For this episode of the perceptive podcast, I spoke with Jake Houston who is a solo developer working on his rhythmic RPG Game Over. We spoke about working on the game, RPG design and more.

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

I could go on about its very light RPG elements (there’s no experience system at all), its comedic story, its characters and music, and I will someday. But until then, please be content with what the Basement Brothers had to say about the original PC-88 version of Popful Mail, which is the version for the weakest machine, but still fun. (39 minutes)

Falcom had developed a reputation for making hardcore, unique and system-heavy RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Xanadu, so Popful Mail was a departure. It was designed to be an early multimedia game, with animations and even voice acting in some versions. This version, however, was distributed on floppy disk, and for a underpowered system, so it couldn’t rely on audio-visual splendor. It still did pretty well for itself, as the Brothers demonstrate.

It’s always saddened me that Popful Mail was a one-off. It’s a property that seems ripe for sequels and animation, but to my knowledge it never happened. Maybe Falcom will ease their stream of Ys sequels someday and look at updating more of the other games in their history, and maybe then they’ll return to Mail and her cartoony comrades. Here’s hoping.

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I was sure I had posted about this before, I mean I had to have. It’s such a cool bit of gaming history, never less than a bit obscure, but still, incredibly, has multiple websites devoted to it today. While waiting to binge on Kirby Air Riders, I figured I’d work off some of my indie KARma (heh) with this post about something that could not possibly be more different.

I’m talking about Eamon, an Apple II text adventure/RPG system with ports to other platforms (there was a not much used C64 version, and a PC/MS-DOS version with a bit more uptake), but was biggest on Apple II.

Eamon itself isn’t a single game, but is more like a family of games, each created to a certain specification. The closest thing that Eamon has to being at its center is the Master Disk, which is a character creation tool and a starter adventure. The idea is, you create and customize a character using the Master Disk, which saves your character and allows you to take them into other adventures, written by others.

If you remember me talking about Dungeon (from Loadstar issue #74 and others), it’s the same kind of idea, but from far earlier, and a lot more freeform. Dungeon had creation tools and a game engine. Eamon adventures were BASIC programs written from scratch, that modified the character file. Your in-game surrogate was really at the mercy of whatever horrors the adventure writers had in mind. If you feel a mild chill of existential horror at the idea, that’s because you live after decades of internet culture has trained you to recoil in fear that a software author could do just anything. It requires a degree of trust on the part of the user. Of course, Eamon adventures varied in quality and fairness. You have to expect that even your best characters could get pasted by a level 1,000 Tarrasque right as an adventure begins. Of course, smart people made backups of their character disk; in a chaotic realm like this, it’s a lot less cheating than basic prudence.

I promised links to websites. Here they are.

There’s Eamon Remastered, which is a web-based recreation with many recreations of classic games. With it, you can create a character which is saved to the website, then put it through the options on the Master Disk, and then can send them through the adventures, without having to get an emulator working or anything. If you just want to try it, that’s probably the best.

There’s a full Eamon Wiki, the Eamon Adventures’ Guild Online, the Adventurer’s Guide to Eamon, and the blog Renga in Blue’s description. Given that it’s an obscure text adventure system written in BASIC and created in 1979, it’s frankly astounding that there’s so much information on it on the Living Web.

I’m surprised that Eamon isn’t more widely remembered now, as there were hundreds of adventures (at least 280) made for it. The Digital Antiquarian wrote about the history and play of Eamon: Part One, Part Two, a liveblogged exploration, A Journey Into the Wonderful World of Eamon, and some expressed frustration on coming up with a definite history of Eamon.

Gaming Jay plays Eamon (33 minutes):

So, how do you play this?

First off, you should probably try the Eamon Remastered web-base recreation, which has a fair number of adventures to play. Here is its manual.

After you create your character (if you’re playing the Apple II original, make sure to follow directions in town, as the game is positively gleeful about killing newly-made characters), you’ll want to buy a weapon and some armor. Advancement in Eamon is not of the level-based D&D style, instead characters advance by doing. When you attack with a weapon, you might improve in your ability to use it. When you’re struck by an attack, you might improve in your use of armor. It lacks the “dopamine hit” (I hate that term) of gaining a level, but I think this is quite a more realisticm, and dare I say, better, method of character advancement. It’s more like the Runequest/Call of Cthulhu/Basic Role-Playing system, where most of a character’s ability is encoded within a number of individual skills. Though it’s a lot more gradual, it also means that characters are a lot more individual.

When you play it, you’ll find that it works basically like Infocom adventures did. Since each Eamon game is a program to itself, things could work very differently between them, but I think most of them tried to adhere to some shared conventions.

The “Beginners Cave” adventure is the intended first experience with EAMON. It provides you with some basic treasure, opponents and advancement. It is quite possible for a new character to die there, so treat this adventure with care. I found that there’s some quirks. “take [item]” tends not to work; “get [item],” however, does. “attack [monster]” can be used to attack in melee. There is a button, by the input box, that you can click for a list of available commands.

I don’t know if this is true of every adventure, but to get away from a battle you’re currently in, it won’t do to move out of it, if you don’t want to fight you should use the “flee” command, although monsters can follow you anyway if they choose. Flee sends you to the previous room you were in. If the monster that was menacing you chooses to follow, then I don’t know what else to do than just keep attacking and hope for the best.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Eamon myself, so I must leave you to your own devices for furthering your adventuring career. Good luck!

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The same people did some other animations over the past months as well, so we might as well make this a roundup post. They’re all official content.

Mod Support (3 minutes):

The game’s leaving Early Access (3½ minutes):

Christmas (3½ minutes):

And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.

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Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Taking a short break form gushing over Atari Games’ Rampart to bring you this fun, short animation, by Only Jerry, set to the battle theme of the Japan-only PC Engine version of Wizardry. It’s only a minute or so, so please enjoy!

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The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.

Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.

But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.

It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.

A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!

On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.

Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.

Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)

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It occurs to me that it might be a good idea to explain what playing Wizardry is like. There was once a time when this basically was what a CRPG was. JRPGs obscured that greatly and became the new default, but before Final Fantasy took over the world, there was a whole pile of what we might now call Wizardry-likes: The Bard’s Tale series, Dragon Wars, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder among them.

All of these party-based CRPGs have a lineup, a list of characters that are generally considered to be in order. Dungeon Master arranges them in more of a 2×2 grid, but there’s still a front line and a rear. Key in all of these games is that the front line is where you should put your melee fighters, who are in substantially more danger and need more HP and equipment protection (often directly using the D&D term Armor Class). The rear is where the characters who can’t take a licking go: the thief and your mages. Clerics/Priests generally can go in either area. By tradition they they can still still use most armor, but the problem is they’re usually the party healer, so being in the front line also means they’re more likely to get taken out by Paralysis or Petrification, leaving the rest of the group in the lurch.

It’s vitally important that the front line holds. Characters who get knocked out will get automatically shuffled to the back of the group, putting the squishies in range of the monsters’ unkind claws and teeth. It might be possible to hurriedly cast some AC-increasing spells, but it’s usually just as fast to cast strong attack magic and end the fight, then cure the downed fighters in camp. If you can’t do that… well, then it’s best to find your way back to town by the most expeditious route.

What route might that be? Well that’s why you’ve hopefully been working on a map! You might have played labyrinth games before, or think you can rely on a spatial sense build from playing first-person shooters, but those are not going to suffice here, you need a map. The Digital Eclipse remake of Wizardry maintains one for you, but as previously said it can be “tricked” by two particular types of maze phenomena: spinners and teleporters. Spinners change your facing randomly but leave you in place; suitably, they’re almost always placed in four-way intersections, so it’s not obvious which why you’re now going, or even if you’re going back the way you came. Teleporters usually leave your facing the same, but now in a different location.

Once you’re in the dungeon, then what?

