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save-the-spiral · 5 years

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InkWizTober Day Thirteen: Ash + Return from Beyond

Welcome to day thirteen of Inktober! I wrote about my oc Fledge, who I’ve written snippets about before but this is literally their entire storyline of the first arc. They use any pronouns before the events of this, but are misgendered hardcore in the beginning and use they/them exclusively afterwards in the first arc. I also included my friend @pyromancyy‘s oc Caleb, Caleb’s not my boy. Warnings for swearing, misgendering, microagressions (touching their hair w/o consent), blood, death, undead creatures, kidnapping (a literal child), forcing my small oc to do horrible things, so child trauma.

(link to prompt lists) (link to inktober tag)

Fledge is eight years old when their entire world is ruined. It happens like this: Merle Ambrose notices a strange human child with no parents in Ravenscar, not hidden like they usually are when outsiders come to Grizzleheim. Merle Ambrose grabs Fledge by the arm, and bodily drags them from the Ravens, claiming that Fledge just needs to go to Ravenwood, that it will domesticate 'him’.

Fledge has to watch the angry expressions on their guardian’s faces morph into helplessness as they are pulled up a rickety wooden ramp and out of Ravenscar.

They’re dazed from some kind of spell, stumbling and mostly dragged through Northguard. Bears and wolves alike who know them- have called Fledgling their Pup or Cub, have cared for them- have to just stand by and watch. Grizzleheim has trade agreements their economy, their entire world, relies on. They can’t start a fight with the wizards now, not when Wizard City houses some of the most powerful wizards, not when they could drag other worlds into it as well.

Right before the Rainbow Bridge, a large bear woman that taught Fledge how to light a fire palms them a small single bladed axe, sadly stepping away before Merle notices. Fledge hides it in the folds of their feathery cloak.

Fledge had never gone over the Rainbow Bridge before that day. Children were forbidden from playing near it, and were never to even think about playing around the Spiral Door beyond it.

They were dragged into the Door, afraid and still dazed, speechless and without the mobility to sign anything either. Then they were pulled through, and it hurts, like their being is pulled apart and put back together. They don’t know if it’s homesickness setting in already or the Door.

Their first impression of Wizard City was that it was weird.

Who keeps their Door in a real living being?

Later, when Fledge learns theoretical physics, they’ll hate the concept of that even more.

They almost pass out from the stress of it, and are very confused when the people around them don’t speak Grizzleheim’s language, having to switch their mind to work with Common. The only thing that anchors them is the coolness of a metal axe blade against their spine, hidden.

They’re introduced as a boy.

Fledge isn’t a boy. They just pick and choose what to wear, sometimes ask to be a boy or a girl when they feel like it, but they won’t ever be a boy always.

They aren’t awake enough anymore to be angry.

A professor with hair like fire in a big stupid curl calls them cute when they wake up. She touches their dreadlocks without permission and it takes everything inside them to not burn her alive for it.

They learned ruthlessness in Grizzleheim from the Wolves and the Bears, but right now they needed the Raven cunning to get back home.

Fledge plays dumb, mostly. They pretend to not know how to write Common, only understanding speech. Every single student and professor treats them like a baby, except for the bald one who looks like he ate rotten berries.

It works for a few weeks, and they fall into a bit of a routine. Stay in their dorm, sit in a classroom and sleep, wander around as if lost when really they’re looking for escape routes, some way to get into the big tree without the permission others seem to need.

It’s not until someone starts trash talking their home world that they blow their cover.

It’s some arrogant death wizard with a rat familiar always perched on his shoulder. Even his peers seem to dislike him, but they still laugh when he insults the people of Grizzleheim.

It’s then that Fledge says, in perfect Common, “Take it back or I duel you and you lose.”

And, well, the boy couldn’t refuse that challenge, even if others seem unnerved that Fledge can speak at all. The death wizard says he’ll go easy on Fledge.

Fledge shrugs, eyes wide as they enter the dueling arena. As soon as the battle array lights up, they pull out a thick deck of cards and the axe they were given, now glowing in ancient Grizzleheim runes, the silver blade reflecting flames that aren’t there.

It only takes a few turns to cast an oversized, screeching phoenix and simultaneously terrify and defeat the boy in one hit.

After that, Fledge walks past all of the shocked students and goes back to their dorm to nap.

The adults tell Fledge to go to the later classes, the ones for older students. The people here are even taller and even meaner at times. Fledge doesn’t ignore assignments now, only answering them in ancient Grizzleheim runes that no one but a few people from their home world could decipher.

Most of the students begin avoiding them, speaking lies about them.

Then the death school falls, and thirty kids along with it. The death professor is blamed, and now every competent wizard is sent to clear monsters from the residential areas of the world.

Fledge has always had a temper. And finally being able to fight something for real, to not hold anything back and vent their frustration?

They may have cracked off a few areas of Firecat Alley on accident, but they do clear out every enemy, so they technically followed orders, only with the other three members on their team having to stay back to not get their flesh melted off their bones.

Maybe they ran away.

Anyway, as soon as Fledge gets back to Ravenwood, Merle Fucking Ambrose is there, and he says Fledge needs to find Professor Malistaire Drake, to defeat the man before the Spiral is destroyed.

The only reason Fledge says yes is because Grizzleheim is in the Spiral, so the whole universe shouldn’t be destroyed.

They’re given a few keys, and told that Krokotopia would be their first stop.

Krokotopia is hot and dry and they hate it in their raven feather cloak and thick leather tunic. They persevere, and play dumb with the dogs because they know the dogs can’t help it, they’re like wolves, but wrong and stupid.

It takes only a few battles in the first pyramid for enemies to start running away from them. They follow leads, dragging dogs out of trouble because they tend to babble out new information, and eventually they get to the second pyramid.

They love the Colosseum, because it has honor to it. More honor than Wizard City could ever have, much more than the Marleybone dogs. It reminds them of home, of proving yourself with your strength.

After the second pyramid, they stay with the Krok in the balance school for a few days, getting their wounds tended to and learning a bit. With their knack for languages they have conversational Krokotopian learned in a couple of days, and they start on their ancient runes too before remembering themself. They rush off to the last pyramid with trade promises between Krokotopia and Grizzleheim running through their head, occupying their thoughts.

The third pyramid is easy as well, though the dead things unnerve Fledge. It’s not simply the fact that they are dead, it’s that they never got their peace, or were brought back to this realm by a dark force.

Fledge delights in defeating Krokopatra, who actually has strategy, and is the first difficult opponent they’ve faced. She still dissolves into sand after revealing that the secret they’re looking for is in Marleybone, but they let her die with honor, with a fairer fight than most got.

Marleybone is just annoying. They run around on rooftops, growling back at dogs who dare to call them uncivilized, and they fix their gang problem within a week with brutal efficiency. The Krokonomicon is no longer in Meowiarty’s hands, though.

If Fledge melts the interior of the huge clock tower, no one alive is around to tell the tale.

They move onto Mooshu now, their last key, their only way to get to Dragonspyre. The culture shock is startling, but learning the languages of the world is the most interesting thing they’ve been able to do in the past half a year since they were kidnapped.

This world takes much longer. With Fledge more sympathetic to their plight, they spend more time doing it right instead of the easier way that ‘technically’ accomplishes their goal. Mooshu’s connection to nature makes them take the longer routes most times, as opposed to razing down their pretty trees and bamboo forests.

They team up with some wizards from Mooshu who are looking for others to help heal their poisoned emperor, to heal the land itself as well.

It takes six months before Fledge stands before the last oni, able to roar back at it with the perfect Mooshu accent and dialect in response to its taunts. They take this battle alone, and it drags on for hours before the Jade Oni falls, the sick form of the emperor taking its place.

Fledge gets the Dragonspyre key, and for the first time feels homesick for a world other than Grizzleheim when they leave.

Dragonspyre is awful. They retch at the stench of brimstone, looking miserably up at the professor from Wizard City who only looks at them pityingly before saying “You got taller.”

Fledge figures if they had to send a child on a mission to murder their sibling they’d be upset too, so they don’t let it phase them. They struggle through Dragonspyre, having to make sense of long dead ghosts and crazed drakes. They travel through time and see a world like Wizard City, and don’t mourn that it’s gone. They spend months getting approval from specters.

Eventually they’re able to travel into the husk that once was Dragonspyre Academy. They speak to the tree left there, and she’s joyful. They learn the ancient Dragonspyrian tongue from her because she seems far too lonely. They promise to visit again each time they have to leave on a new mission in order to finally scale the Great Spyre, and every time Ashley is surprised they come back alive.

Fledge gets to hatch an actual drake. They feel it bump against the thick shell, sitting there at the base of Ashley's trunk. Fledge uses their raven feather cloak as a nest for the giant egg. They cry for the first time in years when the little drake is born, aging rapidly in front of their eyes until its large enough to carry Fledge, though still stumbling like a newborn deer.

Fledge plays for the first time in years too, rolling around and wrestling with the baby drake, chasing and being chased, until Ashley has to remind them of their goal.

It’s two years after being kidnapped when they fly up to the top of the Great Spyre, axe in hand, a drake of their own at their side now, refusing to leave Fledge for even a moment.

They tear through the preliminary forces of undead, reaching Malistaire completely unscathed. The man is surprised, staring at Fledge.

“You’re so small.” His voice cracks, bloodshot eyes wide. “You’re a child- no, no- please-!”

Fledge is numb to it all. Two years of this. They weren’t going to wait for some monologue to end it. The Dragon Titan eyes the scene with one sleepy eye, before rumbling contentedly and falling asleep once again.

Fledge has to dig through Malistaire’s ashes to find the Krokonomicon, but when they do find it they toss it off the world as hard as they can, and hop onto their Drake’s back, flying back down to speak to Ashley again before they have to leave for the last time.

In the end, they return to the Basilica to see the still living Drake brother, only nodding grimly when asked if it was done. Professor Drake’s grip on their shoulder is shaky when they go through the Spiral Door to Wizard City.

The students crowd around, awed by them, still calling them a boy, still asking why they are so silent, still trying to touch their now longer hair.

Fledge is dazed, and their drake is confused, only able to make sure no one gets to close. Eventually they’re saved by the same death student they had beat in a duel two years ago, the arrogant boy now with one less arm and a more subdued attitude, and Fledge gets to drink tea for the first time since Mooshu.

Fledge dozes off in the abandoned Nightside house Caleb had been fixing up into a home. They watch the boy who once yelled at them, was once defeated by them, and has now saved them from a cyclical fate. Fledge finds themself crying when they notice Caleb is, and they curl into their drake’s warmth, lulled into sleep by the promise of safety at last.

Fledge is ten years old when their world is starting to be put back together.

