Legend of the Red Dragon: Won-ish! (with Summary and Rating)

Why do I have the letter "A" on my shield twice?

        

Legend of the Red Dragon

United States

Robinson Technologies (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for Amiga, 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 30 March 2024

Date Ended: 15 April 2024 

Total Hours: 11

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5) in one sense but still frustrating

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

            

Well, my first experience playing an online game with other players led to a few interesting revelations.

   

First, I learned how addictive online games can be. I didn't really enjoy Legend of the Red Dragon; its mechanics are too simple and its humor too juvenile. But something about the enforced time limit and the limited number of actions per day kept me addicted. I found myself staying up past midnight on nights that I should have gone to bed much earlier, just to log in and get my day's work done before someone could come along and kill me.

   

Second, I learned the thrill of slaying real players' characters. I don't necessarily mean "thrill" in a positive way, but rather the way that it occurs in thriller as a movie genre--kind of a sweaty anxiety. I got butterflies in my stomach every time I attacked a real player, something that's never occurred with a computer-generated foe except for maybe some of the bosses in soulsborne games. I could never shake the idea that I was doing something wrong, but my curiosity and lust for power overcame it. I wonder if that's how serial killers feel their first time out.

    

Third, I learned the depression and humiliation from having my own character slain. Repeatedly. Like, every day. It turns out that when you visit the inn, there's a relatively trivial way to bribe the bartender into giving you the key to any player's room, where you can break in and murder them in their sleep--well, maybe. Usually, they wake up, and from there it turns into a proper duel.

     

I break into a fellow player's room to kill her, but I can't even hit her.

    

For a while, every time I logged in, it turned out that someone had killed my character in the night. You revive at midnight, but with 10% less experience. It was infuriating. I took note of who did it, then noted if they were asleep at the inn, then broke in to get my revenge. Do you know what's more enraging and humiliating than having your character killed by another player? Breaking into his room to kill him in revenge, only to have him wake up and kill you again during the attempt. For years, I've heard of players tracking each other down in real life or "swatting" each other, and I've wondered with bafflement how anyone could take things that far. Then I encountered other players in the mildest of online games, and . . . well . . .       

    

     

The amusing thing is how easily I found it to justify my own attacks as completely utilitarian while railing against my character's murders as unjustified and personal. I imagine this contradiction afflicts many MMORPG players.

 

In any event, I began to reason that if I was just going to get killed every night anyway, I might as well go out on my own terms. You get so much experience for killing another character that it's worth the risk. My days started to look like this:

     

• Log in.

• Fight my day's allotment of forest battles. (Occasionally, I got killed during one of these, and that was it.)

• Return to town and buy any weapon or armor upgrades I could afford.

• Visit the training school and see if I could level up.

• Visit the inn and turn in any gems I had for attribute-raising potions.

    

Buying statistics upgrades from the bartender.

       

• Flirt with Violet. This ceased being an option a few days after I joined the server, as Violet married another character named Taz and was replaced by an obese, bucktoothed barmaid named Grizelda. Being "portly," she is of course unworthy of any affection.

        

I thought Violet and I had something special.

     

• Listen to Seth Abel the bard and go out and fight any more forest battles I earned from his song.

• Go to the bank and deposit all my cash except for the amount needed to bribe the bartender and get a room at the inn. 

• Look for other characters to kill, both in the game or asleep in the inn. Pick the lowest-level character who was at least my level. (I'm not sure if it's possible to attack characters with a big level variance. I was never killed by anyone more than a level or two above me.) If I survived that battle, repeat with the next one.

• If I was still alive, rent a room for the night and go to sleep.

       

I think with some creativity, the author could have found ways to make PVP battles more interesting and less deterministic. For instance, give the player renting the room the option to remain alert and armored, at the cost of 20% of his forest battles for the next day. Or require the attacking player to creep into the room unarmored, so if he fails to surprise the sleeping character, he's at a huge disadvantage. 

      

I'm not sure I've shown the main town screen anywhere, so here it is.

     

As it is, almost all player-vs.-player battles--not to mention all regular battles--come down to who strikes the first blow, which in turn usually comes down to which player gets the first attack. The only real exception is the use of your limited special attacks or spells, which you really want to save for PVP battles instead of wasting them on forest creatures--although this means that I died a few times at the hands of forest creatures because I was trying to save those attacks.

    

At some point, I began to wonder if I would ever make Level 12 and get a chance to slay the red dragon, which I figured was necessary for the "won" tag. To ensure that this could happen, even somewhat pathetically, I downloaded a DOS version of the game that mimics a BBS on your own machine so you can just play against the computer with no other players. It's an empty experience--nothing that would sell as a commercial product, particularly since you have the same daily time and battle limits (though these can be adjusted). I started to slowly work my way towards Level 12 in the offline version at the same time I logged in every day with angst for the online version.

   

The offline version had many of the same encounters as the online one. Some notes on both:

    

• The offline version features an occasional gnome who shows up during forest hunts and offers games of blackjack using standard casino rules. You can only bet a maximum of 5,000 gold, though, which doesn't do a lot for you after Level 3 or 4.

