strengths and weaknesses. Score: 2.

5. Magic and Combat. Ground combat is mostly boring. You simply order your characters to fire at an enemy and the two groups exchange shots until someone is dead. I guess it was even worse in an earlier version of the game (I'm playing 3.0) when there was no option to pause to issue orders, and essentially you could only control one of your characters at a time.

Ground combat does probably have more tactics than I actually used. For instance, I never did much with grenades, even though they would have been helpful on clusters of enemies. There are some considerations with terrain and character placement that could have made a difference. If the battles had been harder (or, in any event, less random), I might have been inspired to explore these options further.

Giving orders in the penultimate battle. Technically, I could be hiding my characters behind these objects, but it's more trouble than it's worth.

Because it wasn't necessary to the game, I simply didn't explore space combat much. It has some interesting ideas, with a variety of laser and missile weapons to buy and a variety of programs that you can purchase and run to increase ship maneuverability, defenses, and weapon effectiveness. In my few attempts at it, nothing really gripped me about the mechanic, though. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. Like many things in MegaTraveller, equipment is solid in concept, flawed in execution. There is a lot of stuff to buy and use, including weapons and armor, medkits, grenades, demolition charges, vacuum suits and helmets, spare oxygen tanks, electric torches and lanterns, and various quest items. There just isn't much reason to buy them.

Early in the game, I bought everyone the best level of vacuum suit, which also provides decent armor protection, at $9,800 each. The next level of armor, "combat armor," costs $122,500 each, so I never bothered to go there. Again--and I know I keep repeating myself--if combat had been harder, the armor less expensive, and the quest rewards more lucrative, there would have been a much greater incentive to continually upgrade equipment. Score: 4.

Some of the items I can sell.

            
7. Economy. This one category encapsulates the game's entire raison d'etre and almost everything wrong with it. The economy in MegaTraveller plays a huge role. It's key to the main plot--the first step is to acquire $2 million for the "Jump 2" drive--and it's the only real mechanism of character development, both in terms of equipment and purchasing new skills. You constantly need to resupply ammunition, fuel, and healing (if you don't want to waste a lot of time in the ship's sick bay). It's the driving force behind all of the side quests as well.

On the surface, the economy has everything I like in an RPG: lots of ways to make money, lots of ways to spend it, never a time when you can just ignore it. It's just that the balance is horribly off. When a single reload of "Laser 12" ammo costs almost $20,000, it's hard to get excited about a side quest that offers a $15,000 reward. When you can make almost $60,000 flying back and forth between Efate and Louzy in less than 10 minutes, why would you spend 20 minutes flying a "space race" between three planets for $10,000? When the difference between an adequate combat suit and a great one is $113,000, are you really going to spend a lot of time grinding for that extra cash?

With a few tweaks in rewards and costs, the economy could have been much better-balanced, which would have changed the nature of the game entirely, making the side quests more of a necessity than an option. In particular, I would have removed the trading mechanic entirely (or made the prices more variable) and made the "Jump 2" drive cost a lot less. Score: 5.
                    
8. Quests. The game has a multi-stage main quest with no options or alternate outcomes and a pretty pathetic series of events. There are side quests--still oddly rare in the era--but almost all of them are fetch quests with such small rewards that they're hardly worth the time. The exception is bounty-hunting, which is both lucrative and somewhat fun. Score: 3. 
                
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Nothing here is going to win any awards. The graphics are VGA but look EGA and haven't really advanced beyond games like 2400 A.D. from several years prior. The NPC portraits look simply awful. The sound consists primarily of an annoying rat-tat with every footstep and a blasting noise during combat. I played with the sound off. The interface is generally okay. I like that it supports a mouse without (usually) requiring it. Some of the inventory-related activities, like dropping an item or transferring an item to another character, are clunky and non-intuitive, and it's actually quite easy to drop an item without realizing it (if it's the active object when you hit ESC to leave the inventory screen). Score: 2.

Even not considering the hair, this is the ugliest NPC portrait in history.

                  
10. Gameplay. As a quasi-sandbox game, gameplay is mostly non-linear, allowing the player to explore the systems in any order and do whatever he wants to achieve the first step of the main quest. But since there's so little of interest in the universe--basically just retrieving objects for rewards--it's hard to regard the non-linearity as a major advantage or to call the game "replayable" because of it. The difficulty is moderate, which ends up hurting the game, as it makes so many of the mechanics unnecessary. The pacing is way off, with the first 4/5 made up of boring grinding and the last fifth a quick flurry of fetch quests. Score: 3.