#Wiztober #Wiztober2019 #Inktober #Inktober2019 #Wizard101 #Writing #Fledge #Caleb Deathleague #my oc #my ocs #wizard 101 #wizzy101 #wiz101 #w101 #wizzy

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Game 365: Muryaden (1989)

You are not misinterpreting this screen. The troll is having his genitals stimulated by a magic stone. It’s that kind of game.

Muryaden

France

Elrik et Deckard (developers); Bytlejuice (publisher)

Released in 1989 for Apple II

Date Started: 12 May 2020

Date Ended: 14 May 2020

Total Hours: 5 Difficulty: Moderate (3/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

At first glance, Muryaden is another Ultima clone, but I guess it was intended as a sort of anti-Ultima. It was made by developers who held at least mild contempt for not only Lord British but the entire history of American RPGs. I get this from a web page that one of the authors used to maintain; I would appreciate if anyone who speaks French fluently would scan this page and let me know if there’s anything in the following account that I got wrong. I can read French, but I’m having trouble with this French, which seems to include a lot of slang and nonstandard uses of words. Do French people really use ricaines as a slur for “Americans”?

Anyway, the chief complaint of Elrik and Deckard seems to be that the American approach to fantasy RPGs was too “clean.” They were less interested in high fantasy of the Tolkien type and more interested in gritty Conan-style sword and sorcery, with attendant sex and gore. In their authors’ desires to ensure that their programs wouldn’t be banned by “austere Puritan traditionalists,” they argued, American RPGs always take place in a “quasi-religious atmosphere” in which a noble purifier “arrives at the right time to deliver the world from a diabolical oppressor.” The plots are interchangeable and the universes are “clean and hygienic,” with no sex, brothels, or even any latrines.

The game is credited to “Elrik” and “Deckard.”

I think the authors go a bit too far in imputing motive to American RPG developers (and not far enough in appreciating them for, you know, inventing the genre in the first place), but I’ll concede that they have a point. American CRPGs in the 1980s are awfully vanilla. I don’t know that the solution lies in graphic descriptions of demon ejaculate, but at least it gets points for originality.

The backstory for the game thus reads less like someone trailblazing a new era in realism and more like the fruits of the perverse imaginations of two sex-starved young men. I’m going to elide quite a lot, partly to prevent Google from putting an NC-17 warning on my blog, partly because I didn’t always understand the language, and partly because I just found it gross. Some misunderstandings of my previous positions have led to an incorrect “The CRPG Addict has a problem with breasts!” belief, but I have no problem with the perception that I have a problem with graphic description of anal manipulations with tentacles. That belief is 100% accurate.

The story begins when a sorcerer named Mithgul moved into the middle of a fairly generic fantasy kingdom. He holed himself up in his fortress and got to work on various inventions and experiments, almost all of a sexual nature. He created a “stone of beauty,” an artifact that endowed its holder with “unlimited charisma,” such that he could drive a crowd of people to mass suicide. He mated humans with demons and beasts to produce all kinds of abominations. He collected fluid samples from dozens of species and invented a number of creative aphrodisiacs.

The game is at first visually indistinguishable from one of the Ultimas.

Mithgul’s efforts came to an end when the seed of a demon mixed with some other chemicals and caused an explosion that destroyed Mithgul’s tower. Unfortunately, the escaping vapors engulfed the nearby town of Bar-Calenlad and turned the entire population into nymphomaniacs, leading to massive population growth. A local order of paladins didn’t have any hope of maintaining their chastity vows, and soon their fortress had expanded enough in population to form a new city, Bar-Tolainor. Trolls escaping from Mithgul’s dungeon formed their own city, Echorkeliant. Generations later, each city has developed its own sado-sexual traditions. Lately, a villain named Beltrik the Skatomancer has re-inhabited the ruins of the fortress. He’s kidnapped the daughter of King Valdrin and caused such strife among the trolls that they’ve split into two factions. Into this milieu, the character is dropped without an explicit quest yet.

Character creation.

Character creation doesn’t break much new ground. You assign a name and race (human, elf, dwarf, hobbit), after which the game randomly rolls for wisdom, strength, dexterity, and intelligence, modified by race. These four attributes together determine the derived statistics of vitality, charisma, skill, and perception. Your choice of class (sorcerer, priest, warrior, thief) has further effects on these statistics, and finally you can specify a “type” (charmer, skillful, attentive, resistant) that makes further modifications.

My early-game character sheet.

The game begins with the character standing on the plains outside Bar-Calenlad. The game world is a small 58 x 58, but it seems larger because of frequent random encounters. There are the three cities mentioned in the backstory plus a few dungeons and Castle Gondarnost. The interface follows Ultima‘s tradition of mapping commands to individual keys, such as C)hercher (search), O)uvrir (open), and P)énétrer (enter, as in a city).

Can someone tell me what the phrase y-a peau d’Zébi means?

Enemies mostly include fantasy standards like orcs, trolls, bandits, mercenaries, zombies, kobolds, and giant spiders and snakes. They’re not seen in the environment until they attack. Combat is a little more complex than Ultima but not quite as complex as, say, Wizardry. You face only one enemy at a time, and you have options to fight, change weapons, cast a spell, use an object, advance, back off, surrender, or steal. “Advance” and “back off” are unusual commands, but there’s a distance consideration in combat, with enemies and characters occupying four potential spaces from très proche (very close) to très loin (very far). Certain weapons work better (or don’t work at all) at various distances.

Fighting an ettin from “close enough.”

The cities are menu cities that offer various options depending on the city. Bar-Calenlad offers an inn, a Temple of Eros, a guild, an alchemist, a weapon/armor shop, and a fence. Early on, I didn’t understand the options for the other places, so I just bought a dagger and robe (the only items my strength would let me wield) and headed out to fight.

Menu options in the troll city of Echorkeliant.

It took me a lot of deaths (fortunately, reloading is quick) before I realized the importance of getting physically close to the enemy when all you have is a dagger. The good news is that when you’re that close, enemies spend a lot of their turns trying to back off, which you can allow or not. If you’re successful in disallowing it, the enemy has wasted the turn; if he manages to back off, you can just advance your next round. These advantages helped make up for how lousy a dagger and robe are as melee weapons.

After I strike a decisive blow, the thief tries to back off.

Still, combat was pretty hard, so after I’d won a few battles, I went into the town to check out some of the other options. Fully healing takes only a single gold piece at the Temple of Eros, which is nice. But equally beneficial are temporary boosts to each attribute that the temple offers for 20 gold pieces. If you load up with a couple of these (strength, dexterity, or vitality) before heading out, they greatly improve your chances in combat. You can get similar boosts from potions at the alchemist’s, only these you can carry with you and use in the field at the appropriate times. Finally, when you earn a few hundred experience points, you can spend them at the guild for permanent attribute increases. As you buy these, the game re-calculates the derived statistics. All told, it’s a tight, satisfying combination of character development and economy.

Even better, you can pay experience points to change classes. If you decide you want some magic in your life, that’s only 100 or 200 experience points away.

In 7 more experience points, I can increase my dexterity or change to a sorcerer or warrior class.

I spent a couple hours fighting, building my fortune, and buying attribute increases as I tried to count the number of tiles in the land. Once I was loaded up on buffs, I headed off on the first quest lead, which I got from the inn. When I first checked into the inn, I saw three options with escalating values, and I assumed they were different quality rooms. Later, thinking I was buying a room for the night, I chose the first option. It turns out that the three options are subjects about which you’re bribing the bartender. For the subject “Ered-Morglin,” I learned:

It is a cyclops who directs the mines of Ered-Morglin. His talents as a blacksmith allowed him to make powerful relationships. However, the wise men of Bar-Tolainor suspect him of having allied with Beltrik. They promise their eternal gratitude to whoever brings them the head of the one-eyed monster.

I explored around until I found the dungeon of Ered-Morglin. Dungeons are top-down in this game, not first-person. Otherwise, they’re like exploring cities in the early Ultimas. Some enemies appear out of nowhere, just like in the wilderness, but others are in fixed locations. Secret doors are clued with little breaks in the walls, just as in Ultima IV.

Note the secret door in the wall to my left.

If there’s any way so far in which Muryaden lives up to its backstory and intent, I suppose it’s in the room descriptions that you receive while exploring the dungeon, although none of them are as bawdy as the backstory.

You see a convergent layer of manticore excrement and blood.

The remains of an orgy: the bowels of elves marinated in the blood of gnomes.

You see a statue of Grumsh impaling an elf on a lance!

The combats in the dungeon wore down my vitality to the point that I couldn’t really take any damage or I’d have to reload, but I stubbornly kept at it until I found the cyclops and managed to kill him and take his head. I also found a key beyond him that must be important somewhere. There were only two treasure chests in the dungeon; both had a modest amount of gold.

I have slain the cyclops and can now take his head.

I triumphantly carried the cyclops head to the city of Bar-Tolainor. I visited the sage, who I don’t think gave me any reward at all unless you consider a new quest a reward:

My premature ejaculation is a sign! You are the chosen one. Your destiny is to fight the libidinous Beltrik whose secret I will reveal to you. In fact Mithgul did not perish when his complex exploded. He and the demon he had summoned suffered the full effect of the brunettes. Thus they have fornicated for centuries until the effect of the malefice dissipates. The demon then became familiar with Mithgul. The archmage is daring and perverted by his experience. Had lost much of his knowledge. He renamed himself Beltrik and dedicated himself to the forces of chaos. Here is a letter of introduction to the king. Valdrin will no doubt offer you a substantial reward.

Meanwhile, from the other two auberge options back in Bar-Calenlad, I learn:

In Térégroth resides the Matriarch and her supporters. All are fanatical worshipers of Vaprak and pay bloody tributes to him. The ritual sacrifices organized in honor of the Destroyer are also cannibal orgies, where sins of flesh and money are indiscriminately consumed. This citadel has never, until now, been threatened, thanks to its high walls and its mithril door. Yet each door has its own key; that of Térégroth could also open the Matriarch’s chastity belt.

The lair of Beltrik, the lustful wizard, remains unknown to this day. The sages, however, called it Coron Raugul and claimed it was protected by an invisibility spell. They also say that it is guarded by a nigh-invincible golem. This sentinel, however, has a weak point: its diarrhea, which it can only wipe with the sheets of a spellbook cursed three times. This book is the Pnakoticus Qhultis of Count Bren-lette, also called P. Q. The golem will gladly let pass anyone who offers him a roll of this precious paper. [The joke here is that P. Q. in French is the abbreviation for toilet paper.]

So few golems in ricaine RPGs are cursed with diarrhea, and I just want to say I think it’s what’s been missing.

Getting a clue on the final quest.