   

It's cute, but this is far less than I earn in a regular encounter.

     

• In the offline version, you occasionally encounter really easy enemies even at high levels. I never experienced this online.

      

Hmmm...I wonder who's going to win.

      

• Every level offers at least one forest enemy who's a lot harder than the others, forcing you to watch your battles carefully and use your special attacks (or run) judiciously. When I was Level 8, that enemy was King Vidion. At Level 9, it was an "earth shaker." At Level 10, it was "Sweet-Looking Little Girl." I thought all of them were bad, but Level 11 brought an absolute bastard called "ShadowStormWarrior" who killed me three days in a row.

     

The game loves to twist the knife.

      

• There's an occasional old man who challenges you to a game of over/under. He thinks of a number between 1 and 100, and you have 6 guesses to which he responds "too high" or "too low" to whittle him down. I believe that with perfect strategy, you should be able to get the number a little more than half the time. I kept hitting the wrong key and screwing it up, though. Anyway, if you win, you get an extra spell point. I think this is the primary way that mystic-oriented characters develop their power.

• The "mystical skills" character gets six spells in increments as he levels up: "Pinch Real Hard," "Disappear" (flee without any chance of failing), "Heat Wave," "Light Shield" (halves damage), "Shatter," and "Mind Heal." "Pinch" requires only one spell point, but "Light Shield" requires 12 and "Mind Heal" requires 20, which I only got just before my last dragon battle, but I decided to spend 12 points on "Light Shield" instead of saving the points to heal once in the middle of the battle.

• At the Dark Cloak Tavern--the one in the forest--you can "research" other players to determine what weapons and armor they carry. This can help you decide if you really want to attack them. A single level variance in your equipped items makes a huge difference. 

    

I really should have paid more attention to those offensive and defensive values.

      

• You never really do hear the full story of Olivia, the disembodied head. Every time you speak to her, she starts to accuse some other castle's lord of the problem, and then you walk away before she finishes the story. I see online that there is a process by which you can get (ick) sexual favors from the head. You would never know that this was programmed by a teenaged boy.

• If you hit "S" on the main menu (which doesn't have a command that goes with that selection), you get a little poem called "Halloween" written by Seth Robinson in 1994. It describes a little kid named Billy who's so ugly that he only ever goes outside on Halloween because people assume he's wearing a mask.

    

Very small changes could have given this a proper meter.

     

• Also found on a web site: If you type JENNIE during the forest menu, a prompt comes up asking you to type a single word describing actress Jennie Garth (apparently, Robinson had a crush on her). Various responses (e.g, FOXY, BABE, UGLY) get you different rewards and punishments. 

    

That's how the kids spell it these days.

       

• You can pay the bartender to change your name. If you try to change it to one of the game's NPCs, you get various humorous messages.

     

You are not god!

      

• I guess if you're a thief, you can catch a fairy during the fairy encounter, then use it to help you steal from the bank.

     

The furthest I got with my online character was character Level 9 and rank 10 or 11 with equipment. I might continue to play him, but probably not. Realizing it would take me forever to get to Level 12 and even longer to kill the dragon, I focused more attention on the offline version, which I edited to allow hundreds of forest battles per day instead of the default 15. I kept dying before meeting the maximum allotment, and turning back the clock was one thing I couldn't figure out how to do with the administrative panel. Nonetheless, I kept at it and eventually reached Level 12.

     

Reaching the top level

     

My trainer at Level 12 told me I was ready to hunt the dragon. I started looking around for how to do that. When he didn't appear during random forest encounters, I explored the other menu options and saw there was a way to ask about the dragon in the bar. The bartender suggested that I (S)earch while in the forest.

     

Well, that's heavy.

     

Doing so produces a special encounter at the entrance to the red dragon's lair.

     

Way to bias the choice.

       

I soon found out that while attacking the red dragon is possible for a Level 12 character, it isn't necessarily advisable. In our first battle, he had 15,000 hit points to my 1,784. He has several special attacks, and if you're unlucky enough that he uses his breath attack, over 1,000 of your hit points can disappear instantly.

    

My first encounter with the red dragon.

    

And the result.

     

This happened three days in a row, even with "Light Shield" in place. (There were times I could have run, but you can only challenge the dragon once per day, so fleeing isn't much better than dying.) Each time, I logged in the next day; fought another 100 or so forest battles; leveled up some of my equipment; boosted my strength, hit points, and defense (vitality) with gems; and tried again. Finally, on the fourth try, I got lucky with a couple of critical hits, and even luckier that he didn't use his breath attack.

       

Doesn't sound like I really saved the town, then.

      

Believe it or not, defeating the red dragon doesn't "win" you the game by default. You have to defeat it a number of times set by the system operator. I'm not sure what the number is for the online version I've been playing; all I can tell you is that the top current players in my realm have beaten the dragon three times. What makes this impressive is that each win sends you back to Level 1, albeit with permanent increases in some statistics.

