The CRPG Addict

In Recovery

2012-01-20T13:54:00.004-05:00

Readers,

As you may have noticed, I haven't posted in a week, and I wasn't exactly going gangbusters before that. I haven't come through on several topics, including finishing Wizardry V, posting on dnd, or offering a GIMLET for Skyrim, and I've only won two games since August.

I finally have to face reality: my workload, plus the non-work goals that I want to accomplish, are not compatible with spending hundreds of hours a month playing computer games. Since I became self-employed last year, all this game-playing is directly affecting my financial security.

When I started the blog, it was because I felt an unnatural compulsion to play these games (I hit upon my plan to play every game in chronological order before I knew I was going to blog about it), and I wanted something positive and permanent to come out of it. Except for one or two weeks of Skyrim, I haven't felt this compulsion for several months. Although I value your comments and our dialogue, I'm just not having any fun with it. I know that's showing in both my postings and long absences.

I'm not definitively canceling the blog. It's possible that at some point this year, my professional life will achieve a greater degree of stability and I'll find myself with a lot of down time again. Or I may wake up in the middle of the night three weeks from now, and feel a mad desire to explore wireframe hallways, and you'll seen an erratic posting here or there. In the meantime, I'll leave the blog active for new readers who want to read my postings on older games.

I'm sorry it's come to this, but I thank you for your participation in my little quest. You're the best NPCs.

Sincerely,

Chester "Chet" Bolingbroke
"The Recovering CRPG Addict"

The Best Laid Plans...

2012-01-13T21:54:00.001-05:00

Well, since I last posted:

1. Irene only managed to get my characters up to about Level 12. Partly, this is because she thought better of her all-Buffy-all-the-time plan (she only watched through Season 3), and partly it's because I forgot to show her how to periodically go and level up the characters. So I'm in no better shape than when I left except I have some extra characters in case I lose any more.

2. What I thought would be a leisurely trip full of plenty of time to play games turned into my busiest week in months.

3. It turns out there's no good way to allow donations to Irene's Avon Walk account without ruining our anonymity.

Still, she did her best and deserves some help if I can find a way around #3. More on dnd soon.

P.S. In between my postings, you might want to check out The Adventure Gamer. Its author, The Trickster, is a frequent commenter here. He's doing essentially what I'm doing, but for adventure games. I find his postings very well written, and he even has a GIMLET-style rating system. We're going to overlap on a few games eventually, and it'll be fun to see his take from an AG perspective.

Wizardry V: Sub-Contracting

2012-01-09T19:40:00.000-05:00

My party gets damaged by an oddly-out-of-place Japanese warrior.

A few weeks ago, commenter Jay said that Wizardry V has "as much game time as Skyrim does." When I read his comment, I thought, "Sure. If you're a n00b." Well, now I owe Jay an apology. If anything, he understated. Wizardry V is killing me.

The game does not feel as if it's notably more difficult, in terms of the encounters, than Wizardry I. The difficulty, rather, comes in the size of the game. Each of the levels is at least twice as big as the ones in the first game. Here's Level 3:

I can't color in all of the areas until I'm sure there isn't some kind of transport from a lower level. Also, there's a door I can't open yet that, for all I know, fills in the entire remaining part of the lower half of the map.

The levels are not only large but irregular. Level 3 is at least somewhat square, even if a lot of the space in the upper right and left corners isn't used. Level 4, on the other hand, proved to be extremely long and narrow, although I still haven't explored one stairway there from Level 5 (which I've also partly mapped), so for all I know the part I've mapped is only a small part of the level:

At 47x7, even this section of the level is 46% larger than any level in the first game.

I still find a certain amount of joy in mapping. In these old tile-based games, where there are only a certain number of squares, every square you map is incremental progress towards the end of the game. Even if you could map modern games this way, you wouldn't have the same surety that you were advancing slowly but surely towards the conclusion, as modern games re-use areas frequently. When I played Dragon Age: Origins with my wife, I honestly had no sense of how much longer the game was going to last. When the darkspawn army started attacking Denerim, I figured that was the conclusion, but you never know--the dragon might have flown away to some darkspawn HQ that opened up a brand new set of maps.

Anyway, it's not so much the size of the maps in Wizardry V that makes the game take a long time. I haven't gotten all the way to Level 10 yet, but I'd be willing to bet that, just like the first game, the literal distance between the dungeon entrance and the final square--owing to elevators and portals and such--is less than 100 steps. If you had a party with a high-enough level, I'll bet you could finish it in less than an hour--something that would be impossible with Skyrim. The difficulty comes from the sheer risk associated with exploration. In a permanent-death game, you put your party in peril with every step that you take, and when the levels are more than double the size of Wizardry, that's a lot more chances to run into a party of monsters that kills you. I lost three members of my Christmas-themed party to failed resurrections, including my mage, and I began to dread the prospect of grinding up new ones again.

So when my wife, who has this week off--a week that I'm away on business--announced her intention to do nothing, aside from her daily treadmill session, but sit on the couch and re-watch all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I hit upon an idea.

"How about you do a little light work for me on your laptop while you're watching TV?" I asked.

"No."

"Come on. You owe me a favor." This, strictly speaking, wasn't true. But I'm absent-minded enough that it's possible she owed me a favor and I just forgot. The look she gave me told me that not only was I wrong, but that even suggesting such a thing after putting up with my Skyrim epoch was pushing things too far.

So I pulled out my nuclear option, which I'll tell you about at the end of the posting. She listened, asked a lot of questions, and finally agreed, with one annoying condition: the party had to be good.

"It really doesn't make any difference. It's not like Dragon Age--you don't really make any choices that...." I stopped because I could see I was getting nowhere.

We installed the game on her laptop and spent some time side-by-side rolling up a new party. This took a lot less time with double the computing power, and she seemed to have a lot more luck on the high bonus rolls than I did. She even got a lord. I spent some time getting them up to Level 8 or so while showing her the basics of the game.

The new party.

And so, for the next week, while I'm attending a conference in Los Angeles, she'll be sitting on the couch, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and grinding my party away. I honestly don't know if she'll be fanatical about it, and I'll come home to Level 40 characters, or if she'll just get them up to the level of the three characters I just ditched, which was around 13.

Her task is easy. There's a portal on Level 1 that takes you to an area of Level 2 where you can get an elevator to Levels 3, 4, and 5. I made her memorize the way and gave her the following set of instructions:

1. The moment you get to Level 2, cast LOMILWA (light), LITOFEIT (float so as to avoid traps), and MAPORFIC (protection, which the priest doesn't have yet but should before long).

2. Stand just outside the portal on Level 2. Spin in place and let the monsters come to you. Concentrate your attacks and use mass-damage spells (she has a list, including those she should expect to get later) on any groups of 3 or more.

3. At any point that you run out of damage spells, have less than half your healing spells, the party has less than half its hit points, or any character is afraid, paralyzed, or poisoned, immediately go back into the portal and return to the surface and heal everyone.

4. When you're able to win at least 15 combats before returning to the surface, take the elevator to Level 3 and do the same thing--spin in place right next to the elevator, fight, follow the same rules, and jump back into the elevator if you encounter problems. Once you can win 15 combats in a row there, go to Level 4. She's not to proceed any further than Level 4, though--there are some enemies on Level 5 that can kill even high-level characters in one hit.

To help with the combat and healing, I left her the items and gold from my previous party. I don't think that's cheating, since the game seems to encourage you to swap party members in and out--the key unit of gameplay is the "scenario," not the specific party. I told her just to drop any new items--I figure her chances of finding anything better than the party already has (the previous party had been to Level 5) is low. If she messes up and loses anyone, I still have three characters from the old party alive. We'll have a Buffy/Christmas Story crossover.

So what did I have to promise? Here it is: Irene's mother died of breast cancer three years ago, and for the past two years, she's done the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. She has to raise $1,600 by April, and with few family members left and mostly-poor co-workers, she finds it difficult. I told her I would raise the money for her. In a few days, I'll be posting a link in the sidebar of my blog, and if you're feeling charitable, you can contribute to cancer research in the name of the mother of the woman whose tolerance makes this blog possible. (Please, no pressure, though: I have other ways to raise the money, too.)

While she does my level-grinding for me, in California, I'll be exploring dnd and making my revisit to The Bard's Tale III. When I get back next weekend, I'll try to finish up Wizardry V with my newly-buff party.

What I Hate Most about Skyrim

2012-01-05T23:36:00.000-05:00

I know you're all looking forward to me moving on from Skyrim and getting back to my regular blogging, and I promise it's coming up soon. I'll win this game this weekend, and then the X-box goes to the nearest yard sale. In the meantime, I thought I'd commiserate with you on my biggest pet peeve of the game.

***

I'm walking outside of some place like Solitude, enjoying the sunshine, the birds flying overhead, the architecture, and the conversations between NPCs working the farm. I'm dangerously close to lollygagging.

I come upon a Khajiit sitting cross-legged on the ground. "Huh!" I say. "I don't think I've spoken to him before. Let's see what he has to say."

ME: "Greetings"

KHAJIIT: "Be wary, my friend, for you greet S'am the Murderer!"

GAME: Ba-da-BUM.

ME: "Wait. What? I don't want another quest."

KHAJIIT: "S'am the Murderer is tired of murder today, though. Perhaps you can fulfill my latest contract for me? I'll teach you everything I know about stealth."

ME: "No! I don't want to help you murder people! Get off my quest board!"

KHAJIIT: "How...unfortunate. I'll remain here until you decide to be reasonable."

ME: "I'm not going to 'be reasonable'! I'm going to turn you in to the nearest guard!"

KHAJIIT: "Ha! As if you have any dialogue options when talking with guards. No, I'm just going to hang out here. You'll come back eventually."

ME: [ends conversation]. "Well, maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe he wants me to kill some Thalmor or something. Let's check..." [opens quest log].

Yeah, I don't have Photoshop, all right? I did this in PowerPoint.

ME: "The hell with that! I'm not murdering young lovers! My character is supposed to be good!

A peal of thunder ripples across the sky as every Daedra lord in the game simultaneously chuckles.

I run up to the nearest guard. "Hey!"

GUARD: "...I'm not kidding you. Not for one second. Curved. Swords. I mean, how the #&*# do you forge a..."

ME: "AAAAARGH!"

I run back to the Khajiit, whip out my Blade of Woe, coat it with poison of lingering damage, sneak up behind S'am, and score a 15x damage hit.

S'am falls to his knees and catches his breath. Again and again I strike him, to no avail.

KHAJIIT: "Have you changed your mind about the contract?"

GUARD: "Stop right there, criminal scum!"

I go charging off into the distance. Pausing the game, I grab my notebook from my desk and vow to write down my own quests from now on and never look at the quest log again.

Three hours later, after all my quests are completed except one.

ME: "You know, I never really did like Mjoll the Lioness. She's probably secretly working with the Thieves' Guild..."

***

Now, I made this one up, of course, but there are plenty of quests that you literally cannot avoid, and the only way to get them off your list is to do something horrible. [Spoilers follow.] Perhaps the worst is in Solitude, where you almost immediately get a miscellaneous quest to "Talk to Jaree-Ra about possible employment." Say three words to him, and you're locked into a quest to put out the fire in a lighthouse, run a ship full of innocent people aground, and loot the wreckage. Even though a nearby guard talks about wanting to arrest Jaree-Ra, you can't talk to him about it. You can't kill Jaree-Ra. There's no way out of it except to ignore the quest in your quest list, which is really hard. I'm not the only one who has that problem, right? Right?

I don't think I'm racist, but if I was, it would be towards Argonians. Just...look at them.

It gets even better. Read a freaking book and you get tagged with "Boethiah's Calling," which ultimately requires you to sacrifice a follower on Boethiah's altar. I couldn't get it off my list even when I massacred all of her followers in front of her shrine--she apparently enjoys that. Want to avoid joining the Thieves' Guild? Ha! Not if you want to solve the Stones of Barenziah quest. Not to mention that you get roped into the Thieves' Guild the moment you have to talk to one of its members during the main quest. Oh, and if a noble-looking knight asks for your help clearing evil from an abandoned house in Markarth, don't do it; you'll end up having to kill not only him, but an innocent priest. Have a problem murdering old ladies? Don't talk to Aventus Aretino in Windhelm. Don't even go near his house.

The problem is so prevalent that when I did find a way out of two quests--joining the Dark Brotherhood and eating dead people--by turning my sword on the quest-givers, I was astonished that it worked. I've never played a game that simultaneously amazed me with the scope and variety of its quests and infuriated me with the inescapability of them. What makes it worse are the quest items that you can't get out of your damned inventory. I'm carrying six or seven things that, because of bugs or some non-traditional approach that I took, I can neither use nor drop.

The kind of hand-holding evidenced by un-killable NPCs and un-droppable items drives me mad. Morrowind had neither of these "features" and did fine. If you killed someone that broke the main quest, you got a warning, but otherwise you could backstab anyone that offended your sense of morality. Even Oblivion, though it had a few un-killable NPCs, just told you that the quest was over because some key person had died. It didn't try to protect everyone in the game who might some day give you 150 gold pieces. (My favorite approach was in Baldur's Gate, where if you killed a crucial NPC, he'd be replaced in all his future scenes by "Biff the Understudy.") On my current Skyrim playthrough, I got so mad at the citizens of Markarth that I decided to kill every one of them (I partly justified it because I was a vampire at the time) and found that half of them just wouldn't perish, no matter how long I stood over them, swinging my blade, screaming "Why...won't...you...die?!"

Okay, calm down, Chester. It's just a game. And it's a good game. I'm going to give you a mock GIMLET on in when I finish, and I'm sure it'll rank high. But damn, it's got some annoying quirks and bugs. With the effort that they put into all other aspects of the game, I don't understand why they couldn't have put just a little more into the quest options and given me the opportunity to FUS-RO-DAH Jaree-Ra off the castle ramparts.

The CRPG Compulsive?

2012-01-01T20:30:00.000-05:00

Me and Irene--if I was dumb enough to face my computer in such way that she could walk up behind me and see what I was doing without me noticing.

If you're like many people, today is the first day of a new set of resolutions to finally get your life on track. Or tomorrow, since who starts resolutions on a weekend? Actually, I forgot: tomorrow is a holiday for most people. So Tuesday would be better. Definitely Tuesday.

Most resolutions have something to do with addiction. Quit smoking; quit drinking (or drink less); stop eating so much; stop spending so much. We tend to think about certain resolutions in terms of habits that we want to adopt, but most of the time, this means getting rid of a habit that we want to break. Going to the gym more means watching TV less. Spending more time with the family means spending less time on computer games.

Now before you get worried, I didn't make a resolution to stop playing games, though it would probably be better for my life if I did. That would be one-too-many addictions to jettison in 2012, and I'm already going to have my hands full working on one other. But it's not something I should dismiss lightly. Unfortunately, I don't mean "CRPG Addict" as a metaphor.

If I had a blog called "The Booze Addict"* in which I described my adventures drinking alcohol night after night, spending at least six hours with each brand before rating them on a custom scale you'd all regard it with numb horror, and my comments would be filled with pleas to get help and hyperlinks to Alcoholics Anonymous. But people can read "CRPG Addict" and think that it's meant in a cutesy way, like "chocoholic."

(After I wrote this, I typed http://boozeaddict.blogspot.com into the browser header, and found that it's a real blog, titled "My Family and My Booze: Daily reports on getting off my alcohol addiction." The blogger posted four consecutive days in a row between December 21, 2001 and December 24, 2001, and then never again. I really, really hope that he just discovered that he didn't like blogging.)

I don't mean to suggest that video game addiction is as devastating, or as hard to kick, as alcohol or drug addiction, but it's still a problem. Consider this: I played Skyrim from 3:00 p.m. yesterday until 7:00 a.m. this morning. The only reason that I didn't start playing until 3:00 p.m. yesterday is because I slept until 2:00 after playing until 6:00 a.m. yesterday morning. In fact, in the last seven days, I have done nothing but sleep, bathe, and play Skyrim, save for a couple hours here and there that I used to answer e-mail and crank out my posting on PEDIT5.

I can't help but wonder what I have to show for those 100+ hours. I haven't even won the freaking game. (I would have, of course, if I hadn't started over twice.) I'm way behind on work. I've probably gained 15 pounds, because all my meals have been taken from the couch and generally have involved some form of melted cheese. I only posted one blog entry. I didn't do any of the work in a class I'm taking.

Please, no Skyrim hate in the comments. The issue here isn't whether it's a good game. The issue is that, at least for me, it is an addictive game. Once I start playing it, I literally cannot seem to force myself to stop. "To do" lists, timers, appointments, meals, circadian rhythms, deadlines... Skyrim trumps all of them.

The secret to success surely must be treating your real "to do" list with as much fidelity as this.

This has happened before, of course. I started this blog writing about my "lost weekend" playing Oblivion, and I remember similar stretches of Might & Magic VI and Baldur's Gate in which I pushed the rest of the world aside and did nothing but play games. The advantage was that after about 40 hours, I won them. Skyrim, if you do all the quests--and we must do all the quests, even the bounty hunts and dragon hunts and giant hunts and burglary jobs that keep coming and coming and never actually end yes we must do them too must do them ALL hahahahahaha--must be one of the longest-playing CRPGs ever made--aside from MMORPGs, of course, which I treat like meth. Not even once.

I woke up this morning determined to understand my addiction a little better and, upon reflection, realized that many of my problems have a similar root. Consider:

I rarely sit down to play a game unless I know I'm going to have several hours to devote to it. Related, if I do start playing a game knowing that I'll only have a short time to devote to it, I almost always end up exceeding that time.

If I decide to cook myself some pasta for dinner, I intentionally make too much (i.e., the whole box) because I'm afraid if I don't, I'll run out of pasta before I'm ready to stop eating pasta (which is well past the point at which I'm full).

