The Flipside of Gaming
It’s true! Thanetian Gaming on Youtube has an 18-minute video about Atari Games’ neglected classic Rampart. Remember back in September when I posted a strategy guide that no one asked for over four days? Judging by his video he could stand to read it, but no matter, I’ll accept anyone talking about my favorite arcade game in a positive light!
(EDIT: I’m reminded that AOC is a representative, not a Senator. Which is like, lol, if you care about facts or something. Still I’ve corrected it.)
We don’t post about politics much here. This is entirely not because it might drive people away, but it is because much of the rest of the internet is full of it, and we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, and the terrible consequences if the wrong person (you know who he is) wins in the US in just a week. Anyway, many of our readers aren’t even in the US, and to all of you, I say, I envy you.
But a weird bit of news came out involving Kamala Harris’* VP** candidate Tim Walz that both edges into our lane and is an excuse to talk about something I’ve long been wanting to remark upon, about Sega’s classic arcade racing-game-but-not Crazy Taxi.
(* For non US-people: Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President in 2024. **”VP” stands for Vice President, a largely ceremonial role, but should something happen to the President, the Vice President becomes the new President.)
I’ve played a lot of Crazy Taxi. I played a lot of Crazy Taxi 2 as well. I had a Dreamcast, for the brief period it existed, and they were unquestionably great games for that system, with amazing (if Youtube-unfriendly) soundtracks. Well as it turns out Tim Walz has great taste in games, because back then he had a Dreamcast too, and he had Crazy Taxi for it. And he streamed a few minutes of it, with terrific Democratic*** House Representative**** Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
(***”Democratic” refers to the Democratic Party, the US’s left-ish party that currently serves as our feeble bulwark against the hooting forces of awfulness that beset our entire world. ****”House Representative” means a member of the House of Repesentatives, one of the US’s two Legislative Houses. That concludes the US civics portion of our post.)
Most of the stream was taken up with playing Madden, which isn’t in one of our more favored categories, but the five minutes of Crazy Taxi were posted to Walz’s Youtube channel:
I am conflicted about this video. Walz is one of the most personable people ever to be nominated for high office, a genuinely friendly individual. But he isn’t a great Crazy Taxi player. And it might be because he doesn’t know how to do a maneuver called a “Crazy Dash.”
(Let me say now: I don’t even appreciate making jokes that sound like “he’s bad at gaemz lol im voting for other guy,” the stakes are way too high for me to be able to laugh at that. Just, keep it in your hat/purse/gender neutral container, please.)
But this reminded me of something I’ve thought about for a long time, and was driven (heh) home to me over DragonCon this year. There was a Crazy Taxi machine there, at stand-up model, I think with a slightly flaky gas pedal, that made it unreliable to perform Crazy Dashes.
A Crazy Dash is simple to perform once you know how. From a halt, with the gear shift in Reverse, in quick succession shift to Drive and slam the gas pedal. If the timing is right, your car will lurch forward with a burst of speed. And if you do this while driving, shifting to Reverse with foot off the gas, then shifting to Drive and flooring it with the same timing as a Dash, it’s called a “Limiter Cut,” and you get an even greater burst of speed!
Crazy Dashes and Limiter Cuts are essential to even slightly good games of Crazy Taxi, which is why the sit down version of the game puts instructions for how to do them on the control panel, why the Dreamcast version’s manual explains precisely how to do them, and why at least one of the squares in the “Crazy Box” challenge mode is all about teaching you how to perform them. It’s what I’ve come to think of as gatekeeper knowledge: it guards the way to good scores and long games. If you don’t know it, you’re doomed to fail.
Crazy Taxi is an arcade game. Even on the Dreamcast, it’s just a direct port of the arcade version with added modes. Arcade games want your money, and they don’t want to give you very long games in exchange for it, so the next player can step up and put in their doomed quarters as well. But the catch is, if good players can’t have decently-playing games, then people won’t play. I heard it said that the average target game length was 90 seconds, and average means a substantial number of games will come in under that mark.
Yet, I can play Crazy Taxi for substantially longer than 90 seconds. I can go for 30 minutes. And it’s thanks in part to the Crazy Dash and the Limiter Cut, essential knowledge for the reckless cabbies of Faux San Francisco.
Because of the DragonCon Crazy Taxi machine’s flaky gas pedal, I didn’t have any 30 minute games there. But I did manage to make the scoreboard, barely, at 20th place, with a score of just over $5,000, getting (by the inflated metrics of its scoring system) a Class S license. Thing is, I must have watched a dozen other people play the game at DragonCon this year (the arcades there are always super packed), and none of them came close even to my meager score. Because none of them knew how to do a Crazy Dash. It was a stand-up cabinet, which didn’t have that sticker explaining how to do one.
That’s what I mean by gatekeeper information: it’s literally One Weird Trick to stellar Crazy Taxi scores and game times. Once you know how to do it your journey isn’t over, in fact I think that’s where the game starts to get really interesting, and my highest scores on the easiest difficulty are nearly $70K. But if you don’t know how to at least do a Crazy Dash, you will never get a good game of Crazy Taxi, you just have no chance. You’ll just waste too much time accelerating from a stop, and you’ll have to stop frequently to let off customers and pick up new ones. Its just how it’s designed.
What amazes me is that Crazy Taxi was a hit, it did very well in arcades and on Dreamcast, and yet still most players never learn this information. And in a way, and understand that I’m uncomfortable with this conclusion, that’s for the best? Like how a crane game set to reflex towards a target winning percentage will be more likely not to drop a piece of plush if a lot of players have recently lost, so too are all those players losing quickly at CT allowing the designers to guard half-hour games behind a simple maneuver that, still, few players will ever bother learning. The alternative is to make the trick harder, or even not to have one, dooming everyone, the casual and the dedicated, to those pitiful 90-second games. That’s capitalism for you.
Which shows, I guess, that the illusion of being able to do better is more important to arcade game success than reality? I don’t know, I’m uncomfortable talking about illusions in a post that started out mentioning politics. But hey, Tim Walz! If you read this and want some Crazy Taxi tips, reach out! And good luck in November, please help Kamala Harris to send That Other Person as far away from public office as possible.
Once you start thinking of it in terms of gatekeeper knowledge, you start seeing it everywhere. One-hit kill action games are full of it, since the first time you encounter any enemy, it’s likely to behave in some way that will kill you. The best action games will try to have an enemy demonstrate unexpected behavior at least once before it’s likely to be fatal. And any time a game kills your character out of basic unfairness, like from a sudden unavoidable death trap, that’s gatekeeper info.
UFO 50, for all its greatness, does this a lot. The very first game in the collection, Barbuta, has an instant death laughably close to the start. Some of its games feel like a sequence of deaths you have to experience, each at least once, before you’re allowed to win. But it’s far from unique in this, and in presenting itself as the history of a fictional 80s developer, it could be argued that it’s mirroring the development of game design at the time.
It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:
The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.
High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.
So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.
With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!
The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.
It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
Yes! More Rampart! I’m still out of town at DragonCon so I’m repurposing an old strategy guide I wrote for Extended Play into a week of posts. Even I’m starting to get sick of Rampart by now, but please stick around. And if you’ve ever tried playing this infuriating game in the arcade, this might give you the advice you need to get through to levels you might not have thought possible! And this is even a fairly short post!
Castles available: 6
It’s advised not to start on this level unless it’s your first game. You’ll not only miss out of 5,000 points by starting here, but it means the beginning of Level 2 will begin you with only two cannons instead of three, and you’ll face more ships.
This level is so easy that it barely rates mention. It has six castles, and only Gunships appear. Unless you’re purposely stalling, you’ll finish this map in two rounds. Even if you stall, the level auto-completes in three rounds, regardless of if you fire a single shot.
Another reason to avoid picking Beginner is that its selection is always the “J” map, which is one of the easier selections from the initial four boards. It’s better if you pick it later, when the opposition is harder, to balance out the difficulty.
Castles available: 5
The Veteran level is randomly chosen from one of the other three basic maps, although it tends to be the “C” map most often. Ideally it won’t be the “Hat” map, it being the easiest, as you’ll want it to be your Level 4.
If you started on the board, the first round will always put you up against four ships, one of which may be a Lander. Later ships are frequently also Landers. As a result grunts may appear on this board, but even if some appear, so long as you focus on destroying enemy ships and don’t suffer major setbacks like losing your home castle, you’ll probably wipe out the attackers before they become a huge problem.
On a later round in this level you’ll probably encounter your first Red Ship. A Red Ship tends to get off two or three shots in a round, each producing flaming crater you must build around.
Castles available: 5
You always get to pick this level yourself. I usually try to make it “C,” “J” or “Hat,” in that order. I usually avoid picking “N,” but it’s not really harder than “C,” so pick whatever is your preference.
Much of the fleet will be Landers here, so this is the first level where you must be diligent about thinning out their numbers. Especially try to take care of ships about to land; grunts are unwelcome visitors to deal with, and it’s best if they never show up at all. In the event of a landin, which is sometimes unavoidable, try to spare a few seconds to build a barrier to them, to wall them off from the rest of the board. If you can contain them in a small area around the landing, you can keep their numbers down that way and thus reduce the number of shots you must expend in cleaning them up. Don’t think you can just let them be! They will overwhelm you easily if you ignore them.
I try to pick a home castle that’s near another castle, so I can capture them both with one wall. If you can consistently get both each round, that’s three cannons each time. Use them to connect the space between the two castles, but try to keep that space as small as possible. Try to aim for the minimum-sized rectangle needed to save both of them, and then try to place all your cannons within that rectangle.
Castles available: 4
Now the game starts to get serious. If you can get here on your first credit you’ve done very well, but your weak basic guns will become more and more of a liability for you. Dark ships start appearing on this level, and will continue to appear until the end of the game. They all take one extra hit to sink. That’s three hits for Gunships, four for Landers, and six for Red Ships.
Try to make Landers that have a chance of landing at a diagonal shore your top priority. If one makes it through, then at the start of the Building phase devote three seconds or so it blocking their progress with walls. If they get away from the shore and a significant number appear, then focus on surviving and shoot them with cannons during Battle. Red Ships start to be a significant threat here. Once all the potential landings are taken care of, try to pump six shots into a Red Ship.