   

The default number of dragon-slayings required by my offline version was 10. Since I wanted to see what the ending looked like, I had changed it to 1. Thus, when I defeated the dragon, there was quite a lot of epilogue text, some of it unique to my character class:

    

Right. "Registering."

      

If I try to go back into the game at this point, I get the screen at the top of this entry and dropped back to DOS. The only solution at that point is to reset the system, wiping the current roster. It's obviously not meant to happen very often.

   

I did some calculations, and I figure that if I hadn't set the game to allow a few hundred fights per day, and instead left it at the original 15, but had still changed the required number of red dragon defeats to 1, I would have been able to show that winning screen on 27 June. If I had left the winning conditions set to 10 dragon defeats, you would have seen it around 24 November 2025. That's with me signing in every day for about 15 minutes per session. The online version is more generous with the number of forest battles, and of course you get piles of experience for killing other players. I suspect if I kept going with it, I could defeat the dragon once by the first or second week of June.

   

Given all of that, you'll be impressed to know that one player on the server version, Keu, has won the game--not defeated the dragon, but won the game--43 times. Most of the top players have an active character in every single realm. It's as if instead of devoting myself to playing every RPG that ever existed, I devoted myself to playing just one game, repeatedly.

    

Thus, by any standards of a regular Red Dragon BBS, I didn't "win" the game, but I trust you'll forgive me for simply not having that much time.

    

The last screenshot I took of my character stats.

     

The game supported the addition of custom encounters and quests called In-Game Modules (IGMs). One archive site shows 705 of these modules for both Dragon and its sequel, including such intriguing titles as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Castle Coldrake, and The Star Trek Bar. I couldn't get the modules to run with my offline version, but I watched a video of a player exploring Felicity's Temple, written by a Lloyd Hannesson, where menus gave the player the ability to explore a temple and its environs. There's a minigame that allows you to kill the Red Dragon's children, plus some ribald options when encountering an arcade owner's daughter. Apparently, a major IGM called Wizardstone was going to finish Olivia's story, but it was never completed.

   

Since the IGMs could modify the character, I guess a number of them were written to explicitly cheat, bolstering the character with easy gold or experience for the main game.

   

One thing I did not experience--and this is not a complaint--was inducing my character to have sex with other players' characters. You initiate this by sending the appropriate propositions to other players. According to what I've read online, this can result in experience boosts for both characters but can also lead to STDs, marriage, and pregnancy.

          

Some players are into the game for scenes like this.

   

As we've seen, male characters can also romance Violet the barmaid, and female characters can romance Seth Able the bard, Robinson's in-game alter ego. A 2008 article on The Escapist reviewed the sexual content of the game and quotes Robinson as saying: "In retrospect, it's really pretty preposterous to have a kid who's never kissed a girl put himself in a game digitally scoring with thousands of women. Hmm - what would Freud say?"

    

I think Freud would probably say the same thing my friend Mark said to me 20 years ago on my first trip to Bourbon Street: "Those . . . uh . . . aren't women." I mean, no shame if that's your thing, and I realize that the "girls don't play games" trope is long dead and buried, but I still think the odds are against the heterosexual male player on this one.

          

More from the article:

       

[Robinson's] inspiration was often autobiographical. Robinson wrote in the possibility of contracting sexually transmitted diseases after he had an experience with Chlamydia. When one of his friends had a stillbirth, Robinson added the possibility of miscarriage to the game, too.

By the time Robinson stopped writing code for LoRD, players could flirt, seduce each other, get married and raise families. There were divorces, pregnancies and even children accidentally getting in the way of a monster and being killed. It was a level of sexual maturity that has rarely, if ever, been expressed in a game since.

       

It never occurred to me that some players might think that Chlamydia, miscarriages, and their own children getting killed is what was missing from modern RPGs. If that's what "sexual maturity" means, I guess I owe an apology to Olaf Patzenhauer. Let's have more games in which women shoot beams of light out of their breasts, please.

    

Since I didn't experience any of that, none of it will affect the GIMLET:

   

• 1 point for the game world. We're told there's a red dragon terrorizing everyone and a few proper names appear here and there, but that's it.

• 4 points for character creation and development. Both exist, but both are pretty basic. Where the game gets more points is that class and sex both make a major difference in the nature of encounters and the options you have available. I didn't even experience thief options

         

Leveling up by challenging my master.

     

• 5 points for NPC interaction. I'm regarding the other players as "NPCs" for each PC to give such a high score. But I can't pretend that interaction with other players isn't a primary reason that most people enjoy the game.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. Almost all of that goes to the textual encounters that you experience in between unmemorable battles with silly "monsters." You get a lot of choices during these random encounters, although I wish the game took them a bit more seriously.

• 3 points for magic and combat. The complexities of combat tactics vary by character type, but you have a few options.
  

          

The big boss of the game is a red dragon, but on the way I just blithely defeat multiple gold dragons.

        

• 2 points for equipment. A weapon, an item of armor, and gems. The good news is, the relative power level of each item is never in doubt.