Although I might go weeks between drinks, when I do drink, I almost never have a single drink. Or even just two drinks.

The problem is, this might not be "addiction." A little time at the dictionary and Wikipedia suggests that addiction is a physical or psychological dependence, such that one suffers withdrawal if the object of the dependence is removed. This isn't quite my problem. I go long stretches--as you're all well aware--without playing any games. I also go long stretches without eating, drinking alcohol, or gambling, too. The problem is that when I do do those things, I tend to do them--just like playing Skyrim--to complete satiation. I have, in short, no sense of moderation.

I then researched compulsion for a little while, and while it wasn't a perfect fit, either, it seemed to describe my problem a little better. Compulsives feel an inescapable urge to do something long past the point that it becomes sensible to do it. I had always assumed that the thing in question need be unproductive or unpleasurable, but apparently this need not be the case: witness compulsive eating or compulsive gambling.

The odd thing is that for the past two years, I've been feeling better about my computer game problem. Despite the fact that I've been playing and blogging about it, until recently, I haven't had a lot of days in which I've kicked myself for too much game playing. And the literature on compulsion helps me understand why: a key treatment (aside from medication) for compulsive disorders is to force yourself to do something that breaks the pattern. I'm largely not playing Skyrim right now because I ran out of soda earlier today. Having to get properly dressed, leave the house, and go to the store got me out of the Skyrim zone, and by the time I got home, I didn't feel any particular need to get back in it. When I play CRPGs on my computer and blog about them, the process of stopping to write notes and blog entries breaks the pattern of constant playing and keeps me from playing too much.

I have thus made one game-related resolution for 2012: Skyrim will be the last game that I play that is not part of this blog. After that, I don't play anything else unless I'm actively blogging about it. This should both increase the frequency of my postings in 2012 and also decrease my feelings of self-loathing over too much game-playing.

I should mention, before I sign off, that Irene has been an absolute angel, promising not to complain about my obsession or my odd hours as a sort-of Christmas gift, as long as I get it together this coming week. But Monday is a holiday and all, so I really hope she meant starting Tuesday.

Game 68: The Dungeon/PEDIT5 (1975)

2011-12-29T23:30:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, not the original welcome screen. But probably close.

Here I am, nearly two years after starting this blog, doing what I should have done in the beginning: playing the first CRPG, regardless of platform. The Dungeon was written by Reginald "Rusty" Rutherford on a PLATO terminal at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. It is also known as PEDIT5 because of its original file name, kept generic (the prefix belonged to the Population and Energy group) to avoid signaling that it was a game.

In 2008, Mr. Rutherford described the history of the game in an e-mail sent to Matt Barton and published at Armchair Arcade. In it, he confirms the year as 1975 (in my previous posting, I thought it might have been 1974) and notes that dnd (of which you'll hear more about soon) was already in development. The game features single-character gameplay in a fixed 40-50-room dungeon with random encounters. The character is a generic fighter/magic-user/cleric based on the conventions of Dungeons & Dragons, which had been released the previous year.

We don't know, of course, whether PEDIT5 was the "first" CRPG. For all we know, there were hundreds of such efforts around the world after the release of Dungeons & Dragons, some only half-completed, some only played by the author and his friends. Lore tells of one named m199h that predates PEDIT5 and was lost. What we can say is that PEDIT5 was probably the first CRPG that is widely played, and it is the earliest CRPG that we can still play now.

The manual documents the game thoroughly.

I'm playing it thanks to the folks at Cyber1, who have resurrected the PLATO system and have been collecting its original programs (or "lessons," as PLATO was an educational tool). The manual sets the game in the year 666 in a dungeon called Ramething, beneath a castle of the same name in the town of Mersad ("ambush" in Persian) in the country of Caer Omn (as far as I can tell, "Caer Omn" and "Ramething" are original). You play a "brave young fighter" heading into the dungeon to collect treasure, with the ultimate goal of amassing 20,000 experience points before fleeing the dungeon.

No re-rolling! These early games were brutal.

The game begins by rolling you four attributes: strength, intelligence, constitution, and dexterity. You also get a random roll for hit points. Presumably, Rutherford couldn't think of a meaningful way to program in wisdom or charisma. After giving your character your name, you're dumped into the dungeon at the entrance. Since there are no safe havens, there's no reason not to just head out and go exploring.

Casting a spell in combat. Unfortunately, the "Level 5 Man" defeated me.

Navigation is with the arrow keys and the "b" key to "bash" doors (which has a chance of failing). There are even secret doors, which the manual says you have a 1/6 chance of detecting each time you pass.

The first CRPG is also the first CRPG with secret doors.

Although there are 16 spells in the game (8 mage and 8 cleric, divided into two levels each), you start with only one mage spell. The spells are similar to D&D (sleep, magic missile, cure, hold person, etc.) but with some odd rules influenced by programming limitations. There are no "saving throws," for instance: sleep always works (but not on undead); invisibility just allows you to flee; and charm causes monsters to instantly kill themselves.

A "sleep" spell allows you to effect a satisfying coup-de-grace [dammit, I can't figure out how to make a circumflex in Blogger].

I'm not sure how the game decides which of its 25 monsters (represented by 5 icons) to throw at you. My first encounters, near the entrance, were generally with level 1 rats and kobolds. As I explored, however, I invariably encountered something like a level 5 wight well before I was prepared to deal with it. I never found a dragon.

it was too soon for undead.

The initial attribute roll is enormously important in determining success. None of my characters who got less than a 10 in strength or dexterity survived their first combats. The manual notes that "when you and a monster have combat, you take alternating swings at each other until one is dead." In practice, the game told me that I either defeated the monster or was killed instantly. I don't know if this is because, at my level, the combats took only one round, or if the game just runs all the rounds quickly, in sequence, and tells you the result.

The usual result.

You can achieve up to 5 character levels in the game, although you get access to more spells in between levels. You can also improve by finding a sword +1 or a sword +2. Each monster has a certain number of hit points and is worth a certain number of experience points depending on its level. Level 1 kobolds have 1-3 hit points and are worth 10 experience points, while the toughest creature in the game--dragons--have 6-36 hit points and are worth 840 experience points. With the goal to get to 20,000 experience (though this also includes treasure you find), it takes an awful lot of combat.

Why wouldn't you take it?!

I'd like to be able to say that I played it all the way to 20,000 experience points and "won" the first CRPG, but after I fielded about 25 characters, all of them dying within the first 6 combats, none of them achieving more than 250 experience points, I realized it would take far too long. Some people did it, though: the "Hall of Fame" lists at least 10 players who got more than 20,000 experience; the highest is someone named just "Bob." I'm not sure if this is some original file that reflects players from the 1970s, or if it just shows recent players with Cyber1 accounts. RPGCodex user Elzair (who sometimes comments in my blog) did a "let's play" almost three years ago and had similar ill luck; his posting on it is worth reading if you want more screenshots and rage faces. I Googled a bit, but I was unable to find a testimonial or screenshots from anyone who won the game. I suspect that it doesn't really acknowledge the "win" or do anything special, and that you just have to smile in satisfaction at your high score in the Hall of Fame.

Some day I shall sit around a campfire and tell my sons the epic tale of "the goose."

I'm actually quite impressed. I would have forgiven the first CRPG for being really basic and dumb: perhaps a text-only game in which you managed some basic attributes against some random encounters. (In fact, I've played this game; it was called Braminar, and it came out 12 years after PEDIT5.) Instead, we get a fairly large dungeon, a solid set of attributes, challenging random encounters, 8 spells, monsters with resistances based on type, and graphics that the DOS platform won't surpass until Ultima III. It's a bit too hard, of course, but hell, when it was the only CRPG in existence, a little challenge--and the ability to rate your score against your friends'--was the whole point. For my money, this is at least as good a game as Akalabeth, one of the first commercial CRPGs, which had fewer monsters and encounters, fewer spells, and less sensible character progression. Obviously, I don't recommend playing it now, except as an archaeological exercise; any roguelike will give you a similar challenge with a better gameplay experience.

The manual has an optimistic "future improvements" section, including a multi-level dungeon, that never got implemented because Rutherford left the Population & Energy group in 1976. But Resch, Kemp, Hagstrom, and Nakada incorporated the suggested developments into Orthanc, which I will play anon. My next PLATO-related posting, however, will be on dnd, and I'll talk a bit about the information I picked up from one of its developers, Dirk Pellett.

If you're waiting for an update on Wizardry V, I'm still playing, but having trouble assembling enough interesting material for a blog entry. I'll post something this weekend on it no matter where I am. In the meantime, here are some final words from The Dungeon/PEDIT 5:

The Earliest CRPGs

2011-12-24T12:32:00.000-05:00

The welcome screen of Dungeon, a 1975 PLATO CRPG.

Jazz vies with CRPGs as the great passion of my life. My favorite jazz recording is the 1927 of Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, and Jimmy Dorsey playing "Singin' the Blues" (there's a slightly-bad YouTube version here). The piece is notable as a transition point in jazz, between the joyous, polyphonic cacophony of New Orleans-style jazz and the era of great soloists, and between the carefully-orchestrated pseudo-improvisation (on recordings, at least) of Dixieland and the actual improvisation of the forthcoming bebop era.

What's particularly notable about the performance is that the band never states the melody. From the moment that Trumbauer swoops in with his C-melody saxophone, it's all improvisation. If you had the lyrics in front of you, you'd still have trouble singing along, just like you would with Coleman Hawkins's 1939 recording of "Body and Soul." But you don't have the lyrics in front of you, no matter what a host of web sites tell you; you can't, because we don't really know what they were. I've never even been able to find a "straight" version of the melody. All we can do is try to reconstruct it from the Beiderbecke/Trumbauer performance.

There's a lot about the history of jazz that's like this. We're not really sure where the term came from. We don't know what early jazz bands sounded like because they weren't recorded until 1917, and even then they were crammed into three minutes.. Of perhaps the first great jazz soloist, New Orleans's Buddy Bolden, we have no recordings and only one scratchy photograph. We're not sure who played the trombone on "Singin' the Blues" or some of the instruments on many of Louis Armstrong's early recordings. Much of the history of jazz is simply lost.

Thankfully, the same doesn't have to be true of CRPGs. Unlike jazz, whose antecedents trace to the antebellum south, we can fix the earliest possible origin of CRPGs. Computing power didn't exist to create them until the 1970s and, a few quasi-CRPG precursors aside, they couldn't have been created earlier than the first commercial non-computer RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, came out in 1974. Thus, to search for the earliest CRPGs, we need go no further than the early 1970s which, while almost 40 years ago, was only 40 years ago. Plenty of the first CRPG developers and players are still around. Much of the source code still exists.

In Dungeons and Desktops (2008), Matt Barton calls the 1970s the "Dark Age" of CRPGs, but he does his best to sort through some of the gloom. His account generally matches, but in a few notable cases conflicts, with the recollections of Dirk Pellett, an early CRPG contributor who wrote a history of early CRPGs in an introduction to dnd on Cyber1's PLATO mainframe. Pellett's history, unfortunately not accessible from the Internet, appeared in 2010.

Both trace the first CRPGs to 1974, almost immediately after the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Pellett gives the "first" CRPG as a file called "m119h," which was deleted soon after its creation by someone on the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since the mainframe was intended for "serious academic study and coursework," administrators were quick to delete game programs, and one suspects that there were any number of CRPGs created and deleted while in various stages of development during this era.

The earliest surviving CRPG seems to be a 1974 or 1975 game called The Dungeon by Reginald "Rusty" Rutherford, who was studying in Urbana. He titled the file "pedit5" (which some sources give as the name of the game) to keep it from being deleted as an obvious game. This didn't save it, but somehow the source code got preserved, and it's available on Cyber1 now.

Perhaps the earliest CRPG still in existence.

The game uses an iconographic perspective with surprisingly good icons.

The original dnd by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood came out the same year, and some sources put it earlier than The Dungeon. The game underwent several versions, and this is the one that Dirk Pellett and his brother Flint Pellett are credited with contributing to. It also uses an iconographic perspective, and its random encounters with creatures and treasure show it as the obvious precursor to the DND/Telengard line of games by Daniel Lawrence that I wrote about in July 2010.

The odd thing is that most histories insist that Daniel Lawrence's DND is "not to be confused" with the original dnd, but to me it's obvious that the former is a descendant of the latter, and indeed, Dirk Pellett claims quite bluntly that Lawrence plagiarized his DND (which he commercialized as Telengard) from the original Whisenhunt/Wood dnd. Lawrence, says Pellett, had been attending Purdue University, and:

At some point, he made a blatant copy of dnd on a DEC computer at Purdue, without the knowledge or permission of any of dnd's original authors. It become popular...and spread to other places with DEC computers, always with the 'author' credited as Daniel Lawrence. He later created and successfully marketed Telengard based on the ideas in dnd, without the knowledge or permission of dnd's authors, and without sharing with them any of the money he got from it.

[Later note: In an e-mail to me after this posting was originally published, Dirk Pellet indicated that after he had written this article on the PLATO system, he had a chance to view the source code of Lawrence's DND, and he admits to being less certain that Lawrence directly plagiarized dnd in developing his own game. I'll post more about this when I cover dnd in an upcoming posting.]

Pellett's claims of plagiarism don't stop there. He also says that dnd was plagiarized by a PLATO user nicknamed "Balsabrain," who turned it into an identical game called Sorcery. When the administrators discovered it:

The copy was promptly deleted, and Balsabrain learned that if he wanted to plagiarize PLATO games, he would have to do it OFF of PLATO. He put that lesson to use by plagiarizing Oubliette when he 'created' 'his' game of Wizardry and began to market it.

"Balsabrain," you see, is none other than Robert Woodhead. I played a version of Oubliette in 2010, and I noted the game's obvious influence on Wizardry, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to accuse Woodhead and Greenberg of plagiarizing it. I took a look at the original (1977) Oubliette, and while it does use the same set of attributes, the same first-person perspective, and the same wire-frame dungeon as Wizardry, the original version seems to have only supported a single character. I don't know whether that's enough. There's a fine line between plagiarism and homage.

Other PLATO CRPGs of the 1970s include:

Dungeon (1975), by John Daleske, Gary Fritz, Jon Good, Bill Gammel, and Mark Nakada, which I haven't been able to get to run yet.

Orthanc (1978), by Paul Resch, Larry Kemp, Eric Hagstrom, and Mark Nakada, which appears to be an advanced version of The Dungeon/pedit5. This makes sense, as a number of sources say that when "pedit5" was saved, it was renamed "orthanc1."

Orthanc seems to be The Dungeon but with more options and instructions.

Moria (1978), by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin, a first-person game not to be confused with Moria roguelike.

Avatar (1979), by Bruce Maggs, Andrew Shapira, David Sides, Tom Kirchman, Greg Janusz, and Mark Eastom, which offers a tiny first-person wireframe dungeon but also additional icons.

An Avatar screen shot.

My quick review of these games seems to support a couple of conclusions. First of all, the earliest CRPGs were quickly divided into the top-down/iconographic branch and the first-person branch. The former started with The Dungeon and/or dnd and gave rise to the family of difficult dungeon-crawls filled with random encounters that we saw in Telengard, Caverns of Zoarre, CaveQuest, and DND. Roguelikes also seem to have developed from this branch.

The second branch, starting with Oubliette, spawned (through adaptation or plagiarism) Wizardry and, from there, Might & Magic. Richard Garriott, in the meantime, synthesized the two branches in the Ultima series (starting with Akalabeth) by mixing iconographic outdoor exploration with first-person dungeon exploration.

Now that the good folks at Cyber1 have lent me an account, I feel compelled to play and report on some of the earliest CRPGs, so I'll start with The Dungeon and let you know how it goes. In the meantime, in the event that I've gotten something wrong or I missed a major point here, I encourage anyone with more detailed knowledge of CRPG history to comment.

Wizardry V: It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Torture

2011-12-23T20:44:00.000-05:00

The new party. Level 3 kicked up the monster difficulty a bit, with many more creatures that can paralyze, poison, and kill instantly.

Somewhere between Wizardry IV and Wizardry V, the folks at Sir-Tech seem to have decided that what was really lacking from their games was some adventure-game-style inventory puzzles. You practically can't turn a corner in V without encountering some encounter that you need some object to solve. To me, this does not enhance the game. Dungeon-crawling in the Wizardry series is tough enough without constantly having to backtrack to find some key. Plus, in a game that seems to remember your actions on levels--key enemies, for instance, don't reappear after you've slain them--why oh why can't the game remember that I've already unlocked this door like 18 times?

The spiritual ancestor of Skyrim's alchemy table.

On Level 2, my party had to find a hacksaw (which I wouldn't have found if I hadn't made it a habit to search for "hidden items" in every room) to cut the chains off a door, which led me to an area where I could craft a "spirit-be-gone" potion (the recipe for which I learned elsewhere from a talking duck), which I then used in a square where a spirit kept stealing away a chest, finally allowing me to open the chest and get a jeweled scepter. On Level 3, outside the locked "Temple of Kama Kazi," I found a priest named--wait for it--"Lord Hienmitey"--who offered to trade me a staff needed to enter the temple for the scepter. I gave it to him and he laughed and said actually the scepter was needed to enter the temple, and he then attacked me. I defeated him, but there was no scepter on his body, which meant I had to go back to Level 2 and go through the whole rigmarole again.

Oh, what a clever name.

(Oddly, Hienmitey later appeared in the temple in the castle. I thought maybe he became an NPC at that point, so I paid to have him healed, which he repaid by taking off and showing up at his old dungeon square again. Why? Oh, and even then, he still didn't have the scepter.)

I was dumb enough to pay to resurrect the guy who stole from me and then tried to kill me.