That gives us a final score of 34, right about where I expected it.

I'm tempted to give the game some bonus points for a few of its innovative ideas, like being able to refuel a ship from gas giants, or the mechanics of spaceflight, in which Newtonian physics prevent easy turning, gravity wells of planets can capture you and throw you off course, and an inattentive player can easily get sucked into a sun. But I'd just have to take them away again for its bugs (my fifth character never did fire his weapon) and dumb gameplay decisions, like starting the party in the middle of a hopeless combat. Thus, we'll leave things as they are.

                    
Wow, did this game get polarized reviews. The best seems to come from the always-charitable Dragon, which offered its modal score of 5/5 and praised how well it followed the rules of the tabletop Traveller (ahem, Gaguum?) and designated it "one of the best science-fiction role-playing games ever for the computer."
                 
Much as we're used to high praise from Dragon, we're equally accustomed to reviews from Amiga magazines in which the reviewer seems to have never played an RPG before. From the July 1991 Amiga Computing, we learn that MegaTraveller 1 is--I'm not making this up--"undoubtedly the best ever computer RPG" just before the reviewer goes on to describe an experience that sounds more frustrating than fun. In the June 1991 Amiga Power, our old friend Stuart Campbell, who gave Secret of the Silver Blades 8/100, opines that "if you took the Pacific Ocean, stacked another Pacific Ocean on top of it, and then attached two more Pacific Oceans to either end, it wouldn't be quite as deep as MegaTraveller 1" and concludes that "the attention to detail is almost breathtaking, and if there's been a game with more to do in it than this one, I haven't seen it." I'm tempted to suggest that Mr. Campbell therefore hasn't seen the last three Ultima titles, either of the two Starflights, or any of the Gold Box games, but we know he's seen at least one of those.

Sanity comes from the June 1991 ACE (combat "irritatingly difficult to control"; mechanics "serve to slow down the action rather than generate excitement"), pretty much all the German Amiga and Atari ST magazines (ratings in the 50s out of 100), and Computer Gaming World. Back in the 1980s, when CGW was pretty much the only show in town, I thought my own opinions were widely divergent from those of Scorpia and the other reviewers. Now that we're in the 1990s and puerile gaming magazines like Amiga Power are springing up everywhere, CGW's coverage always seems like a refreshing oasis of reason. In the November 1990 issue, L.S. Lichtman offers a fair and sober review of the mechanics, drawing from some previous experience with the tabletop Traveller. He indicates that fans of the RPG will be both pleased and disappointed with what did and didn't make it into the computer version. He praises the game for simplifying the character creation process (while still leaving it interesting) and extensive manual but criticizes the combat system and issues with the economy, ultimately labeling it an "unfinished product" and "seriously flawed" while still praising its "variety of activities and natural feel to the adventuring that it offers." In 1996, the magazine included the game on its list of "50 worst games" of all time.

Paragon never did have a decent track record with RPGs, and I'm curious how they managed to get the rights to Traveller and other RPGs in the first place. (By contrast, SSI and D&D were a natural pairing.) Their only previous offerings were the nonsensical Alien Fires: 2199 AD (1986) and Wizard Wars (1988), neither of which exemplified a good RPG. Now, suddenly in 1990 and 1991, they got this agreement with Games Designers' Workshop, and issued games based on MegaTraveller, Space: 1889, and Twilight: 2000.
     
The project lead for MegaTraveller was Jane Yeager, and this is the only game on which I can find her credited in such a role; all her other credits include art design and direction. We've seen her work before on DarkSpyre (which, artistically, bears a passing resemblance to MegaTraveller) and will again on Dusk of the Gods (1991), The Summoning (1992), Dungeon Hack (1993), Veil of Darkness (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Menzoberranzan (1994), and Anvil of Dawn (1995), before she leaves the field and turns to computer education and web site development.

Most of Yeager's later work was at DreamForge, which was co-founded by her co-designer on MegaTraveller, Christopher Straka. This is the first game on which he's credited for "design," but he went on to become the lead designer on almost all the titles above, plus Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War (1999), his last credited game.
                   
Next year, we'll see MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients, which everyone seems to think is much better, likely because it involved the active participation of Marc Miller, co-founder of GDW and co-developer of the tabletop Traveller. Also, it looks like primary game design was taken over by F. J. Lennon, who wrote the manual for MegaTraveller 1--arguably the best part of the game.

The 143-page manual provides a solid intro to the Traveller tabletop RPG, not just this game's mechanics.