Castles available: 3
Regardless of how you got here, you have a choice between two new maps for this level, a diagonal peninsula going upper-right to lower-left, or one going from upper-left to lower-right. I call these the “slash” and “backslash” maps, respectively. I usually pick backslash, but both are about the same difficulty.
These maps have the property of having two seas, a small one at the top of the screen and a more typical larger one at the bottom. The small water region is both a blessing and a curse; the restricted movement makes it easier to destroy ships there, but landings are very likely unless you clear out the Landers arriving there. What is more, these maps are the only ones in the game that break the rule about landings only being possible on diagonal shores. Landers in the small sea are also counted as landed if they contact land at the very edge of the screen, even if there’s no diagonal shore nearby. This property doesn’t extend to screen-edge landings in the larger sea.
The worst thing about these levels is that the game takes off the limiter on the number of Red Ships that can be generated each round. Red Ships here are nearly as common as Double-Sailed ones! You’ll frequently see seven or more on-screen at a time. While you must remain vigilant to prevent and/or mitigate landings, you must also work towards reducing the number of Red Ships. The large number of flaming craters on these levels made adopting a “summer home” strategy imperative, where you switch off between castles when one gets too difficult, or even impossible, to save. It’s usually a good idea to try to capture two castles in the first round because of this; then you can station some or all of your cannons for that round at the other castle, so you’re not defenseless when you’re forced to turn to it for survival. From there, you can focus on getting cannons around the third castle for maximum safety.
This level is a strong test of your Rampart skills, and often is a barrier to progression until you’ve played many games. But it’s not invincible. On Easy difficulty, I’ve passed this level still on my first credit multiple times. The biggest thing you have to worry about is the high probability of impossible situations.
Consider: when any castle is adjacent to other objects, you must capture the whole collection as a set. Chains of objects like this increase the difficulty of getting the whole thing, and increases the odds of getting an impossible save. I’ve seen this happen after even the first round on a peninsula board, and I’ve seen it happen on all three castles on one of these maps at the same time.
The only substantive thing you can do, besides rotating between castles, is to shoot some of the dangerous walls yourself. Red Cannonballs don’t leave craters if the wall is already destroyed, but that takes time and often makes for a difficult repair.
So, what if you manage to clear this map? What happens next? The game scrolls the FINAL BATTLE banner, and you get a one-way ticket to:
Castles available: 2
It all comes down to this. This level is a special kind of hell, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it seems you can get away with sinking fewer ships here, and, because you’re surrounded on all sides, your shots often don’t have that far to travel to reach a ship. There are four prime landing areas, each in one corner of the map, so landings can only be delayed, not prevented. And you only get two castles. Enjoy!
When you start looking more closely at the map, some slight advantages become apparent. There’s a lake in the bottom-left of the board, which gets in the way, somewhat, of grunts approaching from the bottom. Both castles have a good amount of land around them, although there are so many Red Ships here that the “summer home” strategy is essential to survival.
The continue limit eases up a little bit here. If you were at the maximum of four continues upon starting Level Six, the game will grant you an extra continue when you get here. (You still have to pay your coins for it though.) And also, if you were at that final credit, the game will actually downgrade your cannons one step when you get here, so get used to expending two/three/five shots for Gunships/Landers/Red Ships again. If (ha ha, “if”) you do expend that last continue, you go back to only needing one/two/four shots to sink ships. (There is more information on the effects of continues on cannon power in the notes, later on.)
This level is an ordeal, but it can be finished surprisingly quickly. I’ve seen it cleared in three rounds, although that was after several continues (it had been a pretty great game up to that point). This level is the big obstacle to one-credit clears, I’ve managed to finish everything up to it on one credit only to bang my head against it repeatedly. Using save states, I’ve managed to finish it with a single continue, so it is possible to finish it relatively cheaply, but making do with such weak cannons is a real challenge.
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
Because I’m out of town for a few days, we’re continuing our week-long coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, yet really hard classic arcade strategy game Rampart.
Each of Rampart’s phases has its own considerations, so let’s take them one at a time.
Rampart’s most traditional mode is its Battle sequence, which plays a bit like Atari’s old hit Missile Command. For a limited amount of time, players use the trackball to move a crosshairs around the screen, and the Fire button launches a cannonball from one of their cannons aimed at that spot.
Cannonballs have a set speed that they travel as they move through the air; nearby shots go directly towards the destination, but distant targets travel in a high arc. Thus, more distant shots take much more time to reach their targets, due to the fact that they have to be angled upward.
The speed of your shots matters for two important reasons. First, in single-player mode, enemy ships don’t always sit still and let your projectiles sink them, but move around at different speeds, and sometimes even try to dodge your shots. One of the most annoying events in Rampart is when you launch a volley towards a ship, and it decides to pull anchor and float elsewhere just as your shots launch, wasting those precious missiles. Firing at close-up ships means you don’t have to lead your targets by nearly as much, and reduces the chance that a ship will just sail out from under your projectiles.
The other important thing is, each cannon can only have one shot in the air at a time. Firing at nearby targets means you can get more shots off during a Battle phase. The combination of the two, being more accurate when shooting moving targets and getting more shots off, means that, absent other issues, you should prioritize firing at ships near your guns.
You cannot entirely erase the chance that a ship will decide to start, or stop, moving after you launch shots towards it, but there is some finesse that can be applied. Ships always sail in a straight line in one of the eight cardinal/diagonal directions, and ships cannot move through other ships. If a moving ship runs into another one, it will stop. They cannot turn around while in motion, but must wait until their invisible captain picks a new direction, which could be immediately or never. They also stop if they reach the shoreline, which for a Lander could be very bad for you. Once in a while a moving ship will just stop for no reason. The only constant is, all ships stop moving at the very end of the Battle phase, once all cannonballs have landed.
The rules of cannonfire, the ones concerning shot speed and there only being one shot in play at a time per weapon, they also apply to the enemy ships. Nearby ships are able to launch more shots at closer walls than distant ones, another reason to prioritize shooting nearby ships. But this must be balanced against those times when you need to prevent a landing, or take out some Red Ships to make the Build phase more survivable.
The game continues no matter how many ships you sink in Battle, but to progress to the next level, and eventually win the game, it’s advantageous to sink ships. The exact qualification for finishing a level is unknown, but it seems to happen after you wipe out most of the ships on-screen.
There is a maximum of 16 ships that can be in play at any time. If that number is reached, but there are some weakened or Single-Sailed Ships on-screen, Rampart is known to remove some of them so stronger ships may enter the fray.
This is the meat of the game. While shooting ships eventually clears levels, you can’t do that without cannons, and cannons are awarded from skill at building. Also, if you fail to capture at least one castle in a round, you lose.
The way it works is, the game hands you an assortment of building pieces of various shapes, one at a time. The pieces you’re given first exist as just a flashing outline that you can maneuver freely over the land with the trackball or joystick. You can move it anywhere while you’re getting it into position, or rotate it clockwise with a press of the “Rotate” button. (If you start out your first building phase without using the button, the game’s voice will suddenly intone, “Use ROTATE for a better fit!” Rampart doesn’t have nearly as much digitized speech as Gauntlet, but it sure is memorable when it does speak.)
The difficult bit is, you cannot place pieces anywhere there is something per-existing. A piece cannot be placed if any part of it overlaps with another wall, the shore, a castle, a cannon, a crater, a grunt, or the edge of the screen. Everything visible beneath the piece’s outline must be the clean, green checkerboard of countryside.
You must place the current piece before you get the next one. Intermediate Rampart players ruefully observe that the game tends to hand out just the wrong piece they need at a given time. A lot of this is observation bias, you don’t tend to notice the times when the game hands you just the right piece, but it’s true that the pieces the game has to hand get larger and more complex as the game continues.
When a piece is plopped down it turns into wall. If the wall adjoins wall pieces already extant, they’ll join together pleasingly into a solid-looking structure. Your task is to connect wall pieces together like this until you have a complete loop all the way around and enclosing at least one castle. Usually you want this castle will be the one you start with, called your “Home Castle.” It’s worth extra points and cannons if you capture it, but any castle will allow you to survive.
There are two particular hassles in the Building phase that deserve special mention. The first are those grunts the Landers sometimes drop off if they reach the shore, and that have the power to move around during Building. They look like tiny tanks, or little battering rams.
Grunts move during Building, meaning they can actually block pieces just as you’re trying to place them. They not only move, but slowly multiply as they go, tending to form lines between the shore and your castles. Worst of all, grunts that make it to your castles have the power to destroy them during the following Battle phase, the only thing in the game that can harm a castle itself.
Grunts are so dangerous that landings must quickly be dealt with or else your game will soon be over. You can shoot them during the Battle phase, or you can surround the territory they’re on, destroying them instantly with a satisfying crunching noise.
One important thing to note about grunts is that they can’t be dropped off just anywhere. Landers (here circled) can only leave grunts on diagonal shorelines. Highlighted above are the landing sites on the “Hat” map. Guard them at all costs.
The other problem you must worry about during Building is craters, flaming pits in the very ground left when the red cannonballs launched by Red Ships strike your wall. A crater is an implacable obstacle; there is no way to remove a crater from the board other than time. Near the end of the game, depending on the randomized ship generation, you may end up with rounds where you must face six or more Red Ships at once, which is horrifying.
When a crater is formed, it’s a full-strength pit of fire. Every Battle phase, each crater diminishes a bit. They all do this in lockstep: all the craters formed in one round will advance to the next state at once.
How does the game decide how quickly to make craters disappear? It’s a function of how recently you’ve put in money and continued the game! If you’ve recently continued, then for a while the game makes craters disappear in two rounds instead of three.
The Cannon phase is much less tense than the others. You get ten seconds to place additional cannons for subsequent Battles. But placement of cannons is one of the most important decisions of all. In a sense, the reason you’re capturing castles, beyond mere survival, is to support your artillery.
For the first Cannon phase of the whole game, the game gives you three cannons to get you started. On the first Cannon phase after continuing, you get four, as part of the “and more firepower” the game promises. On the first round of other levels, you start with just two.
Beyond that, on each successive Cannon phase, you get two more cannons to place for having captured your home castle, and one more for each other castle. But this only happens if you have room to place them. When surrounding castles in the Building phase, you must not only survive, but try to leave extra room for placing cannons, that is, if you want more artillery.