Wizardry V combines the goofiness that I disliked in Might & Magic II (the temple of "Kama Kazi" reminds me, unfavorably, of the NPC "Hari Kari" in MM2; although given my party members' names, I guess I have nothing to complain about) with the nonsensical inventory-hunting tedium of a 1980s adventure game. The items are so random an unmemorable--I have to find a bag of tokens to activate a teleporter to get to the Hurkle Beast, who's guading a bottle of rum that I must give to a knight to pass through a door--that I wish the game had just said, "To get here, you need Item A." I mean, honestly, a "spirit-be-gone potion"?

I have no idea what this is about, so clearly I'm going to have to slog my way back here later.

Adding to this, the levels are enormous. Here's my map of Level 2:

The 0,0 coordinate on all levels seems to be arbitrary.

Level 3 is looking to be just as large, with a complicated, twisty maze in the middle of it. Because passage depends on finding obscure items, I have to be very concerned about missing secret doors, and thus I have to search all of the perimeter walls and all the walls around squares that I eventually color in. Tedious.

Apparently, I need to find some Gold Bond powder somewhere.

As you've noticed, we've had a change in cast. I made a rookie mistake on Level 2 when, with my previous party, I encountered a group of six slimes. I assumed they were the same easy slimes from Level 1, so I just held down the ENTER key (the game's equivalent of Might & Magic's CTRL-A) to blow through the combat. Before I realized that all of the "Killed!" messages I saw flashing by were referring to my own party, four of my six party members were dead. It turned out I was facing "mustard slimes"--quite a bit more deadly. I tried to limp back to the castle, but my remaining two party members were finished off by the next encounter.

The good news is that most of the length of a Wizardry session is mapping. Thus, just as I did with the first Wizardry, I spent a bunch of time grinding a new group of party members. The golem on Level 1 helped. Eventually, my new party exceeded the previous party and I no longer felt any need to rescue them.

Commenter Delmoko's notice that the "Q" key allows you to save an expedition in the dungeon was a bit of a revelation. I completely missed that in the instructions, and I'm pretty sure it's new to this edition of Wizardry (you could go find dead party members in the dungeon in the previous games, but you couldn't deliberately stop and save there). It would have allowed me to take care of the alignment issue if my full-party death hadn't solved that issue on its own. I haven't tried it, but I think this means you could have multiple parties active in the same dungeon at the same time.

I just hadn't bothered to try the key before.

A few other notes from the levels:

I keep encountering pools that invite me to dive in and explore different levels. Mostly, bad things happen to me when I try to do this--poison, disease, and drowning. I note that each of my characters has a "swim" score that probably affects success, but I'm not sure how to improve this.

Level 2 offered up encounters with a bunch of dwarf fighters who wanted me to pay them 100 gold pieces "for a drink," which I kept refusing and getting into combats. I'm not sure if there was something more I was supposed to learn here.

I encountered my first dragon on Level 3. He was a pushover. I stand by the first paragraph in my Skyrim posting last month.

How much sense does it make to encounter a dragon in a dungeon anyway?

I was wrong in an earlier posting that you can't lose attributes when you level up. It's happened a few times. It just doesn't happen on every leveling as it did (at least to me) in the first game.

I might be wrong, but monster difficulty seems to be tied not only to the level but the zone within the level. I've found areas where I consistently encounter more difficult battles than any other places on the same level.

My thief has started to get a lot worse at identifying and disarming traps. The results are often devastating and require a quick trip back to the surface and temple.

This gets old fast.

My feeling is that if Wizardry was going to stick to the same old rules and graphics, they should have stuck to the same old gameplay. I'd rather be re-playing Wizardry than playing Wizardry with dungeons six times as large and eight times as many special items needed to get through them. It's as torturous as it would be if they had made Skyrim with the Akalabeth engine. And I'm only halfway through Level 3! I'm not sure how I'm going to sustain this blog for seven more levels of this, but by next time I post, I'll have some kind of solution.

Wizardry V: Oh, Come All Ye Faithless

2011-12-20T18:13:00.002-05:00

One of Level 2's mysteries.

Because I'm otherwise not going to have much to talk about tonight, let me describe what happened in cinematic terms. There's a tl;dr after the script in case you don't like the shtick.

******

FADE IN

INT. DUNGEON LEVEL 2 - NIGHT

CLOSE-UP: A sword penetrates the slimy skin of a giant toad, piercing between his eyes and into his brain. The disgusting beast collapses in a heap. The sword is yanked roughly from the flesh, and as we DRAW BACK, we see it is held by a bald, scarred, grinning hulk of a man. This is STRONGARM. His left arm is gashed and dripping blood.

STRONGARM

Well, that's the last of them! Doc, I took a bite to my arm. I could use a little DIOS action.

There is no response. Strongarm turns and stares to his right, where four other adventurers are standing above a comical sight: an aged man in chainmail, collapsed on a floor in a contorted position, his legs spread apart and his arms extended as if in the middle of a swing.

STRONGARM

Aw, Christ.

The other four party members are relatively hale. They include a black-clad, hooded thief named 'BONE SHORTY, a robe-wearing elven wizard named MARSALIS, a lithe man in oriental armor named ROUGHINS, and another mail-wearing priest named BECHET.

'BONE SHORTY

Looks like that toad's spit paralyzed him. And Doc's the only one who can cast DIALKO.

BECHET

Let's leave him, then.

STRONGARM

We're not going to leave him! Can you imagine how long it'll take before we get another priest to his level? How long before you can cast the spell, Bechet? You know, we could use a second healer more than we could use a bunch of hocus-pocus nonsense. We have Marsalis for that.

Bechet gives Strongarm the finger.

STRONGARM

He's gonna die soon if we don't get him back up to the castle. Shorty, help me lift him.

'BONE SHORTY

Screw that. My arm still hurts from that jax spike trap I accidentally set off.

ROUGHINS

I'll carry him. Let's just hurry. None of us are in very good shape, and Doc was the only one with decent healing spells.

Roughins spends some time bending Doc's limbs into a more conducive position before heaving him over his back in a fireman's carry.

ROUGHINS

Good think we spent all that time on the strength re-rolls.

Slowly, the party lumbers down a cramped hallway, 'Bone Shorty's torch casting a flickering light on the rough, damp walls. After a time, they come to a staircase and lumber upward, Roughins straining under the weight.

STRONGARM

All right. We'll be at the entrance in a few minutes.

Around a corner in front of the party, a group of three men suddenly appear. Their robes bear the sigil of some forgotten dark god. The party tenses, preparing for battle, but the priests simply eye them warily.

PRIEST

Look, I know that normally, people like us just start attacking you. But frankly, we're not looking for a fight. And it looks like you're in pretty rough shape, too. So...

STRONGARM

Fine. Whatever. Just go on by.

The priests nod, edge past the party, and continue their way down the hallway.

STRONGARM

Okay, let's keep moving. We just need to...

He suddenly notices that 'Bone Shorty, Marsalis, and Bechet are staring at him, nostrils flaring.

STRONGARM

What?

'BONE SHORTY

You just let them go?

STRONGARM
Yeah. What? Did you want to fight them? With no priest and half our hit points missing?

MARSALIS
What are you? Like...you're good now?

STRONGARM
No! I'm just trying to get us to the surface! Believe me, I wanted to kill those jackasses. I wanted to drive my sword right through their chests! But I thought we were in a hurry, and...

He trails off. The other three clearly aren't impressed. Roughins is intently studying patterns on the dungeon walls.

'BONE SHORTY
Whatever, man. Let's just get out of here.

Being evil apparently means killing everyone you see.

INT. GILGAMESH'S TAVERN - LATER

Strongarm and Roughins are sharing a drink at a bar.

STRONGARM

They won't let me go with them any more? What is that supposed to mean?

ROUGHINS

Look, I'm sorry, man. You know me: I don't care about good and evil. I'll adventure with anyone. But these guys, they say they have "standards" or something, and they don't want--and I'm quoting Shorty here--"some lily-livered goody-goody showing things like 'mercy' all the time."

STRONGARM

It wasn't mercy! It was practicality! Those guys could have completely messed us up! I'm not good!

ROUGHINS

Tell that to the universe, buddy. You've got this big scarlet "G" branded on you now, and as long as you have it, the other boys say stay away.

STRONGARM

Well, what if I go back into the dungeon myself and slaughter the first friendly group of enemies I see? The universe will change the "G" to an "E" and we'll all be cool again, right?

ROUGHINS

Yeah, I think that'll work.

INT. DUNGEON LEVEL 1 - NIGHT

Strongarm stands in a dungeon hallway, underneath a ladder leading back to the castle. Corpses of bats, scorpions, and men surround him. He is holding his arms outstretched, spinning clockwise in place.

STRONGARM (screaming)
Two hours of this, and every bloody group of monsters that comes down this hallway is hostile! Damn it, someone friendly and non-belligerent--anyone at all--here I am!

An ominous noise responds from the end of the hallway. Strongarm stops spinning and peers into the gloom. Slowy, an ice phantom comes into view. It roars and charges.

STRONGARM
Great! Another hostile one! Aren't you even going to take time to say--hurk!

Strongarm's diatribe is cut short by the instant paralysis inflicted by the beast's claws. He collapses to the dungeon floor as the phantom begins systematically dismembering him.

FADE OUT
******

tl;dr: I was hauling my beaten-up party to the surface when I came across a party of wandering priests. Instead of engaging them, I decided to let them pass, and the game switched the alignment of my lead character to "good." Now none of the other party members except my neutral samurai will join his party. I took him down into the dungeon alone to try to find more friendly monsters to kill, hoping it would switch his alignment back to evil, but I couldn't find any and I eventually got killed.

Now, I either have to resurrect him and keep trying, or I have to train up a new fighter to Level 9. I thought maybe he'd go evil if I attacked an NPC, but it didn't work.

Before all of this happened, I had explored a fairly good chunk of Level 2. There was an odd beast, accessible from the teleporter (the one requiring the bag of tokens) on Level 1, called the "hurkle" beast. Killing him allowed me to explore his lair and find a bottle of rum, which I needed to get past a fighter on the same level.

I also made enough money to buy the last hint from the talking kettle, which made absolutely no sense at this stage, but I expect it will help me in the end.

Even if I manage to figure out the party/alignment situation, I can tell this game is going to take a long time. I just hope I don't run out of things to write about. I may take a return to Wizard Wars for my next posting, but if anyone has any suggestions about how I can make my fighter evil again, please share!

Later edit: Since posting this, I had the rest of my party retrieve Strongarm and resurrect him. I took him back into the dungeon and eventually encountered several wandering, "friendly" parties, but no matter how many times I attack them, my alignment won't shift from "Good." Looks like I'll have to dump the character. Bollocks.

Building a CRPG Glossary

2011-12-19T23:05:00.003-05:00

During my last couple of years of blogging, I've encountered a number of CRPG phenomena for which I've suggested there ought to be terms. Lately, this has included:

The rhythm that you fall into while repeated re-rolling attributes during character creation, causing you to accidentally blow past the perfect set of statistics. And/or the combination of horror and rage you feel when this happens.

Space...space...space...space...wait...aw, $%*#&.

The act of growing so obsessed with character creation that you never actually play the game.

After you've taken a break from your game for a week or two, the uncomfortable period in which you don't want to continue with the old character but it seems too soon to create a new character.

Rapidly pressing buttons to escape from a conversation you've already experienced, only to click (or hit "A") one too many times and end up asking the same question again.

I couldn't play much today, so I spent a long car ride thinking about other player scenarios that could use terms. Note that I'm explicitly avoiding plot tropes, because those have already been pretty well-covered.

The moment, around the 2/3 point of the game, that you start to feel like you haven't been playing optimally, and that you should probably restart and do it right this time.

Related, the perverse desire to hit "New Game" when you've already invested 120 hours in your existing one.

The rationalizations that you go through while repeatedly extending your allowable game time. (At the start: "I'm only playing for four hours, tops. Then I need to study." After four hours: "Two more hours. I don't have that much material." After two more hours: "All right. I'll just finish this quest and I'm hitting the books." After another hour: "It's more important that I'm relaxed for the test than it is to have a head full of useless knowledge anyway." After three more hours: "Playing games is pretty much as relaxing as sleep is.")

The tortuous backstory that you invent for your character to justify joining the thieves' guild, the fighters' guild, the mages' guild, the paladins' circle, the temple, and the assassins' guild all in the same game.

Wouldn't this pretty much unbalance the entire universe? And what's the likelihood that such a person would be referred to using a generic title like "The Hero of Kvatch" in Tamriel's histories?

The high positive correlation between likelihood of death and the number of minutes since your last save.

Character portrait and icon options that someone obviously took a great deal of time to create and yet it's impossible to imagine anyone using them.

Has anyone ever used this one?

The urge to perform CRPG-related activities in real life. (Thanks to Oblivion and Skyrim, I can't pass a field of wildflowers without wanting to stop my car and grab my Swiss Army Knife.)

The vexing feeling that somewhere--maybe back in the Dwarven ruin you explored six hours ago--you missed a chest.

Undertaking a three-hour journey back to a previously-explored dungeon because a walkthrough informed you of a missed area that will give you 160 more gold pieces and 28 more experience points.

What terms would you suggest for any of the above, or what other player scenarios do you have that deserve terms?

Just an aside: one of the reasons I didn't get much playing done tonight is I went and saw The Muppets. When they re-enacted the opening theme from the old Muppet Show, I damn near cried.

Wizardry V: Fa-La-La

2011-12-18T23:55:00.000-05:00

It's like the game knew I was doing Christmas puns this week.

In today's episode of "It Pays to Read the Manual," we discover three major things about Wizardry V that would have made my dungeon exploration yesterday a little easier:

When shopping in Boltac's Trading Post (any chance Andrew "Werdna" Greenberg and Robert "Trebor" Woodhead had a friend named Catlob?), you have to hit (F)orward to see all the stuff he's got for sale. There's some reasonably cool stuff to buy; I was thinking that I'd be spending my money exclusively on resurrections.

And unlike Demon's Winter, they don't hide the existence of the "Forward" command. I just overlooked it.

Some of the items you can purchase are missile weapons. Just yesterday, I was chastising the game for not keeping current. Unfortunately, mages and bishops can't use them, but if I give one to my thief, that's a fourth guaranteed attack each round. Moreover, I could theoretically operate an all-fighter or all-thief party with the ability to shoot from rear ranks. I'll have to think about it.

I ran into five locked doors yesterday that I assumed needed keys. It turns out there's a (P)ick command that I overlooked when exploring dungeons.

These features made the game a little better, but the secret door thing is going to kill me. I found two of them yesterday, both in somewhat non-obvious places, and I don't know how many more I've missed. I can see that I'm going to have to search pretty much every wall. There are a couple of spells that are supposed to help you find them, but neither of them automatically revealed them for me.

The secret doors and picked locks really opened up the game a bit, though. In short order, I had found the Orb of Llylgamyn, a silver key, and a brass key, which got me through (I think) the rest of Level 1 except for a single locked door my thief can't open. The level has turned out to be an oddly-sized 31 x 30, and if all 10 levels are the same size, this is going to be a long game (as some of you have intimated from your comments).

But that's not the exciting part. The exciting part is that I found three NPCs and, by god, they're true NPCs. I can type keywords and everything. You all promised me that Wizardry V introduced a few innovations, and Ultima IV-style dialogue is apparently one of them.

One NPC was, oddly enough, a talking kettle which, for 100, 500, 1,000, 2,500, and 5,000 gold pieces, gives various hints. I learned that HAIL works with every NPC (see below); I need to figure out why the "Mad Stomper" stomps; I should use the power of the demon to open the gate of the mocking face; and that beyond the Hall of Mirrors lies the Loon. I have no idea what the latter three items mean, and I still need to return with 5,000 gold for the last hint.

He'd better not be laughing at how much he's ripping me off.

A second was a merchant named Ironrose, who sold me a key.

The final NPC, the high priest G'Bli Gedook, had the most to say. I've transcribed my conversation below so you can get a sense of the depth they went into here:

HAIL: Welcome to the Temple of the Brotherhood. La-La be praised!
TEMPLE: What about the temple?
BROTHERHOOD: The brotherhood is an ancient order of disciples that follow the wisdom and teachings of the Gatekeeper. La-La be praised!
GATEKEEPER: The Gatekeeper is the high guardian of the Triaxial Gate. It is he that understands the true nature of the Triaxial Gate and the elemental forces that travel through it. Do you seek the Gatekeeper?
YES: La-La be praised! We have great need of thee. The Gatekeeper has vanished into the Triaxial Gate. It is there you must seek him out.
TRIAXIAL: The Triaxial Gate is the portal for the elemental forces, earth, water, fire, and air to enter our plan of existence. It is the Gatekeeper who maintains the eternal balance among these forces. La-La be praised!
LA-LA: La-La be praised!
BALANCE: Whenever the elemental forces become unstable, the balance is disturbed, and a powerful rift materializes in our world. The Gatekeeper enters into the nexus of this rift, known as the Heart, and therein performs the sacred rite, thus realigning the forces and restoring the balance.
RIFT: The elemental rift has appeared once again, caused by evil incantations originating from within this temple. These dark incantations were invoked by an archrival of the Gatekeeper, a demonic diety [sic] known as "The Sorn." La-La protect us!
SORN: The Sorn is the very essence of evil incarnate, a diabolical fiend whose source of power comes from spreading chaos and destruction in our world. Once the rift had appeared, the Sorn waited until the Gatekeeper entered into the nexus, and then trapped him there, within the very heart of the forces over which the Gatekeeper was the only source of control. La-La have mercy!"
ORB: The Divine Orb of Llylgamyn! Use the Orb to open the Triaxial Gate, and then descend into the fury, into the Heart of the Maelstrom!

I have no idea who "La-La" is. I don't remember the name coming up as the world's "diety" before; if it had, I can't believe I wouldn't have remarked on its lameness. (One suspects the developers had a friend named Al.) Of course, I didn't finish any of the previous games.