                       
I am sick to death of 1990 games that don't crack the 30s in the GIMLET. When I designed the scale, I really thought that the average game would be in the 50s or 60s by now. In my entire last year of blogging, there have been only a handful of really good games--Ultima VI, Quest for Glory II, Secret of the Silver Blades, maybe Lord of the Rings--and a bunch of mediocre offerings that feel like throwbacks to 1986. The future doesn't look any brighter, and soon we have to deal with Space: 1889, yet another science-fiction RPG from Paragon that's based on a tabletop game. Maker's breath, will I be happy to see 1990 in the rear-view mirror. 
               
Hard Nova, written by the same person who thought "Malcolm Trandle" and "The Key of Thor" were good ideas, is next. Yay.

*****

Further reading: My coverage of the sequel, MegaTraveller 2, begins here. Paragon's other GDW-based games includes Space 1889.

The Summoning: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Jera rules the world.

        

The Summoning
United States
Event Horizon (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)
Released 1992 for DOS, 1994 for PC-98
Date Started: 16 August 2020

Date Finished: 20 October 2020

Total Hours: 53
Difficulty: Easy in combats (2/5), hard in puzzles (4/5), average moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 40
Ranking at Time of Posting: 325/392 (83%)
       

Summary

This sequel to DarkSpyre (1990) continues the series' effort to bring Dungeon Master puzzles and combat to a single-character axonometric interface. The player enters a fortress of more than 40 levels (though some are optional) hoping to make his or her way to the mysterious Shadow Weaver, a warlord threatening to take over the entire world. The game's well-written backstory plays well into the encounters, NPCs, and plot twists that the player finds within the labyrinth, and the puzzles--tough but fair, involving innumerable levers, pressure plates, teleporters, and rolling balls--particularly shine. Most RPG elements, such as combat, character development, and equipment, are only average, but the game doesn't do much of anything completely wrong. Although it lasts a bit too long for my tastes, it never reaches levels of frustration as high as DarkSpyre. I enjoyed and recommend it.

     

*****

   

I was physically close to winning when I last wrote, but it still took a while. The longest part involved fully exploring the Otherworld. I didn't realize I had barely scratched the surface. I had missed the second destination of one of those double-destination teleporters, and it led to two new Otherworld maps--Otherworld Two and Otherworld Three.

   

Each map had plenty of enemies (including new giant crabs) and plenty of puzzles. One puzzle left me stumped and I had to consult a "let's play" on YouTube to solve it; it involved shooting arrows across a line of teleporters to activate a pressure plate. There was another one involving a rolling barrel that took me about an hour. That's something I picked up from my brief audit of the cluebook: what I had interpreted as cross-sections of trees were in fact "barrels." These levels introduced the "rolling barrel," which looks like a barrel but acts like a ball.

     

I didn't even realize there was an Otherworld Two.

      

The major purposes of the Otherworld levels were twofold: first, they delivered the series of items I needed to open the way to the part of the Staff of Summoning. Second, they provided two scraps of paper that together contained the "Shape Change" spell. (I also got "Lightning Shield" and "Swiftness.") Otherworld Three ended at King Evermore's Treasure Chamber, where I had to choose one from among several items. I chose Boots of Levitation, expecting that they would help me short-cut other teleporters and pressure plates in the future.

    

Back on the first level, on the other side of a Raido rune, I met a young man with no name. He could not remember ever having a name. He had been waiting in the room where I encountered him for many years but didn't seem particularly bothered by it. He said he felt like a part of him was missing; I figured he must be the Staff of Summoning piece in human form.

        

This guy talks a bit like a living staff.

       

The weird little creature called Qasar had the spell ("Channeling") necessary to turn the kid back into a staff. He would only give the spell to one of his own kind, which was obviously what "Shape Change" was for. I cast it, changed myself to whatever furry toothed creature Qasar is, and spoke to him. He congratulated me for my ingenuity and gave me the seven hand gestures for the spell. 

     

No champagne first?

      

I cast the spell near the nameless kid, and he changed into a staff, which I promptly stuck into my backpack. I returned to King Evermore and gated out of the Overworld, never to return, not even for any of the stuff I left strewn in his foyer.

     

That left the four levels of the citadel, three of which I had already partly explored. Each of the first three levels is roughly organized into quadrants, and you can only pass between quadrants on the same level in certain places. Thus, getting to the northwest quadrant of Level 1 means first going up to the southwest quadrant of Level 3, crossing over, and descending two ladders to Level 1 again. I'm making it sound easier than it is; the reality involved a lot more teleporting and levers and pressure plates. But you get the idea.

