Hillsfar: Final Rating

 
Hillsfar

Westwood Associates (developer), Strategic Simulations (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1990 for PC-98; 1992 for NES

Date Started: 27 February 2013
Date Ended: 28 February 2013
Total Hours: 8
Difficulty: Moderate-Easy (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 31
Ranking at Time of Posting:  43/86 (50%)

I'm a little annoyed that I didn't play Hillsfar before Curse of the Azure Bonds. I had this idea that it was unrelated to the Gold Box games, but after playing it, I realize it was definitely meant to fall in between Pool of Radiance and Curse. I'm particularly upset by an anonymous reader's comment that completing this game produced a few more journal entries in Curse. I looked through the journal entries and found a few candidates.

Granted, these NPCs show up in these places regardless, but it still would have been nice to have this extra flavor.

Knowing all of this makes the game feel more like what it is: a brief diversion in between two superior games, providing some additional context to the region and some additional experience points. You could run your entire party through the guild quests, one by one, and end up with an exported Pool party a level higher when they start Curse.

A 2004 GameSpy article on the "history of D&D video games" encapsulates Hillsfar perfectly:

Neither fish nor fowl, Hillsfar was the first attempt at a Dungeons & Dragons game by then-unknown, Westwood Studios. Hillsfar was basically a series of mini games masquerading as a role-playing game. The story was simple enough; you played a wandering adventurer who came to the town of Hillsfar in search of wealth. When you arrive, you're stripped of your armor and equipment and need to use all your wits to escape from the town. In the process you'll go through many arcade game challenges, including riding on a racing horse over hurdles, an archery shooting gallery, one-on-one arena combat, and picking locks using a full set of lockpicks. While some of the games were fun, none of them could hold a player's interest that long and most ended up giving up on a failed experiment.

The game feels very much like an "experiment." What's all the more striking is that I don't think any of the innovations in Hillsfar lived beyond the game, which is too bad. It would have been fun to see the lockpicking mini-game, for instance, employed in the context of a true RPG. In the Gold Box games, when you want to pick a door or chest lock with a thief, you just choose "Pick Lock" from a menu, and a random roll determines success or failure; adding the mini-game as an option would have been a lot of fun; alas, we had to over a decade before we saw a lockpicking mini-game again (unless someone did it before Oblivion), and it wasn't as good.

The best part of the game. Fast-paced and challenging.

 
Or consider the way the game seamlessly blends action and attributes in the archery mini-game. You have to carefully control your aim by using keypad to nudge a constantly-agitating crosshair while simultaneously timing the firing. A character with high dexterity gets a crosshair that shakes much less than a character with low dexterity. A similar combination of action and attributes governs arena combat and lockpicking. I think that horseback riding is all action, though.

All classes have to prove themselves in the archery mini-game at some point.

The main interface is also a step up from the Gold Box series, supplying a top-down navigation map while still offering a first-person perspective. This is yet another element that wasn't transferred to later games. It really is too bad that these innovative elements weren't employed in the context of a better RPG.

I started a second game with a magic-user character because I wanted to see how the quests and games differ. They don't, really. Neither magic-users or clerics cast a single spell in the game (except goofy ones in taverns), and the only thing that varies among classes is that non-thieves don't have lockpicks. I think magic users can use the "Rod of Blasting" my thief kept finding to clear out obstacles on the horseback trails.

The one thing that changes for the classes are a few silly options in the taverns, none of which amount to much.

 
To compensate for the lack of lockpicks for non-thieves, such characters are frequently solicited by thief NPCs, who will join (and thus allow access to the lockpicking mini-game) for half the discovered gold. Although a good idea, the artifice simply conspires to ensure that every player has essentially the same game regardless of class, with the exception of the specific guild-based excuses for breaking into various buildings and riding to various places on horseback.

I thus didn't play very far with my magic-user, but I did take several minutes of annotated video to give you a sense of how the game and its mini-games operate. I'm curious about your reactions to this. I've moved into an office that produces an annoying echoing effect when I record things in it--at least until I get more stuff on the walls--so I thought I'd try an unnarrated video with more text annotations instead. It takes longer to make than voice-over recordings, but I imagine it might be easier for some of you to watch.

A quick GIMLET, then:

• 3 points for the game world. The game basically "fits" in theme and setting between Pool and Curse, but although the manual sets up an intriguing story about a city under the grip of a tyrant, the gameplay makes essentially no use of the story. The iron-fisted rule of Maalthiir is simply an excuse to have no weapons or magic in the game.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Like the game's back story, character creation is just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Your character class determines only what guild you join; gameplay is otherwise the same. This means that dexterity and strength are going to be the two paramount attributes for any character, regardless of class: you need them to dodge traps, force locks, and perform well in arena combat. This is one of the few RPGs in which a magic-user with an intelligence of 5 could still succeed wildly. You get experience for quest completion and arena combats, but so little that my multi-class fighter/thief didn't rise a level during the game.

• 4 points for NPC interaction. There isn't much of it, but you do get wandering salesfolk, informers, guild masters, waitresses, and bar patrons. There are no dialogue options among them, nor many choices to make, but these interactions do help teach you about the game world and advance the plot.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. There are essentially neither in the game, with the exception of the arena combats. But the game does do one thing well by having bar patrons talk about the foes you'll be facing in the arena, offering tips to help you plan a combat strategy.