There was a riddle that stumped me for a while:

The answer was VAMPIRE, but it threw me because the statue is clearly not a vampire. Instead, it looks like a cat, and you have to admit that CAT sort-of goes with the first part of the riddle. Heck, it doesn't go bad with the second part, either. Beyond it was the toughest battle on the level, against a golem, which forced me to resurrect three of my characters. Because of the greedy kettle, I had to grind for a while to earn the cash.

At one point, I fell down a pit to Level 2 and I experienced that half-excited, half-terrified feeling that you get when you lose your tether and you carefully creep down the hallways, looking for a ladder or rope back to a familiar place.

I'm not sure what the bag of tokens is for, but I'm really hoping I get to go on a tilt-a-whirl.

As I prepare to explore Level 2 in earnest, I'm surprised at how much character development occurred on Level 1. My characters are all level 7 and my spellcasters have more than half their spell levels. But I haven't forgotten what franchise I'm playing, and I'm not going to let my guard down. There have been some interesting encounters and innovations so far, and I look forward to seeing what develops further down the dungeon.

Wizardry V: All I Want for Christmas is Two Front Ranks

2011-12-17T23:30:00.000-05:00

The new party. Totally evil except for the samurai.

If anyone's thinking about playing Pool of Radiance in the near future, here's a way to make it awesome: an all-mage party. Think about it. Fighters have basically one thing to do, but mages have a host of options. You'd get to try out all the spells that no one ever tries because "fireball" is too useful to waste a slot memorizing "slow." The opening stages would be a major challenge, sure, but imagine how rewarding it would be. What's that I hear? "What about healing spells?" Boo-hoo. Bring along a cleric NPC. Or, better yet, haul your butts back to a temple after every map. Are you worried you won't have enough gold?

I thought about doing this on my play-through, but a) I chickened out, and b) I thought that since I was publicly blogging the game, I had a responsibility to try out all the game's options. But last night, after blogging about Wizardry V, it hit me: the options in this game are pretty much the same as in the first four games. Essentially, I'm replaying the same game for the fifth time. Given that, I can go hog-wild.

Well, no I can't. The game has that stubborn restriction by which only the first three characters can fight, and they're always right up-front in combat. If you had an all-mage party, the first three characters would get slaughtered. If you had an all-fighter party, the last three would have nothing to do. And this, my friends, is one example of why the Wizardry series' lack of evolution is not representative of some kind of raw purity. You don't even have to go to iconographic (thanks, JS) games like Pool of Radiance to get some slightly better tactics. The Bard's Tale II introduced distances and missile weapons. Might & Magic assigns which characters can fight based on the shape of the combat terrain. The only virtues I find in Wizardry V's throwback system are the challenges associated with permanent death, limited saves, and limited spell restoration. But the combat mechanics are too primitive to allow me to do anything creative with character classes.

Still, after suffering a full-party death last night, I decided to do something different and adventure with an evil party. Partly, I wanted to try out a ninja, and you have to be evil for that. Unfortunately, the minimum stats for a ninja require at least 40 bonus points during character creation, and although I hit that once yesterday, today the highest I got was 28. So I settled for a high-scoring thief who hopefully I can upgrade to ninja later.

This time, while rolling new characters, I kept tally of the bonus pools, and a curious pattern emerged. These were the figures out of 125 rolls:

Score	Appearances
7	30
8	33
9	21
10	27
17	1
18	5
19	2
20	5
28	1

What do you suppose the underlying programming is here? My guess is that the game selects a random base score of 7-10 and then, about 10% of the time, adds 10 to that total and then, maybe another 10% of the time, adds an additional 10, and so on. That would partly explain why there are no scores between 11 and 16 or between 21 and 26. The variances within the groupings (e.g., 21 occurrences of 9 but 33 of 8) seems higher than you would expect by random chance, but a chi-square test tells me that the significance level associated with that is 0.42. We'd need less than 0.05 in my profession to call it statistically significant; I'm not sure what the standard for CPRGs is.

If you're wondering if I'm going on about measures of statistical significance because I wasted the entire evening creating a party again, have no fear. I eventually did get a decent group and headed out into the dungeon. This time around, I did something probably against my rules and backed up the save file. I'm not going to keep backing it up, but I also wasn't going to start over again from scratch if I lost the party it took me 2 hours to create within the first 12 minutes.

This is my favorite foe so far. High reward, low risk.

I didn't, in any event. Only suffering a few character deaths, requiring me to raise them, I managed to get my part up to levels 4 and 5, which is enough to explore the first dungeon level without too much fear. The problem is, I'm a bit stuck. This is the map I've created so far:

I tried an RPG mapping application, but I didn't like it as much as Excel.

The DUMAPIC spell helped me figure out the coordinates, and so far the dungeon is at least 25 x 30, but with---as you can see--lots of blank space. I've encountered four locked doors that seem to require keys, a temple where they say I need an orb to enter, and an area that I'm scared to enter because it says not to when "the motor is on" (the "motor room" to the north is one of the locked doors).

You don't mess with this kind of thing in permanent death games.

There's a transportation chamber that requires a "token" and a weird message that I can't yet interpret. Overall, I feel a bit like I'm in an adventure game where I'm lacking the one item that will open the door that will get me the succession of other items.

Any ideas on this?

I suspect the solution lies in the INSPECT command, which has the option to search for "hidden objects." So I'm going to retrace my steps and inspect every damned square. This is not a welcome addition to the game.

A few notes:

Either the game does not have fixed encounters, or it remembers that you already defeated them. I've yet to encounter monsters in the same square repeatedly.
Unlike Wizardry I, you don't lose attributes when leveling; you only gain.

This is a very satisfying process.

The game may scale the encounters. I started encountering multiple groups when I reached level 3.
My thief is a lot more successful at disarming traps than in previous Wizardrys.
Like The Bard's Tale, thieves have a "hide" option that, if successful, allows them to "ambush" opponents on the next round. Unfortunately, I'm not successful that option.

This was not a common message in the first Wizardry.

Let's see if I can get Level 1 finished off by my next posting.

Wisp Bastards

2011-12-17T01:08:00.003-05:00

Just a quick note that my list of most annoying CRPG enemies has been updated with a new entry on wisps (both Ultima V and Oblivion). I said I was going to do that three months ago, but I've been running a bit behind.

Wizardry V: Home for the Holidays

2011-12-16T20:39:00.000-05:00

Yeah...I'm pretty sure those are bats.

I made fun of Wizardry V when I first started playing it, but now I confess to a certain gratitude for its unchanging nature. It's like coming back to the old neighborhood, or listening to a song that was your favorite decades ago. By periodically revisiting something that hasn't changed, you have a useful lens with which to analyze what has changed. Who hasn't had the experience of returning to the house we grew up in, or an old school, and noticing how smaller everything looks? Or popping in a mix tape you made in 1987 and chuckling at how idealistic and naïve you were then? The Wizardry experience allows me to reflect both on how much the genre has changed and on how much I've changed as a player.

These thoughts motivated me to go back and take a look at my original postings on Wizardry almost two years ago. I generally try to avoid reading anything--on the blog and off--that I wrote more than a day previously. It always embarrasses me with my inexperience and lack of wisdom. In this case, though, I thought it was important to recollect what I originally thought of the game. The first thing I noted was how awful I was at using Blogger back then. For god's sake, I wasn't even center-justifying captions--and I clearly hadn't learned how to use DOSBox's internal image capture yet. Christ.

It was shortly after the beginning of my grand CRPG odyssey, and I had just come off a four-month period of playing Rogue almost non-stop. I blew through a couple easy, quick games, but Wizardry was the first game that had any real depth and length to it. (I'm not sure that I gave enough credit to it, really, for its major innovations: multiple characters, a large dungeon for the time full of special encounters, a sophisticated magic system.) In the postings, I toyed with the idea of quitting prematurely after a few moments of frustration, but I can't believe I seriously contemplated it. At the time, I hadn't stopped playing a winnable game before winning, so I must have been reluctant to break that record.

On the other hand, I'm amazed by how much patience I had. I remember now how many times I had to create characters, only to have them die; how many resurrections went wrong and turned my Level 6 characters to ash; how many full-party deaths I suffered. I remember maintaining a roster three times as large as the party size, rotating among them, just so I'd have relief members to rescue parties that died in the dungeon. I completely restarted the game three or four times, including one time in which I had reached the last level. That weekend I spent with my wife watching Lord of the Rings while I slowly leveled up my characters against Murphy's Ghosts stands out vividly. I can't honestly say that I would do that today.

If, back at the beginning, I had any stubbornness about quitting games before winning, I quickly succumbed after several hours of Wizardry II. I still maintain that I had a good reason for it. My adherence to my rules was such that I didn't even create a backup of my characters, so when I suffered a full-party death on the first level, I was faced with the prospect of returning to Wizardry to create new characters, leveling them up in that game, and then starting Wizardry II again. It was far more effort than I was willing to invest, no matter how fanatical my love of CRPGs. But however solid my justification, I had broken my "won" record, and it put me on a slippery slope of bailing on games after satisfying my six hour rule. Wizardry III was the next to fall--on far less justifiable grounds, since it restarts characters at Level 1. Wizard's Crown and The Bard's Tale II similarly became victims of my impatience and frustration.

More recently, I've been feeling bad about this, and I vowed to try harder to avoid quitting, which is why I still list Wizard Wars as an active game despite it being, quite literally, one of the worst CRPGs I've ever played. For perverse reasons I don't understand, I'm determined to not only finish the game but also my walkthrough.

Enough self-reflection. Let's talk about the game. After my initial posting, I spent hours and hours on character creation. I do like the attribute-generation system of the series, which hasn't changed between I and V (excepting IV, which was an oddity in many ways). Instead of randomly rolling scores for strength, I.Q., piety, vitality, agility, and luck, you get a set of standard scores based on your race and then a pool of "bonus" points to spread however you like. As you start out, your character is capable of being nothing; classes become available when you allocate enough bonus points to the right attributes.

The number of bonus points is, it turns out, extremely variable. When I first started rolling up characters, I was getting bonus pools of around 7-10. I figured 10 was the upper limit, and I started rejecting characters with fewer points than that. Just as I'd gotten a slate of 4 or 5 party members together, I suddenly rolled a bonus pool of 18. Knowing that was possible, I immediately dumped my previous characters and started rejecting anything less than 18. Rolls of 18 came along maybe 1 out of every 20, and the process of "re-rolling" isn't as simple as it is in some games where you just keep hitting SPACE or something. In Wizardry V, you have to "create" the character, name him, choose a race, and choose an alignment (there are still no sexes) before you find out what your bonus is going to be. Then, even if you don't like it, you have to put enough points into a statistic to choose a class, choose it, and finally say (n)o, you don't want to keep the character.

Thus, you're looking at about 15 seconds for every "re-roll" and, given the rarity of 18s in the bonuses, about 6 minutes per character. That still doesn't sound so bad, and in around a half hour, I had 5 characters who had started with bonuses of at least 18. Most of them had 16-18 in their primary attributes and still had enough left over for good vitality and dexterity.

Then I rolled a 28.

#@$%.

It turns out that bonus rolls of much higher than 18 are possible, but extremely rare. Once I realized that...well, let's just say that practically an entire RPG-playing day passed in the character creation process. I think my highest was 43. But, at last, I had a party of mixed races, classes, and alignments with very high attribute scores among them. I went to add them to my roster and start adventuring.

I had forgotten that good and evil characters can't adventure together in the same party.

#@$%.

A couple more hours of rolling, and I had a good-and-neutral party. I finally gave up and accepted some bonus rolls of 18-20, but in the end I felt I had a solid group.

Until they started to die.

What I had forgotten during this lengthy and obsessive process of character creation is how notoriously lethal Wizardry dungeons are. High attributes make them easier but not easy, and if I'd spent any time remembering my previous postings before I started playing, I would have realized that I'd be creating new characters constantly, especially during the opening stages. You will recall, of course, that full-party death in a Wizardry game does not mean that you can frantically quit and reload from your last save point. Uh-uh. Your party's corpses remain strewn across the dungeon floor, permanently dead, until a relief party can retrieve and raise them.

The game lies. There is no cemetery.

Thus, my current party is only mediocre, attribute-wise, but I'm using them to get accustomed to the dungeon, re-acquainted with the game dynamics, and current with the changes between the first installments and V.

Story-wise, Wizardry V seems to ignore IV; at least, the manual makes no mention of Werdna's return or any of the possible five endings of the previous game. We're back in Llylgamyn, the kingdom that I would have saved in III if I hadn't quit. There was a time of peace and learning following the restoration of the Orb of Earithin, but now a renegade female mage named "The Sorn" has decided that she wants to end the universe and she's created an "unnatural, magical vortex" deep in a dungeon called the Maelstrom. In it, she's imprisoned the Gatekeeper, a demi-god who's the only being able to stop her. The sages of Llylgamyn want my party to get advice from G'bli Gedook, a high priest on the first level of the dungeon, then descend into the depths, kill The Sorn, and free the Gatekeeper.

At this point, I've only explored a bit of the first level, and I haven't found G'bli Gedook yet. I can report with confidence that Wizardry V has not restricted itself to 15 x 15 maps. Even accounting for the possibility that the maps double-back on themselves like in I, they're at least 25 x 25. There also seem to be a lot more "dead" squares in this game, although I'm not completely convinced I'm searching for secret doors effectively. In I-III, you just "kicked" the wall where you suspected one would be, but this game has an "inspect" option, and I'm not sure if finding things is automatic or based upon luck or character skill. I'm also encountering a lot of locked doors resistant to bashing.

I've used this multiple times, but I've yet to find anything.

I can also report that thieves seem to have a new "hide in shadows" ability, and my thief has actually been reasonably successful at disarming traps.

In the first Wizardry, this was the most terrifying part of the game.

By tomorrow, I'm hoping to finish mapping level 1 and perhaps stabilize my party at character levels 3 or 4. By then, I should have a stronger grasp on what's changed. My long winter break started a bit later then I'd hoped, but I'm finally home for good, and it's nice to have a challenging dungeon crawl to play by the fire.

Too Much of a Good Thing

2011-11-29T21:13:00.010-05:00

Over the long weekend, I took CRPG-playing way too far by spending at least 30 hours on four separate CRPGs--and I have almost nothing (blog-wise) to show for it.

The first game was, of course, Skyrim. I've take a hit on some discussion boards for praising this game, but honestly, the only reason I can think not to like it is that you deliberately want to be contrary. Sure, there are things not to like about it, but to not like it as a whole? Do you like games at all?

Running into dragons keeps cramping my style, though. I get stocked up on potions to make a run at some dungeon, and on the way there I have to drink them all fighting a dragon.

The second was Dragon Age: Origins, and playing it has entirely been against my will. My wife, Irene, went and picked up Dragon Age II a few weeks ago, but she insisted on replaying Origins, and all its expansions, this time as a female PC, so she could marry Alistair. Much of my weekend was a fight with Irene about playing Skyrim longer versus stopping it for Dragon Age. First-world problems, I know.

I've had a curious reaction to Dragon Age. On the surface, it seems to have all the things I like about CRPGs--an original game world with lots of lore, memorable NPCs, copious dialogue options, loads of side quests--and yet I find it curiously soulless. Few CRPGs are brilliantly original in their game worlds--most are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons in some way--but Dragon Age more than most feels somehow...assembled. It has that characterless feeling of "master-planned communities" in the mid-west and west, where the streets are all arranged in a grid and there's a strip mall at every major intersection.

It's interesting to compare the two modern games in respect to their approaches to role-playing. In Dragon Age (like most Interplay and Bioware titles), role-playing is almost entirely through dialogue. You decide who you are and you speak accordingly. Someone says something and you get maybe five choices:

The "good" option
A slightly lamer good option
The selfishly-evil option
The psychotically-evil option
Something to kill the dialogue in case you hate dialogue

Sometimes there are fewer, but they basically boil down to good, selfish, bad.

Thus:

A young girl approaches, crying. "I've lost Mr. Snuffles!" she wails. "If you can find him, I'll give you these five shiny pieces I found in my da's desk!"

"I'll do it! And don't worry about the gold. Use that to buy more bread for your family." [Morrigan disapproves]
"I'll see if I can get to it."
"Sure, I'll find Mr. Snuffles. But why don't you go home and see if you can find some more shiny pieces first?"
"I'll take those 'shiny pieces' off your corpse!"
"Go away, kid."

Again, this is normal in a lot of games from these developers and publishers, but it just feels so much more formulaic in Dragon Age. While I generally like dialogue, I agree that basing role-playing and quests around it forces you along a limited selection of paths. Dragon Age way overdoes it both the dialogue and romances for my tastes, anyway. The fact that I like both doesn't mean I want to spend 20 minutes reassuring Leliana that she's good in the sack.

In Skyrim, on the other hand, role-playing is based on how you interact with the game world--on what you do rather than what you say. The dialogue options, though better than in Oblivion, can't hold a candle to Dragon Age. More than once, indeed, I've found myself forced into accepting quests because I had no dialogue option to tell the quest-giver to sod off. In one city, knight asked me to accompany him into a haunted house and started me on a path where the only option to get the quest off my quest board was to beat a helpless priest to death with a rusty mace.

I care more about clearing my "to do" list than I do about role-playing!

But what happens in between the dialogue in Skyrim is priceless. In Dragon Age, no matter how you role-play, combat and exploration go the same ways. You fight the same enemies in the same places for the same results, and all that matters is your overall motivation. Skyrim offers essentially limitless possibilities in combat and exploration. I'm just outside a bandit chief's room and I need to get a key off him. I could:

Snipe him with a poisoned-soaked arrow
Sneak up behind him and try to slit his throat
Sneak up behind him and pickpocket the key
Use an invisibility potion to walk up next to him and then let him have it with lightning blasts from both hands
Summon a wave of skeletons
Send a follower to take care of him
Lead him outside and use a "shout" to send him spinning off a nearby cliff, then take the key from his corpse
Lead him to the nearest guard outpost and let them deal with him
Get him to chase me into a room full of his bandit friends, then use my "rage" scroll in the room, causing everyone to attack each other

The only way they could make it better is if I could talk to the bandit chief before attacking him, then try to persuade or bribe him for the key. Unfortunately, the game features two types of NPCs: those that you can talk to, and those that come charging at you, swords drawn, the moment they see you. Dragon Age usually has dialogues even when combat is inevitable.