Unfortunately, I ran into a technical problem that’s going to prevent me from continuing with the game without starting over. While I was exploring Ered-Morglin, testing the walls for secret doors, I found an illusory wall that let me out of the dungeon, onto a random part of the map terrain. I figured that it was a secret “back door.” By walking one space back the way I’d come, I returned to the dungeon. I didn’t think anything of it, and I finished the dungeon. Because it was closer the cyclops than the main entry, I used the “back door” to get out. I was able to turn in the quest without any problem.

I soon realized that the “back door” wasn’t that at all but a game corruption. The game still thinks I’m in the dungeon, and if I wander on the map into any coordinates that the dungeon level covers, I suddenly find myself back in the dungeon. Since there are towns and dungeons, and I think even the castle in that coverage area, that’s no good. I need to be able to enter those areas on the main map without warping to the dungeon. Unfortunately, trying to exit from the dungeon the regular way just freezes the game. I thought maybe if I found a second dungeon and entered and exited, it would work, but those aren’t on the accessible part of the map.

As far as I can get.

Fortunately, I don’t need to win it myself because “Deckard’s” web page describes what happens: The player takes the letter of introduction from the sage to King Valdrin of Gondarnost, who steps out of his harem long enough to give the player a new quest. Valdrin’s daughter was kidnapped by Beltrik, used as a “toy” for a while, then given to the Matriarch of Térégroth. Valdrin wants her back so he can marry her to the troll king, Bortrog, to seal an alliance between the cities. Valdrin also suggests that Bortrog would reward the character for killing the Matriarch.

Defeating the Matriarch. Don’t ask me why the screen shots are in this color.

The key found in Ered-Morglin turns out to be the key to Térégroth and the Matriarch’s chastity belt. The player goes to Térégroth, kills the Matriarch, recovers the chastity belt as proof, and frees the princess. The game makes a point of noting that the princess’s cell smells of urine, because that was important. The princess appears in your inventory, and from then on you can “use” her like any object for things I’ll leave to your imagination.

You return the princess to Valdrin, who does marry her to Bortrog. Bortrog rewards you for the Matriarch’s belt. But he doesn’t think his new bride is sexy enough, so he wants Beltrik’s beauty stone. The scroll found in Térégroth turns out to be the key to finding the invisible city of Coron Raugul. It’s also the item necessary to give to the golem to let you pass.

The player confronts Beltrik.

In Coron Raugul, the player defeats Beltrik and his pet demon and finds the stone, which turns out to be called “Muryaden” for whatever reason. Bringing it back to the troll king results in a congratulatory screen in which the troll king gives you the stone (after he’s done using it). His mage attunes the stone so that it will serve like a permanent Potion of Healing. The player can continue killing monsters and building his statistics if he wants.

The winning screen.

It will surprise no one that the plot elements of Muryaden aren’t my favorite parts of the game. The authors’ complaints about a certain lack of grit in the typical RPG of the period are not wrong, but the solution would lie in the future, with more complex characters, more nuanced plots, an in general better writing, not in the toilet humor of a couple of teenagers. At the same time, though, there are plenty of elements of the game that I don’t mind. I like the low-key nature of the quests. I like that the main character is more of a mercenary than a hero, and that none of his employers are sparkling clean. I like that the developers kept it small and short, understanding that they didn’t have the mechanics for an epic game. And as I said above, character development and combat are pretty tight. It earns a 24 on my GIMLET, doing best in character development, combat, economy, and gameplay (3s). That’s not a horrible score for an independent Ultima clone.

Elrik and Deckard continued their partnership with Muryaden Livre 2 in 1991. I can only hope that the extra two years matured their storytelling while preserving their inventiveness. I’m not sure what happened to them after that. “Elrik” was a pseudonym for Eric Bertrand, and there is a programmer of that name with numerous credits on Ubisoft titles, but his ludography doesn’t pick up until 2006, or 17 years after Muryaden, and I’m not sure if it’s the same developer. “Deckard” seems to be a Jean-Marc Boutillon; from an interview he gave, I don’t get the impression that he worked on anything more than these two titles.

We are going to move on to Abandoned Places: A Time for Heroes after another Britannian episode.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-365-muryaden-1989/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons review

It’s 5am, I can’t get back to sleep, so out of habit I reach for the Switch on the bedside table to check in on my island. For the past three weeks this has been how every day’s started. Animal Crossing: New Horizons has become a part of my life. Last night, just before bed, I wrote a letter to Billy, a jock and a goat, designed to make him want to leave. He’d become a nuisance as I was going about my daily chores, chasing me down and making me apologise and make amends to the other animals he’d just hot-headedly disagreed with. This morning, I’m wondering if I’ve been too rash.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Reviewed on Switch

Availability: Out March 20th on Switch

Do the animals really have feelings? Could Billy understand the hastily written postcard I’d sent him? I don’t know for sure, but such is the strange spell Animal Crossing casts, offering up a fantastical vivarium patrolled by anthropomorphic creatures that soon feels utterly, utterly real. It’s a magical sleight of hand, an illusion conjured up by countless little tricks – how the hours pass in-game as they do in the real world, and as the seasons do too. I’ve seen winter’s snow thaw and spring slowly bloom over the course of several long days, and seen the sun rise and set above the beach on the island’s northern edge.

It’s how the animals respond to your actions, and go about their own island life in your absence. On Sunday morning I walked over to the town square to find Carrie, a warm-hearted kangaroo, and Tabby, a hyperactive kitten, doing yoga exercises together. Later that night, while out on another stroll, I spot Plucky the Chicken solemnly pacing the cliffs at the top of the island and wondering whether it was time for her to move on. I do all I can to talk her out of it.

Fashion forward – picking out a new look is super easy now thanks to the wardrobe feature. You can also change your facial features – and gender – at any point by simply accessing a mirror.

How can you fail to be sucked into a world that’s at once so mundane yet so magical? Such has been the way since Katsuya Eguchi’s playful life-sim first came to be with the N64’s Animal Forest in 2001 and its subsequent localisation on GameCube a year later. The series has only grown in popularity ever since, which makes it all the more exciting that this is the first mainline outing in eight years, with New Leaf co-lead Aya Kyogoku now acting as sole director.

That’s not to say nothing has happened in the time since, and you’ll find traces of Animal Crossing’s more recent ventures here, as well as the creep of the modern. New Horizons neatly lifts concepts from spin-offs Happy Home Designer and Pocket Camp, with more comprehensive tools when placing furniture around your house and with the radical introduction of crafting (it might well lift some ideas from Animal Crossing Amiibo Party too, but I wouldn’t know as that was one deviation too far from the formula for me and, I’m sure, many others). DIY designs are passed on by other animals, or maybe you’ll find one washed up in a bottle on the beach or floating by in a present in the sky, the recipes tucked away in your own compendium and the materials you need gathered by hacking away at trees or hitting stones with your shovel.

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You have your own mobile phone, a sort of stand-in for your slowly expanding menu, and it’s there you’ll even find daily challenges that reward you Nook Miles, a new in-game currency that allows you to attain goods via an in-game ATM. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is every bit a contemporary game.

Yet for all that, New Horizons reminds me most of the very first Animal Crossing. Maybe it’s how it goes back to basics, and goes back to the wild. When you first set foot on your island you’re a lone pioneer, knee deep in weeds. You’re even landlocked for those first few days, the further reaches of the island on the other side of a river you won’t yet have the means to cross. It’s up to you to clear the way for new islanders, to pick out their plots and furnish them and then to reach out to other animals – whether they be passing through the campsite or frittering away a day on a nearby mystery island – to give them the sales pitch. Progress in New Horizons is slow, as it always has been in Animal Crossing, but here it’s got real purpose.

Is this a gritty reboot for Animal Crossing? As unpalatable as that might sound, it kind of is – and it definitely works. There’s a more grounded logic at play here, to those first few weeks at least. Your first pieces of furniture will likely be made from naked wood chopped from the very trees around you (though rest assured you’ll soon enough get the option to lend them a lick of paint or apply a fresh design with a customisation kit – another new feature for New Horizons). Elsewhere there’s a stronger throughline thoughtfully imposed on a game whose aimlessness has always been one of its biggest strengths, and once you’ve flipped your first few houses and invited a couple of animals to stay the sense of ownership over your surroundings is unparalleled in the series.

Arranging furniture is now a joy as opposed to the chore it could be in earlier games.

A regular rhythm soon establishes itself, though everyone’s routine will be entirely their own. My own starts with a trip to the wardrobe to pick a new outfit for the day ahead, followed by an early-morning tour of the island, collecting shells and digging up fossils for Blathers to assess over at the museum, all of which keeps me busy until the shops open at 8am. Then it’s deciding whether to give over the rest of the day to fishing, or maybe to furnishing the island’s exterior with whatever new trinkets the Nook twins have in stock.

The augmentations to Animal Crossing’s well-established rhythm are plentiful. A proper storage system is now in place in your home, meaning you no longer have to dedicate a room to hoarding any items you don’t yet have a purpose for. Menus have been de-fussed and items stack more readily, meaning it’s easier to pick out a fresh outfit or redecorate a room. Tools are easily accessible via a new wheel – though it’s worth noting not all the changes in New Horizon are welcome.

Tool durability, while not new to the series, is more pronounced here in an attempt to push the crafting side a bit harder, though it’s pushed a bit too hard with items breaking after around 30 uses. If you didn’t like the constant fuss of changing up weapons in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I doubt you’ll find it much more palatable here. Some long-established features can also take a little too long to unlock – my first 30 hours of play were conducted to a single piece of music rather than the evolving soundtrack of older games, a measure that goes too far in stripping back the experience before it’s folded in again.

The museum is now on a much larger scale than seen in older Animal Crossing outings, and as with the rest of New Horizons the added fidelity makes all the difference.

They’re just two small, annoying details in a game that’s full of plenty more delightful ones, though. The way trees rustle in the wind, and how the world is gently littered with fallen branches the morning after a storm; the muted patter of raindrops on your umbrella when you go for a walk in a downpour, or how you’ll see those raindrops cascade down your windows if you opt to stay indoors; how each animal is brought to life with writing that boasts phenomenal character and economy.

And it’s how, even some 90 hours in, Animal Crossing: New Horizons maintains its ability to surprise. It’s how each day presents a new mystery to unravel, or a new visitor to hang out with – though often it’s satisfying enough just to check in to see how your flowers are doing. I just went for another morning stroll, and spotted Billy the trouble-making goat running arms out through a copse of trees, a look of glee fixed on his face. I can’t bring myself to make him leave; indeed, I think I properly like him now, for all his faults.

He’s a keeper, and so too is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, probably the best this series has ever had to offer and therefore one of Nintendo’s very best games to date. It presents a world absurd in its mundanity yet shot through with magic, offering an escapism that’s reassuringly dependable. I just hope you weren’t planning on playing anything else this year.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/animal-crossing-new-horizons-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=animal-crossing-new-horizons-review

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mikemortgage · 5 years

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s murky claims on weather, shutdown

WASHINGTON — There’s nothing like a cold snap to bring out the global-warming skepticism of President Donald Trump.

