Dungeon Hack: Blitzkrieg

A minotaur prepares to swing his axe, which looks like it ought to be impossible with the height of the ceiling.

        

I started over after the first entry, deciding to go with a slightly easier game. I lowered the levels to 10, kept secret doors turned off, said "no" to the water level, and created a mage/cleric named Tirena. She got some decent statistics within the first few rolls:

         

No one's pretty or healthy after 10 levels in a dungeon anyway.

       

A mage/cleric is a bit of a handful. Like all characters, she has two hand slots available, but she has at least seven potential things to put in them:

     

• The primary weapon
• A shield
• The cleric holy symbol, for casting cleric spells
• The mage spellbook, for casting mage spells
• Usable items, such as wands, potions, and scrolls
• Items that I want to identify
• Conjured magical weapons

        

Add to this the fact that the character can cast cleric spells while wearing armor but not mage spells. I'm constantly swapping items in and out of slots depending on what enemies I'm facing and how many spells I have left. I mind this less than I might have expected. If I was playing a party of four characters, it would probably be too annoying to bother with, and I'd end up under-valuing one of the two classes. With only one character to manage, constantly swapping things in and out gives me something to do between battles.

    

I've completed six levels. As we discussed last time, each level offers two types of enemies plus a single "boss" enemy who's a higher level than the regular two. Level 1, as before, gave me orcs and goblins. The boss was a hobgoblin. I found a Ring of Feather Falling and a mace +1 among various lesser treasures.

   

One of each.

      

Level 2 served up hobgoblins and troglodytes as the main enemies; the boss was a ghoul. I had my first level-up, with both classes reaching Level 4 (I started at 3). Before I finished the level, I ran into a pit trap and fell to Level 3, which had shadows and ghouls. It was a while before I found the stairs back up to Level 2 and discovered that the "boss" there was also a ghoul.

  

I realized at some point during this process that there's no reason to conserve anything, particularly spell slots. Since you only meet two types of monsters on each level (with that one exception), no monster is any different than any other. Might as well blast away. I fell into a habit of exhausting my mage spellbook (mostly "Magic Missile") before donning the armor and spending the rest of the day with my cleric spells and equipment, only to repeat the cycle after the next rest.  

       

This isn't what I normally think of as a "troglodyte."

       

Shadows and troglodytes both sap strength, but it's not permanent. Ghouls can paralyze for a while, but paralysis just stops you from acting, not moving. You can run away until it wears off. 

    

Still, I was motivated to stay out of melee combat, and it was in messing around with spells that I discovered how awesome "Spiritual Hammer" is. Is it this awesome in other D&D games? I've been ignoring it for most of my gaming career, apparently to my detriment. It creates a magical throwing Thor hammer that comes back to you. If you miss an enemy on the initial throw, it might hit him in the back on the rebound. And you can summon one for each hand!

      

Hammer time!

     

By the time I finished Level 3, I was loving this game. After the first session, I thought I'd be bored with it. But now I was charging through the hallways, hurling double hammers at every shade who approached, getting them coming and going, blasting away with my mage spells, slamming keys into doors, barely ever having to pause to get my bearings because everything is so linear. The key to the enjoyment of this game is that it plays fast. There's no point mapping anything because it's all randomly-generated (and the automap does a great job). There's no point waiting because enemies respawn. There's no point conserving because every level brings new stuff. It's probably worth holding one high-powered item in reserve for a particularly tough boss, but otherwise Dungeon Hack is a game of swift offense.

    

That isn't to say there aren't some problems. Chief among them are horrendous timing issues. Even with the emulator cranked up to a level way above an era 486, I suffer maddening pauses sometimes when moving and turning. It's particularly annoying when this happens in combat, causing me to over-turn and get disoriented.

      

Foreshadowing?

      

Meanwhile, forget about the "Combat Waltz" or any other dance moves. The only way to not get hit by enemies is to not get next to them. This can be difficult. Enemies sometimes dither in one square for several seconds, and other times they seem to move three squares at once. If the enemy does get next to you, and the game's clock decides that homeboy gets an attack, all the shuffling and running in the world isn't going to avoid it. The particularly annoying (and slightly amusing) thing is that the game's combat timer isn't synced well with the characters' positions. There are times that I'll get adjacent to an enemy, then run backwards down the corridor. Ten seconds later and ten steps away, the game suddenly registers a hit and the character goes "oof!"

