Game 252: Deathlord (1987)

 

          

By 1987, computer role-playing games were showing real promise, but it was still too early in the genre's history for a game that's epically long. Up to and including 1987, the longest non-roguelike game I played was Might & Magic (1987) at 50 hours. (Roguelikes get a pass in this analysis because their difficulty imparts a "length" that has nothing to do with the scope of the game world.) It was a great game, but it wouldn't have been great with the size of Skyrim's game world. Ultima IV delighted me at 36 hours, but it knew when to quit. 

So when Deathlord promises to fill "a few hundred hours" of time, I can't help but groan. Using my standard assumptions (-40% for publisher hyperbole, cut the remainder in half for today's better efficiency, subtract another third given my experience), we might still only be looking at a 60-hour title, but even that's too long. I suppose there was no way for a developer to know this in 1987, but they hadn't come far enough in terms of content, mechanics, and world-building to justify this kind of scope. You need depth with breadth.

This is doubly true given the fact that Deathlord's authors didn't come up with anything original in the interface or game mechanics. The game is an Ultima III clone that uses Wizardry's character, combat, and permadeath systems and a Dungeons & Dragons rule backbone. Its only "originality" is to put a Japanese skin on everything. A game that truly explored Asian mythology and philosophy would be a breath of fresh air in this era, but the developers simply took the standard set of Dungeons & Dragons races, classes, and spells and either literally translated them to Japanese, created nonsense words, or didn't bother to translate them at all. As we'll later see, this hackneyed attempt at an "eastern" theme wasn't the developers' fault, but I have to play the game that was created, not the one intended.

 

Even the backstory is as minimalist as possible, leaving me only with the hope that it will gain some more depth as the game progresses. An "outcast wizard" has raised monstrous forces, attacked the kingdom of Kodan, and destroyed one of its cities. Monsters are even amassing in the catacombs beneath the emperor's very own castle. The emperor is offering enormous rewards of gold and land to anyone who can defeat the Deathlord. The Deathlord, meanwhile, taunts the party in the game manual, hinting that "seven words, six items, and your ineptitude prevent us from meeting."

    

A sign in town summons the party to the main quest.

     

The player creates up to 6 party members to join the expedition. These are drawn from 8 races, mostly taken from D&D: human, toshi (elf), nintoshi (half-elf), kobito (dwarf), gnome, obake (halfling), troll, and ogre. I can't find any evidence that toshi and nintoshi come from any Japanese words with related meanings, but kobito is a literal translation of "dwarf" (according to Google translate, it can also mean "child"); and obake is a monster in Japanese folklore. Only the manual's description of the race shows the latter's clear origin in halflings.

The list of classes is similar but shows little more originality. Among them, we see senshi (fighter), kishi (paladin), ryoshi (ranger), yabajin (barbarian), yakuza (thief), ansatsusha (assassin), shisai (priest), shizen (druid), genkai (illusionist), and mahotsukai (wizard). Some of these, like mahotsukai and shisai, are quite literal translations. Other times, the game bends D&D tropes to traditional Japanese mythological classes, like ninja, samurai, and ronin.

The game uses Wizardry's character creation system in which the attributes are rolled first, and the player can then select among the classes that meet the minimum attribute requirements. Attributes are strength, constitution, intelligence, dexterity, charisma, size, and power. All but "size" follow the standard D&D mold in which 3-18 is the basic limit for humans and some non-human races might get another point or two in particular attributes. In one unique twist, if a character doesn't have high enough attribute rolls to be anything, you can make him a kosaku (peasant), who would be a challenging character to play.
     

This guy can be just about anything.

    
Character creation finishes off with a name and alignment (if the class doesn't already force a particular alignment). As with Wizardry, good and evil characters can't join the same party here. You can't have a kishi (paladin) with a ninja.

I created a "good" party consisting of:

• Kyuboru, a male human kishi (human paladin)
• Kebukai, a male ogre samurai
• Poniteru,  female obake yakuza (halfling thief)
• Natsu, a female nintoshi ryoshi (half-elf ranger)

     

Natsu's starting attributes.

    

• Kuriboshi, a male toshi mahotsukai (elf wizard)
• Megan, a female kobito shisai (dwarf priest)

      

If I'd known that the group's name would appear constantly on the game window, I would have put some more thought into it.

    
The game starts the party on a tiled landscape somewhere in Kodan. The outdoor window displays prominently the time and the positions of the sun and moon. It uses the old Ultima tradition of disallowing visibility through mountains or dense forests. I learned quite early that there is a terrain type--I guess maybe swamp?--that you don't want to walk on, as it deals damage to the party with every step.
    

The opening moments.