The fact that periods of extreme cold happen in a warming climate is well known by his government but Trump’s crack Sunday — “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” — suggests that hasn’t sunk in for the president.

Over the past week and through the weekend, Trump and his team misstated the reality on myriad issues, many connected with the partial government shutdown, Trump’s proposed wall and the Russia investigation. Here’s a look:

RUSSIA

TRUMP: “Remember it was Buzzfeed that released the totally discredited ‘Dossier,’ paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (as opposition research), on which the entire Russian probe is based!” — tweet Friday.

THE FACTS: Trump’s claim that special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is based on a “discredited dossier” is false. The FBI’s investigation actually began months before it received a dossier of anti-Trump research financed by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The FBI probe’s origins were based on other evidence — not the existence of the dossier, which has not been discredited.

Last year, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee found the Russia probe was initiated after the FBI received information related to Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, not the dossier. The committee’s final report was praised by Trump.

——

CLIMATE CHANGE

TRUMP: “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!” — tweet Sunday.

THE FACTS: Trump is suggesting, as he has done before, that global warming can’t exist if it’s cold outside. But he is conflating weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which changes daily. Climate is like personality, which is long term.

The climate is warming, which still allows for intense cold spells.

While much of the United States was frigid Sunday, that is still less than 2 per cent of the world. Earth on Sunday was about 0.9 degrees (0.5 Celsius) warmer than from 1979-2000, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer.

The White House in November produced the National Climate Assessment by scientists from 13 Trump administration agencies and outside scientists. It amounted to a slap in the face for those who question whether climate is changing.

“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report says.

The White House report swept aside the idea, already discredited, that a particular plunge in temperatures can cast uncertainty on whether Earth is warming. It says more than 90 per cent of current warming is caused by humans: “There are no credible alternative human or natural explanations supported by the observational evidence.”

——

THE SHUTDOWN

TRUMP: “As a candidate for President, I promised I would fix this crisis, and I intend to keep that promise one way or the other. …To physically secure our border, the plan includes $5.7 billion for a strategic deployment of physical barriers, or a wall. This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea. These are steel barriers in high-priority locations.” — remarks Saturday.

THE FACTS: His campaign promise to build a concrete border wall continues to evolve.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump pledged to build a “big, beautiful wall” made of concrete, rebar and steel across the length of the southern border with Mexico. Back then, he lashed out at the suggestion that what he was proposing had anything in common with mere fencing.

“Jeb Bush just talked about my border proposal to build a ‘fence,’ he tweeted in 2015. “It’s not a fence, Jeb, it’s a WALL, and there’s a BIG difference!”

And as recently as Dec. 31, he tweeted, “An all concrete Wall was NEVER ABANDONED.”

He now commonly refers to the wall as “steel slats” and “steel barriers.”

——

TRUMP: “If we build a powerful and fully designed see-through steel barrier on our southern border, the crime rate and drug problem in our country would be quickly and greatly reduced. Some say it could be cut in half.” — remarks from White House on Saturday.

TRUMP, on the virtues of a wall: “We can stop heroin.” — White House remarks Saturday.

THE FACTS: His comments fly in the face of findings by his government about how drugs get into the county. Drugs from Mexico are primarily smuggled into the U.S. at official border crossings, not remote lands that can be walled off. His proposal Saturday to end the government shutdown implicitly recognizes that reality by proposing money to improve drug-detection technology specifically at land ports of entry.

Even so, Trump pitched a wall as a solution to drugs and crime.

The Drug Enforcement Administration says “only a small percentage” of heroin seized by U.S. authorities comes across on territory between ports of entry. It says the same is true of drugs overall.

Even if a wall could stop all drugs from Mexico, America’s drug problem would be far from over. For example, the government says about 40 per cent of opioid deaths in 2016 involved prescription painkillers, made by pharmaceutical companies. Some feed the addiction of people who have prescriptions; others are stolen and sold on the black market. Moreover, illicit versions of powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have come to the U.S. from China.

On crime, many researchers have found that people in the U.S. illegally are less likely to commit violence than U.S. citizens.

——

TRUMP: “Nancy Pelosi’s in Hawaii over the holidays, now she’s in Puerto Rico with a bunch of Democrats and lobbyists, you know, enjoying the sun and partying down there.” — Fox News interview on Jan. 12.

TRUMP: “I’d rather see the Democrats come back from their vacation and act. … I’m in the White House, and most of them are in different locations. They’re watching a certain musical in a very nice location.” — Fox News interview.

TRUMP: “A lot of the Democrats were in Puerto Rico celebrating something. I don’t know, maybe they’re celebrating the shutdown.” — comments Jan. 14.

THE FACTS: Far from “enjoying the sun” in Puerto Rico, Pelosi stayed in Washington, which got a big snowfall. She spent that weekend working at the Capitol, said Drew Hammill, her deputy chief of staff.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer did not go to Puerto Rico, either. The senator from New York spent that weekend in New York, said spokesman Justin Goodman.

Most Democratic lawmakers were somewhere other than Puerto Rico. Most who went are members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. They attended the annual winter retreat of the caucus’s political and fundraising arm.

Some attended “Hamilton” as the musical opened a two-week run in Puerto Rico expected to raise millions of dollars for artists and cultural groups struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Referring to Democrats at the fundraising performance in his Fox News interview, Trump called it “frankly, ridiculous.”

During the trip, lawmakers indeed met political contributors but also made several visits to local and federal institutions, said Marieli Padro, spokeswoman for Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Jenniffer Gonzalez. Last Saturday, a small group visited the veterans’ hospital to learn about its needs post-hurricane, while another group met U.S. Coast Guard officials.

Trump is correct that Pelosi visited Hawaii over the Christmas holiday.

——

TRUMP: “We need strong barriers and walls. Nothing else is going to work.” — remarks Thursday at the Pentagon.

TRUMP: “You can have all the people you want dressed in military. You can have ICE. You can have Border Patrol. If you don’t have that barrier, there’s not a thing you can do. You know, they all say, ‘We like technology.’ I like technology, too. But we can have all the drones in the world flying around; we can have all the sensors in the world, but if you don’t have a strong steel or concrete barrier, there’s no way you’re going to stop these people from rushing.” — remarks Jan. 14 in New Orleans.

THE FACTS: The evidence is inconclusive on the effectiveness of border walls or other barriers.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, reported in 2017 that the government does not have a way to measure how well barriers work to deter illegal immigration from Mexico. Despite $2.3 billion spent by the government on such construction from 2007 to 2015, GAO found that authorities “cannot measure the contribution of fencing to border security operations along the southwest border because it has not developed metrics for this assessment.”

Few people dispute that fences contributed to a sharp drop in crossings in cities such as San Diego and El Paso, Texas. Before fences were built in San Diego, crossers played soccer on U.S. soil as vendors hawked tamales, waiting until night fell to overwhelm agents. But those barriers also pushed people into more remote and less-patrolled areas such as in Arizona, where thousands of migrants have perished in extreme heat.

When barriers were built in the Border Patrol’s Yuma, Arizona, sector in the mid-2000s, arrests for illegal crossings plummeted 94 per cent in three years to 8,363 from 138,438. When barriers were built in San Diego in the 1990s and early 2000s, arrests fell 80 per cent over seven years from 524,231 in 1995 to 100,681 in 2002. But both areas also saw sharp increases in Border Patrol staffing during that time, making it difficult to pinpoint why illegal crossings fell so dramatically.

——

KEVIN HASSETT, Trump economic adviser: “You know as soon as it’s resolved, then people get their paychecks and the government will go back to acting normal and the economy will go back to the 3 per cent growth that President Trump’s policies have delivered.” — interview Tuesday with Fox Business Network.

THE FACTS: It’s true the economy probably will get a boost once the shutdown ends, but few independent economists think that boost will be sustained. The economy is facing other headwinds that make it unlikely growth will return to 2018’s pace. Before the shutdown, most independent economists already were forecasting that growth would slow this year as the impact of President Trump’s tax credit fades and trade tensions and slowing global growth take a toll.

Even if the government shutdown ends up being a wash in economic terms, with strong growth in the second quarter offsetting weakness in the first, the economy is likely to be weaker this year than last. Scott Anderson, an economist at Bank of the West, expects last year’s stock market drop will cause many wealthier households to pull back on spending, a drag on growth this year.

He’s not alone. A group of 15 economists at major U.S. banks earlier this month projected that growth would slow to just a 2.1 per cent pace in 2019, down from roughly 3 per cent in 2018.

The economy’s current health is difficult to gauge because the partial shutdown means many economic statistics aren’t being released. Recent signs are mixed: The job market is strong, with few layoffs in sight, and manufacturing output rose in December. But higher interest rates have also caused home prices and sales to fall.

——

SYRIA

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: “The caliphate has crumbled, and ISIS has been defeated.” — remarks Wednesday at State Department.

THE FACTS: Pence’s remark followed the deadly suicide bombing claimed by IS, which demonstrated the extremist group, however weakened, has not been vanquished. The bombing underscored Pentagon assertions that IS still poses a threat and is capable of deadly attacks.

The attack killed at least 16 people in Syria, including two U.S. service members and two American civilians. It was the deadliest assault on U.S. troops in Syria since American forces went into the country in 2015.

A tweet Wednesday morning by Pence’s press secretary, Alyssa Farah, indicated the vice-president had been briefed on the attacks before he delivered his remarks claiming the defeat of IS. Pence later released a statement acknowledging the fatalities and IS “remnants” but reaffirming Trump’s plan to withdraw troops.

“We will never allow the remnants of ISIS to re-establish their evil and murderous caliphate,” he said.

Trump, in a Dec. 19 tweet, announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. He said: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” He said the troops would begin coming home “now.” That plan triggered immediate pushback from military leaders and the resignation of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis.

Over the past month, however, Trump and others have appeared to adjust the timeline, and U.S. officials have suggested it will probably take several months to withdraw American forces from Syria safely.

——

VETERANS

TRUMP: ��Just announced that Veterans unemployment has reached an 18 year low, really good news for our Vets and their families. Will soon be an all time low! Do you think the media will report on this and all of the other great economic news? — tweet Tuesday.

THE FACTS: Trump is wrong in terms of up-to-date monthly data, right when measuring veterans’ unemployment over a longer term.

It is true that the average veterans’ unemployment rate for 2018 was 3.5 per cent, the lowest annual figure since 2000, when it was 2.9 per cent.

On a monthly basis, the rate is more volatile. The lowest vets’ unemployment rate under Trump was 2.7 per cent in October 2017, and it has risen a bit since then to 3.2 per cent in December, the latest data available. In the 18 years that the government has tracked veterans’ unemployment data, the lowest monthly rate was 2.3 per cent in May 2000.

