Bloodwych: Dead Ends

Nowhere left to go.

Shortly after the last time I blogged, I ran into a literal dead end with Bloodwych. Even after retracing my steps twice and sketching a crude map of the dungeon, I could only find one door I hadn't opened, and I couldn't find a key for that door.

I broke down and looked at an online map offered by a gentleman named Alan Chapman at one of the few online resources for Bloodwych. I'm glad I did, because that dead-end pictured above is actually supposed to be a set of stairs. This is apparently a well-known bug in the game (reader Leszek Wronski alluded to it on my first posting), called the "Welcome Back! bug" after a sign at the top of a nearby set of stairs. Owing to a certain dearth of solid material on Bloodwych online, it took me a while to solve. Someone had created a patch, but it only runs on 32-bit machines unless you use DOSBox, in which case you also need another file. I don't normally supply tech support on this blog, but for future readers who might come across this entry while having the same problem: you want to find the fix file called WBFIX.EXE somewhere online (it actually came with the version of Bloodwych I downloaded) and another file called CWSDPMI.EXE. Open DOSBox, run the latter first, then the former.

All of this raises the question about why I struggled so hard to fix a game I didn't really like when I had a perfect excuse to stop playing. The truth is, I took to heart the "RTFM" exchanges from back in March. The guy had a point. I bailed on the second two Bard's Tale games way too soon. I may not finish Bloodwych--it's extremely long and repetitive--but I want to make sure I fully explore it before I come to that decision.

Yesterday was an odd day. I've had a serious back pain problem for a few days, and since I didn't have to go anywhere yesterday, I loaded up on pain medication. In addition to doing a great job on my back, the medication made me disoriented and yet oddly obsessive about the task in front of me. I ended up playing Bloodwych for roughly 12 hours straight. I had nightmares about the game when I went to bed, and today I can't remember half of what I did.

Despite the investment of time, I didn't get very far: I explored one tower and recovered one of the five crystals I need to defeat Zendick. Halfway through the day, I began to seriously regret not mapping the levels, but I persisted in not mapping until the end. If I continue playing, I think I'll have to change my mind about this, as the levels are extremely complex, and missing a single item can cripple your progress.

20% done!

Character leveling was also very slow. When I began yesterday's gameplay, all four of my characters were Level 3. When I finished, three were Level 5 and one was Level 6. I can't imagine how slow it goes if you're playing in tandem with another player/party. I hate to keep comparing this game to Dungeon Master, but I miss the other game's leveling system, where you leveled up fairly regularly based on what skills you used rather than your starting class.

I do confess to some enjoyment of the equipment-based leveling. I like multi-character games in which there are several things to buy and wield, so that every hour or so, you find an upgraded pair of gloves, armor, a shield, or a weapon. Unlike in Dungeon Master, statistics make it immediately apparent how each item relates to the others.

Finding mithril plate is cool, even if it's a bit odd that my mage can wear it.

The game also follows Dungeon Master's tradition of telling you nothing about the foes you face--not even their names. Some are easily identifiable, of course--a dragon, a giant crab, a skeleton, and beholders among them--but I have no idea what some the humanoids are supposed to be.

 

 

Some of the foes encountered yesterday.

The culmination of the day was the achievement of the Serpent Crystal at the top of the Serpent Tower. Fighting my way to the top wasn't easy. First off, I rescind what I said yesterday about bobbing-and-weaving during combat as "quasi-cheating." When I said that, I was still capable of winning combats without resorting to such tactics. As I soon realized, simply standing face-to-face with most monsters is a death sentence, no matter how well-equipped you are, and no matter what tactics you use. The game seems to assume that you'll use guerilla-style combat to win most battles, and it occasionally has some fun with you by designing the levels in such a way that such combat is impossible. The entire top level was like that, with lots of  linear corridors, dead ends, and enemies coming from multiple directions. Surviving it took a lot of work, and yet I can't say it was "satisfying" work, because it relied on lots of luck and reloading rather than any real "tactics."

This wasn't nice.

When I left the Serpent Tower, I had a key to the Moon Tower, and thus settled on it as the next port of call. I took a 20-minute video illustrating various gameplay elements.

For those of you who don't like to watch narrated video, the major sections are:

1. Some introductory stuff and a tour of the interface.

2. Combat against a couple groups of beholders, illustrating the bob-and-weave method, how the resurrection room works, and what happens when you die.

3. Trying to sell excess items to shopkeepers. This process has been very frustrating, and they usually insult me rather than buy anything. I'm looking forward to getting the "alchemy" spell, which automatically converts extra items to gold. Gold is important because you need it to purchase new spells from the spell fairy every time you level up, and to buy potions from the occasional (actually, only one so far) potion shop.

4. Dispelling some illusory walls.

The only accessible room in the Moon Tower has a couple of gem-shaped receptacles on the walls, and I assume I need to fill these before I can progress forward. Unfortunately, I don't have any gems to put in them. Clearly, I overlooked them somewhere in the main tower or Serpent Tower, meaning I have to retrace my steps (and probably map this time) if I want to keep playing. I am seriously considering quitting on it, motivated primarily by Trudodyr's report that nothing really changes.