   
If you're already used to Ultima, it takes a while to learn the interface. Movement is via the IJKL cluster; I keep accidentally hitting "M" to move south and finding myself in the "light torch" dialogue. Other commands, like (A)ttack, (B)oard, and (C)ast are similar, but I get tripped up a lot when I go to talk to an NPC and accidentally hit "T" (which is "give" in this game) instead of (O)rate. One interesting addition here is the ability to assign common sequences of commands to macros.

My characters started naked, so a key priority was finding a town and getting some equipment. Within a few screens, I came to a city and entered. (If there's any way to figure out the city names, I haven't discovered it.)  You have to (O)rate with shopkeepers and then hit (B)uy. The game follows rules similar to D&D in terms of who can wield what, but you have to learn Japanese names, like tanto (dagger), harame-do (studded leather armor), and masakari (battle axe). You can apparently possess only one weapon and armor type at a time--picking up a new one replaces the old one--which must significantly limit the utility of the (S)ell command.
    

At last, a game in which bo-staffs and jo-sticks are viable choices.

     
An equipment store sold lock picks, torches, and holy water, and a cafeteria sold food. My characters all started with 99 food (the maximum) and it seems to deplete fairly slowly--maybe 4 units per day, and a game day lasts more than 90 minutes real-time.

The first town also introduced me to the game's approach to NPCs, which is somewhere in between Ultima III and IV. After hitting (O)rate, you have options to chat, talk, inquire, offer gold, offer an item, buy, or sell. Most NPCs respond only to "chat" and deliver a one-line comment. "Talk" is supposed to provide a more in-depth conversation with certain key NPCs; "inquire" allows you to type your own keyword, but of course you have to have learned something to ask from another NPC first. So far, with "chat" and "talk," I've learned that demons are deadly, ships get stolen, ruins are rich, there are caverns under the palace, I should "look to the North" and "find the words," and "things are tough all over."
     

A bit of obvious advice.

     
The town had a ton of locked doors. There's no "open" command in the game; either doors are already ajar or they need to be picked or forced. I didn't exhaustively explore them yet, but at least one of them took me into a sub-area where I found a bunch of treasure chests (a la Ultima III) and a vampire capable of killing my party members in one hit. I don't know if there's any alignment penalty for opening treasure chests found in secret areas.
    

Ultima IV taught me to be wary of situations like this.

     
Enemies are few and far between in the wilderness, not swarming incessantly like in Ultima I-III. The basic approach to combat is similar to Wizardry. In battle, each character acts in turn and can attack, cast a spell, use an item, flee, or try to negotiate for peace. When it comes to spellcasting, characters have a pool of magic points to spend on spells of different levels. The spells are mostly copied from D&D; for instance, mages have clear analogues to "Magic Missile" and "Sleep" at first level and "Lightning Bolt" and "Haste" at third level. Ryoshi (rangers) have shizen (druid) spells, which include clear analogues of "Entangle" and "Faerie Fire." Of course, they're all in Japanese, and as in Wizardry, you have to type the full spell name: kusamotsu for "Entangle," todo for "Magic Missile," akari for "Light," and so forth. Until I have everything memorized, the manual section with the spell names will have to be a constant companion.
    

In combat, my ranger successfully casts "Entangle" on some brigands.

     
Wandering some more in the outdoors, I found the king's castle and (without exploring it at all), marched to his throne room.
     

Could you maybe be more specific?

     
Elsewhere, I discovered a cave that briefly gave me my first experience with dungeons. They maintain the top-down interface instead of switching to first-person like Ultima. Unfortunately, the first monster that attacked me killed one of my characters instantly, so I probably need to save it for later. It's going to be tough to grind, though--I simply don't find many monsters in the outdoor environment. This makes it easier than most Ultima clones to rest and heal after battle, since both hit points and spell points recharge from just waiting or moving around.
    

Entering a dungeon. The terrain tot he south and west of me is poisonous swamp.

     
The key difficulty in Deathlord comes from its permadeath system. In that, it is much like Wizardry. The game saves continually, as you transition areas, and as you enter and exit combat. A character's death is almost instantly recorded in the save file, forcing you to explore resurrection options. If the entire party dies, you can--again, just like Wizardry--call up another party to retrieve their bodies and possessions. The manual suggests that you can backup your party disk occasionally but calls this option "not the most honorable."
    

I didn't hesitate to reload a save state when my priest was killed instantly by a vampire.

    
The permadeath is easily avoided with emulator save states, of course, and I've decided to allow myself the luxury to use these while I figure out the game. Otherwise, I'll just be re-rolling a bunch of Level 1 characters the way I did in Wizardry. Once I actually find a temple to resurrect slain characters, I'll try to adhere more to the game's intended difficulty.

I hate to start a game on a negative tone, but it feels like we've already been here a dozen times, so I'm starting Deathlord already a little tired of it. I've read online that the game's approach to its emerging story and dungeon design are highlights, so I hope to feel better about it next time.