Veterans’ unemployment has fallen mostly for the same reasons that joblessness has dropped generally: strong hiring and steady economic growth for the past eight years.

——

TRUMP: “We got Veterans Choice. We got Veterans Choice approved, which is pretty amazing. They’ve been trying to get that for years and years — decades and decades.” — remarks Jan. 14 in New Orleans.

THE FACTS: No, he is not the first president in “decades and decades” to get Congress to pass a private-sector health program for veterans. Congress first approved the Veterans Choice program in 2014 during the Obama administration.

The program was approved after some veterans died while waiting months for appointments at the Phoenix VA medical centre. It allows veterans to see doctors outside the VA system if they must wait more than 30 days for an appointment or drive more than 40 miles to a VA facility.

Trump did sign legislation in June to expand the Choice program, part of his campaign promise to give veterans greater access to private care at government expense. The exact scope of that new program will be subject to yet-to-be-completed rules that will determine veterans’ eligibility as well as federal funding. The VA has yet to resolve long-term financing due to congressional budget caps that could put money for VA or other domestic programs at risk later this year.

——

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Christopher Rugaber, Seth Borenstein and Jill Colvin in Washington and Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.

——

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

Follow https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

from Financial Post http://bit.ly/2U2WBkv via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

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supermoneydesign · 6 years

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coining

How to evaporate to the heavens / omnipresence

The coin unified matter and representation: precious disk and rounded number. This would allow the solid coin to slowly melt and even evaporate. To be not bread for broken bodies, but breath for broken souls. This is its story.

I. MINT

BANG was the sound of the hammer that marked my birth. The birth of me, metal disk with a price tag, and the epoch of symbolic value. I was born Turkish. Strong and handsome I must have looked, shining in the setting sun over a river in the lands of Lydia. My brilliant body, a water-stirred mix from silver and gold particles, revealed a relief in the light. This birthmark of smooth ridges on my face spelled out my name: 2k E. The mouths of those hands fortunate enough to behold me spoke my full name: Two Kilograms Electrolyte. It was undebatable who I was. It was tangible in my body. It was written on my skin. I am both what I am and what my name says. My value could by no one be mistaken. And it wasn’t. I was so reliable, swift and outspoken that I quickly unchained societies from their suppressive systems of trade. Gone were the days of barter. A bucket of milk for two dozen eggs? Fine, unless you only need four. The Egyptians would engrave “a credit for eight eggs” in their administration of stone tablets. A fine means of social control, to regulate those at the bottom of the pyramid. In following centuries your egg credit would be measured in Greek grains of salt, Roman cattle, Persian spices, or portable bars of precious metals. Trade with anyone! That is, only when people trust your scales. No, it was me who freed the many. Solidifying the abstract debt into the concrete number on my face. No need to remember what he owes you. Nor to make another engrave it. Nor to weigh any goods. My face showed my gravity. My beauty sealed my integrity. Any imposter would miss the finesse and traits to uphold sufficient similarity. Soon I was minted en masse. To give unbarred access to the good of mankind to any hand that beheld me. What is any power without the power to use the skills of others? It was me who brought it to the masses.

Just a bit too soon.

Hard times came. Evil times. Medieval times. People didn’t want me anymore. As the area for goods to circulate was confined to the few acres of the landowner, I was of no use.

I thought it was the end of me.

II. MELT

On an early spring morning a ray of sunshine caught my golden locks. I was in a dark space. Damp cool air. Smells of leather. Almost calming, if it weren’t for the cacophony of jingles caused by the rhythmic tremble. The only light source in the pouch was the hole torn in the escape. Two fingers took me. They were free, as was the fugitive hand to whom I was given, and the sensation of brightness that met my face. Casts and castles had started crumbling, and from an age long winter’s sleep I awakened. Yes, trade was reborn, and so was I. Yet I was not alone anymore. I was many. In every nation I had a different face. And it was when my different sides met, that I started to melt.

Some of my faces were deemed more desirable than others. People would give five en profile French kings for a single embossed English queen. Even though my silver body was equally massive in France and England. No longer it was my body that granted me value, but the eagerness of people to lay their hands on me. But desire is a fluid phenomenon. It comes and goes. And so my self-worth became the plaything of the glance of others. It was the superficiality of my face that gravitated attention. Even when I felt desired, it was less and less about my precious body and more and more a numbers game. I got packed, stacked, and counted. Not to spend, but to have. When people had too much of me, they locked me up cold and darkly behind thick steel walls with uncrackable locks. It was not me anymore who passed from hand to hand, but a mere paper note that granted access to me. I became a number on a bill stating how much the owner could get in return. Although he never did.

Again, I thought it was the end. But it was only the beginning of melting.

The portemonnaie never fully turned portefeuille. The wallet was still a purse. My metal may have lost its value, but not its shine. While big bills handled big numbers, I found a steady place between the global tectonic plates of currency. The crumbling cracks. The margin of manoeuvre. The precious of the poor. In other words, the glue of the everyday.

I took a dive for a wish. Freed a shopping cart. Made you a philanthropist. Caused a coin wave in the casino. Got a homeless human a tea. Thanked a waiter. Locked a winter coat in the opera.

But also. Fixed a camera to a stand. Flattened a chocolate wrapper. Nudged the guy to approach that girl. Spinned longer than a dime. Fooled the grandkid. Hid the hickey. Transformed into a souvenir. Revealed that she won a theme park ticket. Surprised a kid with the color of the gumball. Granted the condom in the loo.

I was lost. Missed. Found. And I made his day. I was the holiday memory. I was the birthday present.

A mundane friend. An intimate lover. A third hand, helping out when needed. The modern man was a moneyman, a coinman, a human-metal alloy.

How could human and I ever be separated, if not by the magnetic swipe of a piece of plastic.

III. MIST

The descent of my liquid body came with the ascent of a new society called cashless. What use is a coin when all value can be piled up to a single score? People got access passes to their scores. Wallets shrunk to the size of plastic. I became annoying. A beggar a relieve. My metal corpse remained a memory. Memories of grandparents. Of times when economies of metal functioned like mechanical motors and majestic machines. The rolling disk, the wheel of progress, the never-ending circle, had suddenly lost its materiality. I am no more disk from metal alloys, but mere lines and circles, zeroes and ones.

Only a symbol was left of me. But as a rocket that shook off its solid and liquid support engines as ballast. I’m so fast and high now, I don’t need a physical manifestation as a seductive shiny canvas for the projection of desire. Yes, the virtual is material too. But more like gas. CO2. More expansive, harder to grasp. Harder to see, feel, hold on to. And harder to contain, control, avoid. I am all around. Freed from my heavy body I travel the globe in instants. Past evaluations make future speculations. Constructed confidence inflates boundless bubbles. When the gold rush became a metaphor, I became more real than ever. I have become the milieu. You cannot point at me. I’m everywhere. I’m your language. Your thoughts. Your life goals. Still. Or even more. Like a game. High score. I am your score and your life. Only when you take your thumb to pay you see if I’m still there.

How long still?

I may resurrect in the Cloud. Bits and ideologies condense in small drops of cryptocurrencies. Coins from bits. Coins for bots. Or my gaseous state so light I may lift up high into space itself. The object of desire becomes nothing. Or nothingness. Negative space, negative desire. I don’t know if I die or rebirth. But it’s ok. Whether it will be space or the Cloud, I’ll be waiting in heaven.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Challenge of the Five Realms: Summary and Rating

Notice how the box has little scenes from each of the five realms.

Challenge of the Five Realms: Spellbound in the World of Nhagardia

United States MicroProse (developer and publisher, under its Microplay label)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 2 November 2019

Date Ended: 31 December 2019

Total Hours: 35

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

Summary:

Challenge of the Five Realms is a plot-heavy axonometric title set on the flat world of Nhagardia. A prince must race against a creeping darkness to retrieve the five crowns of Nhagardia’s five kingdoms (human, gnome, elf, fish-man, and effete flying man), whose leaders have been killed by the mysterious, demonic Grimnoth. The game is as full-featured as anything in 1992, with animated cut scenes and voiced digital dialogue at the beginning and end. There are hundreds of NPCs, dozens of side quests, and a book’s worth of dialogue. Many of the NPCs may join the party, which maxes at 10. The tactical combat system works relatively well. But the game lacks in other key role-playing areas, particularly character development. *****

Challenge of the Five Realms is easily the best game from the team that previously created the Paragon Software adaptations of Games Designers’ Workshop (GDW) titles, including the two MegaTraveller games, Space 1889, and Twilight: 2000. This suggests that either the GDW games were fertile practice ground or the development team did better without GDW fetters, or perhaps both.

However, Challenge is far from a perfect title, and at least one of its weaknesses was seen likewise in the GDW adaptations: almost no character development. Characters enter the party as full adults with long careers behind them. You may choose, keep, or reject them because of their attributes and skills, but you don’t expect those attributes and skills to get better during the game–at least not in any consistent, understandable way. Some skills increase not at all, a few increase by 3 or 4 points, and a couple increase by 50 points. That’s a Paragon game if I ever heard one.

It’s too bad because the game is quite strong on other RPG mechanics, including combat and side quests, but Challenge really drives home how an RPG player like me only cares about those things in the context of character development. Take away the reward, and I don’t really care if the old woman gets her wedding ring back or not. The economy and inventory systems are likewise a bit of a mess, meaning that not even they compensate for a lack of intrinsic character development.

There are a few other flaws that don’t entirely cripple the game but come close. The time limit is employed badly. The limit itself is fairly generous, and it’s hard to imagine a moderately conscientious player running afoul of it. The problem is that the “creeping darkness” slowly eats the map from the bottom up, so that your time constraints are a lot more urgent for the locations in the south The various towns and castles in Nhagardia are all interesting in appearance and character, and it’s a shame to have to rush through them. It’s equally a shame to reduce replayability by forcing the player to prioritize the southern locations; without the “creeping darkness,” the game would be satisfyingly non-linear.

What happens if you miss the time limit.

I have a feeling that this is going to GIMLET in the extremes, with several high scores and several low scores.

1. Game World. The setting, backstory, and plot are all strong. I like the way that each kingdom has its own character, and the people have their own values. In the human kingdom, each town and castle has its own story to impart. I love the slow reveal of the depth of Clesodor’s evil. The twists at the end didn’t do as much for me, but at least they brought the whole thing to a proper conclusion. Someone really wrote this one. Score: 7.

Grimnoth lays out the charges against my father. All of this was unknown at the beginning of the game.

2. Character Creation and Development. If the old Paragon develops should have kept anything from their GDW experience, it was the Traveller-style character creation process that puts the character through a wringer of training and experience before shoving him out the door and into your party. Instead, the authors opted for an Ultima IV-style process of answering role-playing questions to determine the main character’s starting skills and attributes. Other characters come as they are.