The more cannons you have, the more shots you can get off in the Battle phase, and thus the more of a dent you can put into the enemy navy and/or other players’ walls. This, in turn, decreases the shots coming in towards your walls, lets you do something about Landers before they drop off Grunts, lets you shoot at Grunts directly, allows you to sink more Red Ships before they set your whole countryside ablaze, and ultimately depletes the opposing navy faster.
Lots of cannons mean lots of shots! Shots can stop landings, clear out Red Ships, and hasten the end of the level.
But cannons are also a big problem. Each cannon you place is a 2×2 square of ground that cannot be otherwise built upon, which restricts the shapes of pieces that can fit on the ground. Having lots of cannons progresses you through the level, but increases the area you have to surround to survive.
Practically, you must build at least some cannons directly adjacent to your castle, and other cannons adjacent to those, in a big sulfuric blob. Thus, to capture that castle, you’ll also have to capture all the cannons that adjoin it, a mass of guns that grows in size with each round. And in case you come up with the idea to build cannons away from castles to avoid this, you should know that cannons that aren’t “owned” during a battle phase sit idle, doing nothing.
A “summer home” is a secondary castle you turn to in order to survive, usually with cannons attached, when your home castle is too difficult to recover.
You must have cannons to survive through each level, to punch back against the enemy, to take care of threats and eventually to advance towards finishing it, but having them makes later Building phases harder. Once a cannon is placed, it cannot be removed except by losing and continuing the game. And not having any cannons is a counter to using the “summer home” strategy for every round: while you can often abandon your home castle and its armaments in favor of a small unadorned dwelling out in the sticks, unless you’ve built cannons there on previous rounds, you’ll have, at most, one gun to thwart landings. A lot of games have ended due to this.
One subtle aspect to Rampart strategy is the cannon firing order. Cannons fire in the order in which they were placed. Any uncaptured cannons, and also cannons with shots in the air, are ignored in the queue. The difference in lead time between a cannon near the shore, and one way back at the screen edge, is significant, and can result in a lot of missed shots. To thwart this, it helps to try to build cannons in one mass, instead of spread out, and to try to build in more centralized locations, but truthfully it’s difficult to consciously make use of this strategy during a game.
This is a danger spot, a location where, if a single Red Cannonball hits, it renders the whole castle and its cannons impossible to capture.
One thing that players cannot afford to ignore is the danger of building cannons too close to the water or the edge of the screen. This is a huge concern. Building cannons close to hard barriers like those greatly reduces the number of pieces that will fit between the gun and the obstacle, and increases the chance that a red cannonball will hit in a such a place as to create an impossible rescue. To the game’s credit, Red Ships do not appear to target these locations intentionally, but neither do they avoid them, so It’s important to try to leave at least two spaces between cannons and any hard barriers, and more if you can. Especially look out for one-space diagonal separation, because it isn’t as obviously dangerous as horizontal or vertical. The more free space around your installations, the easier it’ll be to build walls there later, and the better off you’ll be.
So what if you decide you have enough cannons and don’t want to place some or all this round, do you have to sit and wait out the clock? Why, no: if you make five consecutive illegal cannon placements in a row, the game will take that as a signal that you’re done placing them and end the Cannon phase immediately.
That’s three parts so far! Yes, there’s more to say about this diabolical game, but we’ll take a break for a couple of days, for other posts. See you soon!
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
We continue our lengthy, obsessive coverage of Atari Games’ brilliant, but really difficult, arcade strategy game Rampart.
Rampart is really two separate but related games, the single-player game and multiplayer. Both are excellent. Even so, this article mostly concerns itself with single-player, but towards the end I will have a few things to say about its multiplayer mode.
Before we begin, you should know that Rampart is a highly abstract game, and as such it might not be easy to see how it all fits together from a text description. I have uploaded several complete playthroughs of the game to YouTube, the first such on that site of the arcade version. You might watch a bit of one of them, it should make it pretty obvious how the game works.
In both single-player and multiplayer, after selecting a home castle and placing initial cannons, the game repeats a sequence of rounds, each consisting of a Battle phase, Building phase and Cannon phase. In the Battle phase, players shoot at ships or the other players’ walls, while those ships or enemy cannons fire back at their own walls. In the Building phase, players place a variety of shaped pieces in an attempt to fix their wall and/or construct walls around at least one of the castles on their land within a time limit. Then in the Cannon phase, players get a number of new cannons to place within the territory they captured in the Building phase, adding to the number of shots they can get off in Battle.
Select Home Castle, then
Cannons -> Battle -> Building -> repeat
This cycle continues until the player wins or loses. Losing happens when a player fails to capture a castle in time in Building. Winning happens, in single-player, when the game decides the ships don’t have a reasonable chance of defeating the player, and advances to the next level, out of six in total. In multiplayer, it happens when all the other players have lost and don’t continue, or for a set number of battles. If the fight goes the full distance, the winner is the surviving player with the highest score.
A defeated player can put more money in the machine to continue the game “with more firepower.” This is allowed four times in single-player, so up to five credits in all, and losing after that results in a solid Game Over. The dynamics of continuing in Rampart are really more complex than this, and I’ll explain those later, but for the time being, you should know “with more firepower” signifies several important changes that are not all clear during play.
In multiplayer, losing players can choose to continue individually twice. That can make for a decently long game if all the players choose to buy all their continues. But eventually, the game will declare a round to be the “Final Battle,” after which no continues will be offered to losing players, and the game ends regardless. The number of rounds a game is allowed to go is operator-adjustable, and continued games usually add a few battles to the overall length.
There also exists one semi-secret game variation. If just two players play Rampart, and at least one of them is joining in again after a completed game, there is a map selection screen that offers the chance to play a composite game mode, featuring both two players and ships! In this, the ships belong to one or the other side, and are color-coded based on who they belong to. They function like extra cannons, generally firing where the player aims their cursor, but are more autonomous. This mode is an interesting variation, and is fairly obscure. Could there be other such secrets hidden in Rampart’s code?
For now, we’re most concerned with figuring out and defeating the very difficult single-player game. The basic play of both games is similar, but there is a lot of difference between attacking ships or walls, and the structure of single-player is quite different, so it’s worth treating each mode separately.
When you put a coin in and press Start, this appears:
This ornate lobby screen is accompanied by booming drums and realistic, although synthesized, trumpets and fifes. With the volume turned up (as all Rampart machines should rightfully have) the effect is startling and bound to attract some attention. The purpose of this screen is to give other players the opportunity to join the game, for unlike the Gauntlet-style, “join any time” play model Atari pioneered and most arcade games used, once underway a game of Rampart cannot be entered by others. Players can only leave a game, by failing and not continuing.
An interesting thing about Rampart is that, after a game concludes, it always returns to the lobby screen and adds the player’s score to a total across all their games in the session. This encourages players to play repeated games, to see their overall score climb higher and higher. I’ve seen the total go up to over 900,000 points, which takes around 18 full-length games. I know of no reason to go for a high total score other than vanity, but if someone else has information on this I’d certainly like to know!
Assuming a single-player game, the screen clears and shows an overview screen of an island. There are four possible maps that can be selected for play here. At the start of the game, two areas along the shore are boxed, one marked “RECRUIT,” the other “VETERAN +5000 points.” Most of Atari Games’ arcade releases had such a selection, for it was a major part of their house style to offer a basic and an advanced difficulty, with a score bonus for starting harder. With Rampart, this choice is mostly an illusion. All choosing Recruit does is start you off with a very easy first board (the Recruit map is always the “J” map), which usually takes two rounds to finish.
Each level pits the player against a larger and more dangerous enemy navy.
At first, only weak Single-Sailed Ships attack, which go down with two hits from basic cannonry. Here, I call these Gunships.
With level two comes Double-Sailed Ships, a.k.a. Landers, which take three hits, and if they manage to get close to a diagonal shoreline, they drop off a swarm of evil little Grunts.
Grunts are a huge danger! They are the only enemy that has the power to move around during the Building phase. I’ll have more to say about them later, but for now just know that a grunt beachhead, left unopposed, has more credit-ending power than anything else in the game.
Starting with level three, Red Ships join the battle. Although few in number at first, these take five shots to sink, and their red cannonballs leave fiery craters where they land. Craters block piece placement and persist for multiple rounds. Usually a Red Ship can get off two or three shots each Battle, and they add up.
Levels four through six feature the same kinds of ships, but they’re darker in color, which in game terms means they take one additional hit before sinking. Dark Gunships take three hits, Dark Landers require four hits, and Dark Red Ships only go down after six cannonballs have struck them.
Every time you complete a level, you’re returned to the island screen to pick a new map to play. After the first level, three remaining unplayed options are offered. If you chose a Recruit game you’ll eventually have to face all these boards, but if you picked Veteran and started on level two, you end up skipping one of them, an opportunity to avoid a disliked map.
The “C” Map
The “Hat” Map
The “J” Map
The “N” Map
The maps are not even in difficulty. Generally, easier maps have castles with land around them on all sides, and more straight horizontal or vertical coastline, giving Landers fewer places to land. My opinion is that the “Hat” map is the easiest, followed by the “J” map, then the “C” and “Lowercase N” maps. A good strategy is to try to get one of the harder two maps out of the way as first selection, so you can later play the J and Hat maps to offset the harshness of the third and fourth levels, but sometimes the Veteran selection level ends up being the Hat, and you’ll have to play them in a different order.
The “Slash” Map
The “Backslash” Map
Level five is selected from one of two unique maps, both peninsulas with water on both sides. Both are difficult, although I think the “Backslash” board is a little easier. As you progress, each level starts you out with fewer castles to capture. By this point you’re only getting three castles, and you’ll probably have to use all of them to survive.
The final, “Island” Map
The last level is an island to itself, with a lake on it and only two castles! Here, ships attack from both sides of the screen. This level is a trial; although you have to sink fewer ships here to win, it’s difficult to prevent landings and grunts from overwhelming you, and the craters from Red Ships can easily give you an inescapable situation unless you mitigate them.
If you finish the last level, you get special ending music, and an illustration that few arcade goers have seen, before being returned to the High Score and Lobby screens. It may seem anti-climatic, but final victory and safe shores are their own reward.