Game 251: Time Horn: Il Corno del Tempo (1991)

Nothing about this game is in English except the title, and even that is repeated in Italian.

     

It's never a good sign when you're role-playing a "hero" named Mordred, but that's where we find ourselves in the curiously redundant Time Horn: Il Corno del Tempo from Lindasoft. It is the first RPG on my list from Italy (and one of only three on the list at all), raising the question of whether other efforts have simply not been catalogued or whether the Italians, having sent America its best food and singers for 100 years, decided to be a good sport and import for a change.

I have not been able to find documentation for the game (which seems to exist only for the Amiga), but fortunately an introductory screen offers the basic plot: In the world of Soldoro, a knight named Mordred struggles to save his kingdom from an invasion by the Occult Master. He has sold an artifact called the Globe of Falibar to get the 4,500 gold coins needed to hire other adventurers and outfit his party. His ultimate goal is to find the Time Horn, kept in the Temple of Soldoro, and use it to destroy the Occult Master.
      

The only documentation I have for this game.

     
The game begins on a  map with five cities (Knheim, Yoras, Darjor, Argat, and Filbrim), some kind of ruined city or castle in the middle, and a temple in the northeast. When you click on each city, it brings up a screen indicating whether you've completed the city's three "missions," so my best guess is that you have to complete all 15 missions before you can do anything with the ruined city or temple.
     

The game world.

     
You don't actually move on the map; you just click from location to location and indicate whether you want to go there, a process that advances the game calendar several days. I'm not sure if there's any real penalty to this or if there's a time limit to the game.

Each of the cities offers the same menu of services: a castello (castle) where you can take missions, a locanda (inn), where you can enlist other adventurers to your cause, an emporio for buying food and drink, an armeria for weapons and armor, an orefice (goldsmith) for uncertain purpose, and a gilda dei maghi for learning new spells.
     

Buying items in the armory.

    
Mordred begins with 30 strength, 15 wisdom, 20 dexterity, 30 resistance, 19 weight, 12 mobility, and no protection. The armory sells a typical set of D&D-derived equipment, translated to Italian, including mazze (maces), pugnali (daggers), and spade (swords). Mordred comes with a sword, a large shield, and something abbreviated "arm. legg." which I suspect is armatura leggera (light armor), which seems to be halfway between armatura cuoio (leather armor) and armatura di ferro (iron armor). As he equips items in missions, his protection goes up but so does his weight. There aren't any expensive or magic items in the armory's list to save for.
     

Checking out Mordred's statistics on the main "town" screen.

    
Characters recruited at inns include a mage, an Amazon, a paladin, a barbarian, and a dwarf. Each costs between 500 (barbarian) and 2000 (mage) gold pieces per mission. The mage starts with a few spells like "Arrow," "Heal," "Poison," and "Cure Poison."
     

The selection of NPCs waiting in the inn.

    
Until I experienced (and lost) a couple of missions, I didn't realize the importance of stocking up on water and food. The characters need to eat and drink frequently during missions (perhaps influenced by the weight carried), and food and water are rarely found during the mission.
     

A sign announces the setting of this city's first mission.

     

Accepting a mission takes you to a mission map, where you encounter monsters, find items, and solve small puzzles. The overall structure feels something like Paladin or HeroQuest, or perhaps a light version of Knights of Legend. Unfortunately, there's no in-game text indicating what your quest or objective is. I don't know if this information accompanied the manual.

During the missions, each character has a certain number of movement points to get around the map. He or she can also go into the inventory to equip and un-equip items, eat, and drink; examine objects and signs; cast spells; and attack enemies. Characters (or, at least, characters at the opening levels) can only attack or cast once per round. When dealing with enemies, there thus aren't many tactics except not to blunder into them, ensuring that they get the first attack. This is hard, because clearly they can sense you from well off-screen (and even use missile weapons from off-screen), but you have no way of seeing them until you're only 6 squares away.
       

My dwarf has just finished attacking the goblin. He then stood aside so my Valkyrie could finish off the goblin with an arrow.

      
Enemies drop weapons when they die, but I suspect the sale value of the items is outweighed by the encumbrance issues.

I attempted the first mission in Knheim twice, the first time with just the mage NPC, the second time with the paladin and barbarian. Both times were miserable failures. In my first attempt, I didn't know enough about how the food and water system worked and didn't bring enough. Both my characters "died exhausted" before the enemies killed them.
     

The paladin is hungry. But his fatigue meter--under his name--depletes whether I feed him or not.

      
The second time, though, the same thing happened, even though I packed plenty of sundries. I did make it a lot further into the level. It starts in a small forest patrolled by "gollums." You have to find a lever to open the gate to a small fortress, where you fight goblins and gnomes. A stairway goes down into a dungeon from there, and multiple rooms and corridors eventually lead to yet another level. The "gnome lords" that inhabit the dungeon were too tough for my characters and ultimately killed them.
     