Unfortunately, where the creators’ GDW experience comes through the most is in the lack of character development. No explanation is given for why some skills (“Learn Spells,” “Bargaining”) increase steadily with use while others (including all the combat skills) don’t increase at all. It is a depressing oversight that nearly strips the game of its RPG credentials entirely. Score: 2.

Chesotor ended the game hardly better than where he started.

3. NPCs. Challenge undoubtedly offers more NPC speech than any previous game. It isn’t quite “dialogue,” though. Except for a small number of yes/no responses, the game speaks for the characters, and thus the NPCs’ speeches are more like information dumps than anything approaching “role-playing.” Beyond that, the attention to NPC characterization is excellent, as is the general quality of the text.

Even more fun is the sheer number of NPCs who will join your quest. You have a generous party size (10) and at least three times that number of potential members, including the novel idea of “grouped” party members. For the first time that I remember in RPG history, your NPC companion have bits of banter as you enter areas, talk to other NPCs, and solve quests. My only complaint is that dismissed companions utterly disappear from the game instead of going back to where you acquired them (or to a central location). Score: 6.

The NPCs in this game were interesting, but man did they have a lot to say.

4. Encounters and Foes. Weak again. Almost all of the combat foes are people, with very little to distinguish them or to change player tactics. There are no puzzles beyond simple inventory puzzles. However, the game does excel in what I call “contextual encounters.” Nhagardia is not a land swarming with monsters that you must mindlessly kill; every combat is set in a context, usually with some preceding dialogue, so you always know who you’re fighting and why. Score: 3.

5. Magic and Combat. Ironically, the old Paragon team finally fielded a decent combat system in a game that only has about a dozen battles. It’s hard to characterize the exact nature of the system. It looks somewhat like “real-time with pause” except that it only appears “real-time” and there are actually turns at fixed intervals behind the scenes. Either way, whether the player micromanages the combat by issuing new orders every round or just relies on “quick combat,” the mechanics and tactics are generally satisfying.

Spells are another matter. The spell system is primarily used for puzzle-solving (woe is the character who lacks “Truth,” in particular) and travel. Combat spells are a bit under-developed. There are no area-effect spells and only a couple of buffing spells. Magic depletes so quickly that you can only cast a few spells in any given combat anyway, which makes it jarring to have so many endgame enemies that don’t respond to physical weapons. Again, the developers’ lack of experience (none of the GDW properties were fantasy RPGs) shows here. Score: 4.

Fighting some peregrines.

6. Equipment. Another weak area. The game has slots for a lot of different equipment types, but I only ever found a few rings, one item of headwear, and a couple of pairs of boots. There are maybe three magic items to find during your adventures, but beyond that the roster of weapons and armor is no different than the starting store in a typical D&D-derived game. Score: 2.

7. Economy. The economy is so favorable to the player that I think it might be bugged. From the moment the game began, I spent blithely whenever anyone asked for money, and I never seemed to lack any. Of course, there isn’t a lot to spend money on. All shops of the same type sell the same things, and you can get most of your equipment in the starting castle. Score: 2.

8. Quests. If you can say one thing for the Paragon team, they’re one of the only groups of developers in this period that truly understands “side quests.” Every map area has a bunch of Joe Commoners with their own problems that they’re hoping that the characters will solve. These side quests are rewarded with gold, spell reagents, equipment, and the availability of new NPCs. Some of the quests even have multiple options for ending them, usually favoring one town faction over another.

Meanwhile, the main quest and its various stages are equally compelling. An open question is whether it would be possible to complete the game by murdering each king for his crown. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics are very good for the era, and I particularly like the title cards that precede each map. Sound effects, on the other hand, are a bit too sparse. There are no background sounds, and only the occasional effect during combat.

The interface is horrid. Keyboard backups for the most common commands don’t help much when you have to move exclusively with the mouse. The process of hailing and talking to NPCs is needlessly complex and inconsistent. After 35 hours, I still can’t give a good account of it. Sometimes, you have to both “Hail” and “Speak” and other times you just seem to have to walk near an NPC to get him to start talking. Sometimes, the speech cursor remains active and you can keep clicking on other NPCs, and sometimes you have to start over. Sometimes dialogue exits on its own and sometimes there seems to be no way to exit. Once or twice, I literally had to reload the game.

The multiple inventory screens added needless complexity to what should have been a simple process.

The inventory interface is also needlessly cumbersome. The idea of a single chest shared by all characters is great. Beyond that, each character simply needed an individual “wearable” inventory. Instead, each character has his own pouch, backpack, and non-specific “inventory” space in addition to the wearable inventory and collective chest. Also, the process of removing and replacing things in the chest could have been quicker. The interface issues were so consistently annoying that they weaken the entire category score despite the good graphics. Score: 2.

10. Gameplay. As previously discussed, the game would be wonderfully non-linear if the team hadn’t forced the player to prioritize the southern locations. Even with that weakness, there’s still a lot of non-linearity to the game, which enhances its replayability. The length and challenge are about right. We thus finish on a strong category with only minor complaints. Score: 7.

The final score thus adds up to 41, well above the “recommended” threshold. I thought it would out-perform all of the Paragon games, but it turns out I gave the same score to MegaTraveller 2, which had many of the same strengths and weaknesses.

I don’t know what was happening at Computer Gaming World in the fall of 1993, but the lukewarm review (by Gordon Goble, who I’ve never seen before) is the worst one that I’ve seen in the magazine since its first few issues. It’s like it didn’t even pass the eyes of an editor. (Among other things, Goble makes reference to “Darth Vadar.”) It’s full of pretentiousness, non-sequiturs, dumb jokes, senseless allusions, and tired cliches. He spends several paragraphs complaining that he attacked some random NPC, and that NPC turned out to be harder to defeat than would make sense. His concluding paragraph references “inadequate beta testing” and “a certain awkwardness to gameplay” that aren’t justified by any of his previous text. Gods know what editor was asleep at the wheel for this one, but I certainly hope this is the last we’ll see of this writer.

There must have been something in the water that month, because Dragon magazine’s three-star pan is equally baffling in different ways. The author’s enjoyment is far too influenced by what he or she sees as plot holes (“Why the evil fellow simply can’t take the crown after he kills the king makes no sense”), as if any fantasy RPG of the period holds up to the most cursory plot scrutiny.

As we previously covered, Challenge was the first RPG from the old Paragon Software team after the company was acquired my MicroProse. The team included Marc Miller, F. J. Lennon, Paul M. Conklin, and Quinno Martin. For some members, this was their last RPG. Others contributed to MicroProse’s BloodNet (1993), which uses a similar interface, before leaving MicroProse for Take-Two Interactive. BloodNet will be our last MicroProse title and the last of the Paragon legacy. Hopefully, by then I’ll have been able to get in touch with one of the team’s principal developers and get some insight as to why this series, though innovative, always slightly missed the mark.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/challenge-of-the-five-realms-summary-and-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Game 344: Bandor II (1992)

That’s a lazy title graphic.

Bandor II

United States

Magic Lemon (developer and publisher)

Released as shareware in 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 26 October 2019

Date Finished: 28 October 2019

Total Hours: 14

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

I was willing to give some credit to Bandor: The Search for the Storm Giant King (1992) for at least having the originality to try to clone the Gold Box instead of Ultima, Dungeon Master, Wizardry, or any other title that we’ve seen dozens of times. All that good will is gone with Bandor II, which differs so little from Bandor that it feels more like a remake than a sequel–albeit a remake in which very little is actually remade except trivial graphics and interface changes.

And let’s not over-emphasize those graphics upgrades.

In the original Bandor, you controlled a party of four adventurers set loose in the titular city to take quests from the council and its chief wizard, Osi. Both games draw heavily from Pool of Radiance in the nature of the plot and quests; for instance, a mysterious warlord organizing monsters in the slums, and someone poisoning a nearby river. In the first game, the city’s woes were revealed to be the machinations of the Storm Giant King, whose defeat ended the game well before I’d completed all the side quests. Here, the game begins with new ills facing the city, including word that the Storm Giant King has returned. Bandor II is subtitled “The Wrath of the Storm Giant King” on some external sites, but the subtitle is never given on a game screen or within the game files.

Bandor is having more problems.

I tried to import my characters from the first game but couldn’t figure it out, so I created brand new ones. Classes are warrior, thief, mage, friar, rogue (warrior/thief), and jack-of-all-trades (warrior/thief/mage). Races are human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, and half-dwarf, with only the mongrels able to be jacks-of-all-trades. Attributes are strength, magic, and luck, given as percentages from 0 to 100. Everyone begins with axes and leather armor. Spellcasters have spellbooks that (annoyingly) must be swapped into the weapon slot when you actually want to cast a spell.

I was uninspired during character creation and chose an uninspiring name.

The game re-uses the three 40 x 40 maps from the first title: the city of Bandor, the forest, and the underworld (slums) to the city’s east. The underworld has a teleporter to a fourth map, titled “Landthi’s Lair,” which makes no sense until you reach the final encounter. The city map is entirely wasted. The huge space has only a few shops and no special encounters.

This was a huge waste of time.

A large city council building in the center doles out quests. There are only 5 in the game:

Retrieve a bottle of Elixir of B’Tet from the Fortune Teller in the slums; bring it back to the wizard Osi. The Fortune Teller has you rescue her brother, the guildmaster, from a group of bandits before she hands over the elixir.

The Fortune Teller has a sub-quest.

Investigate unexplained deaths in the city slums near the old Temple of B’Nah. This turns out to be former acolytes of B’Nah attempting to resurrect him. One combat clears this quest.

Getting rewarded back at the city council chambers.

Find out who’s poisoning the River Quoth. It turns out to be a dragon.

Investigate the return of the Storm Giant King and find out who is behind his return.

The council issues the main quest of the game.

Only the last quest is necessary to win the game, and depending on your exploration pattern, it’s entirely possible that you’ll stumble on that quest first.

Bandor featured three major problems, none of which is fixed in Bandor II:

1. No inventory improvements. From your starting axes and leather armor, you can use your gold to buy slightly better items like long swords and plate armor. Once you have those, there’s nothing else. No upgrades are found during adventuring, or as quest rewards. This means there’s no purpose to the economy except healing and resurrections.

There’s hardly anything worth buying here.

2. A horrible mouse-only interface. I hated the mouse-driven interface of both games. Actions require too many clicks; there are no alternatives to clicking; and clicking even slightly away from the center of your target produces a question mark, a pause, and a noxious noise that made me want to punch a kitten. The worst part is that this game was supposed to feature a keyboard interface, and it technically does. But it’s bugged and broken, failing to read your input about half the item. Worse, you have to choose one or the other during configuration. Good games have redundant commands active at the same time.

