Wizardry 8: Old-School Goes Old-School!
Continuing my play-through of 2001's Wizardry 8, a classic "old-school" RPG, I broke down and checked out a walkthrough for Wizardry 8 to find out what to do with the graveyard. As it turns out, the runes on the tombstones had absolutely nothing to do with the hanged-spirit looking thing in the mausoleum. The latter could be gotten rid of by a simple weapon traditionally employed against vampires and the undead.

My missing ingredient was a dagger. A simple dagger, not one of the fancy ones I currently possessed. What's even more astounding is - it is now impossible for me to buy a simple dagger. I even went back to the monastery, to the merchant who is on the cliff above the crash site where I began my adventure, and even he didn't have a simple dagger to sell. Poniards or a main gauche or throwing knives? No problem. But a simple dagger possessed by a 1st-level rogue? No dice.

Fortunately, some Higardi highwaymen came to my rescue. Well, not literally. They actually tried to kill me and take my stuff. I did unto others instead, and one of the bandits in the five packs that attacked me dropped a simple dagger on the ground as he died. Ka-ching!

I made my way back to the cemetery (this is no small feat - travel along the roads is always time consuming due to the frequent encounters), and went to the pillar in the corner. I jammed the dagger into the seam between blocks. It sorta-kinda pointed the way to a spot southeast of the cemetery. I went outside the cemetery walls, in the corner of the vale, and there was a little mushroom ring. Taking a deep breath and saving my game, I stepped inside.

And found myself transported into a very old-school dungeon. Mind you, this is old-school as perceived by an old-school game, which is very old-school. We're talking about a 21 x 21 grid of walls forming a dungeon level here. The walls are textured, but also bear a white outline (reminiscent of the first 4 Wizardries) so you can see the grid.

One thing that came immediately to my attention was that there was no exit. I deliberately skipped reading anything in the walk-through about the dungeon beyond what I was supposed to do to get there. I stumbled along blindly, ran into some nasty spike traps, found a whole bunch of doors that were locked with some SERIOUS lock levels, and found out that the auto-map was virtually useless.

At this point I began to wonder if I shouldn't reload that saved game from before I entered the dungeon.

I decided to stick with it. And thus committed myself to about a four-hour ordeal that involved a LOT of reloading saved games from combats gone bad, and about six points of increase in my rogue-turned-bard's lockpicking ability.

The first couple of hours involved me wandering about pretty aimlessly, trying to make sense of what was appearing on the automap, unlocking doors, and getting into fights. I'd find mushroom rings which would teleport me to other locations on the map. I kept finding myself revisiting old territory in the maze, and not finding anything resembling a way out. However, old-school training eventually kicked in. I knew what had to be done.

I pulled out the graph paper.

With the graph paper and pencil in hand, I started re-exploring the map, using those friendly grid-lines on the wall texture for their natural purpose. I found a couple of unexplored doors, some interesting magical items, and the final encounter with the Big Bad Boss (Baron Englund, an undead dude) and his hench-specters. He guarded the mushroom ring that was the exit back to the graveyard.

While I can't say the Easter Egg Dungeon was any kind of wonderful game-making experience, or even a high-caliber joke. But it was really cool that somebody took the time to throw this little nod to even older-school gameplay into the world (and, I hear, there are more). And it was actually worthwhile - besides running up my lock picking ability, there were a couple of unique items to be found there (although one, I later discovered, was a cursed item you REALLY don't want to use...), and I did level up most of my characters in my wanderings. I had fun.

After my exploration into the dungeon, I went back to Trynton, and began following Marten's trail some more. This involved slogging through some swampland, and eventually coming to a castle called Marten's Bluff. It looked deserted, but after going through the entry hall, I found myself blocked off by glass walls and a big machine that looked like it was supposed to make the walls come together, squishing anything left standing in the entry chamber.

"This isn't going to end well, " I thought. But nothing happened. There was a glowing panel on the floor. I stepped on it, expecting the walls to squish me like a bug. Instead, the panel turned out to be the floor of an elevator, which took me down to the underground section of the castle.

Apparently, this underground warren had become home to the T'Rang. I was never very fond of them back in the Wizardry 7 days. However, they were treating me as some kind of hero, telling me that they are looking over me. And, by the way, they want me to join up with them as an ally. I haven't committed yet, because I really don't like them. I just want to find the stolen artifact, which as far as I know is hidden down here. Past a locked door that needs a T'Rang handprint to pass through.