There are two lessons that I've learned the hard way:

1. Both "archers/assassins" and "adventurers" are kind of worthless. They both have lousy spell points (less than half of the mage) and also do lousy in combat (my fighter routinely scores hits in the 40-60 range while my adventurer rarely gets above 15). If I was starting over, I'd play with two fighters and two mages.

2. The CPU speed determines how quickly hit points, vitality, and spell points regenerate, but it also determines how quickly you get hungry. I used up all my food and was still starving before I thought to lower the DOSBox speed from the default of 3000 cycles to a more reasonable 700-800.

On the subject of dead ends, I've found through some of my research that Mirrorsoft, the company that produced Bloodwych (through its label, Image Works), has an interesting history. Headquartered in London, the company was a subsidiary of The Daily Mirror, a daily tabloid published since 1903. Mirrorsoft was founded as an educational software publisher, but its educational offerings were soon outstripped by its games, of which it published more than 50 between 1983 and 1991. Most are action games; Bloodwych is the only CRPG.

Mirrorsoft appears to have been the U.K. distributor for Dungeon Master, which partly explains the similarity in interface, although the company doesn't seem to have any ties to the specific developers. The developers of Bloodwych are collectively credited as TAG and seem to be Peter James and brothers Anthony Taglione and Philip Taglione. They created the original world of Trazere, in which Bloodwych and The Four Crystals of Trazere (AKA Legend) are set.

Bloodwych might have been better known if not for a financial scandal and collapse of Mirrorosoft following the death of Ian Robert Maxwell in 1991. Maxwell owned The Mirror, Mirrorsoft, several Scottish newspapers, several book companies (including Macmillan), and The New York Daily News. He was the Rubert Murdoch of his day. In 1991, however, he died under mysterious circumstances when he fell off his yacht off the Canary Islands. After his death, a former Israeli Mossad officer claimed that Maxwell had been an agent for the service, even while he served in the British parliament.

More important for our purposes, it came to light that he'd been embezzling money from his companies' pension funds and that his companies were under water in debt. By 1992, the media empire had collapsed, its subsidiaries sold to pay off debts. Mirrorsoft was sold to Acclaim Entertainment, which had its own credibility issues and went out of business in 2004. Taglione and James had just begun work on The Four Crystals of Trazere when Mirrorsoft collapsed, and apparently it wasn't far enough along to be part of the Acclaim deal. Instead, they pitched it to Mindscape, and it was accepted. I'll be playing that game in a couple of years.

Tomorrow, I'll make a decision whether to continue with Bloodwych or move on. There don't really seem to be any walkthroughs or full-length LPs online, so I have an urge to finish it just to document the ending. On the other hand, it really is excruciatingly boring, repetitive, and linear.

Game 74: Bloodwych (1989)

I honestly don't know what this is, but it's the closest we get to a title screen.

       

Bloodwych
United Kingdom

Image Works (Mirrorsoft)
Released 1989 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS; 1990 for Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum
Date Started: 29 July 2012

     

In July, I attended ReaderCon in Burlington, Massachusetts, where every year they feature a "bad prose competition." They mostly draw their passages from science fiction and fantasy, but I wish I could convince them to include some selections from CRPGs. The Bloodwych manual introduces the game with all of the literary skill of a seven-year-old describing the plot of a movie to his mom:

You are one of the Bloodwych. You must take on the persona of one of the last sixteen champions of Trazere. You must first explore Treidwyl, recruiting more champions, and gathering items to aid your task. Once you are prepared you must get the four crystals of storing from the towers. Take them to the fifth tower and there destroy Zendick, and banish the Lord of Entropy to the realm of chaos. To do this you will have to defeat the agents of Zendick. The Lord of Entropy has transformed many of the citizens of Trazere into weird monsters, and twisted the minds of many into those of psychotic killers. Some of these citizens may aid you, but many will try to destroy you. Good luck in your mission, and remember the spirit of the Bloodwych is always with you.

Well. Glad we cleared that up. I think we're going to have our own "bad prose" competition on The CRPG Addict fairly soon.

Bloodwych's aspirations to be Dungeon Master are blatant from the outset. Where the earlier game began with a novelette by writer Nancy Holder, Bloodwych begins with a tract written by whatever Image Works intern displayed the greatest knowledge of Saturday morning cartoons. In it, we learn that there was once a "secret order of psychic mages" called...wait for it...the Bloodwych. Ruling from the city of Treihadwyl, they governed the land of Trazere in justice and peace. But one of them--you saw this coming--craved more power. This wizard, named Zendick, overthrew the Grand Dragon of the Bloodwych, cast his fellow mages into the astral plane, and summoned monsters to roam the once-peaceful streets. Now he seeks to summon the Lord of Entropy to unmake the universe so he can remake it in his own image. But somewhere in the astral plane, a couple of the Bloodwych have gotten their minds together and possessed one of the Champions of Trazere and are impelling him to recruit followers to defeat Zendick.