I said last time that you should make your own characters, but that will also leave them at experience level 1, which is really weak. Until you reach level 2, every expedition into the dungeon should contain a single encounter. The starting quadrant of the first level has just three rooms. Enter one of them, fight or run from the inhabitants, then run to the stairs. If you used any spells or took any damage, have the affected characters stay at the Inn. It takes a lot of stays to lose even one point of Vim, so it’s nearly free.

If you’re playing with the original Inn, then stays will be more expensive unless you stay at the Stables, which gets you your spells back and nothing else. But that’s okay, because you can then dip into the maze and have your priest cast DIOS on your injured. You can repeat that cycle as many times as you like, and it won’t even age your characters. It almost feels like cheating, but you want to push every advantage you have as far as it will go.

Get used to training up level 1 characters, you’ll be doing it several times. You’ll want a B-team of characters to rescue your main group if need be, a Bishop of moderate level to identify found equipment without paying Boltac’s insane prices, maybe a separate Evil/Good team if you want to try out a Ninja/Lord, and maybe characters to replace failed resurrections from ash. The only time you’ll have to train up a character unaided, though, is the first time.

It is true, one of the modernizations in the Digital Eclipse remake is the ability to outright hire characters of levels approaching your highest experience level reached, but it’s not free, and could end up being really pricey. If you’re broke, then you can’t hire anyone over level 1, and if you have no characters you won’t be able to earn more money. Also, you should know that there’s a limit of 20 characters you can have among all those you have at one time. I don’t know what happens if all of your characters are dead and in the maze at once. Seems like they should have accounted for that possibility, though.

How to handle those first fights

Use every advantage you have! Mages begin with the sleep spell KATINO, and while it’s almost useless later in the game it’s the key to surviving the first floor, that and the priest’s Dispel Undead ability.

There aren’t many monsters that can appear randomly on the first level:

Bubbly Slimes: the weakest monsters in the entire dungeon. They never flee and are immune to sleep spells, but are almost never a danger.

Kobolds: easy to beat unless they outnumber you. KATINO, the sleep spell, works quite well.

Orcs: Like kobolds but a little beefier. Both kobolds and orcs are very prone to running away if you’re even slightly above their level. Use KATINO.

Level 1 Rogues: Also weak and prone to fleeing, and vulnerable to KATINO.

Undead Kobolds: one of the very few (possibly the only) monster in the game with a description of “Skeleton.” For first-level groups kobold skeletons are pretty dangerous, all the numbers of kobolds but without their tendency to run away or vulnerability to sleep. You might be tempted to fight them hand-to-hand for the experience points, but this is just the kind of thinking that gets first-level parties slaughtered. You have a priest; they should be trying to dispel them every turn. (If you don’t have a priest then go right back to town and make one!)

Bushwackers: the horrors of the first floor, they do around a d8 of damage, making them deadly. If a group of first level characters encounters a group of Bushwackers without any KATINOs available it’s best to try to run. Bushwackers can be a problem even for 2nd level parties, but against higher level groups they’re just as prone to fleeing as their lower level compatriots.

Zombies: about one time in five, a group of Bushwackers will be generated with an assisting team of Zombies. This is by far the most dangerous encounter possible on the first floor, pretty much impossible for a first-level group to defeat without a lot of luck on their side. I’d have the priest try to dispel the Zombies, and use your mage(s) to cast KATINO on the Bushwackers. If you can get all the Bushwackers asleep, maybe use any remaining extra spell slots on HALITO on the zombies, but there is no really good way to survive this. Fortunately Bushwackers+Zombies is a rare combination, I’ve only seen it happen once on the first floor.

There is one more monster that can appear on the first floor….

Murphy’s Ghost

A beloved monster among Wizardry fans, and something of a legend in the annals of CRPGs, is Murphy’s Ghost. It’s a special encounter that can occur in one specific room on the first level of the dungeon. It’s in a region behind a secret door, so you might not find it until you learn the light spell MILWA, or possibly its longer-lasting version LOMILWA.

In the original, stepping onto its encounter spot was enough to make Murphy’s Ghost appear. Now you have to search to fight them. In both cases though the fight is easily repeatable.

On the first floor, Murphy’s Ghost can appear in groups of up to two. The fight isn’t that difficult, and even against low level characters it can’t do more than 4 hit points of damage every round. The main problem is that Murphy’s Ghost has a very low (that is, very good) Armor Class, at -3, and has many hit points. No attack magic works on the ghost, but spells that worsen its AC, or improve your characters’, work well. It takes around 40-50 melee attacks, on average, to fell a Murphy’s Ghost. One ghost earns 4,450 experience points, which split six ways it still over 700 XP apiece, and a pair of them can be enough to gain a whole level’s worth of experience at once. It is possible, rarely, to earn more experience from other groups on the first level, but Murphy’s Ghost has the advantage of only getting one attack per round, and of appearing every time its room is entered/it’s searched for, even if you just fought it a couple of moves before.

Murphy’s Ghost is slightly less useful in the Digital Eclipse version because the new unskippable battle animations take up a lot of extra time. It was always the combination of easy repetition, battle speed and relatively low difficulty that made fighting Murphy’s host appealing. After your group gets a couple of extra levels on their bones the first floor starts looking a lot less treacherous anyway.

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Wizardry hates you

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a.k.a. Wizardry I, is a classic and venerable CRPG from the early days of computer gaming. It’s thought to be the very first computer RPG where you played as a party of more than one character. Even the early PLATO RPGs didn’t have a single player control a whole group like that.

Wizardry took D&D as its inspiration in ways that now even D&D itself doesn’t know. Its Armor Class value counts down like it did in olden times. And death is meant to stick, and be costly to recover from. Dead characters can fail to be revived, which turns them to ash and costs even more to fix. And that can fail too, and the character is just gone.

Pit traps in the dungeon have no counter, most of them have no hint they’re waiting there, their damage scales with the dungeon level so they’re nearly always a danger, and frequently kill your mage characters. Yet, they are not the worst the game has to offer, especially when you get to the second game, which contains what may be the single cruelest trap ever put into a computer game, and I am not exaggerating.

Then there’s the mazes themselves. They’re tricky, and although there are many quality-of-life improvements in the new game, including an automap, the game purposely doesn’t protect you from its map-foiling tricks. If you get teleported or spun around, the game’s automap won’t notice, and it’ll mess up your map! This is by design, because playing Wizardry with an infallible map is a hugely different experience. You’re supposed to get confused.

So you see, Wizardry hates you.

Wizardry doesn’t hate you that much

These stories are frightening, enough that I imagine they’ve scared some players away from the game. But despite (and in a way, because of) them, Wizardry is still a lot of fun to play. For the first seven experience levels characters grow gratifiyingly quickly, and the play, due to its challenge and its consequences, is rarely boring. The original game underwent a year of playtesting before it was released to the Apple II-owning public, and the balance bourne of that time and work shines through. Wizardry is still a fun game to play, and while many of Digital Eclipse’s changes to adopt the game to current tastes are appreciated, I’m not convinced they’re all positive ones. It is what it is though, and I want to emphasize, what that is, is still fun.

Make backup saves of your game

Still though, one change that I can only regard as positive is that it’s really easy to make a backup copy of your save file. This isn’t just anyone telling you this! It’s me! I wrote a roguelike column for years for GameSetWatch insisting that permadeath was okay and that players shouldn’t back up save files to avoid it! But roguelikes are designed to be replayed many times, and anyway are usually pretty short so your time investment can’t become too large. Wizardry is not a long game, but it isn’t short either.

While Wizardry’s mazes don’t change, the game can throw all kinds of enemy parties against you, and even advanced parties once in a while get screwed over by the RNG. It is a rite of passage to rescue a deceased group one or two members at time from the dungeon, but it gets old after the first time or two. I don’t suggest winding back time every time a character dies, I think that’s going too far. But it will save you if, say, a character fails their revive from ash roll, or your party wipes beneath a set encounter space.

