Chrontendo’s back! Dr. Sparkle’s long-running journey through the entire library of the Famicom and NES continues. He’s been doing this for at least 15 years! Chrontendo got its start as a blog, then moved to a YouTube format, although every episode is also uploaded to the Internet Archive. Dr. Sparkle tries to complete the games he covers, meaning, sometimes it takes a very long time to construct an episode, especially when it contains a lengthy JRPG.
In addition to being generally watchable by anyone with even a passing interest in video gaming history, Chrontendo is a good series just to have on in the background while you do other things. What I’m saying is that it’s comfortable. Like Comfortable Doug! (warning: earworm)
Chrontendo 60 is subtitled “The Most Perverted Episode,” covers April through May of 1990, and features:
horse racing sim Kurogane Hiroshi No Yosou Daisuki! Kachiuma Densetsu,
a long section the original Fire Emblem and the series in general,
Rare’s PinBot, a very unique and interesting simulation of a real Williams pinball table with some unique video extras,
GameTek’s home version of the Nickelodeon game show Double Dare, which was also made by Rare,
the ludicrously-titled Dinowarz: The Destruction of Spondylus,
Imagineering’s Ghostbusters II,
Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road, by Rare,
a very long section on the epic Final Fantasy III, from and by Square, which Dr. Sparkle proclaims to be the best JRPG on the system,
Kagerou Densetsu, a “sorta action RPG thing” published by “Pixel,” but we’re not sure who exactly that is, and may have been intended, it is speculated, to be a kind of RPG-ish sequel to The Legend of Kage, and
Nintendo World Cup (forgive me for not typing out the entire Japanese title), that weird Kunio soccer game that Nintendo published under their own banner, just with all the story and setting removed. It’s a decent soccer game even so.
With this episode, Dr. Sparkle is declaring a dividing point for the series. Up until now has been the rise of the Famicom; the rest covers its fall, what he calls the “Byzantine Empire” phase of the system’s life. This doesn’t mean the series is almost over though. Far, far from it.
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
So let us talk about what is probably the worst thing about Omega: it’s capriciousness.
If you read the experiences of the CRPG Addict you might be given to thinking that Omega is actually pretty easy. Judging by the title screen on his review, he was playing 0.71, a version I don’t have access too, and may actually no longer be available anywhere on the vast World Wide Web.
My version is 0.80, which it seems like it must be harder than his. Also, he backed up his save games, which, while the instructions specifically suggest it if you’re having trouble, is still cheating. All of my games have been played traditionally. And let’s be clear as to why: because I’m a snob. A roguelike snob.
Of course most classic roguelikes have a degree of deadly capriciousness, but for some reason it’s especially bad in Omega. I don’t think I’ve seen a game with as many ways for a game to go from terrific to dead instantly, often without warning and in a single turn.
Here’s a list of ways this can happen, most of which I’ve personally seen.
To get it out of the way: you can be struck by a cosmic at nearly any time above-ground (and even underground? I don’t think so). That does 10 damage purely from random chance, with no way to avoid or reduce it. If you have less than 10 HP, your game is just over. Some characters don’t even start with 10 maximum HP. Cosmic rays are triggered at two different places in the code, on tables for indoor events and outdoor events. My reading of the code indicates that indoors, a check that can produce a cosmic ray happens every ten game minutes, and outdoors it’s every game hour. However, depending on the terrain, multiple hourly checks can be made per move. Cosmic ray hits are far from the only bad things that can happen per hour, so it’s best to go by road if you can, and with other travel aids if possible.
The hedge maze in Rampart is a terrific source of deaths. Traps in there can absolutely wipe you out, or else make the game unplayable. Traps exist elsewhere, but the hedge maze both has a higher density than elsewhere (it always seems to have at least one, and probably has several), and is right there in Rampart. There are a small number of possible layouts for the maze, and traps tend to appear in the same kinds of places, so eventually you figure out where you should search. Specifically: fire traps and scythe traps do a lot of damage, an abyss trap can bestow a bunch of falling damage arbitrarily and effectively teleport you, acid traps do damage can destroy multiple pieces of equipment, a disintegration trap can destroy equipment or kill you outright, and an alarm trap won’t do any damage, but it will make all the guards in Rampart permanently hostile, dooming your character unless you can take them, which is unlikely at the point in the game when you’ll be exploring the hedge maze.
Once you step out of the starting city of Rampart there’s the countryside, a whimsically deadly region where you can have “encounters,” during which you may be killed (I can attest) by bandits, goblin shamans, lions, bears, bog haunts, mirrorshades, liches, or even “doberman death-hounds,” who are both fast and get lots of attacks. Encounters can generate a monster right beside you, and in that case the game even gives it the first turn. Many times my games have consisted of spending the 15 minutes or so getting all my chores in Rampart done to get my character started, leaving town, getting an encounter on the way to the Archdruid’s temple, and getting wiped out literally before I could do anything. The only thing you really can do about these situations is decrease the amount of time you spend outside.
What did Lawrence Brothers have against dobermans?
I’ve died to random encounters three games in a row before: #1: Upon exiting the Archdruid’s temple, immediately, a random encounter. Then, in the tactical map, they got a turn before me and I died. I don’t even know what it was; it was invisible and killed me with a missile. #2: Upon exiting the city of Rampart, again before I got a turn, a random encounter. This time it was a goblin shaman casting spells. One was an area effect spell that killed the caster and awarded me an experience level, but then also killed me. #3: I got some steps towards the Archdruid’s temple before I got a random encounter that completely surrounded me with hedges. Trying to wade through them poisoned me to poison death.