 

• 2 points for magic and combat. There's no magic. The limited combat in the arena is action-oriented: a series of feints, blocks, and attacks from the right, left, or forward. We've had action combat before--Drakkhen, Galdregon's Domain, and Times of Lore among them--and in general I've given these games low ratings for lack of tactics. The mini-game in Hillsfar is a little better than these, but overall this is one of the few RPGs in which combat doesn't play a major part in the gameplay.

• 2 points for equipment. One of the few RPGs in which your character doesn't carry weapons or armor. The equipment you do have is limited to healing potions, knock rings, lock picks, and Rods of Blasting--all designed to make the mini-games easier.

• 3 points for the economy. You get gold from chests and quest completion, and the gold is necessary to keep a good supply of your limited equipment items, plus buy bits of information from NPCs on the street or in taverns. There's a bank where you can store it to protect yourself from the occasional thief or guard that steals it all. I would say that the quest rewards provide too much, making it unnecessary to explore random houses for it, but if the game had forced me to do a lot of that, it would have just annoyed me.

• 3 points for the quests. I have to say, I'm a sucker for the "guild-based" quest system where you show up, get an assignment, complete it relatively quickly, and turn it in for the next quest. It takes even a boring game like this and propels it forward briskly. We've only seen such a system with a few other games, like Star Command. Unfortunately, there are no role-playing choices to make and no alternate outcomes. The game does a reasonable job mixing and matching its limited gameplay options in its quests.

If it was lying outside the chest, why did I have to open the chest to find it? This game's insistence on tying almost all quest-based progression to chests is a little absurd.

 

• 5 points for graphics, sound and interface. All okay. We've exited the "bloop" era for sounds, and effects like arena blows and galloping horses sound realistic, but there are very few of them in the game. The graphics are pretty and the limited controls are easy to master. I liked the map/first person split screen while navigating the town. The only place I really had any kind of problem was in the arena, and I'm willing to admit that I'm just not very good at that style of combat.

• 3 points for gameplay. Though boring, trite, linear, and repetitive, the gameplay has three things going for it: it's pitched at a good difficulty level, it offers some minimum amount of replayability for different classes (if you really care to see what all the guilds have to offer), and it doesn't last very long. When a game isn't very good, it can only be redeemed by not wearing out its welcome.

As you can see, Hillsfar doesn't excel in any area, and the final score comes to a measly 29, the lowest I've given a non-1970s game since Don't Go Alone. I'm going to us my "bonus" category to bump it up to 31, though, to recognize the innovations in the mini-games. I did enjoy the challenge that lockpicking and archery provided, at least, and I have a regard for games that show me something new.

Ads for the game emphasized it as a stopping point between Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds. I can't think of many other franchises that allow you to transfer characters in and out of such different games.

Computer Gaming World reviewed Hillsfar in the same September 1989 issue as Curse of the Azure Bonds. Reviewer Roe Adams also praised the lockpicking mini-game, noting that the game provided "the best simulation of thieving skills ever done in any medium," and that "the satisfaction of ripping through a 6-tumbler lock is unparalleled"--before stating that "alas, the rest of the game fails to even remotely come up to this caliber of design." He loathed having to return to camp--requiring at least two horseback rides--to save the game--and concluded the review with a sensible bit of incredulity: "Imagine the absurdity of doing mage or cleric quests without being able to cast any spells at all!"

The developer of Hillsfar, Westwood Studios, has a spotty history with me. They were responsible for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, which infuriated me with its ending, and Questron II, which I felt was too linear and outdated. But all three games have a few things in common: an emphasis on graphics and not on gameplay; unimportance of combat; and a very short playing time. I'll run into them again later this year with The Mines of Titan and in coming years with Circuit's Edge, DragonStrike, and the Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore series. Here's hoping their approach improves.

Now, after a brief detour, it's on to a game that I've really been anticipating: Starflight II.

Game 91: Hillsfar (1989)

        

Hillsfar

United States

Westwood Associates (developer), Strategic Simulations (publisher)

Released 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64; 1990 for PC-98; 1992 for NES

Date Started: 27 February 2013

     

Hillsfar feels like an experiment in which SSI, makers of the "Gold Box" games, tried to determine if they could create another game in the same campaign setting, but featuring none of the gameplay elements that made the Gold Box series popular. Instead of a party game, we have a single-player game. Instead of tactical combat, we have action combat (and not much of that). Instead of exploration and mapping, we have mini-games. The game isn't entirely irredeemable--some of the mini-games are actually fun--but the overall experience is a bit bizarre.

Set just after Pool of Radiance and contemporaneously with Curse of the Azure Bonds (you can transfer characters back and forth with Curse), Hillsfar has an interesting premise. The corrupt city council has just been overthrown by a merchant-mage named Maalthiir who has proclaimed himself First Lord of Hillsfar. He has outlawed weapons and magic and enforces his edicts with a mercenary company called the Red Plumes.

The limited game world.

The city has come up peripherally in the previous two games; my party embarked from Hillsfar before arriving in Phlan in Pool, and in Curse, I encountered Red Plumes in Yulash (though they were mostly allies, since they were fighting against the Zhentarim). Hillsfar was also a visitable menu town in Curse.

The game begins with the player in camp outside Hillsfar, where you create or import your character. It is the only place where you can save your progress. (This swiftly becomes annoying.) The standard set of D&D races (human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, and halfling) and classes (fighter, mage, thief, cleric, and multi-classes) are available. The manual hints that the focus of the game is on thievery (since magic and weapons are outlawed in Hillsfar, there's naught else to do), so I chose a half-elf fighter/thief. It didn't take me much rolling to get 18s in both strength and dexterity.