Thus, the game also copies Dungeon Master's odd framing device in which the on-screen characters are really being controlled or possessed by an off-screen mage. And, like the former game, you start by selecting pre-defined characters rather than rolling your own. There are 16 possible initial characters among four classes--fighters, mages, adventurers, and archers/assassins--with various inventories of items and spells, and various attributes of strength, intelligence, and charisma.

"Ulrich Sternaxe" sounds a lot like another name I've been hearing lately...

The characters are amusingly odd, including ones that look like an orc, a jawa, Wonder Woman, a lizard, and a skeleton. I nearly went with "Baldrick the Dung" who, despite his name and what appears to be a scrotum on his forehead...

...had the highest charisma, but ultimately I settled with "Eleanor of Avalon," who seemed like a well-rounded character. Whomever you choose, it appears that the other PCs are wandering around the starting area. Within moments after starting, I met the second guy in the top row, an orc-looking fighter named Astroth, and added him to my party.

Navigation and commands are also extremely similar to Dungeon Master, as you can see from the screenshots below, both offering battles with skeletons. The interface elements are in different locations, but both offer icons for moving and turning, combat and defense, and arranging party members information. There are status bars for each character's health, stamina, and magic.

Bloodwych has notably worse graphics and (at first glance) less complexity in combat tactics. You cannot assign individual fight commands to each character, for instance; you can only instruct everyone to fight. You also can't see each status for all characters; only one at a time.

At first, these "downgrades" from Dungeon Master had me longing for the earlier game, but slowly I started to encounter some of Bloodwych's unique charms. To start, there are actual NPCs and a dialogue system. As you encounter NPCs wandering around the dungeon, you can ask questions about locations and objects, and even recruit them to the party (at least, according to the manual, on the first level).

Slightly more advanced than "NAME! JOB! HEALTH!"

Second, the game has keyboard commands for movement, the lack of which was one of the things that bothered me most about Dungeon Master [Later edit: I misremembered; Dungeon Master had keyboard commands for movement. What bothered me was the lack of keyboard commands for other functions, like accessing inventory--something that hasn't changed in Bloodwych.] However, what it gains from these it loses from extremely small and numerous icons. This is not a game you can play on an airplane with your laptop's trackpad.

Third, you collect gold in the game, and the manual promises some sort of economy--again, something I found lacking in Dungeon Master.

Unfortunately, there are a number of things I already don't like. The sound, for instance. As far as I can tell, there isn't any--only music. The music is a relentlessly repeating passacaglia in some minor key that had me reaching for the mute button after only a few minutes. Neither combats nor opening doors produce any sound. I think it's a platform issue. I watched a quick YouTube video showing a C64 version with markedly worse graphics but some rudimentary sound.

In addition to the combat, the spell system is also significantly dumbed down from Dungeon Master. While spells do seem to be composed of a selection of runes, you can't choose them individually or experiment; you have to "know" the whole spell. You can, however, adjust the power of the spell before casting.

I haven't figured out what "magelock" does yet, but I suspect it locks doors.

In gameplay terms, I've explored the first level, killed a bunch of nameless monsters (like Dungeon Master, you don't get any clues as to the names of your foes), and collected a lot of treasure from bodies and alcoves. I've collected one NPC, but I know where there are more hanging around, and after I have a chance to evaluate them, I'll round out my party with four. I haven't seen any obvious level progression yet.

Fighting some guy who's not even facing me.

Much has been made in various online reviews about the two-player option in the game, which I admit is somewhat impressive. Two players can play cooperatively via a split-screen view in which the parties can see each other, fight the same monsters, trade equipment, and whatnot.

Two parties view each other with a skeleton in between.

The two players share the same keyboard: movement keys for the top party are on the right side and for the bottom party on the left side. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to set it up so it recognizes a second mouse. I'd try harder, but I don't have anyone to play with anyway. That sounded sadder than I intended.

Before I go, I want to hypothesize the conversation that must have occurred amongst this group of mages.

Mage Leader: Well, we're a group of good mages who are going to rule the land in peace and justice. What shall we call ourselves?

Zendick: How about the BLOODwych?! Bwu-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Mage 2 (whispering to Mage 3): Do you think we're going to have problems with him later?

Legend: Summary and Rating

           

Legend

United Kingdom

Mindscape (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Published in the United States as The Four Crystals of Trazere

Date Started: 7 April 2018

Date Ended: 21 May 2018 

Total Hours: 33

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 37

Ranking at time of posting: 221/290 (76%)

I really struggled over whether to quit this one. On the one hand, it was getting a little better. On the other, it was simply exhausting. Combats in Kilijan's Dark Tower became difficult enough that each one was a nail-biting fight to the death, requiring all my best tactics and spells, and even then I had to reload half of them. Most RPGs give you maybe 10 throw-away battles punctuated by the occasional significant battle. In Legend, none of the battles are throw-aways. A random encounter in a corridor you just cleared can absolutely destroy you, with enemies pouring in from all sides, a new one arriving to replace every one you've slain. I swear, some battles go on long enough that the game decides to generate a new random battle while you're still fighting the old one.