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
The next week is going to be pretty busy for me, so I’m reusing a long long piece I originally wrote for the short-lived fanzine I made, Extended Play. It’s been seen before, but only by a very small audience.
Rampart has been an obsession to me since it came out around 1990. I still think it’s one of the finest arcade games ever made, actually one of the best video games period. People tend to describe it as either an early version of Tower Defense, or Missile Command meets Tetris, but neither description is very good. Simply, there had never been a game like Rampart before, and despite some attempts to clone it, there’s never been a game like it since, either.
We’re all as obsessed with weird old arcade games as I am, right? Right?? Most (but not all) of the next week of posts will all be about this wonderful, but extremely difficult, game, one of the best from Atari Games at their heights. Please bear with me, and please, try to understand why I’ve been so into this unique game for so long.
In the late 80s Atari Games was recovering from 1983’s Great Game Crash, which decimated the US arcade industry and resulted in a great dying out of companies. Atari Games, newly split away from the consumer electronics company that would make the Atari ST, weathered it better than most, primarily through developing ingenious kinds of games the likes of which were seen nowhere else.
This period, 1984-1990, is the age that began with Marble Madness and the System 1 hardware, followed by hits like Paperboy, 720 Degrees, Gauntlet, Toobin’, Cyberball and others. It lasted roughly to the release of Street Fighter II, which sparked the fighting game craze and made arcades inhospitable to most other genres for a while. At the tail end of this period came Rampart, designed by John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who also created three of the games in the foregoing list.
It’s a bit obscure now, but it was quite a hit for Atari at the time. For home systems Rampart received no less than thirteen distinct ports, plus a few notable emulations. It got very good reviews from Nintendo Power (SNES version) and Videogames & Computer Entertainment (arcade). More recently, it was released emulated with network play for free for the PlayStation 3. And yet, still, no one talks about Rampart anymore.
That is a weird thing about what I call Atari Games’ “Silver Age,” that time after the classic arcade boom of the late 70s/early 80s but before the rise of one-on-one fighting games, its games, while still fun and surprisingly ingenious, and widely ported, don’t have the star power, other than a couple of things like Gauntlet, that Japanese releases from the same time have garnered.
Part of the reason may be trademark-related. The name Atari still carries considerable nostalgic weight, but another company, the one formerly known as Infogrammes, bought the trademark and the classic Fuji logo, and still releases games under it. They own the rights to everything before Marble Madness. Games after that were owned by Midway for a while, but Midway then, in a crushing indignity, renamed them Midway Games West, before closing them outright in 2005, getting out of arcades altogether. Many of its assets were sold to Warner Bros. Entertainment, who presumably now owns the rights to Atari’s post-Marble Madness catalog.
I’ve written before that, at their peak, I think Atari Games was more ingenious and original than Nintendo themselves. They made some stinkers, sure (few remember Thunderjaws, or their arcade take on Tim Burton’s Batman movie) but their best games were, and still are, amazing. I think that Rampart, while little talked about now, is at the top of the gilded heap.
Rampart is great, but it’s difficult. For a game I’ve been obsessed with since its release in arcades in 1989, I can only complete it on default settings about a third of the time, and usually only after expending all the continues the game allows. This was common for Atari Games games, who tended to make arcade machines that mocked the idea of one credit runs, but even among those, Rampart is hard. You are not going to master this one overnight.
I view my purpose here usually to be a secondary source. That is, I prefer to summarize, encapsulate, explain and preserve information available elsewhere. But the thing about Rampart is, there is very little of this information to find. For a game that was popular at the time of its release and with so many ports, googling it will not turn up much to aid you. As far as I know, and I’ve searched for it many times throughout the years, Rampart has never had a good, comprehensive strategy guide written for it.
It is because of this, favored reader, that I have decided that this shall be that guide. Since most of it is self-discovered, I have no one to blame for errors but myself. I have made some efforts to make sure it’s correct, but, well, sometimes even well-considered assumptions turn out to be false. I’ve done what I can.
(More tomorrow!)
Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.
Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.
If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.
A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.
Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.
Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.
Mission: Impossible (TechTinkering)
Dani Bunten’s classic economic simulation M.U.L.E. is one of the all-time greats, still fairly obscure even among people who know and talk about video and computer games, but hugely influential. Wikipedia tells us that Shigeru Miyamoto considers it an influence on the Pikmin games (although other than in theme I really don’t see it).
There are three current ways to play M.U.L.E. One is Planet M.U.L.E., an official port sponsored by Ozark Softscape, which is several years old, and I was certain I had posted here about before. It’s a proper update with new graphics and a lot of character. A thing about M.U.L.E. is that the original versions were intricately designed in a lot of ways, not just in game rules but the little details. The way the phase ending noise speeds up, the exact difficulty of catching a Wampus, the speeds with which players walk through terrain, the many details of auctions, even the time it takes to outfit a mule and leave/enter town, it’s all finely calculated. You can tell that Dani cared deeply about the game, and it’s a polished as any game I’ve ever seen, and that’s the old 8-bit computer versions. Planet M.U.L.E. isn’t as polished, but it’s still very nice, and you can tell its makers thought hard about it. It offers both local and online play.
Sadly, Planet M.U.L.E. seems to be on life support. While games can still be played, and the automated best player posts still go up on its blog, it’s not gotten an update in years, and it’s even possible they’ve lost the source code.
One legacy of Planet M.U.L.E. is a wonderful Youtube video they made that explains the game and how to play. It’s a great introduction:
M.U.L.E. Returns was a mobile port. It has a website, that’s still around, but apparently none of those versions are available. It’s got a page for a Steam version, but it’s not available despite the original game being released in 2013. The site claims it may come back some day, but it cannot be purchased currently.
Then there’s the new roboanimal on the block, M.U.L.E. Online, which is on itch.io for a very reasonable $5. It has the blessing of Ozark Softscape, and is a near match for the Atari 800 version. You won’t get any improved graphics or sound here, but you will get a game that copies the original very closely, which is perfectly fine in my opinion. It offers local single and multiplayer, as well as internet-based online play. They also promote a board game version of M.U.L.E, which I’ve long wanted to try!
Or there’s emulation. Back in college I played M.U.L.E. with roommates via an Atari 800 emulator burnt to a Dreamcast disk, a great way to play if you have the system, controllers and means to construct the disk because the Dreamcast has four controller ports. (M.U.L.E. is by far at its best when you have four people playing.) The Commdore 64 and IBM PC versions were also made by Dani and the others at Ozark Softscape. The C64 port is close to the Atari 8-bit version. I don’t know about the DOS PC version. I can say that the NES version made by Mindscape is a terrible version, while sadly possibly the most-played because of the great popularity of the NES. If you tried that version and wondered what the fuss is about, you should seek out the Atari 8-bit version and play it before writing off the game entirely.
World Of Mule is a fansite dedicated to M.U.L.E. in all its forms. For its 40th anniversary, they’ve published a long retrospective on the game, its history and the new versions. (That’s where the above image comes from.) It’s a fitting tribute to one of the most influential computer games ever made.
Long ago, on primordial wiki-like site everything2.com, I personally wrote a long examination and play guide to M.U.L.E. While my writing style back then was pretty crazy, I think the information holds up. If you have an interest, you may want to take a look.
Planet Mule ($0, Windows, Mac and Linux)
M.U.L.E. Returns (versions currently unavailable)
M.U.L.E. Online (itch.io, Windows, Mac and Linux, $5)
World of M.U.L.E. (carpeludum.com)
M.U.L.E. The Board Game (boardgamegeek item page)
I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time! U Can Beat Video Games has finally covered the best NES Dragon Warrior, the third game in the series. It was Dragon Quest III in Japan, due to some trademark issue with TSR I think. IV isn’t bad, and has fun characters, but there aren’t as many variant strategies in it, and in the last chapter you don’t get to control the actions of most of your party members. DWIII always gives you full control of your characters, plus it lets you create characters with names and classes of your choosing, meaning, like the first Final Fantasy, you can make completely custom parties and play the game in many different ways. It was the game that spawned the urban legend that the Japanese government requested that Enix release Dragon Quest games on weekends, because so many people ditched work to stand in line to buy it. (I don’t know if it’s true, but the story has often been passed around.)
It’s also the first Dragon Quest/Warrior game that allows for class changing, which resets a character to Level 1 (similar to an human AD&D character who dual-classed), but only halves their stats, and lets them keep all the spells they learned. Since they’re Level 1 again, they gain levels very rapidly for a while, allowing them to quickly surpass their previous heights. It’s kind of an early version of the “prestige” mode of clicker games, where you reset all your progress in exchange for faster progress afterward!
It also has a cool story that eventually connects with the first two games, and has a good variety of activity, including growing a town from scratch like 25 years before Breath of the Wild and betting on monster fights! It’s also got all the challenge of the early Dragon Quest games, with later monsters who can cast instant death spells on everyone in your party at once, as well as doing other horrible things to them.
Because Dragon Warrior III doesn’t pull its punches against the player, the various tricks that the narrator does to use the engine’s bugs against it feel like playing fair, and yet, even with full knowledge of the game and multiple player leveling and cash gaining strategies he still has problems once in a while. It’s a really tough game!
This may end up being U Can Beat Video Games’ magnum opus, at least of the NES era, it’s a really long game that takes three videos, of almost 12 hours total length, to cover in its entirety! Here they are:
EPISODE ONE: Creating Your Party Through to Getting the Ship (3 hours, 59 minutes)
EPISODE TWO: Getting the Ship through to Defeating Archfiend Baramos (4 hours, 22 minutes)
EPISODE THREE: The Dark World to the Final Boss, Plus Extras (3 hours, 35 minutes)
Please enjoy, and Rubiss help us all!
‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.
We’re approaching the end of our burst of coverage of Unix, DOS, Linux, Mac and Amiga roguelike Omega. There are even other places to play it that have arrived since then, including OS/2, Windows console native, Windows with graphics, and even in-browser.
My experiences with Omega have been filled with death, frustration, annoyance, exasperation, and death. But I have also greatly enjoyed the game. While even with source-diving I have not gotten much farther than completing the Goblin Caves, the game is still enjoyable for me to play. There’s lots of cool things to discover, powerful items to find, and interesting strategies to formulate. In Omega one may see early forms of ideas found in venerable NetHack and ADOM.