     

Moving up to the next level.

      

• 5 points for the economy. This is a relatively strong category, since there are multiple ways to earn money (killing monsters, gambling, killing other players) and spend it (weapons, armor, information, bribing the bartender for keys). I was never close to being able to afford the top weapon and armor.
  

• 4 points for quests. There's a main quest and a lot of side quests that build the character, though they're mostly too silly to be considered actual role-playing.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and input. I can't offer much here since there are only a few ASCII graphics and no sound, but the menu works great.

• 5 points for gameplay. This is a guess, a halfway point between what my GIMLET technically looks for (nonlinearity, replayability, dignified length and challenge) and what the players of this specific type of game are looking for. 
  

    

So that gives us a final score of 35, but really the things I look for on the GIMLET aren't the "point" of this kind of game.

      

Whatever I think of the experience playing Dragon, it can't be denied that it was wildly successful as BBS games go. According to interviews with Seth Robinson, he sold between 15,000 and 20,000 copies of the game to different BBS operators, and between legitimate copies and pirated ones, it spread around the world. At its peak, there were more than a million sessions per day. Robinson sold the game to Metropolis Gameport, a large BBS operator, in 1998, and they continued to operate it until 2009. As we've seen, there are numerous revivals of Red Dragon online, as well as a browser-based tribute called Legend of the Green Dragon (2002).

   

Robinson, demonstrating the type of sexual maturity discussed in that Escapist article, went on to design Dink Smallwood (1998), which I imagine I'll eventually get to before I die. Before then, however, he wrote Legend of the Red Dragon II: New World (1992), apparently a very different game from its predecessor. In the 2000s, he transitioned to programming for mobile platforms, and at some point, he moved to Japan. He still runs Robinson Technologies from his new residence, offering a variety of games and utilities.

      

I've always suspected that multi-player games weren't for me, and this experience mostly confirmed those suspicions while still supplying some interesting material to write about. I recognize, however, that Red Dragon isn't quite the same as a modern MMO, and I still need to get that type of experience under my belt before I draw any final conclusions about the subgenre.

As for whether I'll continue with the online Red Dragon, probably not--but on the other hand, I'm not sure I can let Killer Bunz have the last kill.

Game 511: The Red Crystal (1993)

    

The Red Crystal

United States

Wild Card Software (developer); Quantum Quality Productions (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 11 April 2024

     

I like to start every new game as unbiased as possible, so I try to avoid learning anything about it from external sources. There have been times that my reactions to universally-adored games have been negative, and there have been times that the opposite has occurred. I feel that either scenario is more likely to happen if I go into the game with a blank slate.

    

I did that with The Red Crystal, but a few hours into it, when I allowed myself to look at the game's Wikipedia summary and saw that Computer Gaming World had rated it the 22nd worst game ever made, I thought, "Yep, that tracks." CGW has been monstrously wrong before--that same list includes Disciples of Steel!--but when I saw that Crystal's chief designer had come from Paragon Software--which never really understood RPGs--and had previously been a lead programmer for MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990), it was all the explanation I needed.

     

You know this guy is evil because he wears a skull on his belt.

     

That designer is Charles Griffith. In addition to MegaTraveller, he programmed some of Paragon's Marvel titles, such as The Punisher (1990) and X-Men II (1991). He was briefly at MicroProse, which bought Paragon, but then seems to have staked out on his own. I suspect that Wild Card Software was his own label. (The company's name comes up briefly in the title screen sequence but is not found on any of the game's documentation.) His publisher, QQP, was a well-known maker of wargames, and according to CGW, they should have stuck to that category. Griffith's LinkedIn profile proudly mentions his time at Paragon/MicroProse and his later work for Acclaim and Stargate Interactive, but it skips over Wild Card and Crystal, which is probably another bad sign.

           

He must be a Targaryen.

       

The game takes place in the empire of Blackmoore, which consists of seven kingdoms which peacefully coexisted for 3000 years. Then some troublemaker named Lexor came out of nowhere, raised an army of the dead, and conquered the empire. He gave each of the seven kingdom's castles to one of his chief lieutenants ("the seven worst tyrants the world has ever known") and tasked them with guarding the Seven Secrets of Life. (Most sites give The Seven Secrets of Life as a subtitle. It appears on the box cover but not anywhere in the manual or title screen, and my policy is always two out of three.) Your goal is, of course, to retrieve them and use them somehow to destroy Lexor. Involved in some nebulous way are red crystals, which have weird magical properties, including foresight and telepathy.

    

Character creation begins by choosing a portrait from a number of cartoonish options that would look perfect in a comic book game, although they don't seem to have been adapted from X-Men II. I am grateful that they offered some helmeted options in case you just want to imagine your own character under the helmet. You can also choose a crest from among six options: a chalice, an eye, a mouth with a wagging tongue that looks a little disgusting, a skull, a fist, and a lightning bolt.

     

Some of the character portraits. The two women look like the same woman from different angles.