This could get pretty interesting.

Taking Notes on Wizardry's Design
Rewarding player exploration is important in any kind of game, but even more so with roleplaying games, which are generally games ABOUT exploration. As a player, you know on a conscious level that the game world is limited to about what you can see. But it's delightful to step off the beaten path a little ways and discover that - instead of the world ending - there's a surprise waiting there for you. Or poking around and finding out that the designers actually thought about you doing something really weird. It's just great fun to discover that there is more to the game - and the game's world - than meets the eye.

Easter eggs are the extreme version of this. Even the hint that there is more to see that you aren't seeing helps make the game world come alive.

Fighting some pretty major threats in the dungeon was challenging. I ended up repeating several fights multiple times. Black slime, some fire-breathing monsters (I forget their names), and the Baron were all pretty nasty fights. The trick I used to win these fights were to pull a "Rainbow Six." Named for the tactic in the game series of that name, I'd stand to the side of the door - out of line-of-sight - and toss in a grenade.

In this case, a fireball or similar area-effect spell. Standard pen & paper tactics. One monster might pop out to engage us, but then they'd block the door so their compatriots couldn't come out to engage us. So we'd fight one monster at a time, except for periodic showering of area-effect spells behind them. Occasionally, the enemies wouldn't come out the door at all - confused as to why they were taking so much damage. The combat would sometimes end, because the enemies didn't think of themselves as "in combat" I guess. So I'd have to press the combat button to get things started again for a couple of rounds. Sometimes, after defeating half the enemies, I'd just close the door, sit, and rest.

Yeah. I'm cheap that way, aren't I?

As a gamer who has played tactical computer wargames, pen & paper games, miniatures games, and even been known to dress up in chain mail armor with padded sticks and duke it out with a hundred other members of a local medievalist group, I appreciate the tactical possibilities presented by doorways. They are choke points that can make battles get really interesting. A tiny force can hold off an army that way. Been there, done that. It's hard enough for human players to to resolve that tactical dilemma sometimes.

As a designer, this makes for some rich opportunities for interesting combats. As a computer programmer, I know what a pain in the butt it can be for the AI to recognize and respond correctly to these kinds of situations. Obviously, the Wizardry 8 AI wasn't quite able to pull it off. For which I am grateful. Otherwise, I'd probably still be down in that dungeon tonight.

More Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women

Labels: Mainstream Games, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:32 AM (Permalink) 1 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
So now we come to part five of my play-through of the 'classic' mainstream CRPG, Wizardry 8 - which proved to be the final chapter of one of the oldest computer RPG series. I missed the game when it was first released seven years ago, and I'm having a blast playing it today. The graphics may have aged, but the gameplay is still solid. As a designer, I'm taking notes.

Most of my party is now around 10th level. And I'm living in mortal terror of little naked winged women. Leaf Pixies, to be exact. But not all - they apparently spawn with different spell load-outs. The ones that were stalking me for hours may have finally de-popped after I spent an entire night hiding from them, huddled in a fetal position, praying they wouldn't discover me. I'd battled them about a dozen times, trying different techniques, and nothing worked. These things are FAST - once they spot you, they WILL run you down like the dog you are. And then they'll open up a can of fairie whup-ass on you.

In this case, it was a group of five pixies. They'd always go first each round. On the first round, most of them would cast Eye For An Eye on themselves, which would reflect any spells you cast on them back against yourself. Maybe one or two would sit out this round of buffing and instead web the entire party, so only about two or three party members would remain free to actually act.

Round two - the last pixies without Eye for an Eye would cast it on themselves (in case you had any funny ideas about targeting individuals with spells), while the rest would pelt the entire - usually bound - party with Armormelt, Whipping Rocks, and the occasional Crush or repeat of the Web spell.

Usually, everyone would survive round two, though occasionally I'd lose my bishop or mage if they were targeted by Crush spells. Round three was the endgame. Sometimes - if enough of my party was free of the webs by then - I could finally take out a pixie. Once, I'd even taken out two! But by the end of round three, the Whipping Rocks and Crush spells would have wiped out both of my principle spellcasters, knocked one of my valkyries unconscious, and probably taken out the bard or the gadgeteer. With maybe one character left alive, conscious, and unbound, I'd close the chapter on this sorry situation and reload.

And get clobbered again.