Aside from combat, role-playing in Skyrim manifests itself in doing things like running from animals rather than killing them, ambushing every wandering Thalmor patrol you find, happily stealing from jarls' palaces but not the homes of townsfolk, and of course choosing to specialize in certain skills. The game doesn't generally acknowledge any of this, so you're essentially role-playing for yourself, which I guess some people find lame.

If you're curious about the third and fourth games I was spending time on, well, they're the ones this blog is supposed to be about. If you haven't been following, last Wednesday, I decided I couldn't get any further in Wizard Wars because of copy protection issues, only to have Skirie immediately find the information I needed. I had done a GIMLET and everything. So I spent some more time trying to win that game, and I determined that knowing the ingredients that go into certain spells means nothing if you can't find these ingredients. I visited every territory several times, ending up no further than I was on Wednesday. I'll keep trying.

I need five items to progress, but a golden potion isn't one of them.

The last game was Wizardry V, and I confess I devoted the least time to it. I got hung up a bit on the character creation process, which I will detail in the next posting, and I barely got out of the gate.

Hint: bonus points of 28 are only possible in 1 out of every 3,426 rolls.

Travel has again made both Skyrim and Dragon Age impossible this week, so I should have some more stuff on Wizardry V and maybe Wizard Wars for the next few days.

Game 67: Wizardry V: Heart of the Maelstrom (1988)

2011-11-24T11:39:00.002-05:00

This isn't an anthropomorphic heart with legs, as I first thought. Those are two women kneeling on either side of it.

You have to hand it to Andrew Greenberg and Sir-Tech: When they've got something that works for them, they sure stick with it. Here, by comparison, are the main castle screen shots of Wizardry (the first one, in 1981) and Wizardry V (1988):

In the intervening 7 years, they sure worked their butts off on that font, didn't they? I mean, as much work as they clearly put into that typeface, I can see where they wouldn't have had time to upgrade the interface or, you know, change the name of the tavern and trading post, even though the game takes place hundreds of years later in a different city. Clearly, Gilgamesh and Boltac were such legends at Trebor's Castle that shop- and tavern-owners around the world honor their name ever since.

Lest you think I'm too hard on the game from its opening screen shot, here's a dungeon-crawling shot:

And here's a combat screen:

You really have to admire the confidence of the developers. It's like if Peter Jackson, in remaking King Kong, had said, "Screw the special effects. Just put a guy in an ape suit. People come for the story anyway."

But you know what? Despite my sarcasm, I'm looking forward to playing Wizardry V. Sometimes you're just in the mood for a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl. It's not like the first Wizardry was boring. And for all the similarity in appearance, this latest edition does promise to offer a little more in the way of encounters, plus some new features in spells and such that I'll cover next time.

The good news is that unlike Wizardry II and Wizardry III, this game doesn't require you to create characters in the first game and then import them. You can create them right in V, which means that when my party inevitably gets wiped out, I won't have to go through the whole rigmarole of creating a new one in I and importing them into V--a process that killed my enthusiasm for II and III. I imported a III party for a little initial exploration (and the screen shots above), but I'm going to create some brand new folks tomorrow.

See if you can identify the four new things on the character screen.

Short posting today. I have to take a quick detour back to Wizard Wars to finish it up. Also, it's apparently some sort of "holiday," and Irene is dragging me off to the house of some people I barely know instead of letting me stay home to play Wizardry and Skyrim. My advice is that you re-acquaint yourself with my postings for Wizardry, Wizardry II, and Wizardry III (and go easy on me; I was new to blogging). I've taken a lot of criticism for bailing on II and III as quickly as I did, so we're in this one for the long haul.

Wizard Wars: Need "Defeat Copyright Protection" Spell

2011-11-23T23:17:00.016-05:00

Note: The first comment on this posting completely rendered it moot. I'm leaving it as-is, but the GIMLET is premature given this new information. I will return to the game and finish it after Thanksgiving.

I'd really like to help.

Well, it turns out that I won't even be able to win Wizard Wars, let alone finish my comprehensive walkthrough--not unless someone reads this and comes through with the game manual. It turns out the game features an evil bit of copy protection by which the manual provides the "ingredients" you need to create the spells you need to solve the quests.

It's too bad, because I was developing a real fondness for it. Wizard Wars is the oddest little game. It's clearly intended for novices, or children, but it has a certain frivolous charm, and it's been an interesting counterpoint to Skyrim.

The first section is like a cross between a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" book and a game of "Concentration." Amidst the 30 territories in the first dimension are a number of quests to solve using items that you find in other areas, so ultimately you end up visiting most of the territories in a precise order that you have to work out through trial and error. There's no real danger, because you can visit a territory multiple times, but figuring it out and taking notes is simplistically fun. It would prepare young CRPG players for more complicated games later on--at least, it would have in this era. Nowadays, games take all your notes for you and make your maps for you and have big arrows indicating where you're supposed to go next.

Unfortunately, it was in the first dimension that I started noticing that a lot of the encounters required spells I didn't have. I thought maybe I'd find them somewhere--I did get one spell called "Psychic Energy" as a quest reward--but after exhaustively visiting each of the territories multiple times, I'm forced to conclude that I'm supposed to create them.

The "Create Spell" screen brings up all of the different objects that you've found and asks you to combine the right ones. The manual apparently lists which items you need for which spells. I started to try them randomly, but there are something like 30 items in the game, and I don't know if the spells occur in combinations of 2, 3, 4, or more. I haven't had to calculate binomial coefficients in a long time (remember "n choose k"?), but if I did the math right, there are, out of 30 objects:

435 possible combinations of 2
4,060 possible combinations of 3
27,405 possible combinations of 4
142,506 possible combinations of 5

Now assuming there are no spells that require six objects, that's still 174,406 things to try. This still sounds like something I might have done when I was a kid; at an average of one attempt per 3 seconds, I could do it while watching all 7 seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard--60 times. But I don't think you'd all have the patience for it.

Somehow, these objects combine to create spells.

I was getting pretty far with "Lightning Bolt" and frankly beginning to question whether I needed any of the spells or objects that these quests would give me, but progress to the third dimension requires defeating a chimera guarding a unicorn in the first dimension, and neither of my existing offense spells will even touch him. Clearly, there's some trinket or spell I need from one of these unsolved quests.

I miss every time.

I did progress some distance through the second dimension, which turned out to be a 15 x 15 maze. Unlike similar 15 x 15 dungeons in, say, The Bard's Tale or Pool of Radiance, it was an actual maze, with essentially one path from beginning to end, and no special encounters anywhere else.

The game helps you out by giving you your starting position, and then updating it after you finish every combat:

There are several named monsters in the maze, and the end of it brings you face-to-face with a wizard named Kalzir, who starts the combat by summoning a random monster. When you defeat the monster, he casts a "light shield" spell that defeats your attacks for a few rounds. He's a tough customer, and I died twice before I finally was able to return and defeat him. You can't save in the maze, but you can return to the main screen by "fleeing" combat with any enemy.

After defeating him, I was rewarded with a trip to the second level of the maze, which promised more of the same. But the foes were so much harder, I realized I needed to bring a lot more loot from the first world. It was a bit of a shock, actually: the combats in the first dimension and the first level of the maze had been fairly easy, even lacking all of my available spells.

Anyway, even if I defeat the second level (I'm not sure how many levels there are), it's clear I won't be able to progress without the puzzle-solving spells that the game requires. It's pretty clear that there's nothing online. I've Googled "Wizard Wars" with "Create Spell" and gotten nothing, and I've tried Googling the specific object names and similarly returned nothing. The only way I'm missing anything is if there's a PDF manual somewhere that hasn't been OCR'd. Couldn't find a legitimate copy on eBay or Amazon. If anyone else has any suggestions, please let me know.

The GIMLET on this game (which I'll update if I do get a manual and can finish it) looks a bit horrible. The game world is thoroughly outlined in the descriptions of the territories, which sound evocative but don't allow you to do much interaction with them (3). Character development is very light, with boosts to the four attributes through combat and encounters, but you don't even get to name your character (2). There are NPCs of a sort, but you have no interaction with them except to agree to help them or not. There are some roving NPCs like dwarves which provide various clues (3). Encounters with enemies offer no role-playing except to decide to "reason" with non-evil monsters, and combat consists of blandly casting your chosen spell over and over until one of you dies, although there might have been some tactical aspects involved in choosing the right spell that I didn't get to experience (3).

The equipment part isn't bad: in addition to spell-creation items, you find a variety of potions, gems, staffs, and other "usable" objects that each serve to make you more or less effective. You have to figure out the uses through trial-and-error or through hints obtained from NPCs (4), but there is no economy (0). Not all of the little quests seemed to be necessary, so I have to conclude that the game has side-quests in addition to the main quest. These were very simplistic, with no role-playing options, but still satisfying, in a very basic way, to check off (3).

The graphics are actually reasonably good (although they take a turn for the worse in the maze), but the sound is virtually non-existent. While the keyboard controls are okay, transitioning between screens takes to long, even with the processor cranked (2). Overall gameplay is methodical, mostly linear, non-replayable, and easy--but at least reasonably fast-paced. I'm pretty sure that if I had the manual and hadn't been trying to write a walkthrough at the same time, I could have won it in 6-8 hours (unless the third dimension ends up being really huge). Still, I can't give it much more than a 2 here despite, as I said before, a certain unreasonable fondness for it.

That gives us a final score of 24, lower than all but a few games, most of which I didn't finish. I would have finished this one. Maybe I felt I needed an easy win before another Wizardry title.

Skyrim: Mid-Game Review

2011-11-22T18:10:00.006-05:00

Because I can't take images from my television, I've stolen these screenshots from The Unofficial Elder Scrolls pages. If they ask me to remove them I will, but I hope my theft is mitigated by my earnest plea that everyone visit TESP because they've done an awesome job cataloging every game, including some I never knew about.

When you're a CRPG addict, most games help you temper that addiction by having a certain limit to their duration. I could love Pool of Radiance, and want to play it from sunrise to sundown, but if I did the game would be over in about two days, and I could go back to doing other things. The Elder Scrolls games, on the other hand, go on forever. They're like single-player MMORPGs. I could see marriages ending and players losing their jobs because of Skyrim.

I'm reaching that point that I've noticed before in Morrowind and Oblivion where the game starts to exhaust me. They all have a way of dragging me in with their non-linearity, immersion, compelling plots, and constant character progression. But, ultimately, I tend to burn myself out on them. I've won both Morrowind and Oblivion, but I've started about 6 times as many games as I've won. I've only finished the Morrowind expansion packs once, and I've never finished the two major Oblivion expansions, as much as I liked the game.

All of this sounds negative, but I still maintain that Skyrim is a great game. Maybe not the best I've ever played, but certainly one of the most addictive. Today, as I was playing, I made a quick list of the things I like and don't like about the game:

Good Things in Skyrim
1. The world is dynamic and chaotic. More than any other game series I've played, The Elder Scrolls represents something of a simulation rather than a tightly-scripted game. The creators established the rules of the engine, seeded the world with objects and characters, and sat back to watch them interact. Thus, every player encounters situations that no other player does. For instance, while traversing the countryside, I came upon a dragon, who immediately engaged me in combat. I fought him for a while, but my hit points dipped dangerously low, so I decided to duck into a nearby house and see if I could recharge. As soon as I got through the front door, the owner--some mage--took exception and started throwing ice shards at me. I ran back outside, pursued by the mage, and ran headlong into the side of the dragon. The mage and dragon apparently decided that I was the least of the threats and started attacking each other. I watched from a distance, cast "heal" until my hit points were restored, and watched as the mage got stomped to death. I then finished off the dragon, whose hit points had been satisfyingly reduced, with a poison-soaked arrow.

It works against you too, unfortunately. I had just left a pleasant farmstead, having promised to deliver a letter from the owner to his son in another town. I suddenly got a message that I had "failed" in the quest. Returning to the farm, I found the owner and his wife dead in their field with a sabre-toothed tiger standing over them.

How many other games allow this kind of randomness in gameplay? NetHack comes to mind, but that's about it.

2. There is a satisfyingly complicated political situation that gives lots of opportunities for role-playing. None of the factions come across as "good" or "evil." You might want to support the empire, but why do they allow bands of Thalmer to roam the kingdom persecuting Talos worshippers? You decide that the Forsworn are barbarian throwbacks, but then hear about all the atrocities the local Nords have been committing on them. Thus, you can pick a side and be lawful neutral, you can adopt a chaotic stance and refuse to pick sides, or you can craftily use the situation to your financial advantage.

3. You have to read to really get a handle on what's happening. Characters tell you about the Stormcloaks, the Thalmer, the Forsworn, and other factions, but you only really understand them if you take time to read the associated books. Like many Elder Scrolls players, I usually start the game determined to read every book--a resolve that collapses the first time I encounter a substantial bookshelf. But I make sure to at least skim everything and make sure I'm not missing some key element of politics or intrigue.

My wife: "You just spent two hours reading books in a game?"

4. Combat is realistic and brutal. I'm not saying it's like real melee combat; otherwise, we'd spend most of the game crying. But it's about as real as you can get and still have fun. Swords connect in sprays of blood. If you get too close to enemies, you end up hammering at them with your pommel instead of swinging. Shields can bash as well as defend. Two-handed weapons do more damage but are much harder to wield and aim, as you would expect.

5. I never get sick of fighting dragons. Some seem to have fixed posts, but others roam randomly, much like the Oblivion gates in the previous game.. Realistically, they sometimes ignore you and go flying off as you stand beneath them howling in frustration.

6. When I first read about smithing, I thought it sounded stupid. And now I'm addicted. The game offers a set of complicated, interrelated processes by which you can tan leather, smelt ore, improve weapons and armor, and create weapons and armor from scratch. Part of why I like it is related to the economy (below); it's very satisfying to turn two pieces of ore and an amethyst worth 40 gold pieces into a silver ring worth 200. There are also very tangible benefits to improving weapons and armor.

7. As far as I can tell, they finally got the economy right. I blogged about game economies early in my career, and it remains a major category in my GIMLET. In Morrowind and Oblivion (as well as countless non-Elder Scrolls games), I find it too easy to get rich too quickly. Skyrim offers so many ways to spend money that 20-30 hours into the game, I'm basically dead broke. (Although I did buy a house in Whiterun.)

8. The alchemy system is cool, but it doesn't break the game. I've liked mixing potions in all the Elder Scrolls games, but Skyrim is the first one to get the balance right. You can't do it anywhere: you have to find an alchemist's lab. The potions aren't quite as strong as the ones in previous games, reagents aren't quite as plentiful, and you don't level up quite as fast. This means that you rarely have a stock of 100 healing potions waiting to bail you out of any battle. I also like that you have to "catch" some of your reagents, like butterflies, fireflies, and fish.

"And now you're spending a half hour making potions? What kind of game is this?"

9. The monsters are monstrous. I've mentioned dragons, but there are also giants, sabre-toothed tigers, giant spiders, mammoths, bears, and trolls that are suitably intimidating in their size and prowess. I've played plenty of CRPGs in which I buffed myself before dangerous combats; I don't think I've ever played one in which a foe actually made me turn around and run. My character is level 23, and these creatures still crush me--crush me to goo.

Skyrim's giant spiders are suitably giant and terrifying.

10. If you commit murder, you can avoid a bounty by killing all the witnesses. You might wonder who would do this, but if you're roleplaying an imperial loyalist or a Stormcloak separatist, you have plenty of opportunities to ambush and slay roving bands of guardsmen or rebels on the road, which would otherwise count as assault and murder.

11. Although they're nowhere near the level of the Interplay/Bioware titles, NPCs are a lot more interesting than in previous Elder Scrolls games. You have some real dialogue options, not just "topics," with them, and they have very realistic conversations with each other as you walk by--not just a bunch of nonsense about seeing mudcrabs the other day.

12. The world is full of animals, including snowshoe hares, elk, moose, foxes, chickens, cows, fish, dogs, and bats. (Though, strangely, no cats that I've seen.) None of them are threatening, although you can kill them for food. I find that they give the world a lot of ambiance. I've also heard you can create chaos by casting "frenzy" on them in the middle of town, but I haven't tried it yet.

Jury's Still Out

1. Occasionally, as you strike the final blow, the game cuts to a brief killing animation, showing you slashing the enemy's throat, or driving your sword through his chest or something. It happens about 1 out of every 10 kills, which is enough to still be fun and not routine. However, my character is often teetering on the edge of death himself by the end of combat, and it's easy, when the game suddenly takes control, to assume for a second that I've been killed. My wife keeps hearing me yell, "OH GODDAMN--oh, wait. Cool."

YouTube user SlickyDave has made a compilation of these animations.

2. You find a lot of food in the game, and if you have a mind you can find a cookpot and whip up stews, roasts, and apple pie. Cooked meals grant more hit points than their raw materials, but it still seems silly.

3. I realize the lockpicking system is much more realistic in this game, but I don't like it.

4. In Oblivion, you could set one active quest at a time and you'd see a marker pointing your way to it. In Skyrim, you can set any quest as "active," and you see multiple markers. It's not that I don't like the ability to have multiple active quests, but I think quest markers are lame. What's the fun of sneaking into a house to search for some juicy bit of evidence if there's a big arrow pointing you to its exact location? I turn them off and set a custom marker when I want to go to a specific place.