        

You then enter a name and choose from five classes: barbarian, knight, lord, sorcerer, and thief. Barbarians are supposed to be all physical offense, knights slightly less so. Lords are supposed to be wealthy, so they can bribe their way out of more combats, but I wonder how well this really works in reality (see below). Same goes for the supposed stealth and trap-defying abilities of thieves. Sorcerers are masters of magic, so they start weak but get stronger as they master their powers.

   

The game's attributes are strength, intelligence (for spells), ability (to disarm traps and such), armor, damage, resistance (to spells), stamina (hit points), and zetos (money). The manual tells you nothing about what the maximums are, so you have to reroll a lot to feel it out for each potential character. I tried a lot of rolls and came up with the following chart:

        

     

"Armor" and "Damage" are odd because they have initial values, but these are changed by the weapons and armor you later equip. Most games make innate damage a function of strength and innate armor as a function of dexterity or what this game calls "ability."

   

This was a pretty solid set of statistics given the maximums above.

     

The game begins on an outdoor map that seems to depict a desert environment. A smaller-scale map to the right (by default, unless you have a companion) shows the entire kingdom, including the seven castles and various towns. The character icon is represented by a sword. NPCs move around the map at the same time, but I find they never have anything interesting to say. Merchants never offer to sell anything and bounty hunters are never looking for you, so they don't engage in combat. It's really a wasted mechanic.

       

I'm so glad we had this encounter.

      

In most RPGs, you head for the town to buy some equipment before you start seriously adventuring, but here that's not possible because you begin with so little cash. (I'm not sure if I can bring myself to use the word "zetos.") So you might as well go right to one of the seven castles. However, for later reference, towns have weapon and armor shops, oracles who provide crystals and healing, wizards who sell spells and potions, wandering NPCs as useless as the ones in the outdoor map, NPCs in houses who sometimes give side quests, and courthouses where you can literally buy the town and I guess start collecting its tax revenue. 

      

Exploring the wasteland, I come upon a castle and its town.

       

The seven castles are all near towns. When you enter, you get a qualitative assessment of how tough the enemies are going to be in the castle compared to your current level. 

       

I guess this one shouldn't be too hard.

     

As you explore the castles, you run into enemies--bestial, undead, humanoid, and other. There are only 15 monsters in the game, but they can exist at different power levels depending on what castle they're in. I think their color has something to do with it. You can try to avoid them, but they tend to swarm you, and it's better to just deal with them even though they (somewhat slowly) respawn.

       

The death screen. I don't understand: how did Lexor's guards fail in my mission?

        

Combat is the game's big failing. Aspects of it probably sounded good to someone. You're taken to a separate "arena" screen for each combat. You and the enemy can run around the screen or stand still and swing at each other. There are theoretically nine types of attacks that you can choose from: three low, three medium, three high. Each enemy is particularly susceptible to one of the nine types of attacks, so you have to experiment a bit to figure out which one applies to that enemy. When you land on it, the difference is obvious. Your attacks go from 1-2 damage per hit to 5-10 or more. Then you have to annotate or remember the best setting for each enemy.

       

Fighting an "orb," which is a beholder with hair. I clearly need to adjust my attack.

        

This all sounds okay, but two more important principles govern combat:

    

• Even if you have your attacks set to the idea setting, you can't just stand next to an enemy swinging away. You'll die after a couple of combats, if not the first.
• Your reach is always greater than the enemy's. (This might not be true with daggers, which I haven't tried.) None of the enemies have missile weapons. Even spellcasters have to get up close to you.

   

In practice, these factors create a combat system in which you wait for the enemy to approach, swing a couple of times as he gets close, then run away before he can hit you. Then you find a new position and do it again. It's tedious and exhausting. One level was enough for me, and I've got dozens of them. Some enemies have over 100 hit points and only take 3 or 4 per hit at best.

  

With a little practice, it's not hard to avoid all enemy attacks. Since you can't afford to stand still and get hit by any enemy, there's functionally no difference between the easy ones and the hard ones except how long combat will take.  

       

That's more like it.

       

Every encounter with an enemy gives you a chance to bribe before you fight. The manual suggests that this is the lord's primary way of dealing with enemies. I don't know how this works. Maybe you get experience for successful bribes. I'm not sure how you get the money to bribe in the first place if you don't fight, but maybe there's a way to do it by running around, collecting treasures from chests until you have enough to buy a town, then bribing off that town's income. Or multiple towns. It would be a unique approach to gameplay if it were possible, but I can't think it would be all that exciting.

   

I leveled up a couple of times as I killed enemies. The experience point statistic is hidden, but it clearly exists. Levels increase maximum stamina and, according to the manual, accuracy.

        

Only in CRPGs does getting struck by lightning leave you stronger. Maybe the armor acts like a Faraday Cage.

        

As I explored the castles, I found additional items to use and wear, including armor, gauntlets, boots, potions, and food. Potions are color-coded, and the manual has nothing to say about them. Food restores stamina. Some slain enemies deliver money. I also found a couple of things that sound like quest items, including "Hunwell's Skull" and a "Lost Crown."