How did I even wander into this situation?
Disintegration traps deserve special mention. I have again checked the game’s code and discovered the logic is: when you activate one, if you’re wearing a cloak, it’ll get disintegrated, no checks, no save, it’s just gone no matter what it is. If no cloak, it’s your armor that gets disintegrated. If no armor, it’s you. Traps in Omega are not common in the Goblin Caves, but can be anywhere there, and there’s lots of space for them.
Back to the hedge maze. Monsters can get generated there too, sometimes out-of-level ones, like lions, bears, “were-swarms,” frost demons, or pterodactyls. It’s right by the cemetery too, and sometimes it gets incorporeal visitors from there.
The hedges themselves can easily kill you. The game always asks if you’re sure when you accidentally miskey into one, thankfully. If you answer ‘Y,’ you open yourself to be stuck to the brambles for a not-insignificant number of turns, getting poisoned (easily deadly if you’re still at level 0), have your cloak ripped apart, or, if your luck is particularly bad, walking straight into the waiting tentacles of a trifid. Moral: YOU SHOULD ANSWER ‘N.’
Then there are the monsters who have unusually deadly attacks. Salamanders can breathe fire for high damage and from a distance unless you have fire resistance from a ring. Bog things can outright frighten you to death in melee. Until you learn that you should wear heavy armor to survive the Goblin Caves you’ll frequently get missiled to death by goblin chieftains, which are a prominent early source of fatality.
Learn to handle them, and later in the Goblin Caves your bane becomes goblin shamans, who can do a variety of awful things to you. The worst of these is sleep. If you get put to sleep, they’ll be able to get off several spells after. While somehow you can block their attacks, and even counterspell their continued enchantments, automatically while asleep, you’ll still often get slowed, snowballed, cursed, diseased, or poisoned. Entering a new level there is a particularly tense moment once these guys start showing up.
Oh here’s a good one. Fighting tooth and nail against goblin chieftains got my hit points down, but I was resting between fights and not doing too badly. Then not seeing any monsters around I walked across the room, happened to step next to a ‘1’ character, a statue. It came to life immediately as a salamander and promptly roasted my ass. I prefer my ass uncooked.
Get a load of this. Rolled stats until I got a character who had an Intelligence of 18, so they could join the Collegium Magii for free right away, and also could join the Gladiators. Did both those things. Bought ten buckets of Lyzzard Partes for early rations. Tripped over a hoplon, a good shield, and found both ring mail +1 and a war-hammer + 2 in the pawn shop. Found the Thieves’ Guild by dint of checking nearly every door in town. Joined the college but failed at the roll for learning a random spell. Went to the Arena and chose to fight the first opponent, a lowly goblin. Set combat tactics to Block Low then Lunge Center. On my first attack against the puny green foe, I take one hit point of damage from them, then: “Oh no! You hit yourself! You died!” Eleven points of damage from a fumble at level 0. That’s like having a fatal accident at after-school martial arts practice.
“Stop hitting yourself!”
At INT 18: “Killed by stupidity.”
It’s not just death that particularly bad luck can cause.
Weapons can shatter if you roll particularly badly in a fight. In general, you should consider your equipment in Omega as ultimately temporary.
Punching is of little use against strong enemies, so I bought a broad sword for 180 gold. Ventured into the wilderness. Got a random encounter involving a freaking lich. I managed to get away, but not before it destroyed my broad sword from a distance with a spell of Destructo Weaponum. I headed back to town and bought another one, then went to the Goblin Caves. Saw some money, stepped to pick it up, but surprise, there was an acid trap there! It destroyed my thieves’ picks, a bucket of Lyzzard Partes, and my broad sword again! Grawlix grawlix.
How does corrosive acid shatter a sword?
If an item gets cursed, you don’t have many recourses. I’ve never seen a scroll of blessing work on them; reading the source code suggests they’re just not strong enough. The most practical thing to do is break the weapon to bits with your bare hands: use the ‘z’ key.
Corporal Phantom guards the entrance.
Phantoms that appear in the hedge maze can level drain you; the main defense against that is a Cloak of Negimmunity, which you probably won’t have at that stage. If you just walk near the hedge maze, it’s possible to awaken a phantom sleeping inside. Phantoms are incorporeal, so weapon attacks don’t work on them, and once they’re awake they can chase you, floating right through buildings, throughout the whole city. The entrance to the city is a long passage with walls on both sides; if you don’t have a way of dealing with the phantom (use magic if you can), it’ll block the passage when you leave town, and get a few free hits on you when you return.
And then there’s the worst death of all, an attack by the dread monster Segmentation Violation:
Omega still has some decades-old bugs in it.
So what is my point? It’s not that you shouldn’t play Omega. It’s that you have to expect that your game could end at almost any time. Your game is not yours to have. Your character lives on borrowed time, so do as much with it as you can while you’ve got them.
These are a few things you can’t completely prevent, but what you can do is reduce their frequency. You can reduce the number of spaces you walk through in dungeons. You can try not to be slow when traveling the wilderness. If you encounter a trap, it might not be fair to it, but riding a horse will mean its effects are more likely to happen to it than to you. And good armor is almost always helpful, if you can afford it.