      

An "execution chamber."

       

I'll spoil for you now that I wasted a lot of time and inventory preparing for a final battle that never came. The Raven, who was relatively easy, was the last "boss-level" enemy that I fought. The Ebon Knight was the last difficult enemy that I fought. I expected some epic-level fight with Shadow Weaver, at least, and I prepared for it by leveling up with a variety of weapon types and magic skills and saving runes like Berkana (restores all magic power) and Dagaz (casts "Slaying" spell), but as we'll see, the endgame doesn't even involve a battle. Some random citadel guard or skeleton was the last enemy slain. Some commenter was right: once you find Warmonger, you can pretty much just use it exclusively. I never once used "Healing" nor used any of my diamonds to make a full-healing potion. I kept a Shield of Spell Absorption, Bracers of Regeneration, and a Cloak of Invisibility for no reason.

       

A clue to the spell parchment to insert.

       

Levels 1-3 of the citadel are mostly about supplying the black and white pearls that you need on Level 3 to open the way to Level 4. There was one key thing to do, however, which was to find the phylactery of Balthazar, the mage controlled by Shadow Weaver. I guess I had been encountering Balthazar for several levels--I just assumed it was some random mage--but you can't defeat him permanently until you find the phylactery, which itself means feeding a bunch of spell scrolls into the appropriate slots.

   

Once found, the phylactery need only be thrown against a wall to free the mage. The act gets you about 50,000 experience points, enough to raise me to Level 10 ("hero").

       

I guess "free" wasn't quite the right word.

       

Five black pearls and five white pearls are needed on Level 3. As some commenters pointed out, you don't ever find any extra black pearls. I did end the game with several extra white ones.

      

Inserting the first pearl.

     

The final level is an outer ring with a group of inner chambers. Various teleporters are scattered throughout the outer ring, leading to isolated inner rooms where you battle guards, skeletons, and stone golems to find iron tokens. You need about eight iron tokens to open the teleporter that leads to Shadow Weaver.

    

There's one!

     

Two sentient swords guard Shadow Weaver's chambers, but Warmonger threatens them and they agree to depart the world, although they swear revenge. From there, getting into Shadow Weaver's chambers is just a matter of inserting half of the Staff of Summoning in a hole. It awaits pickup on the other side of the door.

       

A sequel is set up.

        

Shadow Weaver stands alone in a large, empty room, as if the developers' budget ran out in the final area. Wearing a cloak and mask, she invites the character to take the second half of the staff from the chest behind her and mend it. The chest contains not only the staff but the God of Magic's rune necklace. Casting "Mending" brings up a cinematic in which the staff is made whole.

         

You rule the world but you don't have any furniture?

          

Shadow Weaver then demands that the character hand over the staff. When the character refuses, Shadow Weaver taunts her, claiming that she is impervious to both physical and magical attacks. Indeed, "any attack brought against me will only serve to harm the attacker" (I verified this). Jera says something about thwarting her plan, but Shadow Weaver says: "Plans? What do you know of plans? The puppet speaks back to the master with only wood for brains. You have been my pawn from the beginning, and now your part in my play is done."

      

The player has a few seconds to make a choice of object to hold in her hand before activating the Staff of Summoning. No matter what she chooses, Jera says that she knows that Shadow Weaver is Abighael, daughter of Borel. But Shadow Weaver reveals that she is also Rowena, head of the Council of Mages. She Palpatinesquely played both sides of the war and engineered the arrival of a hero to find the second half of the Staff of Summoning, which for some reason she could not do. "[Now] my revenge will be complete. The world will finally regret the pain it has brought me."

        

TV Tropes calls this "All According to Plan."

        

Three objects work and offer three different endings. The first thing you can do is hold the rune necklace and summon the God of Magic. Shadow Weaver is delighted, as she intended to do that anyway. The moment he appears, he blasts and kills Jera. He and Shadow Weaver then engage in a "great cosmic battle" that Shadow Weaver loses. The God of Magic then apparently destroys the world.

        

         

The second possibility is to hold Chesschantra's skull. Chesschantra paralyzes Jera when she arrives, and Jera watches helplessly as the mother and daughter together summon the God of Magic, who does his thing.

        

Not even a word of gratitude?

       

Mother and daughter battle and defeat the god, at which point Chesschantra turns on her daughter and kills her. 

 

This was mean.