    

Finding a chest in the dungeon. Chests are often empty.

       

Castles have multiple levels with lots of stairways up and down and hidden doors. I had hoped to find the first Secret of Life for this entry, but I started over once (when I realized I'd rolled lousy statistics for the first character) and the castles are large. They have multiple levels, and the game doesn't remember the map once you've left a level, so it's very hard to systematically explore without going in loops. Then, it turns out that some encounters on higher levels are with multiple enemies at once, which makes the entire game less like a CRPG and more like a game of Pac-Man where you spend the entire thing running around trying to avoid getting touched by your foes.

        

It would be nice if they'd given me a bigger screen.

       

The game does have one innovation I haven't covered and probably can't: cooperative multiplayer. Supposedly, you could get a friend to dial in via modem and join the quest, with the second player taking up the spaces on the right hand side of the screen. I haven't been able to figure out how to replicate that--and I couldn't do much with it even if I did--but it is something that few other games of the era were offering. If only it was offered in the service of a game with better combat mechanics.

     

Time so far: 3 hours

 

****

     

I've made an update to the last entry for Tygus Horx based on some information I got from the author. I still couldn't finish the game, but from his notes, we know what the ending should have looked like.

 

Game 510: Dungeon Hack (1993)

You know this is a serious game because it has two ©s, two ®s, and a "TM."

    

Dungeon Hack

United States

DreamForge Entertainment (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, 1995 for PC-98

Date Started: 7 April 2024

      

Dungeon Hack is what I've been waiting for my whole life--a fun, replayable game of infinite variety. No more waiting for years for developers to release a new title. Just roll up a race/class/sex/alignment combination that you haven't tried before--there are 698 of them!--and a random dungeon that you haven't experienced before--there are over 4 billion of them!--then customize the dungeon to the challenge level that you want. Sure, there's no real story, but you have an imagination, don't you? Make up some narration as you go along. All you have to do is . . . 

   

Give me back the keyboard, you little delinquent. Sorry about that, everyone. Thirteen-year-old Chester briefly came forward and insisted on having his say. He and I have been arguing for days now. We've had debates before--usually resolved with a line or two in the "Summary and Rating"--but never before have our differences been so stark. Thirteen-year-old Chester (let's call him "Winnie," like one of his uncles did), who hasn't learned the value of time, whose days seem to stretch out endlessly instead of being calculated in hard, unforgiving hours, loves the idea of a "forever game." Winnie's already making plans to win it 698 times with one set of customizations, then turn around to do it again with another. He already has backstories in mind for half the characters. He'll somehow turn its repetitive, randomized corridors into a novel.

     

Dungeon Hack is much like Eye of the Beholder, but with a single character and, thus, most of the inventory options on the main screen.

    

Adult Chester has places to be. I don't have any idea what Red Crystal is, and I'm never going to find out if I waste time running around mazes for their own sake.

   

What's the difference between that and NetHack? This is "Winnie" again. I hated that nickname. That uncle ended up in prison, by the way.

   

Hoping for healing, my character tries a potion and instead gets confused.

       

That''s a better question than it seems. Until I started playing it, I thought that the word "Hack" in the game's name was a coincidence. Anything but. The game is a fusion of first-person Dungeons & Dragons games like Eye of the Beholder (1991) with roguelike elements, including potions and wands whose color and composition are randomized for each new game, random drawing of dungeon maps, and optional permadeath. Your quest, as in many roguelikes, is to find an orb. The executable to run the game is even titled HACK. 

     

And yet roguelikes are more than just randomization, permadeath, and potion lists that you have to re-learn. They're a full set of keyboard commands, for one thing, whereas Dungeon Hack is the second game in a row that a player has to approach with one hand on the numberpad and the other on the mouse, a contortion without an external numberpad. They're about complex inventory mechanics--or, at least, the Hack line is. I grant you that Rogue doesn't have that aspect, but it makes up for it by being short, which Dungeon Hack definitely is not. In fact, in offering the simplicity of Rogue with the length of some of its descendants, Dungeon Hack resembles Moria or Angband more than its namesake. I didn't like those roguelikes nearly as much. Winnie doesn't care about any of this, of course; he's never even played Rogue.

      

Winnie doesn't realize that all these locks and keys are just busywork.

       

The opening cinematic depicts a cross-legged woman hovering in the air before a generic adventurer, reciting (in recorded voice) a verse about an ancient orb she hopes to find. "My lady, I have answered your summons!" the adventurer announces, just as the mysterious woman divines the location of the orb: "A place of traps to crack brave bones . . . an ancient dungeon." She casts a spell that causes a little orb to shoot across the room and stick to a wall map. The adventurer gushes: "It's a strong magic that can point to maps." Is it really? I would think that would be a pretty easy spell. Incidentally, I don't think that map depicts any place in Faerün.

      

What about letting you levitate indefinitely in the air?