But sometimes, you just die. That’s just the kind of game it is. As you get better at Omega, you still suffer from them, but as you learn to play more effectively, you do find you get farther much more often.
How best to do that will be the subject of the next, and last for now, column on Omega.
Dylan Mansfield at site-favorite Gaming Alexandria tells us that there is now preserved an unreleased Famicom port of Taito classic arcade game The Fairyland Story! Fairies are rife around our offices, I have to tell you, they’re everywhere, getting underfoot and in the way of closing doors. Oh? This game is more to do with a more generic kind of fantasy world? I knew that.
Young witch protagonist Ptolomy clears a number of successive screens of enemies using her magic that can turn them into cakes! Released to arcades in 1985, it’s kind of an intermediate game between 1984’s Chak’n Pop and classic 1986 arcade hit Bubble Bobble. If you’re a fan of the arcade game you should check into this one, as many of the level layouts are different! The announcement post and rom is at Forest of Illusion. Unfortunately-named YouTube channel Hard4Games has a short video about the find:
You want to know a great game that, statistically speaking, you’ve probably never played? Konami’s Maze of Galious for the MSX. It’s an early example of that genre we all now call Metroidvanias (Jeremy Parish, your royalty check is in the mail), and in Japan it was hugely inspirational. More recently, it was a direct inspiration for the La-Mulana games.
Well, more-recently-than-that, some romhackers have updated it to take advantage of the much more powerful MSX2 hardware. This results in much more detailed and colorful graphics and a number of other game improvements.
Playing it requires a rom of the original game (which you much seek out yourself), the patch file (here’s it’s GitHub site), and a patcher like Floating IPS. Or do you? Indie Retro News found a site that’s serving up the game and patch together, all ready to play!
Look at that murderous dungeon room. Now that’s what you call a video game.
If you’re prepared to patch the rom yourself and name it correctly (it’s explained on the project’s GitHub page), it can also be played in the online MSX emulator at webmsx.org.
So, what’s playing it like? Challenging! You have two characters, Popolon and Aphrodite, who have separate health and experience meters. Filling up your experience bar doesn’t actually improve your stats at all; it just heals that character up to full. And your characters’ jumps, while not as stiff as Simon Belmont’s, are not fully controllable in mid-air.
The two characters have subtly different abilities. Popolon’s attacks do more damage, he can jump higher, and his jump height varies according to how long the button is held. He’s also the only one who can push open doors. Aphrodite’s jumps are of constant height, but she’s also the only one who can survive in water! If one character runs out of health, the other can soldier on alone, but reviving the other is a difficult process.
Aww, they’re wearing matching armor!
In fact, the whole game is a difficult process! This is from that thankfully-brief time in the history of video gaming where developers seemed to revel in putting in secret features and hidden passages. Beating the final boss requires you find a very well-hidden item, the Cross, which is in a very secret passage. If you no longer have months to devote to finishing a game, you’re probably going to want to find at least a good FAQ for this one.
It’s nine years old, but I’m amazed by how few seem to know of these old projects that litter the internet, and this is one that’s definitely worth revisiting.
When people talk about reasons for the Great Game Crash of 1983 (which, it should be remembered, was mostly a crash in the U.S., other countries didn’t suffer much loss in popularity), one reason sometimes given was the lack of quality of one specific game: Howard Scott Warshaw’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, for the Atari VCS/2600. (That’s not really the point of this post. For more of this, seen the Addendum, below.)
I should emphasize that it was easy to get frustrated by E.T. Its development was rushed so that it could be in stores in time for the 1982 Christmas season. Warshaw’s previous work Yars’ Revenge was a huge hit for Atari, but its successor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is possibly a bit too experimental. I think E.T. is a better game than Raiders, it’s easier to learn certainly, but it has some definite issues that make it very frustrating to play.
There were a number of issues, but the biggest by far was that it was extremely easy to fall into the many pits that dotted the landscape of the game’s version of Earth, and after floating up out of one, it was just as easy to immediately fall back into one again. You could fall into a pit merely from changing screens in the wrong location.
Back in 2013, a user in the AtariAge forums using the handle recompile produced a hack to fix the game’s problems, including this one. They made a page that the hack from which could be downloaded, and explained, in great technical detail, how it had been made. The result has slightly worse graphics than the original, but is much more playable, and reveals that there is a very interesting game hidden beneath the rushed product mandated by Atari’s managers. Not only is the page and his work still up now, nine years later, but so is the AtariAge thread he made.
Remember: a delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad until someone with enough time, energy and technical know-how takes it upon themselves to fix it, which in E.T.‘s case was about 31 years from its release.
Addendum
Was E.T. the real reason for the U.S. crash? Honestly, I’m dubious. It’s likely a contributing factor, but a slight one. But the fact that it can’t be ruled out, and probably helped a little, makes it something that many writers can point to without much fear of contradiction. It’s the way many narratives are built.
But there were plenty of good games, by the standards of the time, to offset the fortunes of any single title. A more likely explanation was a deluge of bad games, and a market oversaturated by them produced by companies looking for a quick buck, so that unless a consumer had done their research, it was difficult to separate the worthwhile purchases from the cash grabs.
Video games had, almost overnight, turned into a billion-dollar business. For a few years, specifically 1978 to 1982, the success of arcades, and of the Atari VCS and a number of excellent games for it, tantalized a nation. For a brief period, almost everyone sold game cartridges. I remember seeing them on the racks of drug stores during that time.