Backing up your save on the Apple II meant backing up you Scenario Disk, was a time-consuming option. Here, Digital Eclipse outright encourages you to make a copy of your save. The option is right there on the file menu, and I encourage you to use it too.

Use Old-School Creation and Advancement Rules

Under Old-School Options, you should use the original game’s character creation and stat advancement rules. I played through most of the game with the updated rules under the impression that they would take the edge off the difficulty, not knowing that these two actually make the game harder.

Character creation gives each character lineage (formerly called race, a term that’s become more loaded since 1981) set stats, and a number of points to distribute between them. The new system gives all characters a flat 12 points to spend. Under the old system character creation system, most characters got between 7 and 10 points to distribute, but 10% of the time would get ten extra points, and there’s a slim chance to get even more. Players could reroll endlessly to get bonus points in the range of 17 to 20, which was a huge boost! 10% of the time really isn’t that uncommon, and stats matter quite a lot in Wizardry, so it wasn’t hard to give all your characters a substantial boost right out of the gate, enough to start with a Samurai.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. The old rule gives each stat a chance to advance, based on the character’s Age/Vim, with a chance that it could go down as well. The possibility of losing a point should be considered, but often characters gain four or five points upon level gain. It’s more a matter of taste, but I’ve had good experiences with it, at least at low levels.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. Each has about equal chance, so it averages out to two points, which is really low generally, and even lower if you aspire to creating a Lord (a range of stats from 12 to 15) or a Ninja (all 17 or above).

Fortunately, you don’t have to stick with one option or the other, but can switch between them when you want. If you have a character who’s closing in on Lordship or Ninjahood, but just needs a couple of more points in a specific stat to obtain it, you can switch to the new style just before claiming that character’s next experience level, and even switch back afterward.

Creating characters

The game offers you to start you out with a group of pre-made characters of an appropriate mix and starting out at Level 2. I whole-heartedly suggest that you don’t use them.

Wizardry is not a game about helping an Overlord get an amulet back from a wizard. The quest is largely bunk; while Werdna is definitely not on your side, there’s is nothing in the game to suggest that Trebor is in the right either. No, Wizardry is a game about watching your characters grow through adventures, and overcome hardships, and possibly succeed in a great challenge. You really want to make your own characters for this.

While Level 1 characters are very fragile, and somewhat disposable, they’re yours. Under the new rules reviving Level 1 characters is free, and it doesn’t take them many fights to advance to Level 2, where they’re sturdier, and at Level 3 your group even starts learning good spells. Make your whole group and stick it out, you’ll have more fun.

Even once your group starts exploring the dungeon and gets a few levels under their belt, the game will continue to offer you new, randomly-generated extras, with levels approaching those of your highest-level character, in the Tavern. These can be useful as a B-team, to supplement your group if you want to play around with different party compositions, and to help rescue your own characters if they wipe in the dungeon. The original game didn’t have them, and they’re expensive to hire, but they can come in handy.

Party composition

In many classic party-based CRPGs in the Wizardry style, the ideal party is pretty obvious: a fighter, a thief, a cleric and a mage. Wizardry doesn’t buck that trend entirely, the game seems designed around three fighters, a thief, a priest and a mage, but there are interesting tactical possibilities that can be explored with non-standard party composition, and since the game lets you have up to 20 characters on your roster in total and switch them in and out of your main group at any time in town, you can even try them out without restarting your whole game.

Here are some ideas:

• The basics: Figher x 3, Thief, Priest, Mage makes it harder for the monsters to break through that crunchy front line to get to the tasty low-HP classes behind them.
• Go thiefless: I go over this below, in the section of Chests and Traps. In short, you have to forego a lot of treasure, but having an extra priest or mage lets your group rule in other ways.
• Any number of Samurai instead of Fighters: it isn’t hard to make a Samurai in initial character creation, and that’s actually the recommended way to play one, since when a character changes classes their stats in play, they are all lowered tremendously. Samurai start out with more HP than Fighters, but earn slightly less with each level. But in return, they start learning Mage spells at level 4, giving you a few extra uses of DUMAPIC, and eventually MAHALITO, which can make a big difference against some enemy groups.
• Having a Bishop instead of a Priest. I don’t suggest this one so much unless the Bishop is an extra character, because getting to higher tier spells as soon as possible is hugely important and Bishops, although they learn both spell types, get them more slowly. They do have the Identify ability though, which saves you a lot of gold at the Trading Post, and makes selling spare equipment found in the dungeon a reliable source of extra funds.

The most important stat for each class is the obvious one: Strength for Fighter types, Agility for Thieves, Piety for Priests and Intelligence for Mages. But after that, for front liners it’s Vitality, and for spellcasters it’s Agility.

However, Vitality increasess HP and helps the front line hold together for longer, since when the back rank falls into it they tend to get eaten quickly. But every class is helped by Vitality, it increases the chance of revival success, and it’s not a bad idea to add some to your Mages for when dragon breath or an enemy MAHALITO gets through.

Agility affects when a character acts in combat, and it’s important that those huge group-size damage spells happen early in the first round before the enemy has the chance to act. The best fight is the one that ends before the monsters get a single turn.

About VIM, a.k.a. AGE

Wizardry has a check on resting too much. Whenever a character stays at the Inn, they lose a tiny bit of VIM. It’s not enough to show on-screen, we’re talking about a small fraction of a point. In the original game it was called AGE, and started around 18 and counted up. You can switch to that name in the Old-School Rules. Each Inn stay is a week of time, although strangely it only counts for the characters who actually stay at the Inn. So long as you try to make the most of your expeditions into the dungeon your characters won’t age much, but the higher their age grows, the greater the chance (if you’re playing by Old-School stat level gain rules) that stats will go down. And if characters get very old, into their 50s, they could just die, period.

The higher a character’s VIM/lower their AGE, the less of a chance they’ll lose stats when playing with random stat gains, but it’s really subtle unless you class change multiple times.

When characters are revived from death, they age by a random amount that could be up to a year. When characters chance classes, they age considerably, by several years! So it’s best not to change classes lightly.

It’s said, of an early release of Apple II Wizardry, that if you quit the game while in the dungeon, and you resume their advenutres by restarting them as an “Out” Party, that the game would age them by ten years. I’ve only heard of this by rumor, and it seems to indicate that this was changed in later releases. I tell you this just to say, even the original designers thought better of that one.

There’s a lot more to say about playing Wizardry! Watch out for more soon, I still have to get some of my notes organized. We’ll talk about how the game actually plays, and give a plan for tackling the dungeon overall.

EDIT: I repeated myself at one point, so I fixed some wording there. Also some minor fixes elsewhere. I notice that the theme is covering some of the text with my screenshots. I’m not sure why it’s doing that. We’re looking into it.

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The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

Snafaru’s Wizardry Fanpage is a lot newer than most of the sites that get featured here under the Oldweb heading (see left/above), the earliest viewable version of the site on the Wayback Machine is from 2011, practically a baby at 13 years old. Yet it has some renown: I mentioned that I was playing Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake, and someone on Mastodon pointed the site out to me. I then forgot about it, but then found it again through web search. Lucky! And it’s still being updated! If you keep your website up and updated for 13 years you deserve a PRIZE.

In addition to information on the original games, Snafaru maintains a scenario editor for Wizardry, and hosts a number of fanmade scenarios on their site. Wizardry is much older than even the blog, it was first published in 1981, 43 years ago. A game that maintains a fandom that long is amazing, even more so when its publisher went under so long ago.

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Don’t be fooled by this chart, where Wizardry happens to appear at the end. Most of these games were not widely available. Anything for a PDP or PLATO would only have been playable by a select few. Apshai and Ultima I were more widely available than their predecessors, but Wizardry was substantially deeper than either of them, and wasn’t surpassed for a while. For a time, it was the benchmark in the field, and inspired its own substantial subgenre, which we’ve heard called blobbers in the past. (Set Side B on blobbers previously, including an extensive list of them.)