This was all happening in Trynton. Lo and behold, I made it to Trynton. It was nothing like I expected. I thought it would be another city, and it is. But it is not just another city.

I was in a conference once with Tracy Hickman - the co-author of the Dragonlance series (amongst many others) and creator of the legendary (and notorious) Dungeons & Dragons module, "Ravenloft." He commented on how, if you were to take the castles from most of the classic modules of the era and model them in 3D, they'd come out really "dumpy." He found that the best way to really confuse players was to make them work with the vertical. It threw off mapping, and human brains have a tougher time dealing with 3D space (even though we live in it).

The designers of Wizardry 8 may have listened to that same lecture. Trynton is a city of tree-houses. It is highly vertical. Though the 3D graphics make it easier to deal with than text-descriptions of pen & paper D&D, it can still get a bit confusing. But even with the primitive, EverQuest-era graphics of the time, it just looks cool. While it's also kinda cool fighting on a rope bridge allied with a half-dozen or more Trynnies, it makes moving into melee with some enemies almost impossible.

Really, the only things I don't like about Trynton are the marauding bands of Leaf Pixies, and the lack of shops. Although Fuzzfass's potion shop is nicely stocked. I've not completed all the quests here (and I'm not sure I can, yet), but I have managed to make it to the illusionary "seventh bough" and meet the legendary shaman who told me my destiny.

My destiny, apparently, is to die - repeatedly and awfully - at the hands of tiny naked women with wings.

Actually, no, that's not what he told me. His answer was the biggest non-surprise so far: My destiny was intertwined with that of Marten, and the Destinae Dominus. I have to follow Marten's trail. For this, I battled spiders, pixies, vampire bats, rapaxes, and blinding wasps all the way up along a giant tree? Still, redundancy is better than getting lost and confused. I accepted the quest and left a tip in the jar. Not that there was any jar, but I tell 'em that to get their hopes up.

So I am now to continue doing... well, what I was doing. Except now I think I have to head into the swamp. But FIRST, I have to head back to Arnika and sell some stuff. And I have to figure out what's up with that graveyard near Trynton. I found runes on some of the headstones, and I could press them and ... uh, turn them off or whatever. But after finding about six of them, they still didn't make the spirit running the graveyard go away. I tried asking around in Trynton to see if anybody knew about it, but they all gave me the "huh?" response. I'll see if I have any more success in Arnika.

Taking Notes
I have always been a proponent of having adventure-game style puzzles in RPGs. Maybe that's just because I'm old-school where the two genres were both far more vibrant and far more interconnected. Wizardry 8, like many of its predecessors, has this in spades.

There's got to be a balance, though. In graphic adventure games, there is usually not many obstacles to moving between areas to fiddle with objects or hunt for missed clues. In a 3D game, the "hunt the pixel" problem is increased by an order of magnitude due to the third dimension, and getting between areas can be pretty tedious. And treacherous. Particularly when the game scales up the difficulty of the encounters to match your average party level, as Wizardry 8 does.

This makes backtracking pretty time-consuming. Most RPGs, including this one, compensate for this by keeping the puzzles either pretty simple or optional. Or maybe they hoped to generate additional revenue from the strategy guide back in the 90's.

I personally prefer staying in-game for finding out how to solve puzzles, and it'd be cool if the game could offer redundant hints as to solutions or the next move. As Wizardry 8 did, back in Arnika, when both the priest and the aging HLL officer suggested your next course of action. This is hardly universal - after all, nobody in Trynton will even suggest how I should start mending the broken rope bridge. I worry it'll involve inventory items I don't have and don't have a clue where to look for them.

The difficult / dangerous / time-consuming slog from area to area is a reason why I don't enjoy the concept of specialty shops in RPGs - even though they sound cool on paper. My team is accumulating a lot of useless junk I'd like to sell, but the potion shop in town won't buy my crap to help finance a potion to restore a drained comrade. More realistic? Sure. But when the guy is about the only shop in Trynton, and the Rapax back in Arnika is possibly a half-hour or so of unproductive running around and fighting, the convenience factor outweighs the realism.

As I also mentioned, I highly approve of the use of vertical space in the game. The treehouse city is just cool and quirky and alien. And awesome. It gives the game - and the Trynnies - some real character, and brings them to life.