My first task was to ride from camp to Hillsfar. The moment the horse-riding screen appeared, it all came back to me: I've played this game before! All at once, I remembered buying it at a shopping mall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire back in 1989 or 1990. I remember asking the clerk if it was anything like Pool of Radiance, and I remember him saying no, but--and this is suddenly crystal clear in my memory even though I didn't remember the game until today--excitedly adding, "You get to ride a horse!" Even as I bought the game, I remember thinking, "What's the big deal about riding a horse?" and then thinking it doubly so after I started playing it and actually riding the horse. I must not have gotten very far after that, because I don't remember any of the other elements except vaguely the lockpicks. But I definitely remember the side-scrolling screen in which you have to jump over obstacles on your horse.

So right away we have the game's first minigame: horseback riding. The terrain flies by as you trot or gallop along the track, jumping over logs, puddles, and haystacks, and ducking when an arrow appears. There's not much to it, except that later you can trade the horse for an upgrade at the trading post. I traded my initial horse for one named "Jumper," thinking he'd be good at jumping. No, it turns out he got that name because he randomly jumps in the middle of riding, often forcing you to land on an object and falter. I swiftly traded back. If you fall more than four times on one path, you die. It can get pretty tough, with multiple objects in a row that force you to carefully time your leaps.

Wouldn't a smart horseman just steer off this trail and on to the smooth grassland to his left?

Once you make the initial ride and arrive in Hillsfar, you get the main city map. It feels like a combination of The Bard's Tale and the game I just completed, Tangled Tales. As you move in the 3D screen on the left, you see your icon move about the city map on the right. As in Skara Brae, there are numerous random houses to enter as well as several special locations: pubs, guilds for each of the four classes, an arena, an archery range, magic shops, healers, sewers, a haunted mansion, a mage's tower, a book store, a cemetery, a bank, and Lord Maalthiir's Castle.

Despite the setup, "Lord Maalthiir" appears to play no role in the game.

As you wander the city, you're approached by random strangers offering to sell knock rings, healing potions, and information (almost always worthless), as well as the odd magician offering to show you a trick. Sometimes the "trick" is that a pile of gold appears (yay!); other times he teleports you to the arena, where you have to fight a battle.

This cost me 42 gold pieces.

Buildings come in two types: "menu" buildings, where you select from a number of options, and explorable buildings, where you search for treasure and avoid guards. The former turns into the latter during times when they're closed (the game has a day/night cycle). Chief among the "menu" buildings are pubs, where you can buy drinks, listen to gossip, gamble, buy a round for the house, get drunk and rolled by pickpockets, and other assorted actions, some specific to your class, many of which are necessary to get intelligence at certain stages of the plot. Guilds have fewer options (talk to the master, rest), as do shops.

It's the explorable buildings--including dungeons, caves, and sewers--that form the core of the game. They all work the same way. From the moment you enter, you have a timed status bar indicating how long you can run around and open chests before the guards show up. Although every building has some graphical features beyond chests--tables, people sitting in chairs, beds, and some items I can't identify--the only items with which you can really interact are chests.

I have no idea what the things to my southeast and northwest are supposed to be.

When you approach a chest, sometimes you find that it's unlocked and immediately reveals its treasure. But this is rare. More commonly, you find a locked chest, at which point you have the option to a) pick it with lockpicks; b) force it with your strength; c) try to pick it with some random object (this has never worked for me); d) use a "knock ring" (a ring that casts the "knock" spell); or e) use a Chime of Opening (an artifact I have not found). Items b) through d) are all on the same sub-menu, but using lockpicks brings up the lockpicking mini-game.

I guess non-thieves can only try to force it open or use knock rings.

I confess that I like the mini-game even though I suck at it. I think it's superior to both Oblivion's and Skyrim's (the only other lockpicking mini-games I'm familiar with). You have to study the patterns on the lock carefully and then choose the right sequence of picks to press down on the tumblers, one at a time. You start with 10 picks, each of which can be rotated, so there are 20 total combinations.

I was well into the game before I realized you can just pause the mini-game, take your sweet time studying the pattern, and then un-pause it to choose the sequence of picks. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. (Doing it without pausing, I only completed the lockpicking four or five times out of several dozen trying.) But even with pausing, it's difficult; the time limit is extremely short.

A rare successful lockpicking.

Even as a thief, then, I've generally opened chests by forcing the lock or using expensive knock rings. This carries a risk of setitng off a poison, sleep, or dart trap, but forcing works about 75% of the time, and when it doesn't, you can just try again. Chests have gold, healing potions, knock rings, Rods of Blasting (I was never able to use them; I think they're only for mages), and occasionally quest items or information.

Sleep traps suck. Time is short as it is.

Once the status bar gets down to about 30%--well before you've finished exploring the oddly enormous interiors of the buildings--guards start to appear, chasing you all around the maze. Every time they touch you, the status bar accelerates its decline. If they touch you while the status bar is at 0, they'll take all the gold you found and throw you out of the building--and sometimes toss you into the arena, where you have to fight for your life. Fortunately, when the guards appear, so do scattered scrolls of paralysis which freeze the guards for a time. When the status bar gets down to around 20%, you get a message saying "You can now find the exit," at which point a set of previously-hidden stairs appears somewhere in the maze. If you can find it before the guards catch you, you get to keep whatever you found.