Those two games have had a lot more fan obsession directed at them over the years, which has broken off some of their sharper edges. There are entire genres of NetHack variants devoted to fixing things about it that some people disagree with.
Omega has not had this advantage. Rather more things will just kill you in Omega. There are a lot of things that deserve experimentation, but that experimentation will often result in an expedited demise, or else make your character unplayable, or merely erase much of your progress.
At @Play we are of the opinion that more people should play all roguelikes, be they classic, modern, or lite. So please, allow me to present a basic strategy FAQ for Omega. Information from this has been derived from many sources: an old FAQ for 0.75, ancient posts on the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.misc (that’s a link to Google Groups, so follow it before it goes the way of late lamented Reader), and the source code to Omega (these here are the sources I examined).
Why am I so into this? It’s because it’s a worthy game, one that can give an interested player a lot of enjoyment, yet few people talk about it anymore. And yet there is a real sense that this game could someday just vanish. While there’s several Github projects hosting the source with grandiose aims, like converting the code to use C++ or making a “Next Generation” version, they haven’t seen movement in several years.
In a file in the code, Omega creator Laurence Brothers offers his hopes for future development of his project. But then he graduated from college, and passed the game on to others, who, after some initial effort, have not done a great amount with it in the decades since.
Adult Life happens to everyone, and no one should be faulted for failing to maintain an old terminal game that was mostly played by college students. But it is a shame that Omega doesn’t have an inscrutable and forbidding DevTeam like NetHack does, to be mysterious in their aims and slightly malicious in their efforts.
As I’ve said, I’ve been tooling around a little with the source code. Omega’s structure isn’t that hard to understand. Maybe something will come of it. If it does, you can be sure that I’ll mention it here, and probably try to get some more column mileage out of it. Until then, here is a whole lot of strategy discussion on Omega.
This is pretty long! It may be the longest single @Play column I’ve ever written. It’s basically a FAQ itself, although in actuality few have done any asking for a long time. NetHack and ADOM have full wikis. Omega deserves one too, but until that day happens, this is what I’ve been able to piece together.
This logjam of an article is presented along the lines that, if people want to read it, it’s here, and if they don’t, well, at least I’m done talking about Omega for now, and it’s all here neatly in a single page that you can hit Close Tab on with a song in your heart. I don’t expect you to share my obsessions, only that you recognize why I’m obsessed, and to consider if you’d like to house this ancient DOS roguelike in your own brain too.
Here, you will discover how to join guilds, what spells the religions teach, how to immediately earn thousands of gold pieces, the details of more than one secret game mechanic, what to wish for, and how to enter Omega’s secret cheat mode….
Here are the previous posts on Omega: one – two – three – four. And while we’re at it, here’s the two previous posts on Omega’s contemporary Alphaman: first – second.
So, what is your character trying to accomplish in Omega? The answer is: who knows?
In its way a bit like Animal Crossing, there is no definite ending to Omega. Your character can retire if they earn 50,000 gold pieces and buy a condo in Rampart. If you do that, then visit it and choose to retire, to the game, that’s a win: it calls the function p_win(), and ends the game. Pay off Tom Nook!
The other form of winning involves becoming an Adept, which means completing the Adept’s Challenge. In the game’s code this is called a “bigwin.” I am not completely sure of the requirements, but part of it involves going to the Astral Plane, which is done through the auspices of the Oracle of the Blue Flame, so don’t attack her! Once you do so you can make wishes when you want, but your score is frozen at the moment you complete the challenge.
Another form of victory is to get your name in one of the positions of the scoreboard. Instead of a Top-X list of scores, it’s a number of positions in the game world. If your character gets to the top of a guild, or a religion, or completes all the Duke’s quests, or gets the greatest Law or Chaos alignment score seen on that installation, gets commemorated, not just on the scoreboard, but as a presence in the game world for future players to hear about.
Alignment
Maintaining alignment is a weird process. Omega was created at a time when old school D&D’s lawful/chaotic system was still in recent memory. In this moral setup, good and lawfulness get generally conflated, as do evil and chaoticness. A necessarily reductive, even medieval, outlook upon the world, no distinction is made for rulebreaking to help the oppressed, or the enforcement of evil laws.
In D&D, you decide your character’s alignment when you create it, and the DM is expected to enforce that decision, with consequences should the player’s actions not line up with it. This is especially bad for paladins, who can lose all their class powers. In roguelikes like Hacklikes, ADOM and Omega, alignment naturally changes according to the player’s actions: if you do lawful things, your character slowly becomes more lawful, and the same goes for chaotic things.
There are a small number of things that can greatly affect your alignment. One of them is reading a scroll of law or drinking a potion of chaos when you’re already of that alignment. I find it instructive to recognize how Omega represents: law is information, but chaoticness is physical. There is a “chaos sea” in the game, but no such physical manifestation of law. Even so, each undoes the other.
Over time, the things that affect your alignment the most are small but frequent changes, especially how you deal with monsters. If you attack a monster before it gets a swing on you, it’s chaotic; if you let try to hit you first, it’s lawful. No allowance is made for whether you had a choice in the matter.
If you are purposely trying to change your alignment, the best way to do it is, perhaps oddly, by threatening to intelligent monsters.
By threatening them, instead of killing them wordlessly, you get three lawful points. If you threaten them and they surrender (usually from goblins), you’re give a choice to kill them, rob them, or to free it.
If you let them free, you get two more lawful points. If you rob them, you gain two chaotic points, which is not enough to overwhelm the push towards lawful. But if you execute them on the spot, you gain thirteen chaos points, enough to negate the lawful gain and ten more! It’s unsporting, but it’s a good way to ensure that you stay chaotic, like, if you’re in the Sorceror’s Guild and you don’t want to get mega-cursed, or want to advance with them.
Guilds
One of the first things you’ll want to do in a game of Omega is to join at least one guild in the town of Rampart.
There is a ton of information to relate on the guilds and what they each do, their requirements for joining, what you get when you join up and advance, etc. I decided to summarize it all by way of this chart:
You might have to right-click it and save if you want to get a good look; I’d like to increase its size by more, but WordPress seems determined to maintain that left margin, argh.
The Fighting, Magic and Religion categories of guilds are all mutually exclusive with each other: you can only belong to one of each at a time. Some will throw you out if you escape their good graces, which allows you to then join another one: the Paladins if you cease to be lawful, the Gladiators if you somehow escape a match without winning, and the Sorcerors’ if you stop being chaotic-although in that case, you also get pretty heavily cursed, and they refuse to sell you mana for the rest of the game. (I’ve seen at least one report that they outright kill you, but this is not supported by my reading of the source code. They do cause some damage, though.)
The whole early period in Rampart is a lot like an extended character creation session. In D&D terms, you don’t even have a “class” until you pick out your first guild. It’s a good idea to not to earn any experience points until you’ve joined at least one XP-using guild, so you don’t waste any.
Once you’re a member of a guild, however, it can be a good idea to hold back before joining a second. Your earned XP is split between all the guilds you’re a member of. While you’re a member of only one guild, all of your experience goes only into it, making your advancement in it very rapid. The next-to-last rank in each guild is reached at 4,000 XP. It’s not hugely difficult to get to this if you only have one. That’s only like four trifids. If you have four XP-needing guilds (the maximum), you need to get 16,000 XP to get that far.
The exception to this is the Gladiators. Advancement in the Gladiators doesn’t use XP, and so it doesn’t take a share of the XP you earn. This, makes the Gladiators rather best fighting guild for the magic reliant. Even if you never choose to fight in the Arena, you can still take advantage of their extra combat maneuver point and gym credit. You still need pretty good stats to get accepted by them, however.
The highest rank in all the guilds but the Gladiators requires both completing a special quest and exceeding the guild experience total of the last player to reach the top of that guild. In the Gladiators, you must beat a character with about the strength of the current Arena champion. On multi-user systems, players may compete on a shared scoreboard. Provided you then retire, this puts your character up on the scoreboard as the leader of that guild.
Back in the day, I’ve read, players would compete with each other to get up on the board; nowadays, is there any system in the whole world still running Omega this way? It is sadly a lost form of gaming. Nowadays, if you’re playing solo and don’t come up with a different name for all your characters, you’ll end up with multiple slots taken up by the same name, which breaks your perception of the world, a little.
This explanation of higher-level Omega play brings with it the caveat that I myself have yet to win, despite (and, in a way, because of) all of my experimentation with Omega. I will report in with more on Omega’s endgame someday, once I’ve managed to get to it.
So, which guilds should you choose?
Fighting guilds: My favorite is the Gladiators, because they don’t take a share of XP away from the other guilds, and because they give you gym credit, which lets you pick which stats you want to improve. The Mercenaries mostly give you cash, Strength, and Constitution. The Paladins don’t give you any stat advances at all, and you have to be Lawful to join and remain a member. They do give you a lot of perks though, and every advancement gives you a very good item. That absence of stat advances hurts though, it means you end up spending your own money on stat boosts to make up for it.
Magic guilds: There are two choices here. The tradeoff here is between a chance of random spells from the Collegium Magii, or specific spells and half-price mana refills from the Sorcerors. The randomness from the college is fun, and sometimes gets you very powerful magic (and free experience for learning it!) but makes it difficult to plan your magic game. The Sorcerors’ discount on mana helps you make much more use of your spells, whatever they end up being.
The college is free to join if your Int is at least 18. The Sorcerors Guild is much cheaper to join if you become more chaotic first; the fee can be reduced to as little as 100 gold pieces merely by executing a few goblins (talk to the with ‘t’, threaten them, then kill them).
Religions: The main reasons to join a religion, it seems to be, are some extra Power and the many spells they can teach you. Here they are, and the levels on which you receive them:
Level 3 in all the religions teaches Sanctify, and Level 4 gives you Blessing. The Lords of Destiny don’t offer any spells other than those, but you do still get Pow for advancing.
Note that Set grants Invisibility at Level 1, and again at Level 3, which seems to be an error. Getting Invisibility right away is a point in favor of Set, but getting it twice is a point against him. And Athena and Hecate get Shadowform, a very cool spell, a whole level before Set does.