        

The game offers the same world-ending message, although it is unclear why Chesschantra wants to destroy it.

     

But why?

          

The third and "correct" option was my first inclination, so I'm happy with that. If you hold Warmonger in the other hand, the staff summons King Borel. Although Shadow Weaver claims that it's impossible, since Borel was destroyed by the god-created DarkSpyre, Borel does appear. He thanks Jera and opens a portal to take his daughter to "a realm where they may dwell in peace." Abighael seems happy with this result as she takes Borel's hand and steps into the portal.

    

After they leave, Jera is left alone in Shadow Weaver's chambers. Warmonger has disappeared. Jera notes that Borel had his own sword, but it wasn't Warmonger, and she speculates that Warmonger has "gone off to sulk somewhere." I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a hint that one of the swords guarding Shadow Weaver's door went and found Borel and helped him return, or if it's just blather.

        

Am I supposed to attach some significance to this?

      

Shadow Weaver's outfit is left on the ground. Other than grabbing it, the only thing to do is leave via a portal. If the player leaves without putting on the outfit, she is attacked in the next chamber by a group of elite guards. I do not think they are beatable. They do half your hit point total in damage every time they hit, and they almost always hit, and there are about a dozen of them. I tried using all my amassed equipment, including Figurines of Resurrection, and I couldn't kill even one of them. Even if I could, the room's one door has no mechanism to open it.

         

Shadow Weaver should have put these guys on guard duty.

       

The proper solution is to put on Shadow Weaver's outfit.

        

I look and perhaps sound the part. I hope my lack of shadow-weaving abilities isn't a problem.

         

The guards then assume that she is Shadow Weaver and bring news that the final battle has been won and the entire world is under her control. She seems to accept this situation, with plans to rule benevolently while continuing to impersonate Shadow Weaver:

        

The world has seen much of war these past decades. It is now time for a little peace, I think. Come! Gather my messengers! It is time to go out and see what I have won. There are a great many things I have planned!

        

Roll end credits. I tried several other objects with the Staff of Summoning, including the wizards' skulls, but nothing else worked. Making it to the endgame rewards you with about 500,000 experience points, catapulting you to the top level even though it no longer matters.

           

Jera shows a lack of understanding of the economics of ruling the world and keeping a standing army.

                         

The twists at the end were pretty good, although I think some of my commenters oversold them. I was expecting something even more earth-shattering. Still, I have to praise the game for improving upon the approach of DarkSpyre and making the backstory relevant throughout the game. I never really like the "you've been doing my bidding all along" trope, but it's well done here and actually makes sense with the plot reveal. Shadow Weaver's one mistake was assuming Jera wouldn't go to the citadel's lower level and find out how to use the staff from Chesschantra's ghost.

      

          

I like the puzzles of The Summoning much better than DarkSpyre, too. They feel more organic and less artificial (although the previous game had a good reason that they felt artificial). Most of them have a couple of solutions, and some can be skipped entirely or circumvented (e.g., using the Boots of Levitation to get over plates and teleporters; casting "Freeze" to stop rolling balls). I could have done without the double-destination teleporters, however, which force you to test every teleporter once you know they exist.

    

The Summoning has NPCs, but as for other RPG elements, I'm not sure the sequel did a better job. Making Warmonger so overpowered and then introducing it slightly more than halfway through the game was a mistake; it ruins the other weapons. I wasn't enamored of the spell system. For combat tactics and character development, DarkSpyre may have been a little superior. But because of its other elements, I expect The Summoning to out-perform DarkSpyre's GIMLET score of 30.

   

For a game of this many entries, I would normally save the GIMLET for its own article. But I've already got one of those coming up for Dark Queen of Krynn so let's just bang it out here:

     

• 5 points for the game world. It has a good backstory with original elements, referenced repeatedly during the game.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Character creation is relatively meaningless given the way the character develops, and as for that development, I never felt that any of the "level-ups" made me more powerful.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. I like the NPCs: they had personalities and interests of their own. They weren't terribly complex, and the game could have done more with the dialogue keywords, but the system was still miles ahead of DarkSpyre. They even offered a fundamentally role playing choice in the decision whether to kill them as you left them, as most were loyal to Shadow Weaver.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. The foes are nothing special. Some hit harder than others and some throw globs of whatever at you, but for the most part you adopt the same approaches to all of them. I do give credit to the game manual for providing a couple of paragraphs of description for all of them. Most of these points go to the puzzle system, which I regard as a type of "encounter." The two games do a good job bringing Dungeon Master-style puzzles to an axonometric interface.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The fundamental problem with combat is that it's too easy. There are a number of environmental strategies that you might employ if it were harder, including maneuvering enemies into the paths of each others' missiles, leading them to traps or rolling balls or teleporters, using spells like "Magic Wall" to limit the number that can attack you at once, crushing them in doors, or using "Invisibility" to elude them. However, as easy as it is to "Freeze" and heal, not to mention how overpowered Warmonger is, you might as well just wade in swinging. It's too bad because the spell system has some creative spells that I rarely bothered to cast, including "Magic Skill," "Weapon Skill," "Swiftness," "Battlerage," and "Zap Away." You mostly need to save magic points for puzzle-related spells.