Then, almost as suddenly as it had risen, it collapsed. No one knew which games were good and which were bad. Even the good ones were pretty expensive: a $30 game in 1982 was nearly $90 in today’s (2022) money. All of those stores that had jumped on the bandwagon were left with piles of unsold inventory. Console gaming died out almost completely for a few years, until the arrival of the NES, and some canny moves by Nintendo of America, resurrected the industry in the land of its birth.
Hackaday’s Matthew Carlson points to an effort to make the graphics in old Sierra On-Line Adventure games better. The graphics in the games in question weren’t stores as raster images, but rather drawn with vector commands, so theoretically it should be easy. But as the video demonstrates, the resolution of their coordinate system didn’t take into account the possibility that someone might come in later and draw the art into a canvas with higher resolution, which causes some weird glitches that had to be accounted for.
I’m a bit fuzzy on all this and open to correction, but….
In the UK, as far back is 1978, there was an electronic text service called Oracle, of no relation to the current-day owner of Java, OpenOffice, and VirtualBox. It was launched as a competitor to the even-older BBC service Ceefax that launched in 1974. In 1993 Oracle turned into Teletext, Inc. Teletext lasted for a good long while, up until 2009.
There is much more to that story, but we’re getting into the weeds. Our subject is the early teletype video game magazine Digitizer, a service provided on Teletext. Digitizer lasted from 1993 to 2003, a solid ten years full of typically cheeky 90’s British video game news content, delivered through the medium of ASCII text and artwork.
It’s a whole world of gaming enthusiasm from a lost era, and in it one can see the birth of a whole subculture. Some of these people are still writing today over on the site digitizer2000, although sporadically it seems. The site Super Page 58 has worked hard to archive as much of their content as they can, including a voluminous, yet still incomplete, listing of reviews.
And they liked the SNES port of Atari’s Rampart almost as much as I did!
Via MNeko on Twitter, Apotris (itch.io, $0) is nothing more than a really sharp and responsive clone of a certain tetromino-stacking puzzle game. It just feels good to play! It’s Game Boy Advance homebrew, and I can personally vouch that it’s particularly nice if you have the means to play it on a jailbroken 2 or 3DS.
Us remaining (or even new!) blogs in the distant future year 2022 have to stick together, so I feel it’s important to point you to the blog of Matt Sephton, which is on a variety of tech and tech-adjacent topics, including sometimes games!
The particular item of interest there that I want to point you to today is on the obscure Japanese handheld P/ECE, released in 2001, which is a lot like a foreshadowing of Panic’s quirky elite gamer fixation/lust object, the Playdate. It too was a purposely-monochrome device in an age of color, and it also hosts a range of quirky homebrew games. It even still has a website!
Re:
f special note is that it was a place that notable and prolific small-game homebrew design genius Kenta Cho, a.k.a. ABA (Twitter), released their wondrous work even way back then! And where else can you find a demake of Rez that pits you against a malevolent Microsoft Outlook icon?
Please, check out all of these far-flung and varied links!
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
We’re continuing our look at the classic late-80s and early-90s roguelike Omega! Here are parts one and two.
Omega is a cool game with a variety of RPG adventuring to be had, but it also has a slightly steeper learning curve than a Hack-like. So, under the principle of getting the broccoli out of the way so we can get to dessert after, let’s go over a couple of the more mechanical parts of the game: character creation, and the game’s unusual inventory system.
A note: It is the year 2022, we are all busy people, and Omega is an open source game. Thus I have availed myself of reading the source code to get some details of how Omega does things internally. This might be considered to be cheating, but honestly? Omega doesn’t play fair in some areas, so I feel no guilt about reading the code. One of the virtues of roguelike games is that often one can source dive and still find the game very challenging to play, and that’s definitely the case with Omega.
Character Creation
The first thing Omega asks you is if you want to [c]reate a character, or [p]lay as yourself.
If you choose to “create a character,” the game generates stats in D&D style, rolling virtual dice to produce a set of stats in the range of 4 to 18. You’re given ten re-rolls to try to get the best stats you can. (Under the pre-alpha, development version, you get 30 re-rolls. That version has been pre-alpha since 2001.) The system used is similar to the Dungeons & Dragons tradition of summing three six-sided dice for each stat, but there’s two departures:
You’re spotted one point on each stat: it’s impossible to roll a stat less than 4 by this method. You still can’t roll more than 18: one of the dice is essentially five-sided.
When the game rolls Intelligence, it saves the two six-sided dice that were rolled, and also uses those two die values for your Power, Agility and Constitution. Meaning, a lucky character in Intelligence will probably be lucky in several more things. I don’t know why it was designed this way, but it explains some trends in stat rolling I’ve seen.
When rolling character statistics, two of the dice are shared between four stats!
If you run out of re-rolls, the game throws you into play with the last set you rolled. There is absolutely nothing saying you can’t immediately quit (Shift-Q) and start over with a fresh set of re-rolls.
If you choose to “play as yourself,” the game will give you a series of questions and ask that you answer them honestly. They include things like how many pounds can you bench press, how many miles you can run, and can you shuffle a deck of cards with one hand.
It does not ask if you can juggle. Omega characters cannot juggle.
If you’re asked a number and answer higher than a certain amount, the program will print a message expressing incredulity, but accept it anyway. A few of the questions ask if the player has some supernatural abilities, like “Do you have ESP?” and “Can you see auras?” A bit of a spoiler: if you answer these in the negative, your character probably won’t have much Power, and Power is important. You definitely should lie about this.