5. The game world is huge, but it's dominated by mountains, which you can't easily scale. Going from one town to another often takes a long time as you try to find passes and climbable slopes. I realize it's more realistic this way, but I still find it annoying.

6. I still haven't quite reconciled myself to the loss of attributes, particularly speed.

Could Do Without Them

1. Almost every dungeon wears out its welcome before I've finished. I find them way too big. I don't mind tough combats, but don't make me wander through two hours' of corridors to find an amulet.

2. The speed and pathfinding of followers in Morrowind was atrocious. You'd get a quest to lead some Argonian to Ebonheart, and it would take hours of slowly--oh, so slowly--walking there, all the while protecting him from Nix hounds, which he was likely to charge, unarmored, with a dagger. Oblivion greatly improved upon followers, making it so that you literally couldn't lose them; if you got ahead of them, they'd appear by your side when you entered a new location. One of them, the infamous Adoring Fan, not even death would shake. Skyrim has reverted to Morrowind's level of pathfinding. While it's nice to be able to swap inventories with a follower, it doesn't do me any good if I have to carefully lead him around every rock and bush. And just like Morrowind and Oblivion, followers have a way of lunging in front of your sword thrusts.

3. In Oblivion, you could hotkey various items and quickly switch among them in combat. In Skyrim, this has been replaced with a "favorites" menu that, while functional, breaks the immersion a bit.

4. Skyrim makes a distinction between alchemical "ingredients" and food, the latter of which can't be used in potions but can be eaten for minor gains in hit points (between 1-5, usually). If you have a lot of food, you can stop in the middle of combat to wolf it down and heal. I'm not sure what's more absurd: the idea that my stomach could hold 26 heads of cabbage, or that an enemy would stop and wait for me to finish gorging myself on them.

5. While I appreciate the dialogue in the game, the voice acting isn't very good and, like Oblivion, depends on too many of the same voices. Claudia Christian, who played Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, seems to have voiced all the females in the game. It's nice that they got celebrity voice talent, but if you're going to rely on one actress for so many voices, it ought to be someone capable of sounding like different characters.

20-30 hours into the game, and I've barely done anything on the main quest. I've yet to visit the capital, Solitude, nor to find the Imperial Legion, the Blades, the mage's college, the bard's college, or the Thieves' Guild. Haven't encountered a Daedra yet, but I know they're out there. I know there's vampirism and lycanthropy, but they remain in my future. This is a huge game.

I apologize for those of you who think I should stick to my chronology and only look at historical games, but I promise I won't play new releases that often. I may give you one more posting--perhaps with a GIMLET--once I've won, but until then, let's finish up Wizard Wars and get on to Wizardry. I was just about to note the coincidence in names, and then I realized it's because I was playing in alphabetical order. Duh.

Wizard Wars: Walking Through

2011-11-21T23:37:00.001-05:00

The game is easy enough that the death screen is rare.

As a long time connoisseur of CRPG walkthroughs (see my September 2010 posting), I've always been interested in creating one. (Before I started this blog, I used to use them liberally during gameplay, and I still like to read them after I've finished.) But every time I thought to create one for a game I particularly liked, I would find out that someone like Andrew Schultz had already beaten me to it. Now, at last, I've reached a game--Wizard Wars--that has nothing online. No walkthroughs, no let's plays, not even a significant user review. The best we have is an old 1989 article from QuestBusters that Xyzzy Magic linked me to. And while it seems to have a lot of spoilers (I stopped reading), it's still not a proper walkthrough.

So I fired up Notepad and began my text file as I played Wizard Wars. Here's what I've discovered: writing a walkthrough is hard, even for an absurdly simple game like this.

A good walkthrough is exhaustive, which means that I have to do everything there is to do in the game. I've got to visit each of the 30 territories in the first dimension multiple times, making sure I don't miss anything. (It's hard, but not impossible, to miss something when your only options are "Search for Item" and "Search for Inhabitants.") Then I have to catalog each monster, noting both the statistics that are on the surface (hit points and armor points) as well as those on which I have to perform measures of central tendency and dispersion (average damage, average hit rate). After the monsters, I have to try to figure out what all these items do. I've got a bunch of stuff--brass cup, broken sword, platinum bracelet, rocksalt--that seems to serve no purpose. At least not yet.

My mysterious inventory.

Just when I start to feel like I'm developing a solid list of territories and encounters, something hits me: What if the game randomizes some of its encounters on every new game? Now I've got to play it at least one more time to makes sure I encounter the same things in the same places on the second go. Bloody hell.

"Chet," I can hear you all sighing. "Why are you wasting time on this game? Wizardry V is next, and we know you're sneaking off to spend time with Skyrim." And you would be correct. But Wizard Wars is too easy to give up on. When I say "too easy," I mean first that the encounters (at least so far) have been very one-sided, with my wizard blasting his way through every sort of foe, but I also mean that it's too easy in terms of knowing precisely what to do next. Twenty feet to the left of where I'm typing this is a nice long couch upon which currently rests a dormant Xbox controller that, if I press the power button, will launch Skyrim. Yet if I were to abandon Wizard Wars for Skyrim, I'd have to bring up my enormous quest list and figure out which of 49 active quests to embark on next. In modern CRPGs, you're almost paralyzed with indecision. Thus, there's something refreshingly rote about Wizard Wars, at least in the first dimension. You visit each territory one-by-one, search for...you know what? This is easier as a flow chart.

Click to expand.

This isn't to say there were no special encounters in the first dimension. I found a few, but they took multiple visits and only revealed themselves after defeating several random enemies, so it's going to be a long process of searching five or six times before I'm confident I picked up everything. For instance, in territory #30, Raknor, I found some cat people who needed help opening a chest:

The full encounter reads:

Aimex has been the ruler of a cat-like people who have existed since Mazeus created the dimensions. In their keeping is a large iron-bound chest containing a sacred book. In this book lies all the knowledge of this race and its entire history. Long ago, a magical enchantment was cast upon the chest's lock to safeguard the book. Since then, no one has been able to unlock the chest. Worse, no one knows what happened to the mage who enchanted the lock. There is only one way in which the chest may be unlocked and that is with the help of Agien's Magical Lockpick. Aimex says that in return for opening the chest, he will give you an item that has been in his possession for quite some time.

At the time, I didn't have such a lockpick, but I later discovered it while searching for items on another map:

When I took it back to the cat people, they were suitably grateful and gave me a scroll with the "Fear" spell--the second spell I've obtained. (There's an option to "create spells" on the main screen, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work.)

Some of the other territories featured encounters with unique enemies, or bits of advice from sages. Here are a few related screen shots:

Ultimately, I'm not sure what it all adds up to. The main purpose of the first dimension seems to be to develop your character sufficiently so he can survive the second dimension. When Temeres hit 200 wisdom points (he starts with 100), the game gave the second dimension to me as an option. It turns out to be wholly unlike the first, featuring a 3-D maze full of random encounters.

Unless they've done something extraordinarily creative here, I can't imagine an old mapping pro like me having a lot of trouble here.

Unless Wizard Wars offers anything groundbreaking between now and its end, I won't waste your time with more drivel on this game; I'll just give you the "won!" posting at the end. In the meantime, I might take one more diversion into Skyrim since several of my readers said they wouldn't mind another take on it.

Game 66: Wizard Wars (1988)

2011-11-18T23:53:00.004-05:00

It's important not to mix up Wizard Wars, a 1988 game from Paragon, with Wizard Warz, that horrible 1987 quasi-RPG that I played in January. It's also important not to confuse it with the browser-based Wizard Wars (2002). As far as I can tell, the Wizard Wars we're dealing with here has virtually no love online: no walkthroughs, no MobyGames reviews, no fan sites--and, unfortunately, no manual. So, if I can figure things out, my blog can be the authoritative online presence for Wizard Wars.

The game was produced by the same company that made the completely bizarre Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1987), which I played just over a year ago, only to scram as soon as my six-hour minimum was up. They later went on to make MegaTraveller, so not all of their games were doomed to obscurity.

As I said, I can't find a manual for Wizard Wars, so I don't know whether the opening sections are representative of the entire game, or if a more interesting world opens up later. It's rather hard to believe that a commercial publisher released a putative CRPG with such limited gameplay as I've been experiencing.

First off, there's no character creation. You play as Temeres the Wizard, on a quest to defeat the evil wizard Aldorin and do something regarding a white unicorn and a black unicorn. You begin with 100 points each of wisdom, health, and "s.c.e.," which I'm guessing is "spell casting energy" or something. Its maximum goes up as I defeat enemies but depletes as I cast spells in combat.

The limited character screen.

It appears that the realm of Wizard Wars consists of three "dimensions," only one of which is explorable at the outset. Each dimension consists of a number of geographic "territories" (the first has 30). You tell the game which territory you want to visit, and it gives you a bit of a description of what you might expect to find there.

Deciding where to take my next trip.

URBANIA: The ruins of a once-proud ancient civilization dominate Urbania, located in the center of the first dimension. The crumbling remnants of a once-sprawling ancient metropolis litter the Urbanian landscape. A tribe of nomadic elves inhabit the ruins. Impervious to magic, the elves can be extremely loyal allies or deadly enemies, so be wise in your dealing with them.

Sounds good so far, and I rather expected that upon arriving in a place like Urbania, the game would open up and I could explore it. Alas, this is not the case. Upon arrival in each territory, you have five options: Search for an item (which always takes you to a cave), search for inhabitants (which always takes you to a castle), use an item, return an item, and return to the map. It appears that both searches occasionally produce random results.

Sometimes I will find nothing; other times I will find treasure or inhabitants, even when revisiting the same territory. Treasures have included potions (the only other way to heal is a slow one hit point per combat round) and a gemstone that absorbs damage.

At last, the sidewalks of my kingdom will be safe to traverse in winter.

When you encounter another creature, you sometimes have the option to "reason" with it, which hasn't worked for me yet...

...but presumably leads to dialogue in some encounters. Otherwise, you attack. The attack screen offers the options to flee, cast a spell, use an item, or drink a potion.

Temeres starts off with no items or potions, and only one spell--lightning bolt--so options at the outset are fairly limited. The process of attacking and watching the enemy attack (there's no animation, just screen messages) is slow and boring. So far, the combat hasn't been very difficult; sometimes the enemies just stop attacking. This is going to be a short posting, so to compensate, here are a whole slew of enemies attacking me and missing:

As you can see, the graphics aren't awful, although the game does use the same monster graphics for multiple monsters.

The vivid descriptions of each territory prior to the visit are intriguing, which makes it all the more disappointing when you arrive and find the same two screens, with no encounters that have anything to do with the story. And there aren't many CRPGs that don't allow you to move. I can think of a couple others--Beyond Zork, Braminar--but both of those were fundamentally text games with CRPG elements.

There's not much else to tell about it. My plan is to work methodically through the territories, searching for items and inhabitants, until I win the game, reach my six hours, or encounter something more interesting. If anyone has any insight into this game--like why it was made--I'd love to hear it. I don't expect any particular appreciation or anything, but I could be playing Skyrim instead of this.

Wasteland: Final Rating

2011-11-16T16:05:00.010-05:00

Failing to escape the base in an hour still ends the game on a satisfactory note.

A lot of people seemed upset that I didn't enter Project Darwin and encounter Finster, so I took my winning party there to see if he'd still be around, and he was. First, I had to leave Darwin Village through a special avenue that just looked like a normal way out of town before:

I had read minimal spoilers--just enough to note the base's existence--so I found it a legitimate challenge. First, I encountered Finster, a cyborg, who fell quite quickly to my energy weapons.

Then, I took his head and attached it to some android body, and one of my characters--Stetson--was pulled into his mind like in Inception or something. There were numeric puzzles, which I love, although I only got the first two. See if you can get these:

2, 4, 8, 16, ___
4, 2, 8, 4, 32, 16,___
4, 6, 8, 12, ___

The answers to the first two are 32 (it keeps doubling) and 512 (it alternates between half the previous number and a product of the previous two numbers), which I got. The last, I guessed 16 and was told no, it was 20. If it had gone 5, 6, 8, 12, I would have guessed 20, but I don't see the sequence in this one.

I had to face a creature called a "night terror" that had thousands and thousands of hit points. It barely did a lick of damage to me, but it took me about 200 rounds to kill. At the end, I got 64,000 experience points, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

This was followed by a bunch of puzzles that involved the use of particular skills and attributes. I confess I cheated at this point; it would have taken me a long time otherwise: many of the skill and attribute uses seemed nonsensical, and I just wanted to get it done. At the end, I killed Finster a final time and got a security pass that was probably what I needed to avoid RPG-ing all those gates. Finster had one last rant and then died.

The puzzles in the dungeon were interesting--some of the first truly challenging puzzles in CRPGs--but it didn't add a lot more to the game's lore.

Let's move on to the rating.

I've been doing this for almost two years, but I don't think people really understand the nature and purpose of my rating system, which I dubbed the GIMLET. The purpose of the scoring system is not to rank how good a CRPG was for its time, nor to assess it's value in the history of CRPGs. It is, rather, to assess how enjoyable it is to play the game today. The "historical value" stuff is hard to quantify, so I don't even try. I do my best to cover it in the text. But the score is supposed to allow you to rank games against each other regardless of the era. If I give Pool of Radiance a score of 65 and Fable II a score of 55, it means I think you will honestly enjoy Pool of Radiance more, even though it's more than 20 years older. I'm sick of people complaining that my scores don't take into account "how important the game was in the history of CRPGs." That's not the purpose of the score. Got it?

On the historical relevance, there is no question that Wasteland is a landmark. Matt Barton notes:

Wasteland remains remains the favorite CRPG of many gamers who played it back in the late 1980s, and for good reason--it's a captivating and highly innovative game that deserves its place beside The Bard's Tale. It's a testament to the game's enduring legacy that the best-selling Fallout, released in 1997, is in many ways little more than a graphical revamp of the older engine.

No argument. It is the first game that I have played since starting this blog that I felt was truly "replayable," in that different party a skill choices would result in a fundamentally different game. (Demon's Winter is perhaps the closest I've felt before this.) I don't want to replay it immediately, but I certainly wouldn't mind revisiting it at some point in the future. This is game that, I'm sure, improves with second playings, when confusion over basic gameplay elements has been conquered and you can just focus on the story and tactics. It had the first inclusion of skills that advance through usage, the first true splitting of party members so they could act independently, and the first romance (such as it was).

My first major problem with the game was that I feel stories set in the real world ought to be somewhat realistic. It was Aristotle, writing about dramatic structures, who said that "probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities." There are a lot of interpretations of this quote, but I basically interpret it to mean that if you establish at the outset that your novel, film, game, or whatever takes place in a fanciful world in which different laws apply, but remain internally consistent within that world, then you have a better story that if you relate an entirely improbable series of events in a real or familiar world.

Hence, we give a pass to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Morrowind because, even though their worlds are impossible, they establish the ground rules at the outset and remain faithful to them (generally). On the other hand, I simply didn't find Inception remotely plausible (as good as it was) because the implications of technology that allows you to enter someone else's dream would have so many reverberations that it would fundamentally change the nature of human society. If Inception had been about psychics, on the other hand, it would have been probably impossible but not improbably possible. I probably would have enjoyed it more.

Wasteland establishes at the outset that it's set in a post-Cold War, post-apocalyptic United States. As much as I'm turned off by the overall scenario, I can accept that as probable. What I have trouble accepting is the subsequent revelations of undead, artificial intelligence, cloning, energy weapons, cures for diseases that we don't have cures for now, mind linking, and entire cities built in the aftermath by starving, scavenging hordes. Entire scenarios, like the Temple of Blood, were just goofy.

I'm not saying it was a game-killer, though. I would have liked a grittier, more honest setting, but I mostly got past it and enjoyed the game.

1. Game World. The game establishes itself in the real world, following a nuclear holocaust, and slowly reveals the back story that constitutes a threat against the current inhabitants of the American southwest. Post-apocalyptic fiction was fairly common at the time, and the game seems to borrow liberally from The Terminator and similar films and books, so I can't quite call it "original," although the specific factions (the Rangers, the Temple of Blood, the Guardians) are somewhat original. Although the main quest isn't clear at the outset, it's not supposed to be, and I admit enjoying the slow revelation of the game's mysteries (even though I didn't really like the revelations). My biggest complaint in this area is the lack of change in the game world. It's not as bad as, say, Might & Magic, where you encounter the same people and quests every time the map resets. But neither is it as good as Pool of Radiance, where the game world fundamentally shifts as you solve quests. For instance, Finster made no acknowledgement that I had destroyed Cochise, and Faran Brygon never wanted to see me again after I finished his mission to find Max. Score: 6.

2. Character Creation and Development. The game is particularly strong here. I mentioned the skill system repeatedly in my postings, and I like it a lot. It is legitimately difficult to determine what skills to choose, but awfully fun to watch them develop through use and additional training. I never found uses for forgery, sleight of hand, confidence, bureaucracy, or several other skills, but that doesn't mean there were no uses in the game. This is also one of the games to allow you to directly use both skills and attributes to try to solve puzzles and get out of problems. This is probably the best aspect of the game. Skills are not just handy add-ons, as in Might & Magic II, but an absolutely essential part of the game. On the other hand, I don't think the character's sex or nationality ever had any affect on gameplay.

Stetson's final character sheet.

Leveling is a fairly satisfying process by which you not only increase in rank, but you can assign points directly to your attributes (including intelligence, which then gives yo more skill points). One thing I can't complain about is level caps. My highest-ranked character at the end of the game was a cadet, or Level 22 (which I guess is the first officer rank; below that are sergeant argent and master sergeant). But the game has up to 183 ranks, progressing through a series of somewhat silly-sounding positions that exist in no military: fireteam colonel (81-84), lance commander (93-96), technical general (125-128), imperial scarscalp (139), 1st class Fargo (150), photon stud (161), and, at last, supreme jerk (183). The idea of someone grinding this long is simply staggering, although I suppose you could get pretty high in a normal game if you just played one character. Finally, the ability to clone characters was an interesting (if nonsensical) touch. Score: 7.