      

One of several spells I never used.

     

• 4 points for equipment. There certainly is plenty of it. Focusing just on the standard RPG stuff, you've got various types of weapons and armor, wands, potions, necklaces and other magic items (which have laughably short lives), and of course runes with different effects. Again, it would all be more meaningful with harder combats. I do not like that so much equipment was used for puzzle-solving, particularly when it involved items that most players would be expected to use immediately, such as Odin runes and skill books. I don't like that the distribution of equipment is completely determinate. And I don't like that half the game is spent micro-managing your inventory so you're not overburdened.

• 1 point for economy. I'm being generous. Individual gold pieces that take up their own slots is more "equipment" than an economy. 

• 4 points for quests. There's a main quest with several outcomes, even if some are obviously "bad," plus a few side-quests and side-areas.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I didn't think there was anything particularly good or bad about the graphics and limited sound effects. As for the interface, I think it required a bit too much mouse work, and too much of that had a tendency to go awry. The system of dragging the inventory panel up and down was never a good idea; it didn't work well in DarkSpyre or Dusk of the Gods, either. (I seem to have said otherwise in my summary of DarkSpyre, which surprises me.) I would have much preferred a single key to switch between the two. The automap is well-annotated but I would have preferred an easy way to call it up instead of requiring the player to equip a special object.

• 5 points for gameplay. Here, The Summoning significantly outperforms its predecessor, which was painfully linear and difficult. Both games were a bit too long.

     

That gives us a final score of 40. I was expecting something in the 40s, so that basically works. I'd certainly consider it "recommended," and if Event Horizon had made a third title in the series, I suspect they would have done even better. Considering how much I was dreading the game at the outset, I'm pleased where I ended up.

         

Note that the hero in the advertisement is choosing the worst possible ending.

          

Samuel Baker reviewed The Summoning in the March 1993 Computer Gaming World. Some of his statements are a little mysterious ("I found that floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee paid dividends when there were many adversaries"), but overall he was complimentary to the game. Despite some frustrations with the inventory puzzles, he notes that: "I found myself more and more involved with The Summoning, playing not out of duty, but out of pleasure." That's exactly how I felt, although I can't agree with his follow-up: "I was sorry to finish the game." He alludes to Scorpia having tried the game but quitting in frustration, but I can't find her review in the issue he points to. Later that year, the magazine nominated The Summoning for "Role-Playing Game of the Year" but gave the award to Ultima Underworld II. I was surprised to see much less complimentary scores in MobyGames's round-up (they range from 39 in the German Power Play to 82 in the German PC Games); most of the complaints seem to have to do with technical and interface issues that I didn't experience.

       

The Summoning ends our experience in this game world--presumably, Jera ruled in peace forever--but not with Event Horizon or the two primary developers, Christopher Straka and Thomas Holmes. Screenshots of their vampire-themed RPG, Veil of Darkness (1993), suggests that it continues the DarkSpyre engine. Later, they'll move to a first-person interface for Dungeon Hack (1993), Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession (1994), Ravenloft: Stone Prophet (1995), and Anvil of Dawn (1995), but even then some of the graphical and interface elements look familiar. Straka's games have gotten continually better since the odd Wizard Wars (1988), and I look forward to seeing the rest of his trajectory.

    

With that, we get ever-so-closer to the end of 1992. Next, I'm going to attempt the French Oméga, Planète Invisible from 1986, but I warn you I'm not going to have a lot of patience for it. We'll see a wrap-up of Dark Queen of Krynn before that. I would also note that is my 120th entry for 2020, which has been my annual goal since setting up my Patreon account in early 2019. If I maintain my pace, I should have close to 150 entries by the end of the year, making this my most productive year since 2011. Even 10 more entries this year will make it my most productive year since 2013. Tell that to all those people who say Chester Bolingbroke is on his way out.