At one point the game asks if you’re “physically handicapped,” which seems insensitive to me. If you’re in a wheelchair, why should you be expected to carry that over into the computer games you play? But again, everyone lies here anyway.
The last question asks if you’re Irish, which is worth a couple of extra points of Power, so here, too, you should apply a bit of the old blarney.
By lying, you can use the quiz to get yourself a character with 18s in everything without difficulty. You could think of it as an easy mode, in that you can still die pretty easily. After you take the quiz, you’re given the option to save your answers to easily get those stats again. I use the roller system when I play, to add additional variety, but it’s up to you.
Whichever method you use, you’re then asked for your character’s name, then whether you’re interested sexually in [m]ales or [f]emales. Ahem. Poly and asexual players might feel snubbed by this, but secretly, the game also lets you answer ‘y‘ or ‘n‘! Answering ‘y‘ for yes means your character will be considered interested in both; answering ‘n‘ for no means neither. This doesn’t have a huge effect on the game, but it does matter for brothel visits: if you answer ‘n‘, you have a chance of gaining an Intelligence point for a visit. If you answer something else, the point you might gain is in Constitution.
What Do These Numbers Mean?
If you’re familiar with Dungeons & Dragons-style attribute scores you probably already have a good intuitive sense of what the game’s stats do, many of which are the same as in D&D. But not everyone knows those, and even old-schoolers might miss some of Omega’s nuances.
In D&D, these are relatively set in stone except for the occasional gain upon gaining a level. In contrast, Omega has several ways for stats to increase, and a few ways for them to go down.
Strength helps determine the damage done by heavy weapons. If your Strength is high, you should look into a smashing or a two-handed weapon. Just as important, Strength determines your maximum carry weight. Even if you’re not carrying anywhere close to your maximum, being weighed down even a little reduces your speed, which is dangerous in a roguelike world! It also helps you join the Mercenaries and the Gladiators.
Constitution affects your maximum hit points. It doesn’t seem to give you resistance to poison or disease. You need at least average Constitution to join the Mercenaries.
A high Dexterity makes it easier to hit monsters, and also affects damage done with light weapons missile weapons. It reduces the cost of joining the Thieves’ Guild.
Agility determines your base movement speed, which affects how often you act and how easily you can run away from monsters. Since Agility factors into speed, it’s really nice to have. You need good Agility to join the Gladiators.
Intelligence affects the chance to learn spells from random sources. You need an Intelligence of at least 13 to join the Collegium Magii. If your Intelligence is 18, joining it is free! It also helps you cast a couple of high-level spells, but day-to-day, it doesn’t seem to affect much.
Power directly affects your maximum mana (that is, magic) points, making it very nice to have for spellcasters. High Power reduces the cost to join the Sorcerors’ Guild.
During the game, there’s a few more, derived from your level, the above statistics, your equipment, and the whims of fate:
Hit Points (HP), of course, are your character’s healthiness. If you run out you die, but that’s far from the only way.
Mana Points are your character’s immediate magic strength. Your maximum is your Power times your character’s level plus one. (Remember: Omega starts counting levels from zero!) Spells cast come out of this total. A subtle thing about Omega is that your Mana also counts as a protective factor. Some spells that monsters cast will be automatically countered if you have enough mana left.
Hit is your chance to hit, given a general situation.
Dmg is a measure of the amount of damage you might do. Luck matters for a lot; I’ve had a character with a Dmg of over 40 take several whacks to dispose of a lowly sewer rat.
Def is how easily you can dodge blows. Pluses on magic armor go to decrease this.
Arm is what D&D players would call “damage reduction,” it’s a property of heavier armor that reduces the hurt you take that gets through your Def.
And finally there’s Spd, or Speed, measured as a decimal value. A Speed of 1.0 means you act as often as an average monster. High Agility, low carry weight, riding a horse, and Boots of Speed can improve this. I’ve seen as high as 2.50. Carrying a lot of things can save your bacon, and being a little under 1.0 can be okay. I try to keep it above 0.70, preferably 0.80. Your ability in battle decreases sharply below that.
There is also a weird system in Omega that confuses some players, the “combat maneuver sequence.” This system was intended to be transparent to players who don’t care about it, so you don’t need to know about this to play, but you do need to know it exists, because of a bug that manifests sometimes.
When you walk into a monster to attack it, it’s not considered a single hit as in other roguelike games. Instead, your character can automatically perform as many as eight separate moves! Each move can be an Attack, a Block, a Lunge, or a Riposte, and each of these moves can be either High, Center or Low.
By default, your combat maneuver sequence is Attack Center, Block Center, and that suffices in many cases. But some enemies like to attack at certain heights (rats tend to bite at your feet, for example). Intelligent monsters are known to watch for when you attack at a given height, and to then block more often at that height, so changing your combat string sometimes can be helpful.
Higher levels, higher speeds, and being a Gladiator all can give you extra maneuver points, and they’ll go unused if you don’t acknowledge them. You change your combat sequence by pressing Shift-F. There’s subtleties to the system that I’m not covering here, but the game does a good job of explaining it in the help for that function.
The thing you need to know is: there’s a bug in Omega that, once in a while, causes it to forget your combat string. And if your Speed drops too low, it might reset your string to the default. If you’re fighting and you notice that you aren’t seeing any messages from your side, no hits, no blocks, not even misses, you might want to hit Shift-F and at least choose a default string (press ‘!‘).