Two things mitigate this whole process: First, even if the guards catch you and evict you, you still get to keep any quest items or knowledge that you found in the maze. Second, many buildings have secret areas in which the guards can't follow. There, you can take your time opening the chests (which usually have more gold than the main areas) and mosey on to the exit when you're ready.

You just have to keep hitting walls until you find them.

But complicating exploration are random teleportation traps that throw you about the level; one of the chests in each building has a "lever" that turns these off.

The "buildings" dynamic above applies to all buildings in the game, from random houses to quest locations to sewers. Notice anything missing? Monsters, maybe? In most CRPGs, when you enter haunted mansions, mages towers, ruins, or sewers, you fight things, right? Not in Hillsfar. You don't even have a weapon or armor (remember, weapons are outlawed). The only place you fight in the game is in the arena, and barring getting thrown there by guards, I'm not sure that fighting in the arena is mandatory for all classes. This is a rare CRPG that you can "win" without fighting a single battle.

You can choose to fight in the arena for money, and there are quests in the fighter's and thief's tracks, at least, that require it. Combat is all action, with commands to block left, right, and forward; and to attack left, right, and down. You fight with quarterstaffs against a succession of foes, including orcs, minotaurs, and lizard men. I haven't been able to get very good at watching for attacks and effectively blocking them. Essentially, I've found that if I can hit my foe once, I can often trap him in a sequence of attacks that ultimately knocks him out. If you choose to fight in the arena and lose, you get tossed out with 1 hit point. If you're in the arena because the guards threw you there and you lose, you die. It's one of the few ways to die in the game.

Gold is really only necessary to keep up a stock of healing potions and knock rings, both of which cost around 250 apiece (you can buy them in stores or from random sellers on the street) and are the only real "inventory" items in the game. You get a reasonable amount of gold from chests but most of it from solving quests for your guild. Because of that, I haven't had to spend a lot of time looting random houses.

Once you understand horseback riding, town exploration, tavern options, building exploration, and arena combat, you essentially have everything you need to win the game. Quests are just combinations of running around buildings--some of them accessible only by horseback in the environs around the city--visiting taverns for intelligence, and walking around the city. Because of that, the game gets boring pretty quickly.

Plenty of people have questioned the game's CRPG credentials, and it's not hard to see why. It has barely any combat (and no equipping of weapons and armor) or inventory. It has experience and levels, but experience rises so little in the course of the game that you never really level up. You have hit points, but you deplete most of them on traps. At the same time, though, it's one of the few games to date in which the choice of class (if not race and sex) actually matters, which would make it very replayable if it wasn't so fundamentally boring.

As a fighter/thief, I could have joined either guild, but I chose the thieves' guild first. I'm pretty sure you can only get quests from one guild per character, as once I joined the thieves' guild, the fighters' guildmaster was never "in."

Note the misplaced apostrophe.

The thieves' guildmaster, Swipe, set me on a series of quests to join and advance in the guild. All of them were a mixture of collecting intelligence from stores or taverns and then exploring various buildings for quest items. For instance, my introductory quests steps were to:

1. Visit the magic shop and ask about poison fungus. The owner told me I could find it in the sewers.

2. Go into the sewers and open chests (everything appears in a chest, no matter how nonsensical) until I found the fungus.

3. Return the fungus to the guildmaster.

Some of his quests took me outside the city proper, to nearby buildings and ruins, but all indoor exploration in Hillsfar is essentially the same, so there's nothing uniquely exciting about any of the ruins. Some of them have different textures, but all have the same chests, traps, and guards, and none of them have any combats, NPCs, or special encounters.

The outdoor map. Each of the pathways requires a horseback journey.

After the introductory quests to get the fungus and a potion, I had a series of interrelated quests to ultimately obtain a magical amulet. I had to break into the clerics' guild and the castle to solve it, and again you'd think that such places would be interesting, but they're not. They're just like every other building in the game.

Collecting intelligence on the amulet's location from a bar.

And finding the next step on the scavenger hunt in the sewers.

After returning the amulet to the guildmaster, another series of quests had me infiltrating another group of thieves, the Grey Wolves, who were a little too ostentatious in their methods, and were thus attracting unwelcome attention from the Red Plumes. In order to get in, I had to find one of their members who had been arrested and made to fight in the arena. This required me to battle my way through the ranks until I faced him, which was one of the more difficult parts of the game for me, as I never got particularly good at arena combat. To preserve every victory, I had to take a horse out of Hillsfar and back to my camp to save.

I also had to prove myself on the archery range to attract the attention of the Grey Wolves' recruiter. This involved yet another minigame. You face several targets and have to control an agitated cursor while carefully timing your release to hit a swaying or rotating target. It took me a long time to score enough points to get the attention of the gang.

If you try to hit the woman on the right, she holds up a shield at the last minute and then sticks out her tongue at you.

Once I got recruited, I did a couple of jobs for the Grey Wolves, buying time for Swipe to gather his forces and raid their hideout and eliminate them. Once he did, he rewarded me with 20,000 gold pieces and used his Ring of Wishes to give me 9 more hit points. Then he gave me a heck of a surprise:

I thought I was just getting started, but apparently I already won! The game does let me keep playing after this--a rarity for the era--but there are no more quests from the thieves' guild, and it doesn't look like I can join any other guilds. I'm curious if his comment about the Harpers actually means anything if I were to bring this character into Curse of the Azure Bonds.