Somewhere during the mission, I had to find a key that opens a door.

     
Reasoning that without the manual, I needed an advantage for the first mission, just to understand it, I allowed myself to resurrect by save-state-scumming (you otherwise can't save during the missions). But even with this cheat--even reloading after every successful hit by the enemy--I couldn't win. The dungeon just seems to keep going on forever, and my characters have some kind of "fatigue" meter that depletes regardless of whether I have them eat or drink regularly. They kept "dying exhausted." Ultimately, even reloading in those cases, I blundered into a large room with about 5 gnome lords capable of killing each character in a single successful attack. No amount of reloading save states ensured that they missed 5 times in a row. I had to give up.
      

I lose my barbarian during the "monster movement" phase.

    
For my third attempt, I went to a different city, splurged on the Valkyrie, paladin, and dwarf, and tried the first mission there. It started me next to a large farm with several buildings to enter and a large number of goblins swarming the area. After clearing the goblins in the outdoor area, I adopted hit-and-run tactics for those inside: assembling outside the doors, charging through at the beginning of the turn, attacking, and then retreating back outside where the monsters couldn't easily retaliate.
      

My paladin kills a goblin, then prepares to rush back out the southern door so the other goblins can't retaliate during their turns.

      
Once cleared, some of the buildings had chests with gold, jewelry, food, and water.
      

These chests held riches, and ultimately the object of the mission.

      
During the combats, as in the previous scenarios, several of my characters leveled up. This causes each of the characters' attributes to increase between 2 and 6 points. You get experience from successful hits as well as kills, which is nice.
     

The paladin levels up after killing a gnome.

     
Finally, in one of the chests, I found a map. Picking it up gave me the message "missione terminata"--but nothing else happened, and my characters remained in the mission. No new menu option appeared. I hunted around for some kind of exit or extraction point but found nothing.

This therefore seems like another one in which I won't be able to progress unless someone is able to turn up the documentation. I expect that it includes the objective for each mission, instructions on how to get out of the missions, and better information about the fatigue meters. I'll leave this one open for a while and see if anyone shows up with the manual.
    

Just another shot of my characters fighting gnomes and gnome lords in a small dungeon room.

    
I haven't been able to find much on Lindasoft except that it was active from around 1986 to 1992. Time Horn seems to have been an odd lark for the company; its other offerings are sports games like Holo Squash (1992) and Franco Giardelli Hockey (1990). The authors of Time Horn are given in-game as Ignazio Corrao, Sergio Zimmerhofer, and Marco Zimmerhofer. Of the three, Corrao is the only one with a MobyGames profile; he has credits for graphics on a number of European games through 2012.

1991 continues with Synergistic's take on Conan!

Revisiting: Braminar (1987)

    

Braminar

United States

Independently developed; distributed via mail order by PC-SIG

Released in 1987 for DOS

Date Started:  8 November 2010
Date Ended: 28 May 2017

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later) 

    

Braminar is a game that invites us to consider the nature of choice in an RPG. At first look, we are tempted to call it "primitive" because most of its options are simple "Yes/No"--a style that its manual calls "Boolean Interactive Fiction." But then you consider a game like Ultima in which you, say, exit a king's castle, walk a bit to the east and then to the north, and enter a dungeon. During that trip, you have the ability to go north, east, south, or west, but you don't, because other than the dungeon there really isn't any place to go. Braminar would cut out the middle man by having an option to "Enter the dungeon? (Y/N)" immediately upon exiting the castle. Do we really lose anything with such greater efficiency? Are all of the other options offered by Ultima truly "options" if they wouldn't have resulted in anything productive?

    

Braminar's title screen.

     

We could say the same about combat. I claim to like "tactics," and I do, but in this era, all combats occur in a closed system, and despite the myriad combat actions and spells that the games give you, there's usually one clear "best" path that still involves a fair amount of random luck. Is a game truly more "tactical" because you can "power attack," "regular attack," or "defend" instead of just "attack"? Until we enter the era in which game physics allow possibilities that even the developer couldn't anticipate, aren't "tactics" really just an illusion? Why not just let the computer slug it out and get it over with?

     

Reading combat results is almost as fun as participating!

     

There are good counters to these points, largely having to do with enjoying the journey rather than jumping to the destination, but Braminar at least effectively raises the questions. It doesn't do much else because the game really sucks and getting me to replay it was the greatest prank the commenters on my original Braminar post ever pulled. But it did make me think about these issues for about 20 seconds.

      

A Braminar character towards the end of the game.

     

Braminar takes place in a kingdom of the same name, where an "evil overlord" has "raised taxes, enslaved villages, and outlawed hamburgers." The player "plays" a warrior who sets out to raise an army and overthrow the overlord. To do this, he has to raise his own character level to 20, find the Staff of Aviatar, learn the staff's "prime command," and amass enough resources in gold, slaves, and weapons that his army poses a serious challenge to the overlord.