My inventory got so overloaded during the third level of the Dark Tower that I decided to make the journey back to the main map, with all of the random combats in between, to sell the excess goods, donate money at temples to restore luck, and level up. I did all of these things, then couldn't force myself to re-enter the tower and wind all the way back up. I sat on it for a couple of days. Finally, I decided I'd quit if someone else online had documented the endgame.

               

As far as I made it: the stairs going up to Level 4 of the Dark Tower.

            

My, has someone. Starting in November 2011, a YouTube member named Dzyu played the game over 102 videos, ending in May 2013. His videos were invaluable in documenting the endgame. (Another worthy LP series was started in June 2015 by FSSZilla, but as of her 83rd video in November 2017, she hadn't won.)

The Dark Tower turns out to be five levels. At the top, the player defeats Kilijan (who is immune to "Disrupt" and "Paralyze") and gets his magic staff, either keeping it or turning it in to the Ancient for a reward. Somewhere in the Dark Tower, the player finds a skull key that opens up Levels 3 and 4 of Fagranc. Once you clear those, you have to visit taverns to hear of the discovery of a "power gem" in the sewers of Balenhalm by some "ratmen." Balenhalm is a single large level.

Next up are two levels of Moonhenge in the northeast corner of the map. It provides the keys necessary to explore Levels 5 and 6 of Fagranc, which in turn provides the items necessary for the two levels of the Unshrine (which jumps around the map), where the party contends with Tetrahagael, the Chaos Lord. This is apparently an exceedingly difficult battle, as the Chaos Lord has magical protections (which you have to dispel), immunities, and very high hit point total. The Chaos Lord has the key necessary for the eighth and final level of Fagranc.

While exploring the dungeons, the party members also find the titular four crystals of Trazere, each of which boosts the defenses of one of the towers on the overland map. Between dungeons, the party has to reconquer cities seized by the enemy and provide gold to boost staffing at the towers.

      

This is the kind of statement that would make a robot's brain explode on the original Star Trek.

       

After delivering the fourth crystal, the party discovers that King Necrix himself is responsible for the evil taking hold in the land. ("Necrix" always sounded like a suspicious name.) The party must assault the king's fortress, fight up three levels, and slay him at the top. It took Dzyu over half a dozen attempts. Watching this part of the video gives you a sense of the complete chaos that is combat in this game. Even watching instead of playing, I can't tell what's happening most of the time. Spells are exploding all over the place, characters die in seconds. It's so crazy that in the fight where he finally kills the king, he doesn't even realize it for a few seconds.

          

A typical shot from the final battle.

            

Even after killing the king, Dzyu has enough trouble with the chaos beasts that he runs into an adjacent room hoping for better terrain, and in the midst of combat accidentally reads a sign--and unwittingly concludes the game. (To his credit, he recorded a final video in which he completed the combat before reading the sign.) He's clearly let down by the lack of denouement after so many hours ("I think I would have preferred at least some artwork"), but he remarks that he should have expected it given the sparsity of story throughout the game.

             

The winning screen.

        

The sign, of course, confirms Legend as a prequel to Bloodwych, the idea being that the Bloodwych now take over in the place of Necrix, reign peacefully for a while, and are then usurped by Zendick in the first game.

           

Dzyu's late-game spellbook.

       

Throughout the videos, Dzyu clearly enjoys the game for its spells. A late game screenshot shows his current recipe list, which I make out as:

1. "Missile-Disrupt-Disrupt-Disrupt-Damage-Damage-Damage." An all-purpose "blast the hell out of a targeted enemy" spell. "Disrupt" is more powerful than "Damage" but some enemies are immune to it, so I'm sure the goal here was to have a spell that would devastate anyone.

2. "Surround-Damage-Damage-Damage-Missile-Damage-Damage-Damage-Surround-Damage-Damage-Damage-Missile-Damage-Damage-Damage." This one is similar to my "fill the room with fire" spell, but jacked up to the maximum possibility.

3. "Heal-Heal-Heal-Continuous-Heal-Heal-Heal." The best I can figure, this immediately triple-heals the caster, then creates a square of healing magic in the room that other characters can walk or teleport into.

4. "Missile-Surround-Vivify-Heal-Heal." This allows the caster to resurrect any dead characters in a 9-square radius and then immediately heal them a bit.

5. "Regenerate." His only single-rune spell lets the caster regenerate quickly.

6. "Missile-Teleport-Speed." Allows the caster to send one of his colleagues to another place in the room and simultaneously give him extra attacks.

7. "Teleport-Regenerate-Speed-Antimagic-Surround-Teleport-Regenerate-Speed-Mystic Weapon-Antimagic." A kind of holistic pre-combat spell that gives each character the most important buffs and allows him to place himself anywhere in the room at the beginning of combat.

8. "Missile-Forward-Missile-Teleport." No idea. I'm guessing this was a solution to his last puzzle somehow. He doesn't have any of these mixed, which bolsters my hypothesis.