        

The adventurer questions her about the salary she intends to pay, but she dismisses him by saying he'll find his salary on the floor of the dungeon: "There lies gold and gem enough for any man." The adventurer protests: "You'll pay me now or I'll never get there! I need horses, supplies . . . " The woman cuts off his protests by zapping him with a teleport spell that apparently warps him directly to the dungeon. "Live or die, adventurer," she says as he disappears, "but bring the orb to me."

      

Our adventurer forgets what franchise he's a part of.

         

He appears in a swamp outside a blocky-looking dungeon, a gargoyle's head looming above the entryway. As he approaches the door on a wooden walkway, some kind of troll or similar beast leaps out of the swamp onto the walkway in front of him. In perhaps the most (unintentionally?) hilarious moment in introductory cinematic history, the adventurer reaches up and smacks the troll back into the water, barely breaking his stride. "Bring on your worst, dungeon. I am ready!" he declares, as the game transitions to the main menu.

     

He won't be nearly as effective once he actually gets into the dungeon.

     

For his character, the player has the options to create one or choose from a slate of characters with existing names and backstories. I started to recount the list of pre-made characters, but there are like 20 of them, and they're not all that interesting. I'll just observe that a couple of them (principally "Fatzon Axemaiden" and "Kathra Shallowtaint") have unfortunate names, and many of their stories don't seem to go with their alignments. We're told repeatedly that nominally good characters are only in it for the wealth, for instance. 

      

I mean, it would be kind of weird if . . . you know what? I'm just going to let it go.

     

If you want to create your own character--and of course that's what you want to do if you want to be either Chester's or Winnie's friend--your experience is governed by second-edition AD&D rules. That means race/class restrictions and level caps. Only humans can be paladins; only humans or half-elves can be bards; only humans, elves, or half-elves can be rangers. Only demi-humans can be any multi-class.

      

It's nice to have all the character creation options on one screen.

      

Bards are appearing for what I believe is the first time in an official Dungeons & Dragons title. It's a funny game to make their debut, as they don't work great as solo characters. The game also didn't implement any bard song abilities, so the bard is basically a thief who can cast the occasional spell. Weirdly, his alignment must have the word "neutral" on either side but not both. Another oddity is that bards and thieves can wield any weapons.

Single-class fighters, rangers, and paladins start at Level 3; clerics, bards, and thieves at Level 4; and mages at Level 5. That's good; I was thinking about playing as a mage--which I almost never do--but I wasn't looking forward to casting "Magic Missile" once and then resting. 

     

Portraits for male characters.

       

You can re-roll the standard set of D&D attributes as many times as you want or just set the attributes to whatever you want. (The manual doesn't even pretend that you're trying to "match a favorite AD&D® character" anymore.) Alignments are from the standard set of 9, and I'm not sure what significance they have for this game. Your last character selection is a portrait.

   

After that, you get to customize the game's length and difficulty. There are sliders and toggles for the number of levels, the difficulty of monsters, the deadliness of poison, the presence of undead, and a dozen other features. "Easy," "Moderate," and "Hard" macro-settings toggle these switches accordingly. Of particular note is "Character Death Real," a toggle switch that turns on permadeath. The lowest number you can set the dungeon levels is 10, so you can't make yourself a game that's too easy. Finally, you can manually set the "dungeon seed"--the basis of the procedural level generation--in case you want to play the same maps as a friend or something.

      

All of the dungeon settings on "moderate."

     

For this introductory session, I messed around with a few character options, I tried a paladin, a fighter/mage, a bard, and finally finished the level with another paladin. I'll get some opinions before I move forward with any of these characters.

    

Once you commit to a dungeon, the game takes a few minutes to build it using the numeric seed you or the game chose. You're then deposited at the bottom of the entry stairs with a basic set of starting equipment, including a couple of rations. 

     

This bard seems out of his league.

    

Other than their size (28 x 27), dungeon levels are all randomized. I don't know that they share any specific code, but the nature of the randomization seems very similar to that in Anthony Crowther's Captive (1990). The levels are large but quite linear, since the randomization algorithm (unlike NetHack's, we must observe) does not allow access to the same destination from multiple directions. Doors are placed at random intervals, and opening them can involve a variety of buttons, chains, switches, and keys. If the door is keyed, the algorithm ensures that an appropriate key will always be found on the floor before reaching the door. "Keys" can include mallets that strike gongs, coins that drop into slots, and gems that fit into murals on the walls. There's an option in the customization settings to turn on multi-leveled puzzles, for which keys are sometimes found on previous levels, but I guess there are ways that this can screw up the game.

      

Hitting this gong with a mallet is a variant of a lock and key.

      

Textures for walls, doors, and floors are also randomized, including wood, rough-hewn stone, polished marble, and various types of paneling. To keep things from getting too boring, developers also threw in some random decorations and furnishings, most of which can be clicked on for a brief message. These include tapestries with demonic beings ("I certainly hope this creature only appears in this dungeon as a tapestry and not in the flesh!"), paintings, engravings, carvings, incense burners, and floor grates. 

     

It's also for young lovers to stick their hands in and then pretend they were bitten off by retracing their hands into their sleeves as an amusing part of a falling-in-love montage.