     

"Character creation."

    

The player chooses a name and sex during character creation, but everything else is random, including starting gold and hit points, starting "mecidine," the cost of male and female slaves, hair color, and whether the player has "good looks." From there, the random encounters start coming.

• You come up to a hollow tree with a door. Enter? (Y/N) 
• You come upon an enchanted forest. Enter? (Y/N)
• You find a statue of Pan. Approach the statue? (Y/N)
• You come upon a grass hut. You hear sounds from within. Will you enter? (Y/N)
• While you are walking along, the weather suddenly changes. A tornado comes. Will you take shelter? (Y/N)
• You come upon a city. Do you want to enter? (Y/N)
• Do you want to go to the slave market? (Y/N)
• Sell slaves? (Y/N)
• Things seem strangely quite [sic] when out of no where [sic] jumps A [sic] band of orcs. They look grumpy. They say they will let you pass if you give them 7 male slaves, 6 female slaves, and 4 gold pieces. Or you may fight their champ, and win their horde [sic]. Do you wish to (F)ight, (G)ive, or (R)un?

In between these turns, the game keeps you constantly updated with your current statistics and status. You can't save the game; it's meant to be played and won within an hour or so.
    

While there are no tactics during these options, experience does teach you which options lead to what sorts of encounters. You always want to seek shelter during weather events, or you lose slaves and food. Hollow trees with doors might be occupied by friendly gnomes or vacant. If vacant, they tempt you to steal food or a chest, but about 1/3 of the time, your god is watching and punishes you by lowering you a level if you steal and rewards you with something if you just leave.

     

For doing a good deed, my diety [sic] gives me a box of Duncin' [sic] Doughnuts [sic].

      

Gazing into a river leads you to find an item or fight an encounter with monsters. The "winding mountain path" always leads to a guru who asks if you "seek powers of good." If so, he zaps away both your enchanted ring and staff (more below). The gypsy camp is a waste of time that at best lets you win a knife game with 50/50 odds. Grass huts usually have a helpless puppy or a sick man inside, allowing you to please your god by tending to them. Thickets almost always lead to combats and a nice haul of slaves and gold if you win. The Dark Castle of the Mad King always leads to three options: a dungeon where you can find a few gold pieces, a throne room where you can try to steal gold, and a "gallery" where you might find an artifact item and always find some food. The throne room option offers a kind of "quick time event" where you have to enter a combination of unfamiliar keys to simulate stealing gold.

Once you have a little experience, the game becomes relatively easy, and I can't believe I didn't at least pursue it to the finish line in 2010. Combats, though entirely random, almost always end in the player's victory and the accumulation of levels. Exceptions occur with dragons and demons. For them, you want to have found some poison; if you have poison, the game always offers it as a pre-combat option for an instant win.

     

Killing Cerberus with poison. My god is impressed.

      

You gather slaves from victories and (if you want) from buying them in the slave market. They're nearly impossible to keep fed, so if you have more than a couple of dozen, you almost inevitably get a message every round saying that some of your slaves have died from hunger. They also die from diseases unless you keep a stock of expensive medicine to cure them. There are no in-game consequences to letting your slaves die, but it's generally best to just sell them all every time you enter a town or village, at least until you near the endgame.

     

"Enchanted forest" visits rarely go badly.

    

Every time you stumble upon a city or town, you want to visit the bar and have a drink, which has a chance of increasing your hit points, and also rest in the inn in the finest bed, which restores some of the hit points you may have lost in combats. (I never once had any success socializing in the bar despite my "good looks.") You have the option to purchase swords, daggers, bows, arrows, horses, and carts in towns, but as the options are always (Y/N), you can only buy one each per visit. Encounters with rust monsters destroy your accumulated swords and daggers, and encounters with dark elves warp your accumulated arrows and bows. I'm not sure if any of these things really make a difference in combat anyway. 

    

Buying things one-at-a-time in town.

   

Finding the artifacts necessary for the endgame isn't very hard; you almost always encounter them in the gallery of the Dark Castle of the Mad King or by gazing into a river. A little harder is getting the word of activation for the Staff of the Aviatar. You have to successfully answer a riddle from a Statue of Pan, but the riddles are always nonsense and the "correct" answer is simply randomized. 

    

Neither the riddle nor any of its answers make any sense.

   

None of this sounds horrible, and I would agree that perhaps a compelling game could be made with this approach. Unfortunately, Braminar isn't it. It's humor is just groan-worthy, not actually funny. The game is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes. The encounter types are too few, too repetitive, and too predictable. What happens in the game is mostly random, not a product of intelligence, strategy, or role-playing.

    

This is supposed to be funny, I guess. I just don't know how.