Blobbers get their name because a whole RPG adventuring party is considered to exist filling one space in a first-person view of a dungeon grid, but it’s not really a great name because the defining characteristic of this sort of game isn’t the unity of the party but the view of the maze. Creating a first person maze of this type was a popular early graphical trick, because it was easy to program, and could be drawn on a tile-based display or possibly even a terminal. Blobbers continued to rule the roost for first-person games until the foundation of the first person shooters with id Software’s Catacomb-3D and Wolfenstein 3D, and more atmospheric 3D CRPGs like Origin’s Ultima Underworld.

Video and computer games are a field terribly unkind to their legacy. You might point to Mario, Sonic, Pac-Man and such as examples of games where decades-old originals are still known and played, but numerically speaking they are greatly outnumbered by the lost and nearly-forgotten. Games that used to be well known among all game-playing computer users are now mere footnotes, due to their companies going under, or their IPs being owned by uncaring megacorps interested only in milking their very most profitable properties YES I’M TALKING ABOUT ELECTRONIC ARTS. Ahem.

Wizardry is one of the foremost examples of this. For a while it was the best-selling computer RPG around, and its sequels did well for a long while. Wizardry VII was released in 1992, but then its successor Wizardry 8, a landmark title that finally brought the series into true 3D, took nine years to finish, and was sadly released right around the time of the demise of publisher Sir-Tech, although their Canadian branch lasted until 2oo3.

After Sir-Tech Software shut its doors, the series’ torch was held aloft for a long while by a succession of Japanese developers, beginning with ASCII Entertainment. Many of these games are still extremely obscure to the Western world, which seems odd considering how connected we’ve all become. We don’t even know if Robert Woodhead had anything to do with the first of the Japanese games, Wizardry Gaiden. The Japanese Wizardly line is all over the place aesthetically, but in play sticks by the formula of the very earliest games: spell ranks, permadeath, and tricky mazes. Despite being made for systems as varied as the Super Famicom and the PlayStation II, in gameplay they’re all of the Apple II orchard with limited additions. Despite being much that we don’t know, we still know a fair bit, due to an amazing 2020 article on the blog of the CRPG Addict written by “Alex,” with a great comments thread, that all deserves to be etched in stone and set forever on a monument in the middle of the town square of Llylgamyn.

It is more than a mere shame that all of these games remain effectively locked off from the country of Wizardry’s origin. An aging legion of players from the days of the Apple II has no idea that, in a land half a world away, 35 more Wizardry games, with gameplay with a clear recognizable link to the originals, were made and enjoyed. Maybe some day those games will be made more accessible to English-speaking audiences, the ones that aren’t now lost forever, at least.

I’ve said all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to what I had originally intended to be the subject of the piece, the terrific remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made by Digital Eclipse. Perhaps it’s best to hold off on that for a couple of days. Soon!

P.S. If anyone knows of easy-to-learn open source timeline making software, I’d greatly like to know of it, or even if there’s a good Excel or (preferably) LibreOffice add-on for that purpose.

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I make it available with some trepidation. Dungeon has a few significant bugs. For example, it supports two disk drives throughout, but if you use its Dungeon Maker then you need to set it for single drive mode, or else you’ll encounter a Disk Error just at the worst possible time: when saving your project. Its randomized “Lost Worlds” often create dungeons that strand your character in impossible situations, and while there is a way out of them, it involves loading the Guild menu 15 times.

But I’ve played a lot of these random dungeons, and I think overall David Caruso II made a clever little game system, and I think his ideas are worth building upon. That’s why I’m working on a remake/update of Dungeon, that I’m calling Dungeon DX.

I’m making it in Python using the Pygame library. I’ve tried making a game with Pygame before and had some problems with it (I may bring myself to talk about that experience someday), but using it now I’m pleased to see Pygame 2 has become a lot more performant, and that’s even before trying to compile it into a faster form. I’ve built for Dungeon DX a kind of bespoke terminal emulator, but one with support for loads of cool graphics effects. I’ve made dungeon art and monster images for it using the website Fontstruct, which gives the images a low-tech, but distinctive look.

I’ve been working very hard on it, to the extent that I can feel myself getting my hopes up that a substantial number of people may actually play and enjoy it. Most of the times in the past that I’ve done that I’ve had those hopes get crushed, but hey, maybe the nth+1 time’s the charm?

Besides not having all of its bugs, why do I think this project is worth working on? These are the things I find appealing about the original Dungeon, the reasons that I played so much of it myself, things that I don’t generally see in CRPGs these days:

• It’s not a game but a game system. It isn’t a single huge campaign that you play and finish, and it isn’t a single story. Your characters can keep going so long as there are adventures to be had.
• In structure it isn’t like a novel, but it’s more like a series of short stories. Each dungeon is a single screen, that fills out as your character explores it. That may sound a bit like a classic roguelike, and there are some elements of that, but the feel is subtly different. Each single-screen dungeon usually has more adventure packed into it than in a single roguelike dungeon level.
• It’s like a collection of short stories, but that stars your character as they progress through it. The focus is more on the development of that character as they continue their adventuring career. Like how the Conan the Barbarian novellas are each an episode in the life of a single adventurer.
• It features what’s known in some circles as slow character growth. D&D has rapid growth, and it’s gotten even faster as the system has changed through the years. 5th Edition characters advance to second level absurdly quickly, after earning only 300 XP, and that advancement practically doubles their power! 0th-level Dungeon characters (it starts counting at 0) have a lot more durability, but it takes them more time to advance to Level 1, and when they gain it their power only increases a little. In this, a lot more of a Dungeon character’s life is decided at character creation. But it also means, as they increase in power, you know it’s due to your own efforts.
• It’s more simulationist that CRPGs have become as of late. A lot of CRPGs have crept towards gamishness, which generally is okay, I mean they are games after all. But I think RPGs work the best when you can imagine them as being the adventures of real people, so as their power has crept up, and their abilities have gotten more abstract and arbitrary, they have come to feel more and more like playing pieces than living people.
• While there’s a random dungeon maker, you can also make your own adventures for it, and give them to other people! That’s potentially a very great thing. It reminds me of EAMON, an 80s CRPG game system that people could create their own adventures for. (There are still websites devoted to EAMON! It’s a rabbit hole worth exploring, but that’s something more suited for its own post.)
• And finally, it’s hard. Characters die frequently. You can revive them up to three times, and if you don’t mind reloading the guild menu 15 times you can turn the game off to preserve their life, but defeat is frequent without very careful play. You often have to play like a scavenger: take what easy-to-find rewards and successes you can, build your power over time, seek out easy adventures, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Dungeon characters are not heroes, not at first anyway, and if they’re ever to become heroes you’ll have to watch their steps.

Because these are the aspects of Dungeon that I like, they’re the elements that I’m focusing on in making Dungeon DX. My plans aren’t to make it quite as hard, but to still emphasize that these people are not demigods, not yet. A character’s career may be the story of the creation of a demigod, like how Conan, through countless trials, eventually became king of a great nation. It’s kind of a lie that people who rise to greatness frequently do so because of their own efforts, but it’s a pleasing lie, and it makes for a fun saga if you don’t take it too seriously.