So...does that count as "winning," or do I need to play all four of the other classes first? Either way, I'm going to play a mage for a little while to see how gameplay differs and perhaps shoot a video. But you might see the GIMLET already in my next posting.

Curse of the Azure Bonds: Factions

Chaos is sown in their passage.

The overriding theme of Curse of the Azure Bonds is the party's relationship with various factions at work amidst the chaos of the Dalelands. The game manual gives a very good overview of these "power groups," but it's tough to get a full handle on things until you start playing. The key groups and their points of conflict are:

• The Fire Knives hate King Azoun of Cormyr because he kicked them out of Cormyr. They've used their bonding technology to try to assassinate him twice, first with Alias (the heroine of the Azure Bonds novel) and then with my party.

• The Zhentarim, a mercenary group in charge of Zhentil Keep, wants to take over the Dalelands and to that end has invaded the city of Teshwave, has allied with the city of Voonlar, is threatening Dagger Falls, and is fighting with the armies of Hillsfar (called the Red Plumes) in the ruins of Yulash.

• Yulash, meanwhile, is also inhabited by the Cult of Moander,  the god of rot and corruption. Though he was banished to another realm by elves some time ago, his fanatical cultists have tried several times to restore him to Faerûn. Alias and her party were among their (failed) pawns, and my bonds are part of yet another attempt.

• Elminster the Sage protects Shadowdale and has numerous enemies. The Zhentarim have designs on the city, and their Voonlar allies have attacked it several times. Dracandros, a Red Wizard of Thay, seems to be jealous of Elminster, going so far as to duplicate his sigil. Elminster is affiliated with the Harpers, a group of mostly good-aligned agents that oppose evil groups like the Zhentarim.

• There is also a schism within the Zhentarim between the regular troops and mages, and the clerics led by Fzoul, a priest of Bane.

• The Knights of Myth Drannor patrol the ruins of the ancient, powerful elven city, stopping anyone from getting in and anything from getting out. I encountered one of them fighting the Fire Knives for an unknown reason.

It is into this boiling cauldron that my party has been thrown, bonded to four of the five evil groups listed above plus Tyranthraxus, whose particular goals are unknown but who, like many of them, has an allegiance to Bane, the god of fear, hatred, and tyranny. Each of them wants to use me for their own purposes, but their alliance otherwise seems unstable and temporary. As I travel throughout the overland area, I see the evidence of the factions at work with and against each other. My Zhentarim sigil got me ill treatment in several towns (Red Plumes from Hillsfar overturned my drinks and attacked me), and I was barred from several inns. But in others, I was treated like royalty. Armies on the road are marching from one city to another.

How hard would it have been to wrap some cloth around our arms?

Unfortunately, I can't really role-play the factions. Since the primary motivation of the game is revenge against those who have bonded me, I am by default against those five groups and in favor of whomever opposes them. That works out okay for my good-aligned party, but some stronger faction-joining options would have made a more interesting game. The only role-playing option I've encountered so far is a phalanx of soldiers heading from Voonlar to Teshwave, intending to invade. Going with "the enemy of my enemy's allies is my friend," I attacked and routed them.

This was a good role-playing choice since I had no idea how large the "army" was. (It turned out to be about 12 guys.)

As I started to note at the end of the last posting, the outdoor area consists of a dozen visitable areas with multiple routes among them. You don't actually move the party between them but rather specify a destination and a method of travel. In between any two areas, on any route, there's a chance of a fixed encounter. For instance, between Teshwave and Zhentil Keep by boat, you'll be attacked by river pirates (unless you've already fought them off once). Between Tilverton and Dagger Falls by wilderness, you encounter a group of displacer beasts who have recently eaten the mage in charge of training them.

The destinations themselves consist of three types:

• "Menu cities" in which you can visit stores, inns, bars, training halls, and temples, but only by menu.

• Full cities containing one or more 16 x 16 maps that you can explore, all as part of the main quest

• Menu cities with ruins nearby that you can explore via the "Search Area" command. These ruins are largely generic areas with random encounters and not important to the main plot.

Phlan, the setting of the last game, is much reduced in this one.

I was delighted to see that I could travel as far as Phlan, but it turned out to be a menu city. The option to explore the ruins took me to a set of generic ruins and not the same maps as in the original game. Still, there was a fun set of "tavern tales" in the Phlan bar, including the city clerk's depression with no new commissions to hand out. I was also pleased to see that the buccaneer base and the Zhent outpost to the west of Phlan were still in ruins.

Since I left Tilverton, I've been keeping a spreadsheet with every combination of starting point, destination, and route. There are almost 100 total, and I intend to travel every one to make sure I don't miss something important.

In terms of progressing on the main plot, there's an area called the "Standing Stone" (a monument commemorating an elven-human peace accord) where I encounter a mysterious robed man. Apparently, he gives hints as to the best faction to tackle next. But I was late finding the Standing Stone and I made an independent decision to take on the Zhentarim after the Fire Knives. My rationale is that fighters are easier than mages (like the Red Wizard of Thay) or clerics (like the cultists of Moander). Little did I know that the Zhentarim has plenty of mages and clerics--as well as gryphons, manticores, minotaurs, a medusa, and a beholder--in its employ.

Zhentil Keep was a powder keg from the moment I entered. Citizens scurried away from me on the street, whispering about a halfling who had been spreading rumors about me. Groups of mages, clerics, and fighters attacked me openly in the street. Several times, my bonds compelled me to attack them, but as they were priests of the evil god Bane, I didn't mind. I'm still a little unclear why the priest leader of the Zhentarim was compelling me to kill his own people, but it probably had something to do with the previously-mentioned schism.