    

But it was pretty pathetic that I didn't win it the first time. To win, you simply have to find the Overlord's Keep after achieving Level 20 and finding at least the Staff of the Aviatar. Two optional artifacts are the Talisman of Braminar and a magic ring. You're almost certain to find the Talisman during the game, and there's no way to drop it, so it would be tough to reach the end without it. The ring--which during the game automatically destroys the evil wizard Anthrax--can't be dropped, but it can be removed from you via the "mountain path" encounter. Unfortunately, that same encounter also removes the staff. So if you want to reach the endgame without the ring, and get the "best" ending, you have to find or re-find the staff and then find the Overlord's Keep before finding or re-finding the ring.

   

The ring is useful in an encounter with Anthrax.

    

Once you reach the keep and invoke the Staff of the Aviatar, all of your resources--slaves, gold, weapons--are converted to a generic "army strength" and then pitted against the overlord's. You then sit there for a few minutes and watch the two armies battle, with occasional messages like "the enemy uses a magical weapon against you" or "your soldiers are high on moral!" [sic] flashing at the top of the screen.

     

This author Has an interesting relationship With capitalization.

      

Assuming that your party wins, you then find yourself in one-on-one combat with the overlord, but he dies immediately if you have the Talisman. I'm not sure what happens if you don't have the Talisman as I was unable to make it to the end without finding it.

Braminar is famous for sending the winning screen to the printer at this point, but that only happens if you lack the magic ring and thus get the "good" ending. If you have the ring, the "bad" ending is displayed on screen: the Ring of Doom takes over your mind, bends it to cruelty, and causes you to become the very overlord that you just defeated.

     

The "bad" ending of the game, although with this game, no ending is truly "bad."

    

But yes, if you managed to get rid of the Ring of Doom, you'd better hope that you configured LPT1 correctly, because that's the only way that you see your final statistics and learn that you are now the new King of Braminar and that someone has passive-voice gifted you with the Wand of Wonder, whatever that is.

    

    

The game inoffensively passes an afternoon, but when someone writes to me that "this is actually one of my favorite PC games of all time; I played it daily for about two years when I was six or seven, and still play it every now and then today...It's an amazing game and I expect to play it for a long time still to come," I have to believe he's trolling because otherwise my heart would break. Meeting the bare minimum requirements to even be considered an RPG, it earns only 13 points on my GIMLET.

The name of Braminar's author seems to have been lost to the ages, although the documentation that comes with the game mentions previous Boolean Interactive Fiction games called Fantasia, Universe, and Astroman; whether these are from the same author is uncertain.

I'm not sure if Braminar was ever distributed by itself. The only distribution I can find for sure was via shovelware disk called Adventure Addiction offered in the PC-SIG catalog (a company that published independent or "shareware" titles), where it was packaged with titles like Under the Ice (a text adventure on a submarine), Quest of Kukulcan ("an Indiana Jones-type adventure"), Gymnasium Adventure, and Palace Adventure. Braminar is marketed here as a "Fantasia-type adventure," so its predecessor must have been better known at some point. I'm afraid the phrase "Boolean Interactive Fiction" never took off, either; Googling it returns only results for Braminar.

Thus we see that not every game I abandoned in 2010 was a gem that deserves to be revisited. Let's take a look at what else 1987 was offering with Deathlord.

The Magic Candle II: The Four and Forty: Summary and Rating

I confess I never thought of the candle's prisoner as roasting in the candle. That makes what we did to Dreax seem cruel.

     

The Magic Candle II: The Four and Forty

United States

Mindcraft (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS

Date Started:  3 April 2017
Date Ended: 21 May 2017

Total Hours: 71

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

The Magic Candle II is far from a bad game--it has most of the strengths of the first game, really--but I didn't enjoy it for reasons that are hard to quantify. It hits all the right notes in a technical sense, and should get a relatively high GIMLET score because of it, but there was something ineffable that made me not look forward to my sessions. Was I just in a bad mood during the last two months? Or are there subtle issues of balance that my approach to rating games doesn't address?

I'm inclined to think that it's more of the latter, and I addressed some of the issues a few entries ago. Combat is either too easy (with the appropriate mushrooms in your stomach, casting "Sense" as you explore) or too hard (no mushrooms, lots of ambushes), and unlike games in which you're at least rewarded with experience for battle after battle, The Magic Candle series imparts so little in the way of actual character development that it feels like you're fighting for nothing. As a consequence, there weren't many battles in the game that I actually enjoyed.

       

Ambushes like this were all too frequent and frustrating in the later parts of the game.

     

My overall indifference to the game can be seen in the numerous things that I didn't explore, do, or take the time to learn. For instance:

• The game gives you "mindstones" to communicate with party members you've left in other areas of the map, but unlike the first game, it's so easy to get around the game world--and there's no time limit--that I didn't feel it was necessary to communicate over large distances.