Anti-magic zones are a staple of "old school" RPGs (I remember hating the anti-magic LEVEL in Ultima Underworld). The battle in an anti-magic zone in Trynton seems designed specifically to encourage the player to seize an unfair advantage against an otherwise nearly impossible combat. It doesn't take much, but you can position yourself just outside the anti-magic zone, but force the hordes of monsters to fight just inside the zone, incapable of bringing their spells to bear.

Fighting with allied but uncontrolled NPCs in can make for some pretty epic battles. A little slow, but a lot cool. I also like the illusion that I'm not the only guy in the world capable of and willing to battle evil.

Oh, yeah - and having the nastiest, most fearsome opponents in an area be itsy-bitsy little faeries: Definitely worth some bonus points, there. Horrible, toothy, slobbering monsters are always great, but itsy-bitsy naked winged women are just all the more terrifying.

More Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School!

Labels: Mainstream Games, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:02 PM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Matress
I am continuing my play-through of 2001's Wizardry 8, one of the last of the mainstream "old-school" style RPGs. Here's Part 4.

Since my last report, I have acquired a couple of tools to help me out. The first is... a manual! The used copy of the game I bought from E-Bay came with nothing but the discs (those with the full packaging are often selling for as high as three digits). I have found that I was able to figure out most of the game without the documentation just fine. I wouldn't call Wizardry 8 intuitive in its gameplay, necessarily, but for fans of the series and the genre, things aren't too hard to figure out. It would have been handier when creating race / class combinations, but familiarity with Wizardry 7 helped in that. You can find a PDF version of the Wizardry 8 manual at replacementdocs.com.

The second nifty tool is a utility called WizFast which was recommended by several people. I was able to download it from wolfie.wiz8.de. It speeds up monster movement beyond the 5x maximum for the in-game option. I'm actually pretty happy with it at around 5x, but for those really big wilderness encounters that turn into chase scenes, this could really be a time-saver.

Scorpia also contacted me, and offered me some semi-cryptic hints and tips. She always tried hard to do this without giving too much away when she was writing for Computer Gaming World (man, I miss those days). But she did warn me point-blank about the tower, saying, "The Arnika bomb is for real. The DS is not someone who bluffs."

Ah. Good point. Important safety tip.

Anyway, I'm still in Arnika and the nearby areas. There have been plenty of things to do in the city, although most of those things involve that noble goal of adventurers everywhere: To loot anything not nailed to the floor, and to break into any place that is sealed against you. And the locals often don't seem to mind. Hey, these are desperate times, right?

I recovered a diamond for the Arnika bank - stolen, somehow, under their tight security measures. I wasn't pleased enough with the reward. So I made some withdrawals of my own. I was able to... uh, "find" several security cards that gave me access to the vaults in the basement. And the emotionless bank teller apparently didn't seem to notice that I didn't look much like Antone the Rapax. And she complains that these things (like the diamond theft) always seem to occur on her watch!

I found the nearby jail to be abandoned by its guards, who I guess were busy patrolling the streets to aid me in frequent battles against the minions of the Dark Savant. I found their security less than adequate. I ended up releasing some bandits, who I imagine must have been half-starved, as they attacked me immediately rather than expressing their gratitude. I unfortunately had to put them out of their misery. At the bottom of one cell, however, I found a secret entrance to a tunnel that went under the street and into one of the bank vaults. With more loot.

I had one other offer to interact with the bank. Some Ratkin named Rattus Rattus asked me to cash a check for him. And he gave me a zip gun in payment. I agreed, and even made it all the way back to the bank. Before handing Rattus's note to the teller, I decided to read it first. Good thing I did. It bas a hold-up note. That prankster! I quietly folded the note and put it away and left the bank. I later found a gullible merchant who was willing to buy the note for 1 gold piece. I have no idea why.

I hope the Arnika Community Bank is insured. Because I don't think they are going to be in business very long.

In true Gygaxian style, the same exploration that can reward you so handsomely can also bring you a great deal of trouble. While locked doors may be there to protect valuables inside from people like me, that can also be used to keep bad things locked IN. I discovered this exploring one too many locked doors inside the temple of Phoonzang. Who knew there were all those deadly ghosts inside? However, I prevailed, and I'll consider it a service rendered to the temple. With the ghosts gone, maybe they can renovate the chambers and turn them into dining areas or guest rooms or something.