Nothing like compelling me to do something I would have done anyway.

Pressing forward, I eventually encountered the halfling, Olive Rustkettle (another of Alias's companions from the book), who led me into the base of the Fzoul, the Zhent leader, who had captured the sage Dimswart. I'm not entirely sure why she was going through the city ahead of my arrival, telling everyone about me.

When I rescued the sage, he told me a lot more about my bonds (as he did for Alias in the book), including the identity of the high priestess of Moander (Mogion) and the Red Wizard. He suggested that Fzoul had me bonded so that he could make use of a cache of good-aligned weapons (how this works if I chose evil characters is unexplained). Most important, he told me that to defeat Tyranthraxus, I would need three magical artifacts: the Amulet of Lathander, the Helm of Dragons, and the Gauntlet of Moander.

I've played too many CRPGs to trust women in hooded cloaks, but the game left me with no choice.

I found that the base was sealed shut, but a mysterious hooded woman kept showing up and offering to lead me out, and finally I had to accept. She led me to a series of caverns and to her master, a beholder named Dexam, part of a faction of priests and beholders that serve Bane. Although technically allied with Fzoul and the Zhentarim, when Fzoul showed up and demanded that the beholder release me, the beholder blasted him with a disintegration ray and my Zhent bonds disappeared.

The enemy of my enemy did not, in this case, turn out to be my friend.

Dexam left me to his minions, whom I defeated and began looking for a way out. What I was beginning to grasp in the city itself became very clear in the caverns: I was here way too soon. My exploration of the caverns was a long series of deaths and reloads, with no way to escape until after the final battle (even one level-up would have helped). Every enemy I encountered had at least one cleric or priest, and battles with them are like quick-draw gunfights in the Old West, but with "Hold Person" spells instead of guns. If they got the drop on me, I'd have two or three characters frozen instantly, with almost no way to recover at that point. Winning even the random combats was a furious process of "Hold Person" and "Fireball." Some of the battles featured Drow warriors (no idea what they were doing here) with -7 armor class and high magic resistance, and thus virtually undamageable. I'd slay their minions in a couple of minutes and then spend the next 10 desperately trying to deal any damage to them as they took down my party members one by one.

Manticores can shoot their barbs and get about 8 attacks per round. When I had finally dealt with them (with fireballs, mostly), all the while fending off "Hold Person" from the priest, I still had to deal with the Drow. This battle took me about seven tries to win.

The random encounters seemed near-endless, and for a while I worried that they were. The only thing keeping me alive was finding a corner to rest and re-memorize in after every battle or two, and these rest periods carried a high risk of another random combat. Eventually, though, they did end. The whole experience served to remind me that some of the most angst-filled moments I have in CRPGs are when I'm stuck in areas and I don't know when I'll next be able to level up, identify my equipment, and otherwise reach a "stable" position. The expedition-and-return model is so common to CRPGs that it's jarring when games break it by making it unclear when you'll be able to "return" or simply not featuring returns at all (e.g., the entire roguelike sub-genre).

One of 20-25 identical battles in the caves. I don't know where I'd be without "Fireball."

The caves culminated in a major battle against Dexam the Beholder, his hooded assistant--who turned out to be a medusa--and a pack of minotaurs. Since medusas have the ability to gaze my characters to stone, and beholders have death rays and disintegration rays, the battle was essentially a question of whether my saving throws would keep me alive long enough for my fireballs (including a necklace of fireballs that I gave to a cleric) to clear out the minotaurs so that my fighters could reach the beholder and medusa. Even with "Haste," "Bless," "Prayer," and "Protection from Evil" active, it was nearly impossible, and the video below shows how my lower-level party was really out of their league in this battle. (It also illustrates a little about combat, sound, and graphics in the game.)

Nonetheless, perseverance and luck did the trick, and I killed the enemy and got the Amulet of Lathander from the beholder's corpse.

When I emerged from the caverns, Olive took Dimswart away, and I caught yet another glimpse of Princess Nacacia eloping with Gharri of Gond.

Zhentil Keep had descended into full chaos, and I was unable to re-enter the city to finish mapping the unexplored areas. Also, I keep getting attacked by random parties of Zhentarim on the road. But I no longer have drinks spilled on me in pubs, so there's an improvement.

The Zhents weren't happy that I turned their city into 1990s Sarajevo.

A few notes:

• I've had to get used to the idea that large experience rewards are normal and don't mean that I'm going to level up on my next visit to the training hall. Every time I see a 4,000 or 5,000 experience reward, I assume that someone must have leveled up, but no, it takes a dozen of these now.

• The economy is as bad as in Pool of Radiance, and already I'm not bothering to loot enemies after combat. The one good thing is that the game offered a magic shop in Zhentil Keep that sold absurdly expensive gear, like wands of magic missiles for 15,000 gold or potions of speed for 2,000. They also had magic arrows and Darts of the Hornet's Nest. But then again, every random battle with mages on the street produced Bracers of AC 6 that sold for 9,000 gold. And it seems like the shop is inaccessible now anyway. Gold encumbers, so I try to keep every character with just enough to pay for his next level-up and nothing more.

This was briefly cool.

• Hillsfar, a visitable menu town in Curse, was the subject of its own single-character game, Hillsfar, released the same year. I guess it technically came before Curse, since you can import characters from it, so I should have probably played it first.