       

The "mindstones" are a good idea that I did nothing with. I don't even know who the first two people are.

      

• A new music system allows characters to learn half a dozen songs which are supposed to enchant or stun various types of enemies. I couldn't get it to work and didn't really care since it's easy enough to just kill those enemies.

• I didn't wake up half of the gods in the game. It turns out that one of them would have demanded Brennix, and another would have demanded that the sorceress Somona was in my party, so he could kill her. I could have run around talking to NPCs a second time and ensuring that I had the gods' passwords, but the extra attribute points just didn't seem worth it.

• I only bothered to use trainers a couple of times. Some skills advanced by use alone, and for others, the need just wasn't there. 

    

I honestly don't even know what "stealth" is for. Fewer wilderness encounters?

    

• There was something called the "Horn of the Tundra" that I could have found in Maratul and used to call nomads to my side as allies. I never even heard about it.

• There were a few other magic weapons that I could have found if I'd been more careful in my dialogue notes.

      

These issues are all the more notable given that I played with a sub-optimal party. I suppose the best way to make the game truly challenging would be to play with a single character, or just two or three.

The story is okay. This is an era in which most games didn't invest much in stories at all, so for that alone, I'm grateful for the detailed backstory, paragraph book, and NPCs. At the same time, aspects of the story didn't make any sense. Why did Zakhad's forces slaughter the forty guardians of the candle and kidnap the Eldens anyway? Why imprison the Eldens in magic candles? Why did Zakhad think that he had successfully led us into a trap when it depended on so many elements outside his control? Consider, too, that freeing the Eldens was only necessary to defeat Zakhad in the game's own Rube Goldberg plot. Otherwise, they were completely unconnected to the Orb of Light.

     

This didn't quite "ruin" the game, but it came close.

     

Before we get to the GIMLET, let's consider some of the paragraph book entries that I didn't find. I assume most of them are fake, but it's hard to tell; I might have just missed some. Unlike the fake entries in the Gold Box games, which are purposefully designed to lead you astray, most of the ones here could easily have been part of the game: a tavernkeeper calmly discusses his city's resources as a brawl breaks out behind him; the party frees some halflings, who immediately start looking for food; Zakhad taunts the party from atop Rebnard's throne (offering more text here than he does in the real game); the nomad king pretends to be enraged at the party but then turns out to be joking; a goblin tells the party about Deadwood.

There are only a couple that are directly misleading, and both would have you think that the elves of Llendora are evil. One of them depicts the party being captured by the elves and forced to survive for 7 days while the elves hunt them. Another has the sorceress Somona warning the party about the elves' treachery.

   

I never even found the "real" Somona in-game.

     

On to the rating!

1. Game World. I covered this above. The sheer amount of text is impressive, and I love when the backstory integrates well into the actual gameplay. It was just silly at times. The physical world is well-designed, with Gurtex separated into various logical sections. Score: 6.

2. Character Creation and Development. I loved the ability to import the heroes from both previous games, but there otherwise isn't very much to character creation. Development occurs in a few ways, by getting attribute boosts from awakened gods, by training characters in their skills, and (for some skills) by employing those skills. In all cases, the development is extremely incremental, barely felt in the game, and (for weapon skills) too-easily maxed. I suspect I could have won with the starting party even if they hadn't developed at all. I did like that there were a few places in which the party composition mattered to the plot, but in general there weren't any role-playing options related to class or race. Score: 3.

3. NPC Interaction. Definitely a solid part of the game. Talking with NPCs is vital to advancing the plot, and an impressive number of them can be recruited to the party. Even though party-splitting options were reduced for this one, it's still neat that you can spin off your party members to have them study, develop skills, or earn a wage--I just wish there had been more actual reasons to do this. It's also fun the way NPCs comment during exploration; we're almost at the "banter" era perfected in the Infinity Engine titles here. If the game overall were better, it would be fun to replay it with different party combinations. I have no idea why you'd ever favor a hireling over a regular NPC companion, though. Score: 6. 

     

The party learns about the final areas from some NPCs.

      

4. Encounters and Foes. This is one of the areas that sounds better on paper than in the actual game. There is an impressive array of original monsters, well-described in the manual, each with their own special attacks and defenses. But having your shields maxed, eating Gonshis and Mirgets before each combat, and using the "Jump" spell in combat work so universally that none of these special attacks and defenses really matter. Outside of combat, there really aren't any special encounters or puzzles that provide role-playing options. Score: 4.

5. Magic and Combat. Again, good at face value. You've got a tactical combat grid, different types of weapons and attacks, considerations of deployment, movement, and terrain, and an impressive variety of spells. Perhaps if the mushrooms weren't so effective, or if the party didn't always act first in every round, or if any number of other variables had been better balanced, I would have entered combat eagerly each time instead of groaning. Score: 5.

      

The pre-combat options were a welcome addition, but they almost always backfired.