Graphics haven’t improved. I don’t know what this was supposed to be.

3. Too many combats with too few tactics. Bandor tries to emulate the Gold Box combat system but only offers a handful of spells (admittedly, its “Fireball” analog is about as much fun as “Fireball” without being quite so over-powered) and eliminates useful features like backstabbing, delaying, and guarding. Worse, it often puts the party in extremely narrow corridors where only one character can fight and spellcasters can’t cast over their heads because they must have an uninterrupted line-of-sight to the enemy. Random combats are programmed to come along something like every 20 moves, and I found it less annoying to save the game, quit, and reload (which restarts the counter) than to fight all of them.

Fighting bandits in confined conditions.

To these inherited problems, Bandor II maddeningly introduces another:

4. No ability to level up until late in the game. If you visit the guild early in the game, you can’t get in. A message on the door indicates that the guildmaster has gone into the slums to investigate the problems there. You have to rescue him from bandits before he’ll return to the guild and train you. But the bandit encounter is so deep in the slums, you could easily do this quest last, or not at all.

This doesn’t happen until it’s so late you hardly need it.

The only thing to unarguably improve is the automap, which no longer forgets your progress and clearly annotates physical features like doors and uncrossable foliage.

A growing automap of the final area looks a bit like Ultima Underworld’s.

Of the maps, the outdoor forest is the most annoying. It is essentially linear, with trees, bushes, and water blocking any attempt to create your own exploration pattern. In short order, you find a magic staff, talk to a druid who is only able to contact you through the staff, and then fight a dragon to destroy the threat to the city’s water supply. Random battles against ogres and giant rats are more dangerous than the “boss” battle in the area.

This time, it’s a three-headed dragon instead of a sorcerer named Yarash, but the idea is the same.

The slums serve up more giant rats and ogres, along with bandits, fire beasts, and “black servants.” (Nothing like a message saying, “You hit the black servant” to test my liberal sensibilities.) Buildings within this area hold the encounters necessary to solve all quests except the Storm Giant himself.

Threatened by Benson.

The undead Storm Giant King is found through a portal. He attacks after a bit of exposition with two black servants, and again the combat is easier than some of the random ones found in the same area.

The Storm Giant King, just like Tyranthraxus, doesn’t know when to stay dead.

After he’s defeated, you can enter an inner sanctum and find the wizard Landthi, brother of Osi. He takes the credit for raising the Storm Giant King and then attacks with no minions, making the final battle one of the easiest.

The villain delivers his exposition.

The final battle against Landthi in a corner.

Once you defeat Landthi, Osi apparates in and says that Landthi still lives . . . somewhere. He thanks you for your service and ends the game.

Maybe we’d like to be heroes of some other city next time.

I gave the original Bandor 26 points on the GIMLET. Since its sequel uses a near-identical interface, mechanics, and plot, I’m inclined to give it the same thing–minus 2 points for “character creation and development” since you can’t develop for most of the game. I guess I’d also subtract a point for “encounters,” since this game had the same unmemorable foes as the first but without the handful of non-combat encounters that I noted in my review.

If I can say one good thing about Bandor II, it’s that magic and physical combat are well-balanced. You can’t win with just a melee party, but spells aren’t quite the deus ex machina that they are in the Gold Box series. There are only a few of them, and while none of them ever stop being useful (e.g., “Sleep” doesn’t stop working against higher-level foes), they also have logistical concerns that prevent the mage from wiping the floor with every enemy party. For instance, enemies have a chance of dodging spells, you have to be in a line-of-sight to cast them (no other party members blocking), and the spellcaster cannot be in melee range of an enemy.

Blasting the Storm Giant King with a “Fireball.”

Still, unless Bandor III (1993) offers a significantly different experience, I won’t be sad if it never surfaces. We’ll see author Don Lemons’ other work with Shadowkeep I: The Search (1993) and The Infernal Tome (1994).

We’ll check in with Camelot next, after which I’ll either take another stab at The Magic Candle III or move on to Challenge of the Five Realms.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-344-bandor-ii-1992/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Game 314: Zerg (1989)

This version has no title screen; it just launches you right into it.

Zerg

United States

Independently developed and published as freeware

Released in 1989 for Amiga; new version released in 1990; later published on Fish Disk 252 in 1996

Date Started: 31 December 2018

Date Ended: 31 December 2018

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Easy (2/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

Zerg is a minor, inconsequential freeware RPG, destined for a bottom-10% GIMLET score, and yet it must be said that it offered exactly what I needed at exactly the moment that I needed it. After a number of frustrating hours with The Seventh Link and Theldrow, I desperately needed something I could finish and write about in just a few hours. Zerg appeared like a New Year’s miracle.

Some Ultima-esque dialogue as I enter the castle.

The title is as bare-bones as you can get while still technically meeting my specifications as an RPG. This Ultima-inspired game has no backstory, no character creation, no dungeons, no real magic, and only the most basic inventory, character development, and combat systems. It’s primary virtue is brevity plus a certain wit. It is also a rare Ultima clone for the Amiga. (It displays a roughly-Ultima II technology level, minus the dungeons, with a quest system that goes back to Akalabeth.)

The game takes place in the land of Zerg, which is having problems with monsters. Each player controls the same character, named “Wanderer,” who starts out as a Level 1 fighter with 75 strength, 75 wisdom, 75 agility, and 50 hit points. The game begins next to a king’s castle, where the king is looking for a hero to slay monsters and bring back their cadavers. The king will use these trophies “to help investors feel more secure.”

The king offers the first quest. If you say “no,” he says, “away with thee!” and you can’t do anything else to progress.

The kingdom consists of a single island roughly in the shape of a backwards “C,” with the castle at the top and the town of Garolin at the bottom. There are little islets offshore but there’s no way to reach them. In between the castle and the town, monsters appear randomly: kobolds, goblins, orcs, thieves, hobgoblins, fighters, ogres, trolls, giants, gargolyes, and demons. The king gives you individual quests to kill the monsters in that exact order. After you complete each kill, you return to the king for an experience reward and the next quest. A large part of the game involves wandering around, waiting for whatever monster you need next to spawn.

I just killed a goblin. An orc awaits to my east.

As you finish each quest, you gain experience and level up from 1 to 6. Each level-up confers an additional 10 maximum hit points and an additional 5 to each attribute (except for the last one, which gives you 4 points so that the total doesn’t exceed 99).

The king rewards me for the first quest.

My character sheet about midway through the game.

Combat is difficult because you have no tactics, just the (A)ttack command. At the outset, even that doesn’t work because you have no weapons and armor. You must reach Garlion without getting killed by a monster so that you can purchase a dagger and heavy furs. Over the course of the game, as you amass gold from your kills, you slowly upgrade weapons (e.g., mace, short sword, flail, battle axe) and armor (e.g., studded leather, scale mail, banded mail). The best weapon is a pike and the best armor is plate mail.

Shopping for a weapon.

Even with the best weapon and armor, combat is never truly easy, especially against some of the game’s higher foes. The only way to survive long-term is to adopt a strategy by which you stand near the castle or town and wait for enemies to spawn, attack them, and retreat indoors if your hit points fall too low. You then pass time while your hit points regenerate, go back outside, and resume the combat. This isn’t an exploit–it’s the only way to win the game. Even with it, the death screen is a constant companion, but reloading takes mere seconds.

You see this screen a lot.

I have a few compliments. The graphics are some of the best we’ve seen for Ultima clones (although the doors and objects in the castle and town have no substance; you just walk over them.) The game avoids the rubbish we see in most Ultima clones in which enemies can move on the diagonal but you can’t. This means you can generally outrun foes if you need to.

I also have no complaints about the interface, which uses the keypad for movement and sensible letters for common actions, like (A)ttack, (L)ook, and (S)tatus. Perhaps the most baffling of these commands is the “Z” key, which gives you a longitude and latitude. Anyone who could get lost on this completely linear 40 x 40 island should probably be playing another game.

Essentially the only use for the (L)ook command in the entire game.

There are NPCs in the town and castle, but only a couple have anything interesting to say, and for some of them, their lines are cut off. (I fiddled with some video settings towards the end and I think I fixed that.) The only important clues are for the final quest. Once and only once do you have to use the (O)ffer gold command to an NPC.

I have no idea what this NPC was going on about.

The (T)alk and (O)ffer systems come together towards the end. You learn from one NPC that only magic can kill a dragon. Another says you need to offer gold to get the dragon spell, and a third tells you that you have to offer it specifically to the Duke of Cora. There may be more letters there but the name got cut off. Anyway, the duke gives you the spell for 400 gold.

I should tell the king that you’re forcing me to bribe you to save the kingdom.

After you kill a demon, the king’s last quest is to kill a dragon. The dragon doesn’t appear until you get the quest, but after you get it, he’s right outside the castle. You simply have to cast the spell (the extra “magic points” you receive are for nothing) and the dragon dies.

The endgame scene, upon returning to the king, is a little funny. He’s promised you riches and titles, and this is what you get:

“Well, to be quite honest with thee, I didst not think I wouldst see thee again. They feat be truly impressive, and the tongues of the Bards shall ne’er cease spewing thine glories.” The king shakes your hand. “Thou mayst leave now.”

The likely-outraged player hits a key, and then:

“Just kidding!” shrieks the king, noting your bloody weapon edging towards his quavering form. “I didst promise thee unbelievable riches, and thou shalt have them!” The king hands you a sack of gold coins. “The first of may, oh valiant one. And now, let the celebrations begin!”

That’s more like it.

This is more than I ever got from Lord British.

Zerg was written by Michael Gordon Shapiro, who had previously messed around with Stuart Smith’s Adventure Construction Set (1984) and had programmed some (unpublished) text adventures on his Commodore 64. It was Shapiro’s only game as a designer, but he went on to a career as a composer for both game and film music. We won’t see any of his future work because none of the games are RPGs, but they include Empire Earth II (2005), Empire Earth III (2007), and Star Trek: Conquest (2007). Zerg 1.0, which I played, was released in 1989. A version 1.2 came out in 1990, and I’m not sure I see any difference. Fred Fish picked up the title for his Fish Disk freeware series, and the game appeared on issue 252 in 1996. (I am indebted to this interview with Shapiro on Amiga PD for this summary.)

The game earns an 18 on my GIMLET, doing best in the areas of “Economy” (3) and “Graphics, Sound, and Interface” (3, none of it for the sound, as there is none). It manages to just tick off 1 or 2 in everything else. One hesitates to heap too much criticism on independently-developed freeware games, but I feel that Shapiro had a decent interface that suffered from a lack of content. A larger, more interesting game could have been built atop these mechanics. Then again, for a game I wanted to wrap up on New Year’s Eve, it’s length was perfect.