• I have two major complaints about the interface: the game remembers neither memorized spells nor targeted enemies. This makes re-memorizing cast spells and combat (especially ranged combat) more annoying than it needs to be. I wonder if this is ever corrected.

• I really dislike wilderness combats, mostly because the game starts the party about 17 miles from the enemy, and you have to waste a few rounds just getting into position.

• The game has a funny reaction if you order milk in a bar.

Octavianus has reached Level 8 as a cleric and essentially serves all my cleric-based needs now. Cesario is on the cusp of reaching Level 9--one more combat should do it. When he does, I'm going to flip him to a mage. When Octavianus hits Level 9, he'll get his fighter abilities back and will be considerably more useful. Goldeneye, the ranger, just got her first druid spells. I'll experiment with "Entangle," "Faerie Fire," and "Invisibility to Animals" eventually, but right now I'm happy to take "Detect Magic" duties off Viola's hands so Viola can memorize another "Magic Missile" instead.

None of these sound like they'd make better use of a combat round than simply having Goldeneye attack.

Next, I'm going to finish exploring the overland travel routes and then decide whether I want to take on the Red Wizard next or the Cult of Moander. The game suggests the wizard would make the most sense, but I hear he has dragons.

Game 189: Eye of the Beholder (1991)

Despite the 1990 copyright, I don't think it received a release until 1991.

      

Eye of the Beholder
United States

Westwood Associates (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1991 for DOS and Amiga; 1992 for PC-98; 1994 for Sega CD and SNES; 2002 for Game Boy Advance

Date Started: 25 May 2015

   
I think I picked the right game to start 1991. I chose it first because it's a Dungeons & Dragons game, and D&D-based games rarely offer bad CRPG experiences; and second because I knew it was inspired by Dungeon Master, which set the standard for real-time multi-character dungeon crawlers. I didn't know if it would be great, but I knew it wouldn't suck.

Hoping for nothing more than a competent dungeon-crawling experience, I fired up the .exe and was greeted with a great introductory sequence with exciting music, evocative sound effects, and attractive animated VGA graphics, all of which finally said to me: 1) "you're in the 1990s!" and 2) "you're no longer a jackass for choosing the DOS version!"

Yet, if there was one thing that gave me pause, it was this screen:

Westwood and I do not have a good history. Years later, I'm still mad at them about the endings to BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception and Mines of Titan. The first Westwood/SSI pairing, Hillsfar, was flawed at the outset. I like to imagine that after Hillsfar, SSI had a "come to Jesus" meeting with Westwood. "We're going to give you another contract," they said in my fantasy, "but none of your bull$%#t this time. You're going to make a good game, or we're going to bury you." I like to think that the Westwood folks left the meeting shaken, threw back a few drinks, and decided that to avoid screwing this one up too badly, they'd better just copy Dungeon Master.

Eye of the Beholder's dependence on Dungeon Master is so stark that you wonder why there weren't lawsuits involved. The similarities are readily apparent at the macro level--they're both first-person, multi-character, tile-based, real-time dungeon crawlers--and the micro level. You attack enemies in the same kind of interface by right-clicking on the chosen weapon, which makes a "whoosh" sound and requires a cool-down period before you can attack again. Only the front two characters can attack in melee; rear characters can throw missile weapons, and they have a pouch which automatically restocks them with up to four "refills" in the same combat. Picking up thrown missile weapons is tedious. You can do the same sort of real-time tricks, like the side-step attack dance and the fighting backpedal. The puzzles are also the same, involving hidden buttons, weighted pressure plates, and remote door switches. Many treasures are found in little alcoves on the wall.

Tossing a dagger at an approaching giant worm.

There are a few differences, mostly caused by the integration of a Dungeon Master mechanic with AD&D rules: classes are different, the magic system is different, and leveling is by experience rather than use of skills. And of course, being a later game, Eye of the Beholder has better graphics, sound, and animation, though not staggeringly so.

If there's one thing you'd want a developer to copy from Dungeon Master, it's the ability to crush enemies in doors. Alas, that doesn't seem to work here. Even though the door is in the space in front of you, it comes down behind any enemies in that space.

"I'm crushing your h...uh oh."

Unless I'm missing some bit of documentation, the backstory to Eye of the Beholder is left somewhat vague. Taking place in the city of Waterdeep, this is the first CRPG on the Sword Coast, and I was delighted to see Baldur's Gate, Amn, and Neverwinter on the game map. The manual goes into the long history of Waterdeep and its constant transfers of power between various guilds and factions before finally coming into the rule of the semi-anonymous Lords of Waterdeep.

Something or someone named Xanathar--I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's probably a beholder--is causing trouble for the city, but the nature of the trouble is left undefined. The problems seem to be coming from beneath the city, and so the chief Lord, Piergeiron, has commissioned a party of adventurers to enter the underworld and eradicate the threat. The game has the party start with a "Commission and Letter of Marque" giving the party "full rights of passage beneath the City of Waterdeep," as if some guard was going to come along and question our right to be in the sewers.

From the opening animations.

Character creation is all standard AD&D. You choose from the six usual races (human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling) and six classes (paladin, fighter, ranger, cleric, mage, thief) including multi-classes. The rules for non-human races are a bit less draconian than in the Gold Box series; for instance, elves and half-elves never hit a cap in any class they're allowed to select, and dwarves only cap as clerics. Oddly, gnomes can't be mages; I had thought the "gnome illusionist" was a well-established trope by now.