Pawn Shop
One of my favorite aspects of the game is the pawn shop in Rampart. It’s a rotating selection of random items for sale at a discount. Everything there is pre-identified, both good and bad items can be found, and a large selection of items can appear there. There’s enough good items that show up that it’s usually worth your while to check in, but not so many that it makes the random items you find in dungeons pointless.
Coupled with the cash from robbing the autoteller, it’s a great resource that helps make every game feel different, even when much of the opening time in Rampart is not actually all that random. It also has a lot of psychological value. As I mentioned last time, Omega can be really capricious, and sometimes there’s nothing you can do to save your character. If you’re going to be forced to start over for frustrating reasons, it helps a lot to know you can look in on the pawn shop and have a good chance of finding something useful and different to help your new character get on their feet.
If you’re playing Omega 0.90, you’ll find that the Pawn Shop has a much larger selection!
There are a lot of spoilers here, many of which derived from reading the source code. That is your only warning. A game like Omega benefits strongly from having a community around it, to trade discoveries and observations and compete against each other. This community used to exist. Its annals are recorded in the archives of rec.games.roguelike.misc. It doesn’t seem to exist any more. Please take these notes in substitution for it. I have yet to get into the later portions of the game anyway. The early phases are the hardest parts to survive, so maybe this will help get you through the early frustrating phases.
Rolling a character
Major effects of the stats
Strength: Damage with heavy weapons and carry capacity
Constitution: Maximum hit points
Dexterity: Chance to hit and damage with light weapons, chance to disarm traps
Agility: Movement speed and dodging
Intelligence: Chance of learning spells randomly and some aspects of spellcasting
Power: Maximum mana points
Caveats of the above: I have yet to decode the source far enough to be sure of the effects of Strength and Dexterity in fighting; what’s given here is summarized from the game’s help file. There may be minor cases for each that are not covered here.
So long as your character can join a guild that can increase the above, low stats are not necessarily a big problem. See the section on guilds, above, for more information.
Robbing the autoteller
The ATM is “badly programmed,” not in the game’s code but in the game’s fiction, and can be easily exploited. Use Shift-O to open an account and set a password. (All of the ATM key commands are shifted, for some reason.) Then use Shift-P to enter a password, and enter anything except the password you entered. The teller will print a message saying the police have been alerted, and to press space to continue. Hit any key other than space, and after about half a minute you’ll have from 1,000 to 4,000 more gold pieces and five more chaos alignment points.
You can use those alignment points to get started on a career of gleeful lawlessness, or have the Archdruid neutralize most of them, or give 100 gold pieces at the hospice (or 1 gold piece five times) to get back to net zero if you want to join the Paladins or a lawful religion.
Exploring town
Rampart has a lot of resources available, enough so that it can be hard to keep them all in your head. I offer this chart to summarize what’s there. Note, while the layout of the main city is the same from game to game, many of these locations are moved to a random door. Most of these doors will be the ones that are open at the start of the game, but two, the Thieves’ Guild and the Brothel, will be in random closed (yet, unlocked) doors.
The Hedge Maze
The hedge maze is probably the most dangerous location in Rampart, other than the Sewer dungeon. Traps in the maze are a concern; setting off an alarm trap in here can be disastrous, setting the whole guard off looking for you. If this happens, the game can become almost unplayable. Talk to one of them and they may ask you to give yourself up. Doing this pacifies them, but also means you are sent to the City Gaol, although you tend to be released the first time this happens.
There are certain locations in each hedge maze layout that tend to generate either a trap, an item or a monster. As you play you’ll gradually get a sense of where those are.
The primary attractions in the hedge maze are the house of the Oracle, who gives advice as to the next places to go as well as having a mirror that can provide a free self knowledge spell, and the entrance to the Sewers, a popular second destination after finishing with the Goblin Caves.
Around the side and back of the maze is the Cemetary, which has some interesting items in it, which are unfortunately guarded over by liches. At the entrance to the cemetery, when you try to walk in, you’ll be asked something like “Are you sure?” This is not because of any special property of the cemetery itself, there’s a peaceful invisible monster, a haunt, standing in the entrance.
Of special note, the hedges of the maze are separated from the castle by only a narrow moat of water. It is thought that there might be a secret back way into the castle, if one could get past the moat….
There is one more interesting property of the hedge maze. Randomly each game, a few of its bushes are chosen to be trifids. They look identical, and it’s not easy to tell them apart from hedges without special means. If you walk into either, you’re asked if you’re sure.
Walking into a hedge can do a variety of bad things to you, including tearing up your cloak or poisoning you, but walking into a trifid is usually fatal-unless you’re carrying a bucket of salt water outside of your pack! If this is the case, then instead of getting devoured by an evil plant monster, you automatically destroy the trifid and get 1,000 experience points for it! This is usually enough to advance you to the next experience level until you get up to 8,000 XP, and even then it’s a substantial boost. The more experience you get from methods like this, the less you’re put at the mercy of Omega’s combat systems.
The key is, you need the bucket of salt water to perform this trick, and also to either identify which bushes are the trifids. The salt water is sometimes sold for cheap in the Pawn Shop, and are reasonably common finds in the Goblin Caves. Identifying the trifids can be as simple as walking systematically through the hedges, although it’s best if you go cloakless and have poison resistance from a ring. You can also use some spells, like Firebolt and Ball Lightning, which destroy hedges but don’t affect trifids.
Why am I so into this? It’s because it’s a worthy game, one that can give an interested player a lot of enjoyment, yet few people talk about it anymore. There is a real sense that this game could vanish. There’s several Github projects hosting the source. They tend to have grandiose aims like converting the code to use C++ (last update: three years ago), or making a “Next Generation” version (last update: six years ago).
In a file in the code, Omega creator Laurence Brothers mentions his hopes for future development of his project. And then he graduated from college, and passed the game on to others, who, after some initial effort, have not done a great amount with it in the decades since.
Adult Life happens to everyone, and no one should be faulted for failing to maintain an old console game that was mostly played by people in college. But it is a shame that Omega doesn’t have an inscrutible and forbidding DevTeam like NetHack does.
I’m tooling around a little with the source code. Omega’s structure isn’t that hard to understand. Maybe something will come of it. If it does, you can be sure that I’ll mention it here, and probably try to get some column mileage out of it. Until then, here is the conclusion of our strategy coverage of Omega. Previous articles are here: first – second – third – fourth.
Certain spells, if you can get them, can make your journeys much easier:
There’s a good number of ways to gain experience points without fighting!
Food
You can always buy cheap food from the fast food places in Rampart, but they weigh 20 units. Although the default description of fast food is “red-and-white buckets,” they’re just food rations that haven’t been identified yet. Other food may be lighter, but can only be found randomly. I usually buy 10 food rations to start out, which is enough to make it to the Archdruid’s temple and back to Rampart. Note that the food rations you find in dungeons may be poisoned food, which is a different item class than normal food rations.
Combat
Remember to set your combat routine! That’s Shift-F. Read the game’s help about combat to find out more about it. At first you only two points to spend. Generally I find it’s best to spend them on Lunge Center: you get hit more often, but at least you can strike opponents with reasonable frequency. Whenever you gain some Agility, gain a level, or join the Gladiators, check to see if you gained another combat maneuver point. All of these matter, but except for the guaranteed bonus point you get as a Gladiator, they seem to be awarded a bit randomly. My first addition to my combat routine is Block Low at the start; after than, Block Center. From there I may add extra attacks. You can have as many as eight points, which can make you quite the terror.
If you’re against a stronger foe in an encounter, and have a chance, set your fighting routine to blocking at as many different levels as you can. You can escape from an encounter if you get to an edge of the tactical map, even if monsters are adjacent to you. Remember to set your moves back to how you want them later.
If you speed drops significantly (to 0.50 or slower), you’ll be warned that your maneuvers have been reset. This usually means you’re already in big trouble.
Lunarity
This is an obscure but extremely important aspect of Omega! At the side of the screen, there is a display they tells you what the current phase of the moon is. Do not ignore it!
If the phase of the moon matches your alignment, then you get an extra to-hit bonus equal to your experience level, and also do double damage! But if the phase is opposite your alignment, then you take a to-hit penalty of half your level, and do half-damage!
The Lawful phase is a full moon; the Chaotic phase is a new moon. Each is each other’s bad phase. For Druids, the half phases are the best times, and the bad phases are both full and new moons. Each phase period lasts for two game days. If you’re not aware of the effects of the moon, the result is your character just mysteriously rocks or sucks every so often. Lunarity also affects the magic consumption of your spells.
Overworld
In the overworld, unless your character is really strong, there is always the chance the game will screw you over with an adverse effect. Chaos storms can, on a whim, reduce your Power by 10 and zero out your mana, or teleport you into the middle of the Chaos Sea, or even reset your experience total and level to zero and remove all your spells and guild ranks. These eventualities are unavoidable, except by wearing Seven League Boots, which nullifies outdoor travel time. In all other cases they happen ever game hour when on the land. The only solution is to spend as little time outside as possible. Being a Druid, riding a horse, or being in shadowform can reduce this time, but only Seven League Boots negates it entirely.
Aside: One possible result of a chaos storm is being teleported to a random location in the overworld. A possible result of this is being sent to the middle of the Chaos sea, surrounded on all sides. Your only recourse in this instance is to try to swim to shore. The following is one possible result of that:
Summarized: the player is given a big negative alignment boost, then usually a whole experience level, and is then killed outright. Thanks for nothing!
Traps
Four types of traps offer special dangers:
Alarm – In dungeons, basically harmless. In Rampart though, probably makes the game unplayable until you turn yourself in by talking to the guards out trying to kill you.hysically, harmless. But spellcasters will find their magical reserves instantly depleted by this, usually meaning an expensive trip to the Sorceror’s Guild at the very least.
Disintegration – Destroys your cloak, your armor, or you, in that order. It does no damage to you personally if you’re wearing either of those two things. Just be sure to always be wearing either of those things.
Acid – Does damage, but more importantly, can destroy multiple items you’re carrying, even in your pack. Worst of all, if the trap decides to destroy a wand it’ll explode and cause a manastorm, doing heavy damage to you. I’ve been wiped out by two wands exploring from an acid trap.
Abyss – This is the worst trap. Teleports you to The Abyss, a place where you fall for an arbitrary distance, then back to the countrysite to land and take falling damage from the distance you fell. The higher amounts of damage are uncommon, but all too possible, and it can thdo any amount of damage.