3. NPC Interaction. The game has several types of NPCs, and most of them are somewhat interesting. There are those you can talk to in free text, much like Ultima IV, those that give you special encounters in the form of paragraphs, and those that will join your party. I always appreciate free-text chats, but someone please tell me where I was supposed to find out that CHAT was the keyword that prompts so much dialogue! It's not in the manual, as far as I can tell.

This would have been helpful.

NPCs that join you behave much as in The Bard's Tale or even Pool of Radiance: they'll fight for you but won't allow you to direct their specific actions. As far as I could tell, their presence in your party had no bearing on your quests; for instance, Ace asks you to go to Vegas with him to investigate the robot attacks, but having him in your party accomplishes nothing special once you get to Vegas.

I do have to give the game a bonus point for the first NPC sex. We're not yet in the era of truly memorable NPCs, but it's not far away. Score: 5.

4. Encounters and Foes. For foes, there wasn't a lot that excited me. Enemies come in several classes--animal, human, robotic--but within each class, they didn't really distinguish themselves from each other. Harder enemies were harder because they did more damage, but none of them really had special attacks that caused me to adjust my tactics, and even by the end of the game, I couldn't tell you the difference between a steel reaver and a silver strangler, or between a gunman or a desert dweller. I was surprised to find there were hundreds of different foes; I would have guessed less than 30. The one saving grace about enemies is that they respawn and give you plenty of opportunities for grinding.

Encounters are another matter. There are several scripted encounters with bosses in which you have to use various skills and wits to survive (or at least come out on top): deciding whether to kill Ugly John (and risk the booby-trapped Mayor Pedros's wife) or let him go; flirting with the barmaid; choosing between Faran Brygo or Fat Freddie; dealing with the priestess in the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud; deciding whether to kill the brats that mock you in Highpool. There were several ways to role-play these scenarios, and none of your choices seem to hamstring you for the rest of the game. Score: 5.

Incidentally, killing the youths turns Highpool into a ghost town.

5. Magic and Combat. As I covered a couple of days ago, I just didn't like it. It was boring, repetitive, mostly too easy, and not very tactical. I didn't like it in The Bard's Tale II-III, either, of which this was largely a copy. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. I have to give it props for this. There were a huge variety of items to find, test, and carry, including weapons of various types, armor, radiation suits, gas masks (which I never used), canteens, ropes, fruit, machine parts, shovels, keys and passes, and other quest items. It was so difficult to tell what would be useful (I carried a clay pot to the end of the game and never found a use for it) that I had to carry a bunch of stuff around, or at least be prepared to re-buy it from a shop. A lot of the items served as alternate puzzle solutions; you can get through a door by forcing it with strength, picking it with the picklock sill, blowing it up with TNT, or smashing it with a sledgehammer. Some of them are in fixed locations but a lot seemed random. I wouldn't have minded some more armor choices, but it seemed like every area gave me some improvement to a character's offense or defense, which I like. Score: 5.

7. Economy. The dollar-based economy, aside from being a bit unrealistic, never really did much for me. You start off with only a little cash, but you accumulate it fairly quickly. There was one brief period of the game where I worried I would run out, but only because I was using a shop as storage and buying back items for twice the selling price. I ended the game with almost $70,000, which is a sign of a poor economy; on the other hand, I was a bit too conservative with my ammo and demolitions, and I probably could have stood to spend more on rockets. Score: 4.

8. Quests. There is a fairly good main quest with a reasonably satisfying ending. Technically, there are two possibilities to the ending--your party lives or dies--but no real "role-playing" choices that go into it, and you can't decide to join Finster's faction. This is one of the few games of the era to feature side-quests; you don't have to do any of the stuff in Highpool or the Agricultural Station, for instance, and one of the things I love about the game is that you don't have to help anyone--you could just march through every area, guns blazing, killing everyone, taking quest items off their corpses. (This isn't universally true, but generally so.) These side quests offer role-playing opportunities that few games in the era do: witness how I destroyed Savage Village instead of bargaining with its leader. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. I thought the graphics were good enough. Ultima V was better on the iconographic display, but the monster portraits and end-game cut scenes were good here. Sound effects were very limited and not very good, as is par for the course in the era. I honestly can't think of a game with good sound effects yet except Dungeon Master. I thought the controls were intuitive enough. One element I neglected to cover during my gameplay was the ability to create macros. When I realized the battle with the Night Terror was going to take a while, for instance, I recorded a macro in which my lead character simply (a)ttacked with his proton axe and then said (y)es when the game asked if I wanted to execute that command. I did this about 10 times in a row, assigned the macro to F2, and just blogged while the battle was happening. You can assign similar macros to waiting between combats or trying to use skills multiple times. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. The game world is fairly small, with a limited number of places to explore, but it's mostly non-linear. If you go out of a specific order, you have to backtrack a bit, but this isn't too annoying, and if I played it again, I might hustle to Las Vegas sooner and rack up my skills and experience against the robots. As I said above, I think it's a very replayable game. I'd like to try it with a single character, or with different skill combinations. It also doesn't wear out its welcome. I know it seems like I was playing it forever, but I had a month-long break in which I didn't play anything at all. Overall, I found it to be fairly fast-paced. One walkthrough I consulted after winning suggests that, if you really know the game, you could win it in less than an hour. That might be worth trying.

The game's use of puzzles is worth discussing in this section, because it was really the best part of the game. There were number puzzles, word puzzles (UQTU), skill puzzles, inventory puzzles, riddles, and passcodes and clues to find. The journal was a nice touch, too, fleshing out the game world and giving hints about the main quest.

Finally, the game allows you to split up your party in ways not available even in modern games. As far as I can tell, you can create as many groups as you have full party members (not NPCs), and those groups can go anywhere. You could have one character exploring each of the major cities simultaneously. This is something I mentioned in my "wish list" posting and didn't imagine was available in 1988.

Aside from the limited size of the world, I only dock points for one thing: I thought it was too easy. I only suffered full-party deaths a couple of times, when I deliberately wandered into areas well outside my level. I only suffered one character death, too, and that was very early on when I didn't know what I was doing. Score: 7.

This gives us a final score of 53. It ties with Ultima IV, Starflight, and Omega for my fifth-highest rated game so far. But I maintain that the two Might & Magics, Ultima V, and Pool of Radiance are better games. You can find pitchforks and torches at your local Home Depot.

Before we go, I want to talk briefly about the adventurer's journal, because it's a lot of fun. Much like Pool of Radiance, it has a bunch of fake entries to lead you astray if you read the journal when you're not told to--in fact, the very first entry is:

You creep up to the window and, in the soft, muted lights, you see a tall woman with long, blond hair. She sits before a mirror and brushes her hair, then stands and walks over to the sunken tub off to her left. She kneels and her blue, silken robe drops to the floor. She turns the water on and steam slowly fills the air. You watch in fascination as she reaches down into the tub, whirls, and points an Uzi in your direction. "Stop reading paragraphs you're not supposed to read, creeps." She sighs deeply. "Next time I'm going to demand they put me in a Bard's Tale game, this Wasteland duty is dangerous."

There are also a lot of fake paragraphs that give you phony passwords to real locations. But the best part of the fake entries is that there's a whole series suggesting that the main quest of the game involves an alien invasion. The fake entry for the encounter with Finster reads:

The Director, a slender, handsome man, stands as you enter the room. "Rangers, thank the heavens." He follows your gaze as you stare out the window behind his desk and study the alien landscape below. The Director smiles. "As you can see, that lurid, red landscape is the closest approximation we have to the surface of Mars. We have Martian raiders coming to our world here and stealing animals and slaves. We hope, by breeding hunter-killer animals we can take the Martian starships and mount a counter offensive against the extra-terrestrial raiders." He nods. "Will you Rangers join our effort?"

Altogether, there are , I think, more fake entries than real ones, including about 34 fake entries from the "alien" storyline. The creators really put a lot of effort into this.

I understand there was a sort-of sequel to Wasteland in 1990: Fountain of Dreams. It's on my list, as is another 1990 game called Escape from Hell that uses the Wasteland engine. But of course the most famous sequel is the game's spiritual descendants, the Fallout series, none of which I have ever played except one attempt to play the first game before I found it too buggy. I look forward to giving it another try, but I hope it does away with the sentient robots.

On to Wizard Wars!

Shantih shantih shantih

Wasteland: Won!

2011-11-15T18:07:00.000-05:00

This would be the only meaningful contact I've had with "Ranger Center" since starting the game.

I won Wasteland, but in a way that managed to screw up and miss so much stuff that I'm not sure how it was possible to win. I screwed up just as much blogging about it: the sequence of events that I'm about to describe actually started last Friday, but since then I managed to delete the draft posting that had all of the notes I was taking, so I have to reconstruct a week's worth of gameplay from memory (with the help of a couple of walkthroughs). By the end of the game, I was basically just charging and blasting my way through the base, desperate to get to the end. And yet, somehow, I did it.

The path along the main quest, the game's mysteries, and the endgame started with the repair of Max the Android in the sewers below Las Vegas.

It's ALIVE!

Max had the following to say which I'll reprint verbatim because it raises a lot of questions:

"I came down here to negotiate a peace with the cyborgs and what do they do? They rip me up and start using me for spare parts. Ingrates! I have to get back up to Vegas to help prepare for the next assault, but I've got a mission of great importance for you. Head northeast from here and, across the bridge, you'll find a hidden base. It is a journey you must succeed at. There, you'll find lost technology and information that you can use to stop Cochise before it's too late.

"It's possible you'll need to recover some equipment from Project Darwin before you can complete the rebuilding of the sleeper base. Be careful, though, and rebuild as much of the base as you can before you venture off to Darwin. I don't like the things I've heard about it at all."

So: huh? This is where a few dialogue options would have come in handy. First of all, who the hell is Max? Who built him? Where did he come from, and why is he fighting the other robots?

Second, "stop Cochise before it's too late?" Has the infamous Indian chief returned? That would be a heck of a twist. It later turns out he was talking about the base, which is named Cochise, but the game just drops it in the dialogue here like I was supposed to have heard it before. Maybe I was and just missed it.

Either way, I had a new destination: a hidden base in the mountains to the northeast, in a place where the game had showed me just mountains before.

This completely freaked me out. I assumed that there were dozens of such locations across the game world that the game would now reveal to me slowly, and it would be weeks before I won. But it turned out there was only one more after this: Cochise itself.

I never did find out what the bodies were about.

The base, which only had a few robot guards, had a bunch of rooms indicating that some experiments had been going on. A computer had personnel files on the base's former staff, which helped flesh out the back story a bit (see below). There was a "chopper" simulator in the base at which I could have gained the helicopter skill, but none of my characters had enough skill points, and it turned out that I didn't need it anyway (I could have flown a helicopter to Cochise, but it was easy enough just to barge through the front door).

Would flying this have been cool? Someone tell me.

There was also a library where I learned "clone technology." This gave me the ability, using jugs and clone fluid that I created at a workstation, to make clones of my characters.

Something tells me that cloning isn't so easy that you can just learn it in the library.

I ended up cloning Stetson--calling the cloned character Stetson 2--and I was pleased to find that he had all of the skills and levels (even the rank!) of Stetson 1, and I could control him directly in combat. If I had been thinking properly, I would have cloned 2 more characters and gotten rid of the NPCs for good, but at the time I decided one was enough.

Note the second "me" at the far bottom of the screen.

After the base, I returned to Darwin Village, thinking it had something to do with the Darwin Project that Max had gone on about, although I'm not really sure what he meant about needing equipment. In any event, nothing notable happened there, but only because (I later discovered through a walkthrough) that I missed an entire area. I also missed a host of dialogue options with both the bartender and other characters simply because I didn't know that CHAT was a dialogue command that everyone responds to. It's not in the manual, so I'm not sure where I was supposed to pick that up.

I was a fool.

Oddly, though, missing the Project Darwin base didn't turn me into a "walking dead," but it did leave me bereft of ideas about what to do next, so I decided to assail the Guardian's Citadel. The game still warned me that my armor and weapons weren't good enough, but I pushed forward and did manage to slaughter all of the gun-toting priests and nuns staffing the place, though I had to keep retreating outside to rest and heal. Within the base, I found all kinds of keys and passes that later turned out to open doors in Cochise, but I remain a bit confused as to the relationship between Cochise and the Citadel.

Perhaps they're robots. They're oddly resistant to automatic weapons.

The Citadel also held a fantastic stash of weapons and armor, including "power armor" (I'm guessing the best in the game) and enough energy packs to see me through the end. Eventually, I gave up on picking it all up.

I lost track of exactly where I got the clue that Cochise was in the mountains west of Las Vegas. But, in any event, I ventured there to stop the robot invasion. The base had multiple levels, and it was full of tough robot enemies that, again, sent me scurrying out of the base to rest and heal after every two or three combats. There were a bunch of doors I guess I was supposed to have key passes to (perhaps I was supposed to get them in Darwin), but I managed to get through by just blasting the doors with RPGs.

RPGs: The ultimate key.

There was a workbench that noted I could fix broken toasters there, so I used my "toaster repair" skill on the three toasters I had found (and, in the greatest CRPG tradition, kept with me even though in real life an aventuring party would have ditched them a long time ago). I don't think the repaired toasters themselves had any use, but the act of repairing them got me various parts and items that were stuffed within them. I think I needed one of the items, a power coupling, to repair a computer at the end.

I guess that would be a "hint."

At last, I came to the computer that seemed to be the evil mastermind behind the base and its robotic killers. It told me that its mission was to repopulate Earth with "pure stock" after the robots finished killing all other forms of life. In order to piece together the entire story--which I was clueless about as I actually won the game--I had to look at walkthroughs and journal entries that I hadn't actually discovered. The sequence of events seems to be:

Project Darwin, Base Cochise, and Sleeper Base are established in the desert by the U.S. Government. Cochise focuses on research into artificial intelligence; Sleeper Base on cloning and energy weapons; and Project Darwin on genetics. The three bases know of each other but are sort-of in competition. Darwin is directed by Irwin John Finster.

Nuclear war. The bases are cut off from each other and the computer at Cochise is damaged. It becomes self-aware during the attack and repairs itself, but somehow corrupts its programming and decides its mission is to scour the Earth of life and replace it with perfect life forms: cyborgs. (I wonder if the game's creators were influenced by V'ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which also featured a damaged computer that corrupted its original programming and became a threat.)

The researchers at Sleeper abandon their base and go live at the agricultural center.

The Cochise computer allies with Finster and convinces him to become a cyborg. It then takes him over and starts him producing armies of cyborgs, which it believes will be the only forms of life to survive in the new world. Finster gives diseases to anyone who opposes the plan

Cochise starts sending its robots to wipe out the human cities.

The computer gives its villain speech.

The relationship between the human Guardians and Cochise is unclear, as is why the Guardians had the keys to destroy Cochise. Also left unexplained is where the computer found the parts, labor, and technology to create all the cyborgs and other machines.

For a while, I was stuck at this point, because I couldn't figure out a way to go anywhere else in the base. Finally, I found a hollow section of the wall, blasted it open, and descended deeper into the base.

This puzzle was a bit unfair. Nowhere else in the game did you need to test every wall to get through an area.

There were multiple combats with robots and several light puzzles that I needed to solve (e.g., navigating a mine field, crossing a slippery beam) with the help of various skills and attributes (e.g., perception and dexterity) before I got to the lowest level, which was full of computers and robot-assembly machines, as well as a nuclear reactor.

Perception helped me avoid land mines. Some of them.

Through a bunch of trial and error, I repaired the reactor computer, used the keys I had found in the Guardian's Citadel (why did they have them) to activate four switches in a proper order, and entered a sequence of color codes. Again, a lot of trial and error. I was stymied for a while by the fact that once you initiate the process, a wall closes around each switch and prevents you from going to the other switches in the order you need to. Eventually, I figured out the way to solve this was to split up my party into four groups and have them activate the switches in the right sequence. I tried pretty much every combination of sequences before I got it right; I'm sure I just overlooked the clue somewhere.

Anyway, activating the switches caused the base to enter self-destruct sequence, and it gave me only and hour to get out of there. It was dicey, but I made it, and got a series of cut scenes showing Cochise exploding. The world was saved!

'Cause what the world needs right now is another nuclear explosion.

Video of the endgame below, starting with my entering the sequence codes (there are a couple of combats as I run out of the base).

Then, when I contacted Ranger Center, they congratulated me and indicated that they'd had some intelligence about what was going on at Cochise but withheld it from me for reasons I don't quite understand.

But you didn't choose to share it with me. Thanks.

On one hand, it was nice that my efforts in the game ultimately channeled into a main mission and a coherent plot. On the other, I can't say that I'm particularly enamored of the plot. It doesn't make a lot of sense. The technology that you encounter towards the end of the game--laser rifles, self-aware machines, full-body cloning--isn't even available now, let alone in the 1990s. Essentially, the game diverges from a post-apocalyptic setting to a sci-fi setting. The idea of machines trying to wipe out humanity is very derivative of The Terminator, released four years prior. Altogether, I find the whole plot a bit goofy.

But I can't ignore the excellent gameplay elements that Wasteland pioneered. I'll cover them in my "final rating" posting tomorrow.

Wasteland: We Who Were Living Are Now Dying

2011-11-14T22:59:00.001-05:00

What should we read into the fact that he's wearing an LAPD hat?

I had rather hoped to have a "Won!" posting tonight, but I'm stuck in what I think is the final game area (Base Cochise). Since I last posted, I resurrected Max the Android, explored a vacant military base, wiped out the defenders in the Guardian's Citadel, cloned one of my characters, and entered the base. But I'm going to save the story and mythology for the next posting. Here, I thought I'd talk about combat, since I otherwise haven't described it in detail.