Even though you can get two NPCs to join you later, I decided to get every class available in my four-character party, so I went with.

• Starling, a female human paladin
• Bugsy, a male dwarf fighter/thief
• Marina, a female elf mage
• Gaston, a male half-elf cleric/ranger

With Gaston having some ranger skills, this gives me the ability to swap him in as a fighter if Starling or Bugsy (otherwise in the front ranks) get too wounded.

Beholder offers the same ability to modify a character's attributes that the Gold Box games offer, theoretically so you can bring a favorite tabletop character into the setting--not that you can modify levels, equipment, spells, or anything else. Resisting temptation to ratchet everything up to 18 wasn't hard, since a few clicks of "reroll" got some pretty high statistics anyway. Characters start at Level 2 or 3 already depending on race and class.

The game begins on Level 1 of the dungeon, with the party facing the rubble that has crashed down behind them, sealing the exit and trapping them inside. I pick up a couple rocks to use as missile weapons. Nearby, the bones of a slain halfling hold a set of lockpicks that I give to Bugsy. A lever opens a door and we begin exploring the level.

Finding the remains of a previous adventurer adds a nice bit of realism.

Level 1 ends up being quite small, 171 used squares in a 22 x 22 grid. There are only two types of enemies on the first level: kobolds and giant leeches. They don't seem to respawn; this might become a problem for my multi-classed characters if no enemies respawn

The first two levels of the dungeon.

There are some light puzzles on this level, consisting primarily of finding hidden buttons and weighing down pressure plates with rocks to keep doors open. Nothing terribly difficult, but of course on this level the game is just introducing me to mechanics.

Level 2 is much larger, over 400 used squares in a 30 x 30 grid. The only enemies on the level appear to be skeletons and zombies, but there are a lot more puzzles: spinners, keyed doors, secret doors, arcane messages, teleporters, slots on the wall that accept daggers and open remote areas of the dungeon, pits that close based on pressure plate--some of which must be weighted down, and at least one of which must be weighted down by throwing something on it from across a pit.

Tossing a rock across a pit to land on the plate on the other side, which will close the pit. Dungeon Master taught me this.

There are buttons that seem to reconfigure the wall pattern, and at least one keyed door for which I can't find the key. Although I've mapped almost all of it, I need to take another pass through the level to make sure I didn't miss anything. There are also a few buttons that I don't understand, and I need to more thoroughly investigate their effects.

The party contemplates entering a teleporter.

A dagger placed in a slot on the wall produces a non-helpful message.

I don't find much in the way of equipment upgrades--just a few daggers for throwing weapons, a single shield, a sling, and an axe that replaced my fighter's initial short sword. One unfortunate adaptation from Dungeon Master is the inability to tell anything about your weapons and armor. Familiarity with the standard D&D equipment list will probably help a little, but why couldn't the game have displayed weapon and armor statistics when you right-click on them or something?

Miscellaneous observations:

• One thing that I like much better than Dungeon Master is the redundant keyboard and mouse controls. You can do everything from either controller, so it's easy to settle into a pattern based on your own preferences. This is also one of the first games I've seen (maybe the first) to allow you to turn off music independent of other sound.

You can also replace the "bar graphs" for hit points with actual numbers.

• Floor drains occasionally show pairs of eyes, and clicking on them often produces a message like the one below. I don't know if I'll ever find anything in a floor drain, but I suspect I'll click on every damned one of them.

• I'm not sure if food is going to be a problem. Each character has a food meter that depletes a tiny bit with each action. You have to eat to restore it. So far, I've found just enough food (packaged rations, not loose ears of corn or hunks of cheese) to restore what I've been losing. But the locations and amount of food seem to be fixed, so I wonder if I eventually get into trouble by doing things like taking a second look through the same dungeon level.

Marina finds a ration package just as her food level gets low. I don't know what the "special quest for this level!" was all about.

• So far, I haven't done much with magic, mostly because restoring spells involves resting for a long time and exacerbates the food issue. My mage has a few "Magic Missiles" and "Melf's Acid Arrows" (appearing for the first time?) and my cleric has some "Cure Light Wounds" and "Hold Persons."

Preparing to blast some zombies with a "Magic Missile."

• I like that the maps create irregular wall patterns and don't feel compelled to use every space. It makes it feel like more of a real place.

• Like Dungeon Master, the game appears to have no economy.

• Unlike Dungeon Master, the game requires no torches or "Light" spells. The dungeon is just naturally lit, I guess.

• You seem to get experience here for solving puzzles as well as killing enemies.

Gaston levels from finding a hidden area.

• I have no idea how you resurrect, or if it's even possible before you get the fifth-level cleric spell "Raise Dead." Fortunately, combats have been easy enough that no one has come close to dying. Just for fun, I let some skeletons kill me to see what the "full party death" screen would look like.

Four Level 3 heroes is all that the city had to stand against the Minions of Evil?

• There are apparently NPCs in the dungeon, but I haven't met any yet. When I do encounter them, I hope they're distinguishable as such and I don't end up killing them by accident.

• You can save anywhere, but there's only one save slot. That gives me the heebie-jeebies just because of corruption issues. I think I'd better back that up occasionally.

So far, Eye of the Beholder is exactly what I was looking for: not a highly original game, but one that's exceedingly competent at a standard set of RPG tropes. Oh, there are weaknesses to this type of CRPG, and I'm sure I'll grouse about them before the end, but for the moment I'm having a lot of fun.

Time so far: 3 hours
Reload count: 0