My other plans for Dungeon DX, which may change, for while progress has been rapid (because Python is awesome), I’m still iterating over lots of things:

• A retro look, kind of akin to how Dungeon looks on a C64, but still with enhancements. It doesn’t use pixel art, instead using vector graphics created in Fontstruct.
• Dungeon was all one-on-one fights. Dungeon DX should have parties of three characters, fighting enemy groups that can be larger than that.
• Dungeon doesn’t let characters keep items between adventures. For the most part, characters only advance through gaining experience. DX should let characters have a persistent inventory.
• Dungeon doesn’t have any money system at all! DX should both have money and a shop where basic necessities and equipment can be obtained.
• Dungeon doesn’t simulate much of the basis of exploration. My ideas for DX let characters rest in the dungeon, for example, but they must consume food to do so.
• Dungeon has very little graphical splendor. Dungeons themselves are just blocks of green, with black tunnels dug through it, and once in a while a graphic character. That has to change.
• Dungeon’s encounter model isn’t scriptable at all, which limits what can be done. It’s a lot more flexible than you might think it would be, given the C64’s memory limitations, but the edges of what’s possible are still easily reached. I want to change that.
• Dungeon’s magic system is very interesting for its own sake, a collection of 16 spells that are more useful outside of battle than in it. Only one of those spells that does direct damage to enemies! Magic is much more of general utility. While my design has more damage-doing magic than that, I want to keep that feeling that magic is not primarily for harming monsters.
• Dungeon doesn’t let characters learn spells themselves: all magic comes from items that contain it, and depletes with use. There’s interesting things about that system, but it kind of means that high-Intelligence characters aren’t very viable if the dungeon constructor doesn’t give them any magic to use early on.

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‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

Gary Gygax was a weird person. I won’t get into his life or history or, the casual misogyny of AD&D character creation, or the Random Harlot Table. But he did know a lot about medieval weaponry and armor, and to some degree this obsessive interest seeped out and infected a whole generation of nerds.

I know which is generally better: leather armor, studded leather armor, ring mail, chain mail, splint mail, plate mail or plate armor. I know that, although in life each is different, battles are random, and there’s countless factors that might determine who would win in a fight, the order in which I have given them is roughly how effective they are, because it’s the order that Armor Class increases, sorry decreases, in classic Dungeons & Dragons.

While the list of armors is presented, in practically every Player’s Handbook, with their effects on protection right there in order, unless you’re steeped in the material, it is not obvious, just from reading the names of the items, which is supposed to be better than another.

This is a considerable roadblock, and one I struggled with for a while, when I first tried to learn to play Rogue, because that game expects you to know how effective each piece of armor is. You start out with Ring Mail +1. You find a suit of Splint Mail. Should you switch? People who play nearly any classic roguelike are going to run against this eventually. Even now, some games just expect you to know the relative strengths of each.

If you decide to take the chance and try it on, to Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) credit, it tells you immediately how effective the armor is on the status line, and you can compare its value to your past item. To Rogue’s (and Nethack’s) detriment though, if the new armor is cursed, you’re stuck with it, until you can lift the curse (to a new player, unlikely) or die (very likely). And then, unless you’ve been taking notes, you’ll still probably forget the relationship between the two items, meaning you’ll have to guess their relative value again later, and deal with the same risk.

Classic D&D tended to give short shrift to the intricacies of real-life armor use, simplifying a complex topic beyond perhaps what was appropriate. AD&D attempted to remedy that by going overboard, giving each armor ratings according to its bulkiness, how much of the wearer’s body it covered, how much it weighed and how it restricted movement. Gygax’s tendency towards simulation is responsible for some of the most interesting parts of the game, but it didn’t help him here I think.

Most classic roguelikes, at least, use the “bag of Armor Class” approach to armor, which is probably for the best. Nethack probably goes to far in the Gygaxian direction. If you find Plate Mail in Nethack, you’re almost entirely better off just leaving it on the ground, even despite armor’s huge value, because it’s simply too heavy. Even if you can carry it without dipping into Burdened status, or, heaven help you, Stressed, its mass and bulk lowers the number of other items you can carry before you reach Stressed, and carrying many other items is of great importance. This is the secret reason that the various colors of Dragon Scale Mail are so powerful in Nethack: it’s not that they have the highest best AC in the game (though they do), it’s that they’re also really light! Even if you don’t get the color you want, it takes concern about the weight of armor completely off your list of worries.

The use of armor underwent revision throughout D&D’s development. (This page lists the changes in detail.) For reference, the relative quality of D&D, and thus roguelike, armor goes like this.

Why the difference in values? Up until the 3rd edition of D&D, Armor Class started at 10 and counted down as it improved. 3E updated a lot of the game’s math, and changed the combat formula so that AC was a bonus to the defender’s chance to be missed instead of a penalty to the attacker’s chance to strike. Because of that, now it starts at 10 and counts up. The changeover was a whole to-do, I assure you, but now two editions later we barely look back. Back in that day others were confused by the system too, and even Rogue used an ascending armor score. But Nethack, to this day, uses original D&D’s decreasing armor class system.

If you compare those values to those used in 5th Edition, you’ll notice that even the new-style numbers don’t match up completely. As I said, while the relative strengths have remained consistent, if not constant, the numbers continue to change slightly between versions.

That concludes this introductory level class. You’re dismissed! If you’re looking into the relative effects of different polearms… that’s the graduate-level seminar, down the hall.

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Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster writes lots of interesting stuff, and we’ve linked to her several times before. In fact I have a whole Firefox window devoted to pieces she’s made. This one is about the Super Famicom (and others) game Brandish, one of Nihon Falcom’s many interesting RPG experiments.

Brandish is played in a dungeon where each level is a map, and monsters appear on it, and you attack them in real-time, without going to a separate screen. That is to say, combat isn’t “modal.” When switches change the state of the dungeon, you see their results happen immediately. Areas blocked to you are shown as just plain wall until you reveal them.

These things all make Brandish seem almost like (here’s that word again) a roguelike. But Brandish’s dungeon isn’t random, but set; the game isn’t a generalized system like roguelikes often are, but has set scenario. That makes it seem like a lot of other early RPGs. And one weird thing about it that’ll definitely require some adjustment is, Brandish is programmed so that your character always faces up; if you rotate to face a direction, the dungeon rotates around you. But the game doesn’t use the Super Nintendo’s “Mode 7” rotation feature: the dungeon turns immediately, which is disorientating until you get used to it, and even, it’s still a little disorientating. Brandish probably works that way because it was originally a Japanese PC game, and to implement Mode 7 rotation would mean having to rework some graphics to reflect the different perspectives.

Here’s a Youtube video of a playthrough. Skip past the intro, and what I’m talking about should become clear:

And now you’re ready for Kimimi’s own piece on Brandish. She likes it! And I agree, it’s a very interesting system. Brandish was popular enough to get multiple sequels. If you want to learn more about the series generally, Kurt Kalata’s Hardcore Gaming 101 has a good introduction to them.

Kimimi the Game-Eating She Monster Covers Brandish

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It’s been months now since I announced my plans to release some project involving LOADSTAR, a 17-year computer magazine on disk, either here or on itch.io, or both. I’m still working on them.

In the meantime, I present this, a packaged-up release of Dungeon on itch.io, a complete old-school RPG gaming system for the Commdore 64, as it was released on the disk magazine LOADSTAR back in 1990.

Written by David Caruso II, Dungeon is a way of creating adventures for others to play, and a system of creating, maintaining and playing characters in those adventures. It was kind of a throwback even in 1990 (the SNES was released that year), but it definitely has charm, and an old-school kind of appeal.

You start out on the Guild screen, where you create a character from one of five fantasy races, then venture out on adventures stored on floppy disks, which in this release are provided as C64 1541 disk images. Fight monsters to earn experience points, find the object of the quest and then return to the Guild by the exit to have the chance to advance in experience level. If your character dies they’ll be revived, but only up to two times! If something happens and you don’t make it back, but don’t die either, your character will be marked as “GONE,” meaning they’re stuck in limbo until they make it back to the Guild on their own!

Your character advances in level between adventures, but they don’t get to keep any items they found on their journey. If they advance in level however, they get to permanently improve two of their stats. Getting to the maximum score of 25 grants them a special ability, but it’s really hard to get there!