***

I continue to get nowhere with The Seventh Link despite having put about 4 more hours into it. In a typical session, I start up, explore a bit, fight some creatures, but soon find that I haven’t made enough money to pay the food bill, and I thus have to quit without saving my limited progress. I haven’t leveled up or even figured out how to level up. I feel like I must be missing a dungeon somewhere–otherwise, the only thing to do next is somehow make enough gold for a ship, which seems impossible. If anyone has played the game and can offer me the necessary kick in the pants, I’d appreciate it.

Equally frustrating is a five-hour session I spent with Theldrow. (Posting about Theldrow was supposed to be my alternative to posting about The Seventh Link, but I couldn’t make any progress in that game, either. This is why I was so grateful for Zerg.) Theldrow is insanely difficult in its opening stages, but that’s not my problem. My problem is that I can’t figure out anywhere to go. I’ve found the town of Boden, the nearby cemetery with its small crypt, and the secret forest passage that leads to the hermit’s hut and the “Bizarre.” That’s all I can find. Despite ramming into every wall and searching every square, I have no idea how to get to the castle or any other area of the game. I welcome explicit hints for this one as well; otherwise, I may kick it back to 1988, which I think is its original year, and declare 1989 finished.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-314-zerg-1989/

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Crusaders of the Dark Savant: Rattrap

Esteban prepares to cast a spell that rarely fails to perform.

When I last wrote, I thought I was stuck underground in Nyctalinth. As some of you guessed, I simply overlooked a ladder. This brought me to an area I had marked as dead space. In the middle of that area was a statue of Phoonzang, labeled “THE CREATOR.” I couldn’t find anything productive to do with it. From here, a secret door put me back in the main area of Nyctalinth. Someone said I need something from another location before I could finish this map, so I took the Anthracax back to New City.

In New City, I found a random building in which to drop my excess stuff, as several of you recommended. This included quest items I’m pretty sure I’ve already used and special items that require different classes. I find it amusing that other NPCs repeatedly beat me to key treasure chests, despite all the obstacles in between, but apparently the stuff I drop in a random unlocked corner is safe.

I get a lot of use out of the fountain in the starter dungeon near New City.

Commenters had suggested that I might be able to do something with the computer in New City, perhaps with something I’d found in Nyctalinth, but I fiddled with it for a while and nothing seemed to work. I might need a more explicit hint there.

At this point, I had three major unexplored areas: south of Munkharama, northeast of Orkogre, and the sea. I chose the northeast path, but for some reason I decided to walk there from west of New City–probably because I stopped at the fountain in the starting dungeon first. North of the orchid fields, with half of my characters asleep, I ran into Shritis T’Rang, who’d I’d last seen when I gave him orders to STRIKE.

Then why are you wasting my time stopping me?

Shritis insulted me, and I decided I could do with one fewer NPC to encounter randomly in the world. I attacked him, which caused him to somehow immediately summon a veritable army of T’Rang to his side. Fortunately, I was at the peak of my powers, having just maxed out at a fountain, and a full-powered “Nuclear Blast” took care of everyone except Shritis himself. He was no pushover; he was capable of multiple high-damage melee attacks per round, with poison and paralysis effects. It took about six rounds to kill him in melee combat, and I lost Bix in the process (I resurrected him afterwards). I was hoping I’d get some kind of sick weapon or something, but the battle just won me a lot of experience.

East of Nyctalinth and northeast of Orkogre, I entered a grove. Multiple ominous warning messages preceded combats with tree-creatures called “Man o’ Groves” and “Halloweeches.” I swear I’ve seen something that looks like these creatures before, in another game or movie, but I can’t quite place them. There were about six fixed battles in the area, culminating in a combat with their leader, Tobagan.

When the dust settled, I found a slab in the middle of the area, with a carving depicting a giant tree with a gnarled face. Running through my items, the only thing I could think might help was the bonsai tree I’d picked up in Orkogre. When I planted it, it grew into some kind of creature named Maa-Googg, who promised me one of his servants would grant me a boon. The tree shrank and disappeared.

If I tell you my name, will it mean anything to you?

Moving on, we started to encounter a lot more Rattkin parties, and walls started appearing in the environment. Messages indicated that we were circling some kind of ruin, but the entrances were choked with trees and other foliage. Eventually, we reached a square where a tree came alive and lifted the party over the wall and dropped us in the ruins. I assume this was Maa-Googg’s servant.

A tree lifts us over the wall.

The ruins, which I haven’t yet finished, comprise two levels with a maze of ladders connecting them. Large parties of Rattkin have attacked me throughout, although they respond nicely to most spells, including “Asphyxiate.” One battle, however, with a Rattkin named Grimal and several parties of Rattkin Ronin, was almost comically hard. The Ronin version are capable of numerous mage spells, including “Sleep,” “Weaken,” and “Fireball,” and they get multiple attacks per round. When I first encountered them, I was at half-health and got slaughtered. I had to reload several times to defeat them, exhausting my spell points in doing so.

This was one of the hardest battles in the game so far.

There haven’t been any puzzles in the area, but there are a few NPCs. One, occupying an alcove off a large courtyard, is an old blind Rattkin named–groan–“Blienmeis.” He hasn’t had much to say in conversation, and I’m not sure what to do with him. On an upper floor is an impatient, jumpy Rattkin named “Bertie” selling ammunition for bows and slings (I was just complaining about how rare ammo is).

Either NPCs don’t have a lot of answers, or I just keep using the wrong dialogue prompts.

There are two major areas I haven’t been able to figure out how to access. One is a locked door at the entrance to “Rubi’s Funhouse.” The face of a clown on the door is lacking a nose, and none of my existing objects seem to suffice.

The second area is behind a door titled “Ratskell’s Thieves Guild.” There’s a window next to the door, and there a Rattkin demands that I put my hand through the window. He feels my hand and tells me that I’m not a good enough thief, to come back when I’ve had more practice. I suspect this is because I’ve barely put any points into the “Legerdemain” skill, not intending to steal from NPCs. I’m not sure how to fix that at this point, when leveling has slowed to a crawl. I may have to change my ninja back to a thief so I can jack up that skill.

There are so many ways this could go bad.

Lots of miscellaneous notes:

The economy is a bit weird in this game. You rarely encounter anyone with much to sell, but when you do, what you want is inevitably very expensive. Most combats don’t provide gold–through most of the game, I’ve earned more from selling unwanted equipment–but occasionally you meet an enemy that inexplicably delivers a lot of gold. I made about 1,200 gold pieces per battle against the “Mans o’ Groves,” for instance.

My characters’ melee prowess continues to grow as I (slowly) level, with my lord now capable of about eight attacks per round, four at the beginning and four at the end. It’s nice when a game doesn’t under-value melee characters at higher levels. In some earlier Wizardry titles, spellcasters carry almost all the load once you hit the midgame.

This game could really benefit from a Bard’s Tale-like “batch spell” that casts “Armorplate,” “Direction,” “Enchanted Blade,” “Reveal Secret,” and “Magic Screen” simultaneously. I try to keep these spells on as often as possible, but they only last about 15 minutes even at the highest power.

It’s surprising how rarely the party is at 100%. It only happens when you spend some time at a fountain. Resting really doesn’t restore much at all.

The game has an encumbrance system, but since it began I’ve been nowhere near in danger of exceeding any character’s load, and I’m usually packed to the gills with inventory.

When I’m fighting Rattkin leaders, the game always says that they attack with vorpal blades. Where do those blades go when the combat is over? I never get them.

We have a new NPC who frequently drops in for a visit, forcing me to acknowledge her introductory text repeatedly before I can “Leave” and move on.

Why art thou trying to sound like Lord British?

It’s extremely satisfying when I hit an enemy with a sling bullet or dart, do only 1 damage, and then roll a critical hit and kill him.

I haven’t talked much about the disarm and unlock minigames, which I enjoy. The disarm screen requires you to “inspect” the trap and try to figure out the trap’s assembly pattern and match it to several potential traps accessible from the scroll bar. Attempting to disarm a trap or calibrate a lock tumbler requires you to click a button above a window that continually flashes green, red, and yellow.

Picking a lock. Getting all five tumblers was a stroke of luck.

If you click when it’s red, you fail and the trap blows up or the lock jams. If you click when green, you succeed. If you click when yellow, you get another chance. The proportions of the colors are dependent on your “Skullduggery” skill, but otherwise it’s just luck; the colors flash to quickly to actually time them.

Here’s quick review of all of my unsolved puzzles and unexplored areas. I’ll take light hints if I’m already supposed to have the item or knowledge to get past the area.

Nyctalinth: Energy field blocking passage between two pillars.

Nyctalinth: The jeweled staff that the ghost keeps stealing.

Nyctalinth: Gooey balls on the cave floor.

New City: Computer in Controller room.

New City: Whatever I have to say to Professor Wunderland to get key to Old City.

New City: Access to Umpani embassy.

New City: “Twisted Heads” puzzle.

Seas and river south of New City

River north of Munkharama

Northeast ruins: How to get into Rubi’s Funhouse

Northeast ruins: Getting into thieves’ guild.

Continuing wilderness east of northeast ruins.

Munkharama: Getting the 5 flowers for Master Xheng.

Continuing wilderness south of Munkharaam.

I like having my characters settled in a single class. My lord is particularly kicking ass every round with his Sword of 4 Winds. His statistics are almost maxed too–everything’s 17 or 18 except one 16. Ninja (who despite my complaint above did end up with a Vorpal Sword) and Valkyrie continue to pull their weight, landing critical hits with satisfying regularity. My bishop doesn’t have every spell in the game, but it feels like he’s getting close, and when he’s at full power, “Nuclear Blast” and “Death Wish” make ruin out of most enemy parties. When he’s not at full power, the alchemist is there with her terrifyingly effective “Asphyxiation.”

The mage, on the other hand, isn’t doing as well.

Only my mage–who if you’ll recall originally started as a bard–is a little weak. My bishop has more than 200 spell points in several schools and at least 100 in all of them, and my alchemist is well above 100 in all of hers. But my mage, who it feels ought to be racking up the points more quickly as a “pure” spellcaster, is struggling to top 80 in all of his schools. I think his intelligence may be partly to blame. I’ve been unlucky with the dice. The minimum for his class is 12, but after 14 level-ups, he’s only at 14. (When leveling up, the game selects random attributes to increase by one point. Usually, it’s just one attribute, but sometimes you get lucky and get a bump in two, three, or even four.) Perhaps because of this, he doesn’t get many skill points. Where every other spellcaster in my party is already at 100 in his or her primary magic skill, Bix is only just about to break 75. Maybe I should give up and make a samurai out of him or something.

More on Legends of the Lost Realm coming up if I can get anywhere; otherwise, we may take a premature detour to Cobra Mission.

Time so far: 60 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/crusaders-of-the-dark-savant-rattrap/

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