 

Enemies oddly cannot step and then turn in one move, but they can turn, step, and even attack in a single move. Take this guy:

        

He's closer than you think.

     

If this were Dungeon Master, I'd have enough time to go make a sandwich. There, he would have to turn to face me, then pause, then step into the square in front of me, then pause, then attack. But this guy probably did all three of those things in the nanosecond after I took the screenshot. In Dungeon Hack, you can be two squares away from a monster who's facing the wrong direction and it's still too late.

    

I've learned to live with these aggravations because everything else happens at a good clip. By the end of dungeon Level 3, I had reached character Level 5 for both of my classes. I found a pair of Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength and two Shields +1. 

  

Level 4 brought the first level-drainers: wights and shades. I tried to suck up the level drains at first, but it happened too many times. I learned to just rely on my hammers, keep out of their way, and reload if they hit me. I got "Negative Plane Protection" at some point, which stopped the draining.

       

Yeah, screw that.

      

The enemies were worth an incredible amount of experience. I arrived on the dungeon level at character Level 5 in both classes, and I left at Level 9 as a mage and 8 as a cleric. Along the way, I picked up a pair of leather boots, a book that increased my wisdom by 1, and a Stone of Good Luck. I frankly don't know what that latter item does, or how to use it. It doesn't equip in any slot and it doesn't activate from the hand slots. 

         

Taking damage from a shade.

       

The game follows Dungeon Master's convention of never telling you, in-game, what any of the enemies are called. You have to look them up in the manual. The "boss" enemy for dungeon Level 4 was an armored guy surrounded by a blue glow, and he doesn't correspond with anything in the manual. He carries a sword and shield; death knights carry a two-handed sword and have skeletal faces. Steel shadows are just animated armor, so they don't go with the fact that this guy has a face. Swordwraiths don't carry shields, and their armor looks completely different. The manual does warn that its list may not be comprehensive.

    

Any ideas what this guy is?

      

Whatever he was, he was fast. All the backpedaling in the world didn't keep him from catching up with me. After he killed me twice, I decided to try my Wand of Fire on him, and he died in one shot.

   

As you explore, you occasionally find message scrolls that give you hints about the game and perhaps fill in some semblance of story? It's early to tell. This is what I have so far:

• "More than once, the ogre slug I was fighting attempted to hit me with some sort of corrosive spittle."

• "As well, Midnight had a shield, one that would absorb some damage meant for her." [Isn't that what all shields do?]

• "But in order to see illusions, Midnight relied upon her Helm of True Seeing. With it no . . ."

• " . . . ical instrument, this Lute of Well-Being, is also said to strengthen a weakened bard."

• "I wish I had the power of the 'Neutralize Poison' spell. Twice I was struck by the poisonous sting of the wyvern."

     

Did this one appear for the wrong character class?

      

The manual mentions that you might find artifacts from a famous adventurer who preceded you, and I guess in my case, that's "Midnight."

        

Some miscellaneous notes:

    

• The game has a lot of clever ways to offer locks and keys. There are half a dozen different colors of locks and keys to start. Then, sometimes instead of a lock and key you'll have a gem and a mosaic that the gem needs to be placed in, or a plume from a helmet and a relief depicting an armored knight that takes the plume, or a mallet and gong, or a pearl that has to be placed into a clam shell. They're still just very rote, linear puzzles, but at least their variety makes them kind of fun.

       

Just when you thought you'd seen every way to open a door.

    

• I mentioned it last time, but I'll also call attention to the wide variety of things you can click on just to get an atmospheric message.

        

To eat, I would think.

       

• It took me a while to figure out that you can learn spell scrolls by clicking in the spellbook with them.

• Mage spells seem a little underpowered so far. "Magic Missile" significantly underperforms physical attacks. "Ice Storm" often misses. "Hold Undead" didn't work on the undead I faced on Level 4. But the mage class is still worth it for "Improved Identify." 

 

I think this is the only "bad" piece of equipment I've found.