9 & 10. "Missile-Paralyze" and "Missile-Dispel." Both quick spells to affect a single target.

Analyzing some of the videos, "Teleport" is the real workhorse, and it makes sense that "Cloud" objects (rings, potions, wands, helms), which cast the spell, are vital to the party's success. They're the key to placing characters in strategic positions at the outset of combat, and to ensuring that the assassin is well-placed to use his backstabbing abilities. The spell also gets wounded characters out of combat and to healing squares.

My GIMLET combines both my experiences and what I observed in Dzyu's videos.

1. Game World. Neither the game world nor the story is well fleshed out, consisting primarily of allusions rather than real descriptions and sensible bits of lore. The game's "twist"--Necrix being the evil lord behind the invasion--doesn't really make any sense. Why didn't he undermine the "good" armies? Why did he send the party to Fagranc? It's too bad, because the connections to Bloodwych would be more meaningful if the story in either game made more sense. Score: 3.

2. Character Creation and Development. There are limited options during creation, and I feel that the number of levels achievable during the game (about 12) is a little low given the difficulty of combats. You have no choices while leveling up--you just get a random selection of stat upgrades. On the plus side, each of the four characters plays a pretty stark role. You can't just treat them all like fighters. You have to carefully equip and position them in ways that call on the strengths of their classes. I also like that the four classes--berserker, troubadour, assassin, and runemaster--are just a bit different than the standard fantasy RPG roster. Score: 4.

             

A late-game troubadour, from Dzyu's LP.

         

3. NPC Interaction. I'll give a point for a few people in the various towns, but really those are more part of the "encounters" or "economy" than true NPCs. Score: 1.

4. Encounters and Foes. As a somewhat non-visual person, it particularly annoys me when games don't name their monsters or use color to distinguish types or difficulty, and this game does both. The monsters in the game are a varied selection of humanoids and beasts, some of which do physical damage only, some of which are capable of magic, some of which have magical immunities and protections. I suspect it becomes important to note which is which, and I don't like having to fill notebooks with things like "bluish guy that looks like a minotaur--can self-teleport." 

The other aspect to "encounters" is the puzzles. I ran hot and cold, as I do with almost any game that features these sorts of mechanical puzzles (cf. DarkSpyre, Chaos Strikes Back). I thought some were too difficult and others offered the right level of challenge. They seem to get pretty crazy towards the endgame. Score: 4, but those who like puzzle-oriented games might boost this to a 6 or 7.

5. Magic and Combat. The magic system is obviously the highlight of the game, offering potentially thousands of creative combinations. I would love to have this type of spell system, maybe with a few more effects, coupled with a proper tactical combat system--either turn-based like the Gold Box games, or real-time-with-pause, like the Infinity Engine games.

The combat system actually offered in Legend has too few tactical options for non-spellcasters, is too chaotic and confusing, in too tightly-confined territories, with poor pathfinding and AI. It undermines most of the positives of the magic system. Score: 5.

6. Equipment. A positive that I probably didn't focus enough time on. Each character gets a variety of weapons, shields, armor, helms, gloves, boots, amulets, rings, wands, potions, and special items like the troubadour's various instruments. Upgrades are fairly regular. For regular weapons and armor, you can easily see their effects on your various statistics. For magic items, you have to experiment and study the effects (or take them to the Ancient for identification), but the totality of the items allows all characters to wield some magic and thus increases combat tactics. I also like that the available items in shops changed throughout the game, and that the treasures were randomized rather than fixed. Score: 6.

7. Economy. Another strong point. Between equipment, leveling, runes, reagents, donating at temples for "luck," and fortifying towers, money remains relevant until the end of the game. Score: 6.

8. Quests. There's a main quest with multiple stages, but I don't think there are "side quests." One of the stages, at least, gives you a single choice, but in general you're on a linear rail throughout the game. Score: 3.

           

You have to love "I shall kill you all myself . . . Guards!"

          

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. I rather like the oblique-angle graphics and the various dungeon scenes they create, and I didn't have any problems with the interface, which offers redundant mouse and keyboard options--with the exception of targeting (sometimes). Sound, on the other hand, is only serviceable, consisting of the "ding-ding-ding" of weapons while the same troubadour tune drones endlessly in the background. Score: 4.

10. Gameplay. Here's where it all falls apart by hitting every element of the Unholy Quartet: too linear, too hard, not replayable, and above all, too long. I'll give a point in this category in recognition of the outdoor map, which allows relatively free exploration between the dungeons. Score: 1.

That gives us a final score of 37, just above my "recommend to check out" threshold, but not quite all the way to "good."

Anthony Taglione, responsible for both this and Bloodwych, is clearly a talented programmer with some good ideas. Both games started with a popular base (Dungeon Master in the case of Bloodwych) but brought their own innovations. Neither Bloodwych's cooperative multiplayer nor Legend's magic system have anything quite like it among their predecessors. But both games commit the fatal sin of not knowing when to quit. Neither 1989 nor 1992 was ready for 100-hour games; the hardware and software of the time simply didn't support enough content. Even today, I regard a game that requires 100 hours with a jaundiced eye, although I have no trouble with games that allow for that length. I trust you can see the difference.