This presentation of Dungeon is being made with the permission of Fender Tucker, owner and former Managing Editor of LOADSTAR. It isn’t free, but for $5 you get the Dungeon system and five pre-made adventures for it, culled from the 240+ issues of LOADSTAR. I include a stock copy of the open-source Commodore 64 emulator VICE, configured for playing Dungeon. (If $5 is too much for you, rumor has it Loadstar issues can be found online elsewhere. Dungeon was first published on issue #74.)

If you want to know more about it, I have constructed this 40-page PDF of documentation on Dungeon, from the disks of LOADSTAR in 1990, along with the instructions for the adventures and further notes on playing it from me. Here:

(file size: 2.6 MB)

The document refers to an itch.io release, that’s what I’m currently working on. Late in the document there are some spoilers for a particularly difficult adventure using the system.

Dungeon was created by someone named David Caruso II. Neither I nor long-time LOADSTAR managing editor Fender Tucker knows what became of him. I have what is almost certainly an old address for him. It’s been 33 years, and I suspect that Dungeon itself is a couple of years older than that, so it’s possible that Caruso has passed away by now. If he hasn’t, though, I’d like to talk with him. I think (hope?) he’d appreciate that people are still thinking about his creation even now.

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Here are all his Nethack 3.1 posts to date:

Game 504: Nethack [3.1 series] (1993) – Beginning adventures

Nethack [3.1]: Blessed and Cursed – Discovering exercise, death by battery drain

Nethack [3.1]: Rust and Ruin – Beginning of very good game

Nethack [3.1]: Quest for Glory – Middle dungeon levels, Rogue level, Quest branch

Nethack [3.1]: Wish List – Exploring the lower regions of the main dungeon

Nethack [3.1]: Beyond This Place Of Wrath And Tears: from the Castle to Fort Ludios to entering Gehennom to killing Baalzebub

Nethack [3.1]: Nothing Lasts Forever – from killing the Wizard for the first time to getting the Amulet up to escaping the main dungeon for the Elemental Planes

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Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Did I post this one before? An archives search doesn’t turn it up. It’s been in my topic list for a long time, but it seems I never actually post it it. Here it is! It was created by Doctor Octoroc, who still has a website, for CollegeHumor, which doesn’t!

The video is 11 years old, and doesn’t present all of the events of the series, I think because it hadn’t concluded at that point. Still, it may be entertaining.

Breaking Bad 16-Bit RPG (Youtube, 4 1/2 minutes)

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Wizardry used to be the most popular computer game in the world.

It has fallen on hard times recently. Creators SirTech released the terrific Wizardry 8 but then almost immediately closed up. The name is currently owned by a Japanese developer, who make games in the classic style but they’re still quite different, chasing old ghosts instead of trying to adapt the idea for new generations.

A full examination of Wizardry will have to wait for another time, but until then there’s a repackaging of the original Apple II versions available from the Total Replay folks. It’s made to run off of a ProDOS-formatted hard drive, words that themselves form a fearsome incantation, but you can still play it emulated. And should!

It includes an update of the original Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, plus the successor scenarios Night of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamin, plus five fan-made scenarios. It also includes WizPlus, a character editor, but diehards won’t use that. It’s cheating!

To explain Wizardry in summary, it took the ideas of early Dungeons & Dragons and adapted them to a dungeon exploration simulation with the same kind of theoretical basis. In D&D, if a character dies and there’s no way to revive it, it’s gone: no backsies. And sometimes revivals fail, and the character is gone anyway. And the dungeon in a genuinely treacherous place. If your party wipes, to even try to revive them, you have to create a new party of adventures, take them in, find the deceased party’s corpses in the dungeon, and either use magic to revive them there or drag them back to town to have the Temple of Cant do it.

If this sounds forbidding to current sensibilities, it certainly is! But that’s the point. Because of it, it’s about as close as you can get to traditional RP-gaming as you can get on a computer, even more so that official D&D products. Roguelikes come close, but since you only play as a single character in most of them they still don’t quite fit that electronic bill.

Wizard Replay (Apple II, Internet Archive)

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Folder Dungeon, on itch.io, is a short and not-too-difficult game where an adventuring cursor has to dig through the folder structure of a hard drive to find an important file. Each window is a room of the dungeon; entering a Door folder takes you to another room down. You can go back the way you came using the back arrow icon at the bottom of the window.

In addition to doors, rooms can contain items, which can be picked up by clicking on them. Gold is among the items, the value of the coin indicated by a number. Some items cost money; if they do, they’ll have a coin and a number on the item. Some items, notably Health Potions and Ice Cream, take affect immediately; they never enter your inventory, but work immediately on your stats whether you needed it or not.

And, some of the things in rooms are monsters. If you do something other than attack a monster by clicking on it, then every monster in the room has a percentage chance to attack you; if you attack a monster, then it always counter-attacks if it survived the attack, but other monsters in the room don’t get the chance to attack.

Somewhere in each folder structure is an Exit icon. When you find it, you can only enter it once all the monsters in its room have been defeated. You don’t have to defeat all the monsters in a room to leave it, but it does give the monsters in the room a chance to attack you.

The most interesting play mechanic is, every action you take generates “heat.” You can only take so much heat. If heat reaches your maximum capacity, you take one damage per action until you leave the level (which resets heat to 0) or you lower your heat by collecting an Ice Cream.

Note, as you can see in the above screenshot, there’s a display bug in the current version that cuts off the left and right sides of the screen. Or is it a bug? It didn’t actually prevent me from playing? Maybe it’s an aesthetic choice? Anyway, I managed to finish the game on my first attempt, but it was close.

Folder Dungeon (by Ravernt, itch.io, $0)

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Quest of D was a dungeon crawler where the player’s inventory was collected as physical trading cards, that were scanned into the game in order to use them. Shining Force Cross was similar in concept but without the cards; it lasted until 2016. And finally there was Soul Reverse, introduced in 2018.

The world of Japanese arcade games from around this time is largely a big dark area to me, and right around the time when the US arcade industry started its death spiral. It was also a time when server connectivity and online updates came into vogue, meaning when the servers went down, many of them ceased to be playable. It’s really sad that this has become essentially a lost age of gaming, at least to people outside of Japan. We probably couldn’t play them then, and we certainly can’t now.

Dungeons & Deckbuilding: Sega’s Lost Arcade RPGs (JRPG Junkie)

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Xanadu is a Dragon Slayer game. It’s actually Dragon Slayer II, but it plays nothing like the original. Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, is one of the very few Dragon Slayer titles to get a release over the geographic and cultural divide, as Legacy of the Wizard on NES. It doesn’t play like the other games either. It was a tradition to make every Dragon Slayer game play very unlike the others. The way I see it, the series was as much about coming up with a new system to explore and master as it was about having new scenarios and locations.

Xanadu is also a ridiculously obtuse game, which is in keeping with the original. Lots of the Dragon Slayer line expected you to do obtuse things, things not explained to you, to proceed. I’ve played through Legacy of the Wizard, and can verify that it was hard, but compared to Xanadu it seems like a model of straightforward play. In Xanadu, right near the start, there is a place where you fall down a hole, walk left five steps, then double-back right to scroll a secret shop onto the screen, the only place in the entire game where you can buy and sell magic items. Its inventory system doesn’t use words, it’s just a sequence of numbers, indicating quantities, and you’re just supposed to know the order of the items they represent.

Xanadu, like some other prominent RPGs, is secretly about resource management. Each monster you find on the world map screens (which are side-view!) can only be defeated and looted a limited number of times. If you run them out, and are left without the items needed to finish the game, you’re just stuck. You can also get stuck in some areas if you just move the wrong direction. You can save and load the game, but doing so carries costs in gold pieces! The only way to escape this temporal-economic trap is to make a backup of your game disk, and restore your copy from it. I like this idea, I’ve always found the grind-until-you-win nature of many present-day RPGs a bit unappealing. I kind of wish more games now would take inspiration from some of these early efforts, where each game could have a radically different play style, and require the player apply some real strategy to win, but maybe without being quite so user-hostile.