Curses
Generally curses are of the typical roguelike style. Both wearable equipment and wands you’re carrying can be cursed. Worn equipment that gets cursed can’t be removed unless you can somehow lift the curse. The item often gains big negative effects too, like Rings of Strength are transformed into Rings of Burden when cursed.
I don’t have all the information on curses that I’d like to give you. As near as I can tell so far, to actually remove a curse, you have to get a blessing from a god you worship, which relies on sacrificing a good-enough item to them first. Scrolls or spells of blessing do not appear to work, although a blessed item is further away from being cursed to begin with and so can be an effective preventable measure. Your best recourse, that I know of, is to destroy the item by bashing it (Shift-Z). Some items may take multiple attempts.
Dungeon features
Rivers
Water is sometimes a big obstacle dungeons. Once in a while you might get a setup where you can’t make forward progress. You can jump over water, but only if you have seen the ground on the other side and know it’s empty. This is a prime use for a scroll of clairvoyance, which lets you map out a small square section of the current dungeon of your choosing. As an aside, this definition of “clairvoyance” in roguelike terms may have been an influence on NetHack’s, which maps out a section of the dungeon around the player. Or, maybe it was the other way around, and NetHack inspired Omega?
Anyway, a good way to die is to jump into water, which puts you at the mercy of whether the game thinks you’re carrying too much weight to swim out. You’ll be offered the chance to drop various objects to try to lighten your load enough, including as a single action, dropping your entire pack to be lost in the unknown depths. This is one of a number of ways the game has to destroy your whole non-equipped inventory at once; others include overweighing your horse while out in the countryside (it runs off and your pack is in its saddlebags) and an effect from touching a stone in a village.
It’s difficult to have a horse in a dungeon, since your character automatically releases a horse when you enter, but if you can manage it, it seems that they will swim across it readily. The way I know is to befriend a horse found in the dungeon.
Statues
There are statues in Rampart and the villages too. You can try to bash them (with the ‘z’ key), which can turn them to rubble, cause them to give you a random hint, or sometimes come to life. I have seen a statue, in a dungeon once, actually come to life when I stepped near it and immediately attack me. (It was a salamander, and since I didn’t have fire resistance at the time, I died very quickly. Statues aren’t defined to be of any type, they describe as “A strange-looking statue,” so there’s no hint as to what a statue might turn into. It’s for the best to be wary of them.
Rubble
Rubble is created when you tunnel through a wall, sometimes when you bash a statue, and when a monster destroys a door, as well as sometimes just generated randomly in dungeons. When you step on rubble, sometimes you take a small amount of damage, and sometimes you’re stuck in place for a number of turns. You don’t have to repeatedly try to get out of the rubble to escape it. All that matters is the amount of time that passes. You can still attack adjacent monsters while you’re stuck in rubble, you just can’t leave it.
Altars
Altars appear in dungeons as well as in Rampart and villages, and can be used for the same purposes. Most of these random altars will be of alignments other than that of your current god just from the law of averages, so if you’re already in a religion, praying at one in the dungeon is usually a bad idea. You can interact with altars in a couple of other ways. You can bash one, but this will draw the wrath of the altar’s deity. You can also cast the spell of Energy Drain at one. If I read the code right, you might get a couple of points of Power out of one this way if you’re not in a religion, but in any event you’ll still suffer from divine wrath. In this case, you take a random amount of damage between 0 and ten times your experience level, which is often a chance of immediate death. For many characters, this has the potential to be instantly fatal. I shouldn’t have to say this, but especially don’t bash or cast Energy Drain on an altar belonging to a god you’re a follower of.
Lava
Most lava takes the form of isolated pools. You can jump over it. I wouldn’t jump into it. Having a horse is no use here. There seems to only be one defense against walking into lava, other than just answering “n” to the question of whether you’d like to cook yourself: from reading the code, if your character’s name is “Saltheart Foamfollower”, and it’s got to be that exact capitalization, you’ll only take one damage from lava. It appears to be a reference to the Thomas Covenant books by Stephen Donaldson.
Conditions
Poison: Caused by hedges, spells, traps and some monsters. Means your hit points decrease maybe once a game minute. Cure it at the Healer’s, at the Paladins if you’re a member, a potion of poison antidote, or by eating lembas. It goes away on its own if you can survive long enough, but don’t take it lightly.
Disease: Caused by spells and some monsters. Means you don’t naturally heal. (Usually, you regain some hit points every ten minutes.) Get it cursed at the Healer’s, the Paladins if you’re a member, by eating lembas, or by drinking a potion of curing. Note, this is a different curative potion than poison.
Stat loss: Caused by poisoning and miscellaneous other causes. This lowers a stat, but not the max stat associated to it. Cured with a potion of spell of restoration, or by resting for a week in a rented condo. (That cures a number of the more obscure conditions.)
Slowness: This is caused by some spells, especially those of the goblin shamans. It is a long-lived condition. The only cure I know of is a week of rest in a condo, which you should avail yourself of as soon as possible.
Sleep: This one is extremely dangerous. Although the game still lets your character block and even counterspell while you’re asleep, you don’t get to take any non-automatic actions. The death march of flipping through page after page of attack messages, unable to do anything, is one of the most frustrating events in Omega. Fortunately it’s simple to become completely immune to sleep: just eat a schezuan pepper, which when unidentified are described as being “withered reddish stringy vegetables.” They’re not uncommon in the Goblin Caves, and sleep resistance is important enough to get that, if you haven’t found them by the time you’re done with Level 5 in the Caves, it’s worth regenerating the caves to gain more chances to find one. (You regenerate a dungeon by entering a different dungeon, even if just for one turn, the Sewers in the Hedge Maze are good for this. When you go back to the Goblin Caves, they’ll be unmapped, with a new set of monsters, and some of the treasure will be different.)
Level drain: Your level is distinct from your experience total. You can lose levels without losing experience points, which is what level drain is. If it happens, it’s immediately bad, but you get those levels back the next time you earn XP. You can also lose experience points, which in turn brings your level down. That can only be fixed by earning those experience points anew. Certain interactions with altars, particularly, can cause that, like asking for a blessing when a god doesn’t think you’re worthy.
Of special note, conditions are recorded by the number of turns they have left. There are special cases in the code that cause conditions that have more than 1,000 turns to never run out! At that point, the game considers them to be permanent! This is true of both good and bad conditions.
Specific monsters
Lions – Deadly if you’re not already a competent fighter, and fast. A common source of death from random encounters. If you don’t think you can take one, you might set your combat sequence to all blocking at different heights, then trying to get out of the map.
Goblin Chieftains – Common foes in the Goblin Caves, and will kill you a lot if you’re not ready for them. Setting one of your combat sequence items to Lunge Center helps. The big trouble with them is the great axes they wield, which have the potential to go lots of damage. If your own Strength is high, they aren’t bad weapons to wield yourself.
Goblin Shamans – They begin appearing at Level 6 of the Goblin Caves. You need to be sleep resistant (use the schezuan pepper trick I mentioned) before you try fighting them. If one of the slows you, rent a condo for a week to cure it.
Grunts – Usually pretty easy to beat, but if it connects with that club it can do 20+ damage. Best to treat it with respect, especially the one that shows up in the Arena.
Phantoms – They can drain your levels, which a cloak of negimmunity can protect against. They’re also incorporeal, so you can’t just smack them to re-death, but they can be harmed with magic.
Salamanders – As near as I can tell, you just want to make sure you have fire resistance. If you do, they’re pretty easy. If you don’t, you will be well-roasted.
Horses – Can be tamed by giving them a bag of unmilled grain (give with ‘g’). Talk (‘t’) to a tamed horse to ride it.
Mendicant Priests – These annoying supplicants follow you looking for a handout. Once they see you, they stick to you like glue, and can block you in a dead-end. You can give them a trinket to make them go away; this counts as a lawful act. They aren’t hard to kill, but can curse an item if you don’t finish them quickly.
Itinerant Merchants – Worth talking to on the off chance they have a good item for sale. They usually just sell junk, or hype their stables back home.
Fnords – These peaceful creatures are nevertheless very dangerous; while you’re adjacent to them, they summon other monsters, who probably won’t be peaceful. Usually best to just slay, despite this being a chaotic act you may want to avoid.
Soldier Ants – As in NetHack, soldier ants are a particularly deadly foe in Omega. They’re fast and the can poison you. While poisoning in Omega doesn’t have the risk of instant death that it does in NetHack, it drains significant health over a short period of time. If you get stung more than once, you’re probably done for. It can be worth trying to drink unidentified potions to save yourself; either Curing or Neutralize Poison will end the condition. It might be best to turtle up (set your fighting maneuvers to all blocks) and make for the stairs.
Harder foes – Run. A tactic that might work is to set your combat maneuvers to all Block at different heights, to “turtle up.” If you do that, and you do escape, remember to change your maneuvers back after. Note, however, that if you see a really out-of-depth monster, there’s a good chance that it’s actually a phantasticon, a fairly weak creature that masquerades as other types of monster. Its alternate appearances do not give it any special powers. It flips randomly between forms every few turns, so hang out at a distance and see if it changes.
Here’s something really basic: how should you run the game? Most of my playing has been in the DOS version of 0.80.4 running in DOSbox, and that’s how I suggest you play. Every other version has some issue: the Amiga version requires you set up UAE and figure out how to activate it in Workbench; the OS/2 version requires you set up a virtual machine running that OS; the two Windows versions both hide your location from you (the player) when you (the character) are invisible, a joke that’s not so funny when it makes the game difficult to play. The DOS version also hides your location, but still reveals where you’re standing with the terminal cursor.
In that DOS version, when you see the Oracle in the Hedge Maze, the game will ask if you want to ring the [b]ell or look in the [m]irror. Due to a coding oversight, after you look in the mirror, it looks like the prompt is still active. If you then press ‘b’, it’ll be interpreted as a movement command (diagonal down-left), and ask something like “Are you sure?” If you then answer ‘y’es, you’ll walk into the hedge, where you might get stuck, poisoned, or if you’re really unlucky eaten by a trifid. There is a command for interacting again with something right where you’re standing: the ‘@’ key.