Of course, even given any memory- and space-based limitations, this small series is still pretty paltry when it comes to actual story. And both games reward dozens of hours of gameplay with a single screen of text at the endgame. I would have shared Mr. Dzyu's expectation for at least some artwork, particularly since Legend featured an animated introduction.

Computer Gaming World overlooked this one, but Dragon got to it and gave them an uncharacteristically-low 3/5 stars, calling it a "decent effort" with an original magic system but "limited character creation," confusing combat, and an unintuitive interface. European reviews mostly ran in the 80s and 90s (though the German Play Time gave it a 56). Unfortunately, I can't quote any of them because the site I use to find full-text magazines from the period is down. Given the light standards of journalistic integrity that we've seen in most European Amiga magazines, it's hard to imagine that many (if any) of them made it to the end before reviewing the game, and I feel that the interminable length and abrupt conclusion are key parts of the game.

We aren't done with the world of Trazere. 1993 will bring Worlds of Legend: Son of the Empire. Judging by the screenshots and game description, it is simply Legend with different maps, featuring a quasi-East Asian theme. In 1994, we'll face Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard, which appears to be an updated variant of Bloodwych. Those will be our last experiences with Mr. Taglione, as the other offerings from both him and co-designer Peter Owen-James are action and adventure titles (1993's Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1997's Alpha Storm).

We'll clean up a couple of 1988 offerings before getting to the next 1992 game, starting (maybe) with Seven Little Horrors, a bizarre German game from Motelsoft. I'm having trouble with the interface and have written to the publisher for help. If I can't figure it out in time for an entry, we'll move on to the easy-but-bland Talisman, a roguelike for the Atari 800.

*****

I was really looking forward to trying the first version of the long-running UnReal World. Released in 1992, version 1.00b is completely unrecognizable to a player of later versions, with a vastly different interface, different rules, and a high-fantasy setting (rather than real-world Finland). But I can't get it to run. I can run the character creation program and the world setup program, but the main program offers four options, each tied to a function key, and none of them activate. I've verified that the function keys work in DOSBox with other programs. If I can't get 1.00b to run, I have to wait until 1994 for the next major release.

Game 288: Legend (1992)

       

Legend

United Kingdom

Mindscape (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS

Published in the United States as The Four Crystals of Trazere

Date Started: 7 April 2018

 
If there's one major thing that you can credit British RPGs of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it's their experimentation with different perspectives. While most U.S. games remained stubbornly divided between iconographic, top-down, and first-person perspectives, British games (at least, those not based on Dungeon Master)  played with side-view and what we might call "studio" perspectives: those where the screen seems to be framing a scene from a play (Moonstone, Galdregon's Domain, Heavy on the Magick). More important, the U.K. was ahead of the curve on axonometric perspectives, which would eventually comprise a solid chunk of all RPGs. In the U.S., only a small percentage of games so far have used this perspective, perhaps most famously in Faery Tale Adventure (1986) and Ultima VI (1990) and its two spin-offs, and in these cases the perspectives are barely offset from top-down. Axonometric examples from the U.K. include Lords of Chaos (1990), Heimdall (1991), and HeroQuest (1991).
       

A group of four characters explores a dungeon from an axonometric angle.

          
(What I'm calling "axonometric" is usually given as "isometric," but every time I use it we have to have a long discussion about whether it's technically isometric, which means the X, Y, and Z axes have been equally shortened to achieve a 3-D effect, or just axonometric, which can involve any number of perspective angles. In the case of Legend, if it's not actually isometric, it's damned close.)

HeroQuest and Legend both seem ultimately inspired by the action-adventure Cadaver (1990), which featured the same perspective, the same-shaped game area, the same sorts of controls and indicators in the periphery. When I reviewed HeroQuest, I remember remarking that the graphics were quite good, but the limited gameplay didn't give you anything to do with the interesting items you see, and the combat was just laughable. In Legend, both elements are improved, though they still have a long way to go. 
           

Cadaver (1990) seems to be the source of the interface for both HeroQuest (1991) and Legend.

          
Legend was written by Anthony Taglione and is set in the same universe as Taglione's previous Bloodwych (1989). It was marketed in the U.S. as The Four Crystals of Trazere, which is how my list had it until I started playing and found more available copies and documentation under its original name. Graphics are by Peter Owen-James, who also did Bloodwych and Anthony Crowther's Captive (1990). He seems to specialize in gaunt, hollow-cheeked protagonists who look more desperate than heroic.

The brief setup is that some ancient evil is reaching into the world of Trazere and turning its residents into vicious monsters. Four characters--a berserker, a runemaster, a troubadour, and an assassin--assemble to investigate and put a stop to it.
          

The brief backstory is covered in about half a dozen screens.

         
In character creation, you have to go with these four classes. You can choose a name and sex and broadly adjust ability scores by assigning various elemental icons to the character. For instance, "Earth" boosts strength, constitution, and armor class and reduces intelligence, speed, and dexterity while "Air" does the opposite. I went with an all-female party. Each character comes with a starting selection of weapons and armor and a little gold.
         