Youtube channel Basement Brothers made a nice retrospective of Xanadu, and managed to complete the whole game, although by following a video walkthrough. It’s an essential window into a whole universe of RPGs we were denied at the time.

Xanadu (PC-88 Paradise) Falcom’s original classic, and Japan’s must-have 8-bit action RPG of 1985 (Youtube, 39 minutes)

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They often fudge the exact age they’re trying to depict, with genuine medieval institutions sitting beside Renaissance improvements like taverns and shops. Nearly of them also put in magic in a general D&D kind of way, sometimes institutionalizing it into a Harry Potter-style educational system.

Notably, they usually choose the positive aspects of that setting. The king is usually a benevolent ruler. It’s rare that serfdom and plagues come up. The general populace is usually okay with being bound to the land. The Church, when it exists, is sometimes allowed to be evil, in order to give the player a plot road to fighting God at the end.

Hyrule of the Zelda games is likely the most universally-known of these realms, which I once called Generic Fantasylands. The various kingdoms of the Dragon Quest games also nicely fit the bill. Final Fantasy games were among the first to question those tropes, presenting evil empire kingdoms as early at the second game.

John Szczepaniak’s article at Time Extension dives into the question by interviewing a number of relevant Japanese and US figures and developers, including former Squaresoft translator Ted Woolsey. I think the most insightful comments are from Hiromasa Iwasaki, programmer of Ys I and II, who notes that this Japanese conception of a fantasy world mostly comes from movies and the early computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima, that the literature that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons (which in turned inspired Wizardry and Ultima), especially Lord of the Rings and Weird Tales, were generally unknown to Japanese popular culture. Developer Rica Matsumura notices, also, that there is a cool factor in Japan to European folklore that doesn’t apply, over there, to Japanese folklore.

It’s a great read, that says a number of things well that have been bubbling up in the back of my head for a long time, especially that JRPGs recreated both RPG mechanics and fantasy tropes at a remove, that they got their ideas second hand and, in a way similar to how a bunch of gaming tables recreated Dungeons & Dragons in their own image to fill in gaps left in Gary Gygax’s early rulebooks, so too did they make their versions of RPGs to elaborate upon the ideas of Wizardry and Ultima without having seen their bases.

Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Take Place In European Fantasy Settings? (timeextension.com)

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#3 Betrayal at Club Low

You may have played a lot of RPGs, but tell me, have you ever played one where you are a pizza spy trying to break into a club and may inadvertently become the greatest DJ ever known? Betrayal at Club Low is a trip through a strange world where you must use the power of your dice, and pizza, to get past different encounters. Upgrading your dice will give you a better chance at winning encounters, and the story will go differently based on what choices you choose and which encounters you win. There really is nothing else quite like this game, and it’s such a weird delight to go through, especially if you love pizza as well.

#2 Chained Echoes

The most “traditional” RPG on the list this year, Chained Echoes does a great job of mirroring and honoring classic JRPGs but does it in a way that is different the more you look under the surface. With a huge world to explore, challenging combat, and amazing pixel art, this is the game for JRPG fans who are looking for something new to play. While it’s a bit too traditional when it comes to encounters for my taste, it’s still a solid game.

#1: Fear and Hunger 2

I’ve already talked about my love/hate of the brutally difficult Fear and Hunger, and Fear and Hunger 2 continues that trend with more disturbing sights, challenging gameplay, and a whole new world to get lost in…and killed in. This is not for the faint of heart, or those looking for an easy time. This is a game where failing the tutorial will get your legs chopped off.

This is less of an RPG and more of a brutal puzzle for you to try and solve. One day, I need to sit down and try to learn both games. If you like your RPGs hard, and aren’t easily disgusted, there is no other series like it.

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

They have fallen into obscurity in the intervening decades, but it used to be that the Ultima games were some of the biggest RPGs around, and many still have fond memories of them. The story of the rise and fall of Origin Systems, once one of the biggest game publishers, and how now they’re just another of the hundred ignored lines on EA’s balance sheet, is not our business here today, but instead that of one fan’s effort to improve one of the less faithful adaptations: the NES version of Ultima Exodus.

Ultima and Ultima II (and their predecessor Akalabeth) were popular, but Ultima III was the first megahit version of the game, that could be considered to stand up today. Ultima I was pretty small, and Ultima II had a lot of crazy elements like space travel. Ultima III has a much more cohesive game world, a more detailed quest, and generally feels a lot more like what we would consider an RPG game now. Later games would build off of it and become even more popular, especially Ultima IV with its detailed morality system, and Ultima VII with its vast game world, depth of NPC interaction, and many system and UI improvements.

Back to Ultima III. One of its best-selling versions was the Famicom version in Japan, which had a bit of a media blitz around its release. Both the Ultima and Wizardry games had something of a second life on Japanese computer systems and consoles, where they would go on to sell millions of copies more. While EA’s ownership and neglect have meant that Ultima is mostly gone and forgotten*, in Japan new Wizardry games continue to be made, hewing to that series’ original dungeon crawl aesthetic.

* This is, honestly, partly to series creator Richard Garriott’s ownership of several important characters, meaning both parties have to agree to the other’s vision for any further official Ultima game to be made. And Garriott seems to be chasing fads lately; his most recent idea for a game utilizes that bane of all game design concepts, NFTs.

So now you have a little idea of what Ultima is. The Famicom/NES version was a hit in Japan, but it differs from the computer version in many ways. This was pretty much the norm for the many Japanese-made Famicom adaptations of Western games. An article could be usefully written on all the ways Famicom ports of RPGs differ from their originals. Maybe later.

The point of this romhack is to change the NES version of Ultima III: Exodus so it more matches up with the computer versions. It uses its own patching system, so Romhacking.net’s web-based patching system won’t be of use.

So many little things have changed in this version that it’s hard to talk about! At the very least, the graphics have received a complete overhaul. The cartoony figures of the original, which were pretty silly even back then, look a lot more appropriate for a series with the stature and legacy of classic Ultima games.

NES Ultima Exodus is also notorious for a number of significant bugs, including the absence of an important clue, it being impossible to cancel a character’s turn without wasting it, poorly differentiated character classes, and the lack of some of the monsters of the computer version. These have been fixed in this version. Some other niceties have been added, including character portraits for the people you talk to, which is really going above and beyond for a game like this!

It’s pretty much become the definitive console release of this landmark of computer RPG gaming! You should check it out if you have an interest in these things.

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As I mentioned earlier, the creator of Moria, Robert Koeneke, died recently, but thankfully before he went he did interviews about his experiences, notably in David Craddock’s Dungeon Hacks.

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Celebrating Moria (Youtube, 25 minutes)

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In @Play yesterday I mentioned a number of games that use Wizardry’s weird world metaphor. They’re sort of like roguelikes in that the world is divided into a grid of discrete spaces, but instead of viewing them from overhead, you are given a first-person view from the center of that space.

You don’t move with the same kind of smoothly-adjusting motion as Wolfenstein 3D would bring a while later, but movement instead jerks along one space at a time, and you turn in 90 degree increments. These games all disorient the player just enough that mapping them becomes important, but can be easily mapped on graph paper. Your more fiendish RPG dungeons of the type have tricks they play on you as you explore specifically to disorient you, like teleporting you to an identical-looking corridor without telling you, or spinning you around randomly. Wizardry and Bard’s Tale in particular delight in doing this.

It’s such a distinctive and immediately recognizable way to represent dungeon exploration that I’m surprised there isn’t a fan name for it, like “shmup” or “belt scroller.” I’ve calling them blobbers, but those actually get their name from the fact that, if you are commanding a party of characters, they’re all considered to inhabit that one space. The term doesn’t really apply to the mode of movement, only the atomicity of your group.