     

Every once in a while, a wall is replaced with a cool kneeling statue, blocking access (I don't know if there's any way to remove him) or a hole that only the smaller races can get through. There are also illusory doors and the occasional  niche with treasures.

       

I have to have one of these for my house.

       

The programming part of this is all impressive, but I was already sick of it by the end of the first level. Randomization--or, at least, this kind of randomization--prohibits both interesting and realistic dungeon layouts. For all its randomization, NetHack manages to drop in the occasional castle, throne room, store, and treasure zoo. Does Dungeon Hack have anything similar? If so, it's not on the first level. What it does have is plenty of cases where you spend half an hour finding a key to a locked door only to find three squares of nothing on the other side of it.

        

This creepy arm is a lever that opens a door.

     

Each level does have plenty of monsters and treasure, and no matter what seed I started with, the first level had mostly goblins and orcs, maybe with a zombie or two towards the end. Monsters have a variable number of hit points, but they mostly die in one hit, even from the weaker characters. Of course, the character is also pretty weak, and once he or she is down to 8 hit points or less, a single blow could easily mean death, with no other party members to cast healing spells. The same tricks that work in most Dungeon Master variants work here, including the "combat waltz," backpedaling down hallways while throwing things (anything, it seems, can be used as a missile weapon), and so on. 

       

I got "held" for a little while by this undead. Fortunately, "held" characters can still move. They just can't do anything else.

     

The floors are strewn with treasures, including weapons, armor, amulets, potions, wands, scrolls, and rations. I didn't find any rings on Level 1, but I assume they're coming. Scrolls are all labeled, but nothing else is identified, which is a staple of both Dungeon Master clones and roguelikes. Potions, amulets, and wands are identified by color or material (e.g., pink potion, bronze amulet, pine wand), and once you find out what one does, you've identified all others of the same description. The problem is that the game offers no NetHack-like ways of testing what the different items do without trying them and hoping for the best. The effectiveness of armor can be assayed by changes to the armor class, but I'm not sure there's any way, save one, to identify weapons at all.

   

The one exception is if you have a mage or bard who can cast "Improved Identify," which allows you to identify items one at a time. The other classes must either have to rely on scrolls, which I haven't found, some other mechanism that hasn't appeared yet, or just guess. 

      

Now I just need to know what an "Amulet of Imminent Return" actually is.

    

Other notes:

     

• There's a food meter that slowly depletes. So far, all my characters have found enough rations to keep up with it.

• A minor-mode march plays over the title screen, but there is no music in the game itself. There are serviceable sound effects, mostly taken from Beholder.

• You occasionally find machines that take single gold coins to fully restore your health. That's the only "economy" I've seen in the game so far.

      

A little boon to those of us who aren't clerics.

    

• The game has no issue starting multi-classed mages (and bards) wearing armor that prevents them from casting any of their spells.

• I bought the GOG version of the game. It comes with a pre-loaded "High Score" list that has "C. Nova" at the top with 1,024,000 experience points. Other names in the hall of fame are Sprig, Mario, Elizabeth Zazo, J. J. Farnsworth, Room 9B, Borel Darkonious, Jojo the Great, Brady Cosmo, and Reamy Ro. At first, I thought GOG had ripped some random user's disk, but since all the experience point totals are perfectly even, I suspect these names were in the original. 

    

SSI could have made these numbers more realistic.

     

• The game has an excellent automap that annotates monsters (even in completely different parts of the dungeon) and items on the ground. It takes a good 10 seconds to appear, however.

       

A good automap. I can even see the colors.

     

• Monsters appear to respawn.

           

How I move forward will depend on what type of challenge I want to create for myself. Obviously, if I just wanted to breeze through, I could use "easy" mode with a paladin or fighter/cleric or something. But some things walk a fine line between "challenging" and "annoying." I'm toying with the following settings:

   

• Dungeon Depth = 13. Why prolong things? Setting it to the minimum, 10, seems lame, though.
• Monster Amount = High. I like combat-related challenges. I might as well set this high to compensate for the other things I'm thinking about doing.
• Monster Difficulty = maybe a smidge higher than normal.
• Illusory Walls = Off. The last thing I need is to have to go all the way back to pick up three squares in some corner of the dungeon that I missed on the first pass.
• Food Availability = High. Keeping myself fed is not necessarily the type of challenge I'm looking for.
• Water Level = Off. I hate water levels. Plus, someone told me you can get into a "walking dead" situation where you can't survive them.
• Encounter Undead = On. Who doesn't like undead?
• Other settings default.

    

As for characters, I'm toying with:

   

• Paladin. Just my default single-character game character.
• Mage. For the challenge and "Improved Identify."
• Fighter/Mage or Cleric/Mage. Less of a challenge, still get the spell.
• Bard. For the novelty of it, and I still get "Improved Identify," plus he's kind of a fighter-thief without the restrictions of multi-classing.

    

I'll be happy to take your thoughts before moving forward. Even 13 levels feels like it's going to be long.

 

Time so far: 3 hours