Creating a new berserker.

        
Gameplay begins on an overland map from which you can direct the party to various towns and castles and such. Other parties and armies roam the map at the same time, their sigils indicating their power levels, and the manual suggests you can fight them in something called "banner encounters," but I didn't try that in the first session. The manual hinted that the dungeon of Treihadwyl (similar to the "Treidwyl" of Bloodwych) was intended as a starting dungeon, and that was the closest city, so I went there.
          

This reminds me of the overland maps in Moonstone (1991) or Dragon Lord (1990).

        
The city has a "menu town" on top of the dungeon, with options to visit the blacksmith, tavern, artificer, and adventurer's guild. There's not much to do at these locations when you first begin, so I immediately headed for the dungeon.
        

Not much to do here until I earn more money.

         
I am mortified at how long it took me to get out of the first room. To start, I had trouble interpreting the elements in the periphery of the actual gameplay area, in the center of the screen. The central area, surrounded by a black void, is the area where the gameplay actually takes place. The items in the corners are controls and indicators. In the northwest, we have buttons that bring up the automap (the dragon) and character inventory. In the northeast are the directional indicator and a chicken that unkindly flaps its wings when the party is fleeing. The southeast shows available actions (based on equipped items) for the active character.
        

The characters arrive in the first room.

        
Finally, the southwest is where you can select your active character from among the four. The stacks of skulls next to them depict their health levels.

I realized from the manual that you select the characters in the southwest, but I didn't realize they were the same characters milling about the center of the screen. I thought they were starting outside the room and would have to open the first door to enter it. In other words, I didn't realize they were controls instead of the actual people. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how to open that door before I realized that by selecting them, I was simply choosing which figure in the center of the screen was active.

The core of gameplay in Legend is exploring these dungeon rooms and finding the keys, or solving the puzzles, necessary to open doors and access further rooms. The placement of keys imposes a certain linearity on room exploration, but the two dungeon levels in Treihadwyl weren't all that big anyway. The game tells you explicitly what type of key is needed to unlock each door, and you simply have to search items until you find them. Just about any piece of furniture--chests, clocks, desks, tables, weapon racks--can hold treasures, including items. There's no difficulty in opening and looting them--no hidden items, no locks, no traps.
        

My assassin finds a key in a clock.

       
The harder part is the occasional puzzles. They have something of a Dungeon Master quality, with which of course Taglione was intimately familiar. Most of the usable objects are levers or buttons, but they often have non-obvious effects, sometimes in other rooms. Some examples below.
     

This was a tough one. The lever in the middle changed what the lever on the left did--either cause the pillar in the northwest to rotate or belch fire. I had to hit both of the runes with fire to lower the spikes in the northeast, which allowed me to push buttons on those pillars, which did something in a different room, I think.

I had to find a key to open this door to pull the lever behind it to do something in another room that would then allow me to enter this room from the west side.

The troubadour prepares to push a lever that will teleport the runemaster to the inaccessible western area. There, she'll be able to loot the large chest, then pull the lever to return. The plaque in front of the assassin said "send a friend" as a hint.

          
Aside from my confusion on the interface, one of the reasons that I couldn't get out of the first room was that it took me a while to understand the puzzle. Each of the two northern corners had a rune, and I finally had to break down and read the manual thoroughly to realize that the runes correspond to the game's magic system. (Between the puzzles and use of runes, there is some similarity here to 1990's DarkSpyre.) The sigel rune (looks like an "s") is associated with damage and the nȳd rune (looks like an "x") is associated with healing. The game wanted me to cast the appropriate spells on these rune tiles to open the east and west doors.

Thus, I had to explore the spell system right away. It's interesting. You create spells as pairs of runes, the first specifying the "direction" and the second specifying the "effect." Directions include forward (the tile in front of the character), surround (the 8 tiles surrounding the character), missile (wherever the caster aims), and "continuous" which applies to a subset of spells. Effects are damage, healing, paralysis, antimagic, dispelling, charming, speed, teleport, regeneration, resurrection, death, and "make weapon," the last a kind of odd-one out.
         

Mixing spells in the spell interface. This reminds me a bit of Dragon Lord (1990).

      
Both directions and effects require reagents, of which the runemaster begins with a large stock. The game is explicit about what reagents are required for what spells. You select the direction and appropriate reagent, then the path and the appropriate reagent, then mix them together. Once you've done this once, the spell appears on a recipe list and you can mix new ones with just the click of a button.
           

Now that I've mixed a couple of spells, I can just go to this screen to mix them again.

          
My understanding is that it's possible to mix extremely complex spells by combining multiple effect runes--for instance, a targeted spell that dispels the enemy's magic protection and then paralyzes him. But the runemaster only starts with the runes necessary for healing and damage, so that will have to wait until later.

Once I figured out how to mix targeted spells for healing and damage, I was able to cast them at the runes in the corners and open the doors.
       