Keyboard Reminders
I mentioned the main keys back in part two. If you need to be reminded of them, you can get a complete list in-game by pressing ‘?‘ (the traditional roguelike Help key) and then hitting ‘l‘.
Many of the keys are roguelike standard, but there are a few that are different: the pick-up-an-item key is ‘g‘, on DOS the recall-message key is Ctrl-O, and to zap wands you use ‘a‘, I guess for ‘a’pply. To use miscellaneous items, it’s Shift-A; it’ll ask if you want to use an item or an artifact. Artifacts are powerful and rare items, and you usually won’t find any of those until much later.
Omega uses both number pad and the vi keys, with added diagonals, for movement. In case they’re useful (maybe you don’t have a numpad), the vi keys with diagonals are hjkl and yubn.
One of the keys, the letter ‘i‘, is your gateway to your most formidable challenge to learning Omega: its inventory system. Prepare yourself!
Oh Boy, It’s Time To Explain Omega’s Inventory
Probably its inventory has dissuaded more players than anything else from playing Omega. I think it’s really not hard to understand! It’s just different, so it takes a little getting used to. Please try to bear with me, and try to consider what Omega’s creator Laurence Brothers was trying to do with it.
The first thing you have to know is your character has two inventories. The most obvious one consists of the equipped items, the ones your character wears on their person; the other is the character’s pack, which is just a bag for loose things.
Most of the time you’ll want to deal with your character’s equipment items, and just store extra stuff in your pack. There is an array of item slots around your character’s body. If this were Ultima VII or Eye of the Beholder or some other 90s CRPG you’d probably have a paper doll display to drag item icons into, but this is a terminal-screen roguelike, so your equipment slots are all represented by letters of the alphabet.
In most roguelike games, you use the ‘w’ key to Wield a weapon, Shift-W to Wear armor, Shift-T to Take off armor, and a couple other keys like that. Not so in Omega. Instead, you move the item you want to use into the proper slot, and it’s automatically utilized. So to wield a weapon, you put it into your weapon-hand slot, which is slot b. To use a shield, you put it into your shield slot, h. (Unlike D&D characters, Omega characters have figured out they can attach a shield to their arm!)
Omega’s item system generalizes the idea of wielding weapons, wearing protective gear and magic items, and having a few items at-hand for immediate use. Instead of having special commands for these things, they’re all put to use using the same process. If you put items where they’re supposed to go, your character will use them.
Gym Class Movie: Your Body Slots And You
So, you have a plethora of slots in which you can place the various fantasy accouterments that are necessary to successful exploration. Here is a list of these slots. When playing, you might want to keep a list of these until you’ve internalized them all:
*: “up in air” a: ready hand (for general items, like maybe a torch) b: weapon hand (for what you use to bash things) c: left shoulder (a place to store generic items) d: right shoulder (likewise) e-g: belt (more generic item slots; I’ve kept a goblin corpse in one before!) h: shield (used automatically in combat situations) i: armor (put a piece of body armor here to wear it) j: boots (like above but goes on your feet) k: cloak (goes over armor) l-o: fingers (slots for up to four magic rings)
I hope that’s easy enough to understand. Note, if you’re playing 0.90, these letters will be a bit different. They were rearranged a bit to avoid confusion with the inventory management keys.
The most vexing, yet most used, of these slots is the “up in air” item. This is a special slot used as a crossroads between all the other slots and your pack. Whenever you obtain a new item, it goes up in the air, and throws up an inventory prompt so you can communicate to the game what you want to do with it.
A Romp Through The Prompts
When you press the ‘i‘ key (that’s lowercase: in Omega, capital letters are always shifted), you’re shown the list of your item slots and their contents, and the cryptic line:
d, e, l, p, s, t, x, >, <, ?, ESCAPE
If you pick up an item you’ll get a very similar line, except with a tilde in it, and without the list of item slots! This is the short prompt. From the short prompt, if you just press tilde (~), you’ll get to the usual inventory list.
Pressing ‘?‘ describes what these keys all do, and offers to show you full help, but I’ll give you an overview here. They’re all pretty important.
One of the slots will be highlighted with a >> cursor in front of it. That’s the “current item.” You can move the arrow to point to other items with ‘>‘ and ‘<‘ to move up and down. (> and < are the standard roguelike keys for Down and Up. Why don’t the arrow keys work? That’s a good question.) Most of the other commands make use of either this current item, or the “up in air” item.
The ‘e‘ and ‘x‘ keys are your main tools for getting items where they need to be. ‘e‘ exchanges an item from the up-in-air slot with the current slot. ‘x‘ does the same thing, but it also automatically closes the inventory display if the operation ends with the up-in-air slot empty.
If you leave the inventory screen with an item up in the air, that item will fall to the ground! It’s not a place to keep things indefinitely. As I said before, Omega characters can’t juggle.
If you’re at the short prompt, there will be no visible item slot list, and no cursor. Instead, the ‘e‘ and ‘x‘ keys will ask you the letter of the slot you want to move the item to. When you’ve played enough to have memorized what the slot letters are, you can use those and play much faster. Before you get to that point, you can just press ~ to get to the list. There is no game advantage to using one over the other.
Another important inventory operation involves getting stuff into and out of your pack. Your pack also has slots, but they’re all generic.