     

6. Equipment. Weapons, armor, clothing, helms, mushrooms, utility items (shovels, picks), and quest items pretty much exhaust the equipment list. I liked that there were more artifact weapons and armor here than in the first game. The "wear and tear" system doesn't really add anything to the game since it takes a trivial amount of time to repair items. Score: 4.

7. Economy. As with most CRPGs, this category starts out well. You have limited funds and lots of things to buy, including equipment, mushrooms, spellbooks, and training. There's a real incentive to have some characters work an "honest" wage, or to engage in multi-city trade. But after a few successful dungeon crawls, the party is swimming in funds and can keep a stock of 99 of everything. Score: 4.

8. Quests. The main quest is relatively well-done. You start off with one mission (find out what happened to the four-and-forty) but soon find that it's dovetailed with another: help Rebnard conquer Gurtex. While there are no real role-playing options, branches, or alternate endings, there are enough optional elements that I would consider them authentic "side-quests." Score: 4.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The iconographic VGA graphics look fine; the bloopish sound effects are only okay. While I appreciated the keyboard interface, there were elements of it that continually annoyed me, such as the in ability to pool no more than 99 of an item (and thus make even distribution among all characters impossible), the cumbersome system of transferring items between players, and the need to save the notepad independently of the game (I almost never remembered). There were a number of oddities with the way that text scrolled and/or the way you have to read dialogue that continues off the screen that had me missing half of it most of the time. There were other quirks that I didn't talk about in my postings because I had a hard time nailing down what was happening, but I'd frequently use some pre-memorized keyboard combination to do something common, look at the screen, and find I was in a completely different section of the interface. I'd go to eat a Sermin, for instance, and realize that somehow we had camped and I was in the spell memorization screen. Overall, it was somewhat frustrating. Score: 4.

     

The notepad was a good feature. Losing it every time you reload was not.

     

10. Gameplay. I have to give it a lot of points here for being open and nonlinear. It's at least somewhat replayable (with different party combinations). But I also found it too easy and just a tad too long. Score: 5.

Add them up, and we get a subtotal of 45, but I feel the need to subtract a couple of points. One area that my GIMLET doesn't handle very well is the quality of dungeon exploration. When I've wanted to award points for the creative puzzles of a game like Dungeon Master, I've had to shoe-horn them into "Encounters and Foes" or offer bonus points at the end. Here, I have to do the opposite. Although I liked them in the beginning, by the end of the game, I thought The Magic Candle II's approach to dungeons just sucked. They're too big, they take forever, and they're a nightmare to navigate. To ensure you don't miss an important object or encounter, you have to hit every room, and because teleporters are so common in the dungeons, you have to step on practically every square, which involves a lot of "Repel" and "Walkwater" spells as well as creative party configurations. All the teleporters and ambushes got old fast, and the rooms are all relentlessly predictable--it would have been nice to occasionally enter one with no combats.

Thus, subtracting 2 points, we get the final score of 43, 6 points lower than the original Magic Candle but still not bad. There are enough good elements that it deserves to be in my "recommended" zone; it's just oddly unsatisfying.

        

        

More than usual, I was curious how the reviewers of the time felt about the game. I was gratified to see Scorpia, in the June 1992 Computer Gaming World, expressing much of the same angst. While expressing admiration for many of the game's elements, she found dungeon-crawling a "tedious chore," largely because of all the ambushes. She also found the music system "too complicated to bother with." Overall, she found it "an uneven sequel" that needed "more work...in some areas." It sounds like the original release was terribly buggy, too.

As we've noted several times previously, by the early 1990s, CGW wasn't letting Scorpia have the final word on anything, so they published a follow-up review by Stefan Petrucha in the August 1992 issue. His experience with CRPGs is so limited that the review is almost embarrassing to read, far too concerned with graphics and sound, annoyed that he occasionally had to break immersion by looking things up in a paragraph book. (An editorial interpolation helpfully noted that such attitudes are not universal.) This line is particularly irksome: "Those who want a great musical score and the capacity to push the limits of their new 486/33 boards with SVGA graphics will be sorely disappointed." What you mean here, Stefan, is that non-CRPG fans will be sorely disappointed. But even though he clearly didn't win the game, he expresses the same praise I did for the world-building and NPC contributions.

The series has been good enough that I'm curious to see how it evolves in The Magic Candle III (1992) and Bloodstone: An Epic Dwarven Tale (1993), which I understand use the same engine. 1992 year also saw the release of Siege, a strategy game set on Gurtex, which I'm hoping doesn't have a lot of plot elements necessary to understand the series. Magic Candle creator Ali Atabek moved to Interplay in 1994, taking more of a management role, and he seems to have departed the industry later in the 1990s, moving to the medical software field.

Up next on the 1991 list, we have our first Italian CRPG, Time Horn.