The door opens after I blast the rune with a healing spell.

       
The next major issue is combat, of course. Any room you enter for the first time might contain a swarm of foes, but they can also respawn randomly in rooms you've already visited. I have no idea what the enemies are; the game identifies them nowhere in the interface. By appearance so far, they've included things like goblins, kobolds, orcs, wizards, and beholders. But there's no way to get their names or a sense of how powerful they are.

Combat is a chaotic free-for-all that does a decent job anticipating the Infinity Engine. You have to click on each character and activate their weapons to prompt them to engage the enemies. Enemies puff away as they die, but a lot of them seem to have some kind of teleport ability which looks the same. You can't select a specific enemy or otherwise do much to guide the character in combat. Sometimes they seem to go for the closest enemy; other times, they take the most roundabout route to the farthest enemy and insist on attacking from his least-accessible side. Of course, they get hung up on obstacles easily, and certain rooms are designed to make it almost impossible for more than one character to engage the enemy at a time.
         

A few seconds of combat. This is only a little faster than in the actual game.

         
A good solution in the latter case is to flee to a previous room where there's more space to spread out--enemies always follow--but you run a couple of risks. Characters are supposed to stop fleeing when you hit the "rally" button (or ENTER) but sometimes they don't, and you may end up in a worse room than where you started. Moreover, every time you transition screens, there's a chance that enemies will respawn, which means you might find yourself fighting both the original foes plus respawning ones from one or two rooms.

Often, enemies fixate on the first character they see, and if it happens to be one of the weaker ones (i.e., the runemaster or assassin), they can pound away his hit points mercilessly in a few seconds. But it's extremely hard--impossible, really--to coerce your characters into any kind of formation. Success at combat boils down to luck and, unfortunately, a lot of reloads.
       

The party battles some beholders and other monsters in a fairly limited-movement area.

       
You have just a few tactics. Each character has a special ability. The berserker can go into "berserker rage" and do some extra damage. The assassin can "hide in shadows" and theoretically backstab enemies, but good luck actually navigating him around in the chaos of combat. The troubadour can play a song. He only starts with "March of the Bold Ones," a weak regeneration spell that doesn't help much in combat but ensures that you can fully heal after combat before moving on.

Chief among the tactics, theoretically, is the runemaster's ability to cast spells. In the chaos of combat, with everyone moving every which way in real-time, it's almost impossible to successfully target either a healing or damage spell, but you can pause combat at any time and take your time studying the landscape. Without the pause option, I would have given up the game in its early hours, because it takes me at least a few seconds to identify who my party members are. If they're differentiated by color, I can't tell it except for the assassin. I have to study the figures carefully to look at their clothes or weapons, which is hard when they're in the middle of combat and running around the map.
         

This happened too often.

      
You can't activate new actions, switch characters, or do anything else while paused, but you can click on the screen to target a previously-initiated action. Again, it feels a lot like an early version of Infinity Engine combat, except that the Infinity Engine has more tactics and allows you to do a lot more while paused. Those extra options make quite a bit of difference. On the other hand, I'm new to this game, and it's possible that combats will feel more tactical as I acquire more items and powers. I've found area-effect items and scrolls, but I don't see how you keep your own party out of the area of effect. The game would be so much easier if you could just direct one character from room to room, but everyone has to go at once.

There's a huge imbalance in combat power, and thus earned experience. The berserker is killing machine who is rarely in danger of death, does about 10 times the damage of the weaker characters, and earns more experience than the rest of the party combined. This, of course, may change as I get more proficient with spells. I could also deliberately keep her out of combat by not clicking on his weapon, but for the first dungeon, at least, I really need her.

Thus, I blundered and reloaded through the two dungeon levels beneath the city. There were fairly regular equipment upgrades in the chests; this post is getting long so I'll talk more about equipment next time. I returned to the city once to see if I could level up, but only the berserker could.
          

Intelligence doesn't really do much for the berserker.

        
The first level had 15 rooms, and I've found 13 so far on Level 2. But there are corridor screens in between "rooms," and while not as complex, they often have their own items and combats. The total number of screens per level is around 30-35.
           

An automap helps.

         
Unfortunately, I'm stuck on Level 2. There's a room where I have to shut off a series of obstacles along a narrow path. Another room has a series of buttons behind locked doors, and I need four ornate keys to open the doors and push the buttons. I've found two. The fourth is, I'm sure, is beyond the door in the screenshot below.
            

The characters wait for inspiration to strike.

             
The floor runes are clearly the key to this puzzle. But you can't cast spells across the void, so I can't hit the five on the detached platform. I can only hit the one in the far southwest corner, but all that does is to cause a fireball to come belching out of one of the northern pillars. Nothing in the other rooms seems to affect anything here. I am thus stuck and will try to find a hint online if no one has any for me here.

The game certainly isn't the same old thing. I'll give it that. And I kind of look forward to seeing what happens outside with the "banner encounters." But I don't know if I'll be able to come to an accord with this combat system, and I thus hope there aren't too many of these dungeons to explore.

Time so far: 4 hours