I gave a list of a good number of games that offer this kind of movement, but shortly after I thought of a bunch more, and they’re such a weird and varied bunch that I figured I’d take it as an excuse to catalogue as many examples as come to mind, and say some words about them in passing.

In the beginning there’s the Wizardry games, of course. I don’t actually know if it’s the first of the type, but it’s the earliest I can think of. Wizardry games using this format include, I believe, the first seven in the series; the 8th (and last in the core series) finally switched to a full 3D engine. There’s also some Japanese Wizardry games, and some of them use the style as well, but I can only personally vouch for one. That’s eight in total.

There’s some games that use Wizardry-style mazes as only a part of the experience. Some of the Ultima games do this. The Ultima predecessor Akalabeth uses them, and I know Ultima III does too for its dungeons. That’s two more.

There’s two major series of Wizardly-inspired games. The original Bard’s Tale series were blobbers in the truest sense of the term. That’s four: I, II, III and Construction Set. The hugely underrated Might & Magic series also used them for both dungeons and their game worlds up to V. That’s nine more, for a running total of 19.

On the NES there are some surprising examples of the form. I already mentioned Interplay’s Swords & Serpents, a unique and probably doomed attempt to make a Bard’s Tale RPG on a ROM-based system. There’s multiple oodles (boodles! froodles! zoodles! poodles!) of interesting things about that game, like its character-specific password system and its four-player support, but we don’t have the time here to get into that. In fact, I could say that about nearly this entire list.

Two of the most ridiculous kinds of characters to explore 1st-person dungeons are a super spy (as in Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode) and lightbulb-tonguing uncle to a weird and macabre family (as in Fester’s Quest), both also on NES. Adding them to the pile brings us up to 22.

I mentioned Phantasy Star on Sega Master System and Arcana on SNES. There’s also Shining in the Darkness on Genesis and Double Dungeons on the TG16. There’s at least one Madou Monogatari game that uses the system, but I’m only adding games that I can remember without Googling or looking anything up, so I’m only counting it once. We’re now at 27.

There’s 3D Bomberman on the MSX, an early experiment in the Bomberman series where the mazes you’re in are 3D. In the arcade there’s Ed Logg’s Xybots, which was intended to be a Gauntlet sequel but the play ended up being different enough that he changed it to a sci-fi game. Xybots breaks the rules slightly because your character is visible, but it’s still that kind of grid-based, first-person maze. More recently there’s, hm… at least five Etrian Odyssey games? That brings the count up to 34.

Some more miscellaneous RPGs I mentioned last time: Dragon Wars, Eye of the Beholder, and Dungeon Hack. I particularly like Dragon Wars and Dungeon Hack, although for completely different reasons.

Oh! Let’s not forget about the D&D Gold Box series, which use 1st person grid mazes for dungeon exploration. That includes Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, Pools of Darkness, Champions of Krynn, Death Knights of Krynn, Unlimited Adventures, and the Buck Rodgers game made in that style. There are other computer D&D games from the time, but they didn’t use that engine. These games also had other modes of exploration, and overhead-view combat, so they aren’t as tied to the format.

Finally there are some other miscellaneous games. Blobber-style mazes were a low-resource way of immersing the player in a labyrinth, even if there was nothing else in there of interest. My first exposure to the field was a C64 BASIC game called, natch, Labyrinth. I remember seeing a shareware DOS game called 3-Demon. The game that Strong Bad poked around in the Friendlyware video I linked last time is Killer Maze, and definitely fits the discretely granular bill.

So, all in all that’s 48 games completely from memory! But I’m sure there’s more; can you think of any others?

When Wolfenstein 3D came out this entire style of world presentation immediately fell out of favor. Wolf 3D has very much that same kind of grid-based world, but no longer is your position locked to the center of each space. You can turn in angles of less than 90 degrees, and there’s more of a real-time immediacy to the game that’s a lot more engaging.

Wolf 3D pretty easily destroyed this genre. Almost no blobber mazes show up from that point on except for some edge cases that are explicitly calling back to the old style, like the later Japanese Wizardry games and Etrian Odyssey. It is interesting that, once computers became powerful enough to render worlds in a more fluid and immediate kind of way, it made these kinds of distinctive presentation shortcuts irrelevant. It’s kind of saddening.

EDIT: One I had intended to include but somehow left out is Dungeon Master, which xot reminded me of in comments!

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For this perceptive podcast, I spoke with Matt Sharp who is the designer of Video Game Fables to talk about creating a subversive RPG while still adhering to the design and structure of the genre.

• Steam
• twitter
• My Play of Video game Fables on the archive channel

Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”

game-wisdom.com/

Lots of players are also armchair designers, so we like to present interesting tools as they appear. One that recently went up on Steam is the voxel-oriented RPG In A Box ($29.99). It has that interesting 3D-yet-8-bit vibe that make the Dragon Quest Builder games so appealing.

There are a lot of interesting tools out there for a variety of skillsets, and greatly differing levels of flexibility. Some considering are RPG Maker MZ and MV (who knows what the letters are meant to stand for), Zelda Classic for action games, and for more flexible tools it might be worth checking out Godot, or maybe creating something with Python and Pygame.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Not a lot of news today, drebnar! Let’s see what there is to see with our respective light-based optical sensors.

We usually have tons of things to link, so we’ve started leaning away from listicles, but it’s a short broadcast today, so here’s Chris Freiberg’s list of the best 15 Genesis RPGs on Den of Geek. It’s a provocative list, in order from last to first: Gauntlet IV, Ys III: Wanderers From Ys, Syndicate, Sword of Vermillion, Light Crusader, Crusader of Centy, Landstalker, Pirates! Gold, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Shining Force II, Phantasy Star III, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis, Shadowrun, and, of course, Phantasy Star IV. Now, Gauntlet IV is an amazing port, and no one can fault Wonder Boy in Monster World, Landstalker or Pirates! Gold on general terms, but they’re hardly traditional RPGs. And then there are the games left out: the original Shining Force didn’t make it even through SF2 did, there’s no Phantasy Star II or Shining in the Darkness, and most egregious of all IMO, nowhere to be seen are New World Computing’s terrific ports of King’s Bounty or Might & Magic II, which are fully the equal of their computer versions drebnar! And if you’re going to include Pirates! Gold, you gotta include Starflight! And while it’s a bit clunky in interface, there’s the oft-overlooked early Naughty Dog production Rings of Power!

Victoria Kennedy at Eurogamer casually drops that a documentary is approaching on the making of Nintendo 64 system seller Goldeneye 007.

Lots of places are raving about the excellence of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, proclaiming it a return to the greatness of the classic Konami arcade games. WCCFtech’s Ule Lopez chimes in, in their review, and uses it to explain about the wonders of rollback netcode. Okay by us!

Thom Dunn at Boing Boing reports that the newsletter 50 Years of Text Games is being published in book form!

Finally, back at Nintendo Life again, Alana Hagues points us to a YouTube video explain a trick allowing you to explore underwater areas in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

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Franken has made the internet rounds the past few days, being praised by Derek Yu and Video Game Dunkey. I was pointed to it by our own Kent Drebnar, the one-celled gaming organism who does news posts for us. It’s a free and short and free JRPG styled thing up on itch.io. It’s inspired by Final Fantasy VI, For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Moon, and Grow RPG! It’s made with OHRRPGCE, itself a fun, quirky and free RPG creation program.

It’s not really so much as game as a humor delivery mechanism and strongly-guided system of battles. There’s only one choice for actions throughout all the fights, but it’s more of a silly and good-hearted story that you experience through a Dragon Quest play system. It reminds me a lot of another JRPG homage for 3DS and Switch, Fairune, although without its sometimes maddening secret-finding, and with lots of quirky characters, which feel like they were imported from Undertale.

It’s only about an hour long, and did I mention it’s free, so I figure it’s well worth your time and money!

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