There’s a similar issue when you step on a disintegration trap. The game will flip immediately past the notice that your cloak or armor has been destroyed. You can see the notice if you press CTRL-O (in DOS) to look back through the message buffer. Be careful not to step on the trap again immediately after, as you’ll probably disintegrate yourself if you do.
Don’t forget to check the key commands, with ‘?’. There are different keys for ordinary play and the overworld map.
It’s easier to get started playing a chaotic character than a lawful one. A chaotic character can get cheap mana from the Sorceror’s Guild, can build experience and alignment alike by threatening goblins then killing them (starting at around Level 5 you can even do it to chieftains), and you don’t have to worry about giving monsters the first try to hit you. Lawful characters have to play a bit more carefully at first. Neutral characters (like druids) have to play more carefully still.
Don’t drop anything in the overworld, as you won’t be able to pick it back up.
When you see an unfamiliar monster (especially in the overworld, where almost anything can turn up), the first thing you should use is Shift-X to identify it. Especially if it’s displayed as a letter with a background color, it’s almost guaranteed to be something dreadful.
Unlike NetHack, there are no “false” rumors. Anything you read on a hint sheet, hear on the wind, or get from other sources is true.
True Sight protects you from blindness.
At the start of the game, if you plan on going Lawful, it’s not a bad idea to save enough money from the ATM to join the Thieves’ Guild, which can be done before you get to +10 alignment. You can join the Paladins so long as your alignment is >0, so there is a window in there where you can join both. Once you’re in with the Thieves, they’ll never kick you out, but the Paladins definitely might.
Why join the thieves? They identify things cheaply, and then buy the identified things for more than the Pawn Shop will. Identified things generally sell for much more than un-identified. Joining the Thieves, depending on your Dexterity and alignment, may cost more than 1,000 gold. If you don’t have the cash from robbing the autoteller, you might get trapped in a spiral where it’s difficult to scrounge up enough money to join later.
If you get trapped in a dungeon, which happens once in a while, you can tunnel (Shift-T) through walls to get out of it, but you’ll leave a pile of rubble where you dig, which can trap you for some turns and harm you when you try to get over it. Also: if you tunnel too much on a level, you can collapse the dungeon around you, usually resulting in an immediate demise. (There are several warning messages that appear before that occurs though, so occasional tunneling is okay.) Tunneling is generally not useful for getting money embedded in walls, though: the money gets buried in the rubble.
Monsters in Omega never follow you through the stairs to a different level. This is an important fact!
Once the money from robbing the autoteller is used up, you may find yourself in need of more cash. The money you find in dungeons (in the early game at least) tends to be small amounts, worth 10 gold or less.
Here are some other likely sources of money. The best way to earn cash in the early going is selling great axes from goblin chieftains to the Thieves’ guild. You can’t do this unless you’re a member. You get more money if items are identified. If you identify them first, you can get 133 gold each, which tends to pay for your membership before long. The pawn shop doesn’t pay as much, but can be an acceptable fallback, although they, too, pay more if an item has been identified. Neither location will accept cursed items, but great axes used by the goblins are not generated cursed.
Once you find better magic items, you can get a good amont of money from them. And look out for “huge green gem” and “some stones,” as those are gem stones that bring you a lot of cash once they’re ID’d.
It’s risky at low levels, but there’s the Arena. Look out for the grunt, apprentice ninja, and especially salamander opponents in the early going. The salamander follows the apprentice ninja, you really want fire resistance before you tackle that one.
If you’re really low on money, you can go to the Public Works building in Rampart to get your money increased to 99 gold once.
When you talk to an animal, you get a silly reaction that results in the animal handing you an academic paper indicating that ANIMALS CAN’T TALK, DUMMY. Har har.
The Alchemist’s shop in Rampart can buy monster parts from you, or else for a fee turn some parts into useful items. But if you go to see them with such items in your pack, you might be dismayed to constantly be told you don’t have anything. In fact they can use lots of things, but they can only see items if you’re carrying them in one of your main inventory slots. They won’t notice anything in your pack.
The single most useful thing you can do to survive the early game is buy a good weapon (warhammer or morning-star for strong characters, epee or rapier for dexterous ones), then set your fighting routine (Shift-‘F’) to Lunge Center. I usually check the Pawn Shop before buying something in the Armory, in case something better can be had there for cheap. If you’re a strong character, you should probably switch to a great axe, from a goblin chieftain, as soon as you can.
The second most important thing is to have decent armor, which takes the edge off of each source of damage. I usually go with chain mail, or better if the Pawn Shop has something, but try to upgrade to plate, or especially . Generally, I find good heavy armor is better than light armor, even if it slows you down a bit.
Many of the miscellaneous items you find in dungeons, like tin soldiers or broken swords, have no useful purpose, but a few do. We’ve already noted eating schezuan peppers makes you permanently sleep resistant. Giving (with the ‘g’ key) a sack of grain to a horse can make it rideable.
The general loop of the early game is to find useful stuff in the Goblin Mines that you can identify at the Thieves’ Guild (only open at night), then either use or fence there. Use this money to improve your equipment and build your stats at the Gym and Library. There are stones you can touch in the towns that can also improve your stats, but they can have severe drawbacks, including but not limited to destroying everything in your pack.
If you manage to get the Enchantment spell, I know from experimentation that enchanting rings past +6, at least, is risky.
The problem with most good armor is that it’s heavy, and reduces the amount you can carry back to town at once. An exception to this is the best armor the Armory sells, lamellar armor, which offers both great protection and is very light. The problem is, it costs 3,000 gold pieces.
Omega has a cheat mode, which is called “wizard mode” by roguelike tradition. The DOS binaries have it enabled. While broadly intended for development use, it’s also a good way to learn how to play the game. You can activate it by going to the very upper-right corner of Rampart and attacking the corner of the wall to the north-west. The game will ask if you’re sure. Wizard mode is cheating and will disqualify you from the winner’s board, but it can be a less frustrating way to get used to Omega. It has a couple of special commands: Ctrl-W maps the current area, and Ctrl-X lets you make a wish.
If you do this, or you get a wish randomly (which happens once in a great while), a text prompt will appear asking what to wish for. The first thing you’ve got to know is, you only get one try. If you wish for something and the game doesn’t like it, it tells you “you feel stupid,” and what you actually receive is bupkis.
There’s a very limited number of things you can wish for. This isn’t an Infocom-style parser, nor a NetHack-style wish for an item. You can only wish for one of a small number of discrete things. This is a pretty big spoiler, but the game is so laughably precise about what you can wish for and how you must wish for it that I’m going to go ahead and lay out the whole damn list, directly from the source code. You can wish for:
Everything you wish for must be in lowercase beginning with a capital letter, and with no trailing spaces. You won’t get anything you wish for if you don’t capitalize it! The code uses the standard C library function strcmp() to do the check, so you have to get it exactly right.
If you do some searching for old Omega spoilers, you might find indication that you can wish for the main stats in normal play. That used to be possible, but was removed from the game by 0.80. You also used to be able to decide what was summoned. It’s not the only feature that had been heavily nerfed: blessed rods of summoning used to let you specify what you wanted to summon in an oblique way, but in 0.80 and 0.90, it’s always random.
Rods of Apportation lets you get money embedded in walls.
Day businesses in Rampart open at 7 AM and close at 9 PM. Night businesses keep the opposite hours.
Dungeon levels can have multiple down and up stairs, but each has only one entry point coming from above and below. All the stairs doing down from a level lead to the same upstairs. All the stairs going up from a level lead to the same downstairs. If you teleport into a level, you end up at the same entry point. This can be taken advantage of sometimes to speed your travel, but it can also slow you down. It also means, if you’re sent down into a level by a pit trap, you’ll always be left at a place where you can immediately walk back up stairs.
White underscores in dungeons are elevators, they ask you to enter a dungeon level to be taken to. Don’t use them to ascent by more levels than there are in the dungeon. If you’re on Level 3, and go up three levels, it’ll take you to the surface. Higher than that and you’ll suffer a terrible fall.
Goal levels in dungeons cannot be warped to, so go to the level before. The goal level of the Goblin Caves is Level 10, and the goal of the Sewers is Level 18. The other dungeons you’ll have to find yourself (or read one of the FAQs linked below).
The Return spell from the Explorer’s Club is great, acting somewhat like Angband’s Scroll of Recall, or Diablo’s Scroll of Town Portal. Cast it on the first level of a dungeon, and it’ll take you to the deepest level you’ve been to. Otherwise, it’ll take you back to the first level. It usually takes some time to activate though. Because of its operation, it’s usually a good idea to go down stairs you find in a dungeon, even if just for one turn, if they’ll take you to a level you haven’t seen.
In addition to the chance of arbitrary damage, when you trigger an abyss trap, the game rolls d100, and if it comes up 13, you meet Yog-Sothoth (people familiar with H.P. Lovecraft will recognize the name), and if your alignment is higher than -10, you just die instantly. If your alignment is lower than that, you are granted 2,000 XP. There is no special effect if the number comes up as anything other than 13.
We’re done talking about Omega for a good while! If you need more information, some documents on the official Omega distribution site may help you, although they’re all for 0.75: the FAQ for 0.75, a hint sheet, and a spoiler file. There’s more to say, I’m sure, but let’s save some for a future time.
Next month, we’ll have some other roguelike obscurity to talk about. See you then!
I’ve known and spoken with Keith Burgun for over a decade now, and his early hit 100 Rogues for iOS was featured back on @Play. (It’s sadly now unplayable because of a combination of rights issues and Apple’s upgrade policy that makes old iOS software impossible to use.)
Many of Keith’s games made heavy use of randomization. 100 Rogues was a roguelike, Auro was a single-character puzzle/tactics game with randomized maps, and his current Gem Wizards Tactics (Steam, Switch, Xbox, Android) uses random maps.
But Keith is always reexamining his ideas. A while back he decided he didn’t want to keep making roguelikes, taking the ideas from it he liked and leaving the rest behind. And now he’s questioning his use of randomization as well.
He’s written an essay on his blog, titled “Space Narratives: A Map Randomizer Denounces Map Randomization.” It’s got some very interesting points, and he draws in the awesome Ocarina of Time Randomizer project in his discussion, as a way to have benefits of randomness without having to randomize the map itself. It’s good food for thought for developers interested in procedural content!