       

• Having played a few hours of Baldur's Gate 3, I have to say that I find the simplicity of AD&D2 refreshing, where you find a Mace +1 and then a few hours later, you find a Mace +2--instead of a mace that gives you +1 but only in the sunlight and when you have a psychic link with at least one enemy who has taken damage from one of your companions earlier in the same round.  

        

I thought that would be enough for one entry, but it's not, so let's do another couple of levels. Level 5 bucked the previous trend by offering only one enemy type and no "boss": Minotaurs. The level was a labyrinthine maze, and they were waiting around every corner. I had several reloads when I couldn't dodge their two-handed axe attacks in time.

There was another clever stand in for a lock-and-key where a relief on the wall depicted a planet with three moons. The space for the planet was empty; I had to find the orb to stick there.

      

Another clever alternative to a key and lock.

      

The level had a brief section in which, when I entered, my character announced that she was suddenly famished. While in this area, food depleted at a much higher rate. It wasn't long before I was out of it, though. I had plenty of food anyway, plus my character was capable of casting "Create Food and Water."

   

Items found on the level helped me resolve the cleric-mage armor problem. A Ring of Strength allowed me to remove my Gauntlets of Hill Giant Strength and put a pair of Bracers +1 in that slot instead. Then a Cloak of Protection +3 took the place of my chain mail. With this setup, my AC is 1 instead of 0. Good enough.

        

Just a shot of the Level 4 cleric spell list.

       

Minotaurs didn't provide nearly enough experience (at least relatively) as the shades. I only gained one cleric level before heading down to dungeon Level 6.

     

Level 6 brought back undead, specifically mummies. They were joined by trolls. No level-draining, but both of them hit hard enough that I did everything I could to stay out of melee range. I hit mage Level 10 at some point, but I ran out of time before I finished the area.

       

The low ceilings have given the troll a flat top.

      

Short entry, but it's a busy week. This is a good game for a busy week--not much plot, a decent amount of forward momentum. There's only so far you can get on momentum alone, though. We'll see how I feel about the last four levels.

   

Time so far: 7 hours (only 4 on this character)

 

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

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

        

Legend of the Red Dragon

United States

Robinson Technologies (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for Amiga, 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 30 March 2024

Date Ended: 15 April 2024 

Total Hours: 11

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

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

            

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

   

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

   

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

    

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

     

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

    

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

    

     

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

 

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

     

• Log in.

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

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

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

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

    

Buying statistics upgrades from the bartender.

       

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

        

I thought Violet and I had something special.

     

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

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

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

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

       

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

      

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

     

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

    

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

   

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

    

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

   

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

     

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

      

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

      

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

     

The game loves to twist the knife.

      

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

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

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

    

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

      

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

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

    

Very small changes could have given this a proper meter.

     

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

    

That's how the kids spell it these days.

       

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

     

You are not god!

      

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

     

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

     

Reaching the top level

     

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

     

Well, that's heavy.

     

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

     

Way to bias the choice.

       

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

    

My first encounter with the red dragon.

    

And the result.

     

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

       

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

      

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

   

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

    

Right. "Registering."

      

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

   

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

   

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

    

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

    

The last screenshot I took of my character stats.

     

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

   

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

   

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

          

Some players are into the game for scenes like this.

   

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

    

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

          

More from the article:

       

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

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

       

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

    

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

   

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

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

         

Leveling up by challenging my master.

     

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

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

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

          

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

        

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

     

Moving up to the next level.

      

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

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

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

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

    

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

      

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

   

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

      

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

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

Game 511: The Red Crystal (1993)

    

The Red Crystal

United States

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

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 11 April 2024

     

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

    

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

     

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

     

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

           

He must be a Targaryen.

       

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

    

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

     

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

        

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

   

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

        

     

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

   

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

     

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

       

I'm so glad we had this encounter.

      

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

      

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

       

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

       

I guess this one shouldn't be too hard.

     

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

       

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

        

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

       

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

        

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

    

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

   

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

  

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

       

That's more like it.

       

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

   

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

        

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

        

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

    

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

       

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

        

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

       

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

     

Time so far: 3 hours

 

****

     

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