Pack operations take time. Omega actually simulates your pack like a stack. While you can get items out no matter where they are in it, items deeper in the pack take more time to dig out. Items you want available for instant access are best kept in your main inventory slots, if not in your ready hand (a), then maybe on your shoulder (c, d) or belt (e-g). These slots all can contain any item; slots like shield (h) and armor (i) can only contain those kinds of items.
Items deeper in your pack take more time to reach. Ideally though, you won’t keep immediate emergency items in your pack at all.
The ‘s‘ key shows the contents of your pack; ‘p‘ puts the up-in-air item or pointed-at item into your pack; ‘t‘ takes something out of your pack. The ‘t‘ key also offers to show you pack contents if you press ‘?‘. Another thing to note: for some reason, pack letters are all capitals. If you try to get something out of the pack, but don’t press shift, it won’t work.
Remaining functions: ‘d‘ drops the up-in-air or current item immediately; ‘l‘ gives you a text description of the current item, ‘?‘ gives you a reminder of all these keypresses, and ESCAPE transports you out of Inventory Land, and back to the game world proper.
The Inventory System In Practice
So how does this work in play? Well, at the start of the game you have no food. So enter buildings until you find one that tells you:
Commandant Sonder’s Rampart-fried Lyzzard parts. Open 24 hrs. Buy a bucket! Only 5 Au. Make a purchase? [yn]
Answer ‘y‘ to use some of that starting money to obtain some sustenance. It asks “How many?”, so let’s say 10, a good amount for the start of the game.
A passel of Lyzzard Buckets, for your pleasure. *** MORE ***
Omega’s *** MORE *** prompts work like NetHack’s, but appear at the right edge of the screen for some reason. Press the space bar to clear it. You’ll then be thrown into the inventory short prompt:
Action [d,e,l,p,s,t,x,~,?,ESCAPE] ‘Up in air’: 10x red and white striped bucket
You have an item, the new-bought buckets, in the up in air slot, so if you just pressed escape you’d drop your newly-acquired food. What you might want to do is press ‘p‘, to put the item in your pack for later. But if you want to eat immediately, you could press either ‘e‘ or ‘x‘, to move it, to ‘a‘, your ready hand slot. If you do any of these things, you’ll keep the Buckets O’ Lyzzard, and not drop them.
If you put them in your ready hand, or somewhere else on your person, then now you can eat! Exit inventory (if it didn’t happen automatically) and press ‘e‘, the Eat key:
Eat — Select an item [a,?]
Even if you have other items on your person, the food is the only thing that can be called edible, so it’s the only letter listed. You can press ‘a‘ now to chow down.
Your mouth feels like it is growing hair!
Well, it is fast food after all.
If there was already something in the ‘a’ ready hand slot, then the food will go into that slot and whatever had been there will be moved up in the air. You only have so many suitable body slots. You can usually stash anything into your pack, with ‘p’, if you don’t want to be fussed. But your pack has limited space too. If all your suitable body slots and your whole pack are full, you’ll probably have to drop an item.
Ah, that was a lot of broccoli. Are you still with me? Next time, we’ll actually be able to go into game strategy!
Kyle Orland at Ars Technica, who always does good work, has a long piece up about scandals in PC game collecting. It’s a close-knit subculture where members trust each other implicitly, but as the value of old games has gone up, it has recently been awash in forgeries.
A prime culprit in their distribution was Enrico Ricciardi, a prominent figure in the community who many members trusted. He is known for writing books on the history of the Ultima games and the early days of Ultima publisher Origin Systems. It’s not known that he was actually forging the copies of the games, but the fakes are known to have passed through his hands, and it’s considered by the group that he should have been able to spot fakes.
It’s a fascinating article that involves prominent Apple II disk imaging expert 4am doing forensics on a supposedly-legitimate disk of The Chambers of Xenobia and finding it was a cracked copy.
Omega is beloved of a small but devoted cadre of players. Like Alphaman, it is a prominent early roguelike with an overworld, but unlike Alphaman the world map is the same from game to game. In this it can be recognized as a predecessor of ADOM. It is probably the classic roguelike with the most detailed and interesting town, the well-named city of Rampart.
It’s finger lickin’… um, good?
The CRPG Addict, whose Sisyphean project is to play, complete, and write about every CRPG ever made, reviewed Omega in the early going, although his victory over the game was the easiest kind of win (retirement), and he cheated by restoring save files. Although it must be said, Omega’s own help text itself suggests that players back up their saved files if they’re having trouble, and there are some things about it that almost make me want to play that way.
Omega’s sense of difficulty is a bit unusual. It is overflowing with random events, some of them you can’t do anything about, and it’s possible for those events to kill you with very little warning. But if a character can survive the early going, there are also non-random resources that a knowing player can take advantage of that can help them get a leg-up on the game. In this way it’s like NetHack, in that there are counters to randomness, and a bunch of necessary lore to discover that greatly enhances one’s chances of winning.
Much of this lore has been saved in FAQs, spoiler files, blog posts, and comment sections scattered throughout the internet. Most of these sources remain out there to find, but the nature of the web and the intervening years have made them harder to find than they once were. I’ll present a list of links you can use to find them later, but I’ll gather the most important early-game for you once we get into its gameplay.
Omega is a game that has entertained players for many years. In its heyday it was a popular topic of discussion on the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.misc. But it does have a number of attributes that have fallen out of favor with players nowadays. I’m not even talking about the typical things one has to get used to in order to play most classic roguelikes. Omega has some particular things you’re probably just going to have to acclimate yourself to if you’re coming to it from contemporary types of computer gaming. This isn’t to seem overly critical; there are a lot of interesting adventures to be had in its world, but there is a bit of a learning curve. But let me give you a broad overview first.