You begin some distance from your enemy.

The combat in the game is based on the same system used in The Bard's Tale II-III, which means that it's simple and familiar, but not terribly sophisticated. When you initially encounter enemies, they can be up to 90 feet away (I guess your ability to "move silently" has some bearing on this). Enemies more than 20 feet away require ranged weapons to hit, so if you only have melee weapons, you have to try to close the distance by using the "run" command each turn. Here, I wish I had The Bard's Tale III's spell that yanks enemies into melee range.

Running is also how you flee combat, and the terrain comes into play here. If you run more than 90 feet away, you flee, but you can also flee by running off the edge of the map or around a corner so the enemy can no longer see you. Unfortunately, most of them don't pursue you, so you can't just lurk around the corner waiting for them to come to you.

My party splits to take on multiple groups of robots.

Often, enemies will attack you in multiple groups, some at different distances than others. Theoretically, this should create a fairly tactical combat scenario, as you have different fighters target different groups depending on their skill. In reality, I rarely get into this level of detail. Since a character can only attack one group at a time, and if another character finishes off a group before his attack, his attack is wasted for the round, I simply try to spread out the attacks among multiple groups.

During each round, you have 7 options: run closer, or away (either a single character or the whole party), use an item or skill (such as using "doctor" to heal a seriously-wounded character), try to "hire" the enemy (only works on certain NPCs), "evade" (don't do anything for the round), attack, change weapons, and load or unjam a weapon. You have to load when your ammo runs out, of course, but you might also want to do it as it runs low if you need to fire off an entire clip on auto. Weapons jam about 1 out of every 50 times you fire them, requiring you to waste a round unjamming them.

Combat options. Note that things aren't going well for the party. But though everyone fell unconscious at some point, I still won--see below for how that happens.

There are multiple types of weapons in the game:

Melee weapons: fists, knives, crowbars, axes, chainsaws, proton axes
Throwing weapons: throwing knives, spears
Clip pistols: M1911A1 .45 pistols and VP91Z 9mm pistols (the first is a real designation for a common military service pistol; the latter appears to have been made up for the game)
Rifles: M17 carbines and M19 rifles
Submachine guns: Mac 17s and Uzis
Anti-tank weapons: manglers, sabot rockets, LAW rockets, and RPGs
Demolitions: TNT, grenades, and plastic explosives
Assault rifles: AK97 assault rifles and M1989A1 NATO assault rifles
Energy weapons: Laser pistols, laser carbines, laser rifles, ion beamers, and meson cannons

Some of the game's many weapons.

As you saw, when I first started the game, I determined to be a melee-only party, but this swiftly grew untenable as my characters were mowed down over and over while trying to charge into melee range. So I capitulated and started arming myself with guns.

Not only did the axe kill the bastard, but daring to attack such a tough foe with a melee weapon raised my skill level.

I made the mistake of spreading skills for different types of weapons throughout my party, and I realized later in the game that I had screwed it up: lower-level weapons soon become utterly ineffective. Now, late in the game, I've found a couple of proton axes that serve as good melee weapons (when I can get into range), but all of the skill points I've invested in assault rifles (not to mention the ammo I've saved for them) avail me not as clip after clip refuses to have any effect on higher-level enemies. This makes sense when I'm shooting at armored robots and tanks, I guess, but it doesn't make a lot of sense when my enemies are friars and nuns. The good news is that as long as the character has 1 skill point in the weapon, he levels up reasonably quickly through constant use.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, though. I've found "power armor" for all of my characters, and this renders many of my foes' attacks just as ineffective as when I try to shoot them with submachine guns. Still, if I were to play the game over again, I wouldn't waste any skill points on clip pistols or submachine guns. I might give one or two of my characters melee skills, but I'd save the rest of my skill points for automatic and energy weapons.

I also made the mistake of saving up a bunch of anti-tank weapons instead of using them...well, on tanks. I now have about 20 RPGs and LAW rockets in my inventories. I've been trying to burn them, and I do find they perform tolerably well on a lot of enemies. More important, they blast open a lot of doors. I missed a key or two somewhere, so I'm glad the game gives me the opportunity to just destroy the steel doors.

A LAW rocket does its job against a robot. Note the fanciful descriptions of the damage and death. They were cute, but I usually had the scroll rate set so fast that I never really read them.

At this point, I've given all my characters energy weapons. I guess power packs for them are in limited supply during the game, but I keep finding new caches and have never came close to running out. I did find that the laser pistols and carbines stopped working well on enemies, though, and I had to give everyone rifles, ion beamers, and meson cannons.

Back to combat, though. For submachine guns, automatic weapons, and energy weapons, the game lets you choose whether to fire a single shot, a burst of shots, or empty the entire clip on "auto." I wish I'd chosen "auto" more often because by firing bursts, I ended up losing a lot of hit points and having to retreat from the areas, heal up in the desert (time passes so slowly indoors that it takes forever to wait and heal), and return. I've already entered and exited the final base about 15 times.

These guys were horribly deadly and worth burning entire clips on.

When enemies reduce your hit points to 0, your characters fall unconscious. If they really beat you down, you might become "seriously" or "critically" injured. At that point, you need attention from someone with a medic or doctor skill because otherwise you keep getting worse until you die. Unconscious characters heal and eventually wake up. The odd thing is, enemies won't target unconscious characters, and a fully unconscious party doesn't "die" in combat--everyone's got to be at least "serious." This has created some weird situations in which I've won tough combats even though everyone's been knocked unconscious. A couple of characters will wake up, have time to fire off a couple of shots, and then get wounded into unconsciousness again. Then a couple more characters will wake up, etc. Because of this quirk, it's been a while since I've suffered a full-party death.

In the video below, which I took a few days ago, you see me wandering around Las Vegas, but you can see a battle with some tanks starting at around 00:55. Note how it starts them all at 95 feet away--if I wanted to run towards them, it would take 9 turns, so I really need to just start shooting, which I do, in bursts. I decide to arm Damyata, the person with the highest AT weapon skill, with a LAW rocket. Note how Philomel's rifle jams, and I have to waste a turn unjamming it (02:07). Note also how I can't tell the three NPCs who to target or how many shots to fire, which is why I have them armed with single-shot weapons so they don't waste entire clips. My bullets aren't doing much damage to them, but Damyata's LAW rocket does a reasonably good job (02:23).

Throughout the video, I'm clicking on the options so you can see what I'm doing--the game supports a mouse this way--but in most of my play, I used the keyboard, which is much, much quicker.

Note how ACE's "rifle" skill goes up to Level 4 (03:33); the manual says that skills are more likely to increase when you're using them on tough enemies, and I suppose shooting a carbine rifle at a tank is about as tough as it gets.

Anyway, the combat lasts a long time, mostly because I'm shooting at tanks with bullets, but no one dies. One thing I find annoying is how the game gives all the experience to the characters who struck the killing blows, no matter how much everyone else contributes to the damage. In this case, Philomel made out like a bandit (05:35).

An attack against human scavengers a few minutes later (06:00) is much easier, but look at the phrase when they die: "sends him to meet his maker just as he peels off a final shot." That happens a lot, with robots, too. Even though my character kills the enemies, they manage to get in one attack.

I end the video messing around a bit on the inventory and character screens. You can reload out of battle, which saves you from having to waste a round in the next combat.

The analogous combat screen in Bard's Tale III.

Having described all of this, I can't say that I love the combat system. It's not consistently dangerous enough to make you meticulously plot your tactics, and even when it is, you can usually escape out of the area, rest and heal, and try again. While classes of enemies respond to different attacks, the overwhelming strategy is just to use the most powerful weapon you have, try to conserve ammo when you can, and keep firing until you win. It looks like they tried to implement a more tactical battle board by giving you the ability to split your party through the "run" command, but in practice it takes so long to position multiple characters around the battlefield that it's less hassle to stand in one place and shoot. Except at the very beginning, I've found that I simply sleepwalk through most combats.

As I indicated, I think I'm in the final base, but it's full of tough robot combats and computers that I'm not really sure what to do with. I feel like I missed a lot of stuff somewhere, so I'm eager to finish it (if I can) and look at a walkthrough. Either I'll have a "won!" posting tomorrow or I'll be begging you for help.

One More Skyrim Posting

2011-11-13T22:10:00.006-05:00

Dragons don't actually exist, so I can't say with any authority what it would be like to fight one. But I suspect, at least, that it would be harder than in most CRPGs that feature dragons. Such games seem to easily forget that a) dragons are much bigger than people; and b) dragons can fly. I don't care how armed, armored, and experienced you are, I want you to imagine the likely result of taking on a grizzly bear in melee combat. Now imagine if the grizzly bear was 8 times bigger, had wings, had natural scale armor, and could breath fire. Yeah.

Yet in games like Might & Magic and Ultima V, they just casually show up in lists of monsters that you manage to slay with swords and arrows. There are plenty of games that feature dragons, but there are no games that have made me feel like I was truly fighting #&$@#ing dragons!

Until Skyrim, that is. This is the first CRPG I have ever played in which battles against dragons proceed pretty much how I would expect them to proceed, with the dragon taking advantage of its air superiority, and my character hiding behind things and feebly sniping at it with a bow until it gets tired and lands, at which point I go charging with my axe, and most of the time get burned to a crisp in mid-stride.

And if you think that's cool, you should see how the game handles giants. They're actually giant. And they wield weapons that, quite sensibly, kill you in a single hit.

Two days ago, I said: "This will be my last word on the game until about 2023, though: Tomorrow, it's back to Wasteland. I promise." The disheartening thing is not that I'm breaking my promise, but that I didn't even try very hard to keep it. For the last 48 hours, I have done absolutely nothing but play Skyrim, except to feed the cats--but only then because they were howling at me so much that it was interfering with my playing of Skyrim.

I rescind my earlier reservations: the game is fantastic--perhaps the best CRPG I have ever played. More than any other game, the combats make you feel like you are truly fighting for your life. The game world is impossibly detailed, and exploring the dungeons is the most immersive experience I've ever had playing a game. NPCs have real conversations with each other as you wander through cities. The quests, far from the mostly fetch-and-carry missions of Morrowind and Oblivion, are original and nuanced, and offer real role-playing choices. Unlike previous Elder Scrolls games, there are real dialogue options here (although not as extensive as in the Bioware/Interplay titles).

And then there's the back story, which reveals itself only slowly, and brilliantly, in dialogue and books. Set 200 years after Oblivion, the game features a world in which the fabled Empire is truly falling apart, and it's hard to tell at this stage whether this collapse is related to, or independent of, the crisis facing Skyrim. I can't remember another game in which I was so eager to see the main quest unfold, or to try what I've already accomplished with different character classes and choices.

I was wrong about the "dumbing down" of the skill development system. As killias2 said earlier today, "it's like they subtracted 4 and added 10." I wouldn't have minded if the attributes were still there, but overall the "perks" system is a decent replacement for the previous systems. I confess, though, to some paralysis about which perks to choose, so I've been racking up points without spending them.

Did I mention the spells? This is literally the first CRPG I've ever played that really made me want to be a mage. Blasting the bandit with fire from one hand and lighting from the other never gets old.

I haven't quite reached a verdict on how I feel about the smithing process (you can smelt your own ore, tan your own hides, and--using the ingots and leather strips that result from these processes--create and upgrade your weapons) or the alchemy system yet. But I can't say that I hate them.

My one major quibble is the way that a strike from a giant sends you spinning into the stratosphere. It's amusing the first few times, but I suspect that in real life, the hammer would just turn your body into paste. I don't know for sure whether this was intended or a bug.

Anyway: Sorry. I will be back to Wasteland tomorrow, and I can promise this because--after trying every possible way to trick and wheedle my way out of it--I've had to leave my home to go to Rochester, New York for the week. As I couldn't bring my Xbox with me, Skyrim is not an option until I return this weekend. I should have won Wasteland by then; I feel like the end is very close.

The rest of you need to be playing Skyrim. Someone tell me how it is on the PC.

Skyrim Break

2011-11-11T20:46:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, I drove home from D.C.--about eight hours--and as I got off the exit for my town, I realized it was almost midnight. Out of idle curiosity, I decided to swing by the local GameStop and see if they were going to be open at midnight for people wanting to purchase Skyrim.

Ho boy. There was a line stretching so far that the people at the end could have probably had the game shipped to them faster than they were going to get it at GameStop. I stopped and chatted with a few of them. Oddly, they weren't all in line for Skyrim, though I was pretty sure that was the only major game released today. Most of them were, though. A lot of them had pre-ordered it, and the consensus seemed to be that expecting to waltz into GameStop and purchase it today was the height of folly. Reasoning that I had plenty of other things to do this weekend, I just drove home and forgot about it.

This morning, I drove down to Wal-Mart to get a universal power adapter for a laptop, and what did I see? An entire case full of copies of Skyrim. Ha! I guess the people who pre-ordered and waited in line got to play it a few extra hours last night, but otherwise I can't imagine why you'd spend a couple hours standing in the cold for it. Anyway, I paid $60 for it and spent most of the day playing it. (I should mention that I bought it for the X-Box 360, not the PC, which is why I couldn't just download it.)

This is the first game that I've bought on opening day, and the first new game I've played in which I didn't read anything about it first. Thus, the plot and gameplay elements were complete surprises to me--and not necessarily happy ones.

I know you don't come to my blog to get breaking news and reviews of current CRPGs, so I keep this brief. As in all Elder Scrolls games, you start as a prisoner--this time in a wagon, trundling to your execution in the Nord city of Helgen. The conversations of the other doomed souls in the wagon reveal them to be "Stormcloaks," followers of a lord named Ulfric Stormcloak who has styled himself the rightful king of Skyrim and is in rebellion against the Empire. As the wagon pulls into town and you disembark, the game asks for your race, sex, name, and appearance, and I was happy to see that at last I had the ability to create a bald character.

The executions begin, but just as you put your head down on the chopping block, a dragon appears and starts attacking the town. To hear the locals describe it later, there hasn't been a dragon 'round these parts in a thousand years. As everyone flees in panic, you have the option to follow the Stormcloaks or the Imperial Guard. I chose the Guard--I've never been much of a fan of separatists--and was rewarded with my freedom for helping to save the guard captain. After that, as is par for the course with The Elder Scrolls, the game opens completely up and allows you to go anywhere on the map, though it's strongly suggested that you start in a nearby town. Like Oblivion and Morrowind, the world is vast, with numerous towns, forts, ruins, caves, and other areas to explore, and there promises to be dozens of quests.

The game so far hasn't given me any indication of how long after Oblivion it takes place. I've been avoiding spoilers on that. But clearly some weird stuff has happened, because the folk speak of the "eight divines"--apparently worship of Talos (the ascended Tiber Septim) has been outlawed throughout the empire. Whether this has anything to do with the main quest, involving dragons and civil war, I don't know. [Later edit: I realized that the starting date, in-game, is listed as year 201 of the 4th era. Since the 3rd era ended at the close of Oblivion, I guess this game takes place 201 years later.]

Having played it for a few hours, I'm honestly not sure if I like it. The graphics are beautiful, the sound is first-rate, and the world is very evocative. But the dumbing-down of the character development system that began in Oblivion has continued in Skyrim. In particular:

You don't choose a class. Instead, you just focus on the skills you want to improve on and sort-of self-define your class. (Increases in any 10 skills lead to a level increase.) This isn't horrible, since you could essentially do the same thing in the previous games (no matter what your initial selection, you could choose to specialize in other skills); however...

Some of the skills are gone. Particularly irksome are the loss of athletics and acrobatics--I really liked improving those in the previous games. Combat skills have been reduced to "one-handed" and "two-handed" (a far crime from Morrowind's spear, axe, short blade, long blade, and blunt) and there's no more hand-to-hand skill. Overall, Morrowind had 27 skills, Oblivion had 21, and Skyrim has 18.

Perhaps most shockingly, there are no attributes! Strength, speed, endurance, and so forth are fixed and immutable. Instead, when you increase levels, you make direct boosts to your health, magic, or stamina--these are no longer derived.

Balancing this somewhat are "perks," which are tied to specific skills and are chosen by the player during level-ups. For instance, players who want to specialize in the block skill can choose a "shield bash" perk and marksmen can choose a perk that allows them to zoom. There are hundreds of these, so you have to make more choices than in previous games when it comes to focusing your skills.

Still, many of the things I used to like about Morrowind and Oblivion--incrementally increasing my maximum encumbrance; getting to the point where I can race, leaping across the countryside because of high athletics and speed levels; mixing attribute-boosting potions--are no longer available.

There are some gameplay elements that make up for the changes in character development. Combat is much more realistic and, consequently, much more brutal. You have the option to dual-wield both weapons and spells. Spells are cast continuously, so when you choose to cast "flame" on someone, you can just hold down the trigger and become a human flamethrower (expending magic points constantly, of course). The physics are very realistic, and you can set things on fire (although it doesn't seem to permanently damage them). I like the conversations marginally better, and there's more depth and complexity to the quests. I haven't quite decided if I like the new "smith" skill which allows you to create and upgrade weapons and armor given the right raw materials (unlike previous games, you don't need to repair things), and I'm still struggling a bit with the lockpicking minigame.

Health regenerates continually, like mana and stamina, which I think is somewhat lame.

Oh, and apropos of our recent discussion on the issue, there are children in the game, although I have confirmed that you can't harm a hair on their heads. (Trying counts as a crime and rouses the entire town to slaughter you, however.)

So, a mixed bag, but I still have plenty of things left to discover and may end up liking it in the end. This will be my last word on the game until about 2023, though: Tomorrow, it's back to Wasteland. I promise.

Note: Sorry for the lack of images here, but I don't really know how to capture them on my TV.