The Hedge Maze of the City of Rampart
About the Game
Omega’s origin is said to extend back to the late 80s, but records on the internet extend only as far back as about 1993. It was created by Laurence Raphael Brothers while he was at Rutgers University. He passed the torch to others to maintain the game at some time before 1993, but even version 0.90.4, the most recent version of the core code of Omega, lists his name in the source code as copyright holder. Lawrence Brothers has been known to sometimes get in contact with people who write about Omega, including the CRPG Addict.
In 1993 it seems Robert Paige Rendell picked up development of Omega. Erik Max Francis currently maintains the official Omega Distribution Page. While the core game has seen no development in a long time, ports for various systems have been made, including OS/2, classic MacOS and even a Windows port with graphical tiles.
Omega doesn’t present you with a great scenario at the start of play. It is more like a general setting, in TTRPG terms a sandbox that you investigate on your own. Your explorations are mostly directionless at the start. There is a character you can turn to that can provide players with a direction for their explorations, and you can also get quests from the Duke of Rampart, but the game doesn’t point you in their direction, and nothing forces you to heed their words. Omega is more like an adventure setting than a single mission you are trying to perform.
The game world is like that of ADOM, with an overworld, a sprawling sequence of above-ground terrain, with locations in it to find and explore that are in the same places every game. It’s the contents of these locations that are randomly generated every time you play. The dungeons are generated and persist, but only if you don’t enter another dungeon; if you go into the Goblin Caves, then leave and go to the Sewers in the city, when you return to the Caves they will have been refreshed. The layout will be the same, but the map will be forgotten, and the monsters will be different. A player can take advantage of this fact.
Lions lurk outside the city gates
The other kinds of locations seem to remain the same each time, although the city of Rampart, the main urban location in the game and the place where you begin play, has mostly the same map every game, but the contents of the buildings are mixed up when the game begins, and its hedge maze area is selected from one of a number of possible layouts. Rampart is the center of the game in many ways. Most of its guilds are based there, and to advance in them and get many of their benefits you’ll have to return to haunt their doorsteps. There are other settlements in the game, but none of them are anything like Rampart. It’s a cool location. It might be the greatest city in all roguelikedom.
The Layout of Rampart
Rampart is the largest city in the game, and where your journeys begin. It’s a good place to pick up supplies, decide which guilds and religions you want to join, and get equipment.
Places in Rampart with set locations, and randomly-placed locations once you’ve discovered them, can be moved to quickly with the Automove command (Shift-M). For more information on the city and places of interest within it, I must ask that you wait until next time. Until then, why not explore on your own, and see what you can figure out? All you have to lose is maybe twenty or thirty lives.
Basic Keys
?: Help. Provides a lot of information about the game and its systems. Refer to the ‘l’ option here for more keys that aren’t listed here.
numpad/vi keys: walk, bump into enemies to attack them
numpad 5: run
.: Wait 10 seconds, note this is twice the length of time it takes to move a step
,: Wait a specified number of minutes
s: Search surrounding spaces for secret doors or traps
i: Inventory (explained further down)
x: Examine something in a location in sight. (very useful for distinguishing what monster or item is on a space)
g: Pick something up at your feet. (Think of it as ‘g’ain)
e: Eat something
q: Drink a potion (‘q’uaff)
r: Read something
a: Zap wands and rods (think of it as ‘a’pply). Note, to be used, most items must be worn on your person. You can’t just use items out of your pack, you have to get them out first.t: Talk to someone. This is used to greet some characters and threaten monsters. Talk with and greet a horse you own to ride it.
f: Fire a weapon or throw an item.
o: Open door. (used frequently)
c: Close door. (used less often)
m: Cast a magic spell. You specify which spell you want to use by entering its name. You only have to enter as many letters as to distinguish the spell from the others you know.
Shift-A: Use miscellaneous items or artifacts. The item that lets you escape the Arena when you win a fight is of this type.
Shift-F: Change your attack routine. (‘F’ight)
Shift-S: Save the game (supply the filename as an argument on the command line to load the game)
Shift-T: Tunnel through a wall (use in moderation)
Shift-M: Autotravel to a known location in your current town. Places that are the same from game to game are automatically known, randomly-placed locations must have been entered at least once. As with spells, you enter the place’s name, but only have to enter as many letters to uniquely identify your destination.
Shift-E: Get off your horse.
Shift-D: Disarm a trap.
Shift-G: Give an item to someone.
Ctrl-I: Look in your pack.
On Inventory To use most items, they can’t just be in your pack, but must be in one of your equipment slots. Your “Ready Hand” slot and your three Belt slots can hold almost anything, and are good ones to use for single-use and miscellaneous items. I like to keep food in the ‘e’ slot of my belt.
x: E’x’change the up-in-air item with the one (if present) in one of your inventory slots.
s: Show contents of your pack.
p: Stash the up-in-air item in your pack.
t: Take an item from your pack.
d: Drop an item from the selected slot
—–
I’ve got much more to say about Omega, but this article is already much longer than I wanted it to be! There’s so much ground to cover that I’m increasing the post frequency of @Play for a bit, so you won’t have too long to wait for the next part. In the meantime, you might find these links to be of interest….