One of the treasures in the bank - the sword Bloodlust - turned out to have a curse attached to it. I wasn't paying attention when I gave it to my samurai-turned-gadgeteer. I figured it'd make a good close-quarters weapon when we got flanked. Then I discovered he was incapable of switching back to his gun - or any other weapon. Fortunately, selling the sword back to its original owner, Antone the Rapax (who assumed it had been made by his brother - I'm not making this up!), almost made up for the cost of the "remove curse" scroll we had to use to free our gadgeteer-swordsman from its powerful compulsion.

Greed has its drawbacks.

I am now on the trail of the big artifact that the Dark Savant is after - the Destinae Dominus. The introductory movie made it sound like someone had just absconded with the thing moments before the Dark Savant arrived. But, according to certain townspeople, the theft took place a hundred years ago. I guess when you are dealing with ancient prophecies, a mere century is still a current event. Anyway, the thief was a former cop (well, HLL guardsman) named Marten. While he's being painted as a villain by some, I wonder if he didn't have a heads-up that the Big Bad would be coming one day and decided to keep it safe. Or maybe he was an adventurer like me, and had that problem with looting everything that wasn't nailed down.

He apparently fled to the nearby town of Trynton, and the "Trynnies" hid him and the Destinae Dominus for some time. When the HLL came after him, he managed to give them the slip.

Since I think I've exhausted most of the currently-available quest opportunities in Arnika (I think), it looks like my trail now leads to Trynton. I wonder if there is anybody alive there who knows about Marten, or where he might have taken the Destinae Dominus...

And besides, it might be best to get out of town before people start discovering that their private vaults are empty and start putting two and two together. Maybe after I've saved the entire universe, they'll cut me some slack.

Other Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School!

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:18 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8: Vi Domina Tricks
eAfter running the gauntlet along Arnika Road (and finding another bolted-door building along the easier Arnika-Trynton Road that may or may not be capable of being entered at some point), I am now in civilized territory: The formerly thriving town of Arnika.

I'm still not exactly sure how it is pronounced. The residents all pronounce it a little differently. Most seem to pronounce it ar-NEE-ka, but I've also heard AR-nee-ka and AR-ne-ka. While it's a small thing, it's noticeable. We've got a town west of Salt Lake City called "Tooele." Everyone in the region pronounces it correctly - at least after being corrected once after trying to call it "Tool" or "TOOL-ee". It's pronounced, by the way, "Too-ILL-a." Don't ask. We also have a town called "Hurricane" which is pronounced "HURR-i-cun." Actors might screw this up, but residents never would.

Arnika is a lot more fun than my last session. There are people to talk to. There are abandoned houses to clear out. There's a rogue named Myles whom I found myself grouped with. Since I already had a rogue, it enabled me to turn my rogue into a bard. I'm not positive how long Myles will stay with our group, but for now, he's with us.

The big quest Myles had for us (though he's talked about robbing the bank) was to rescue some girl by a crashed space ship. We had to fight off a group of Savant Guards - robots with blades on their hands. Definitely challenging, and they don't scare easily. There were also some bandits - Higardi raiders - monkeying around outside the ship that we had to fight our way through. Fortunately, they do scare fairly easily. We had to use every bit of tactics I could come up with to defeat them without losing anyone in our group (I actually took them on before bringing Myles on board).

One bummer about fights in Wizardry 8 is that the enemy can flank and surround you, but you can't really do the same to them. You can, however, dictate a lot of the terms of the fight - maneuvering with your back to a wall (or better, a corner) to limit their frontage, force them to come to you while you pelt them with ranged attacks (especially magical area-effect attacks), and use temporarily disabling spells like fear spells or sleep spells to disrupt them from attacking.

You can also make sure you have your fights within earshot of the friendly guards or monks in the area. They are quick to rush into a fight, draw off a little heat off of your beleagered party members if you need it, and add their own firepower to assist you. If there is an XP hit to receiving their aid, it's not been that noticable.

At the crash site, we rescued the girl from a bunch of savant guard robots, though she was kicking butt pretty well. Once we rescued her, she turned out to be Vi Domina, formerly appearing in Wizardry 7. She joined the party - and turned out to be merely my own average party level (6 at the point she joined us). Somehow I thought she was a much bigger bad-ass than that. I guess skills atrophy over time.

She joined the party, gave us gold, scads of experience points (taking some party members to level 7), and asked us to escort her to visit friends. Free XP for a milk run, plus a chance to get introduced to characters who can use less-than-generic dialog with other NPCs. This was a cute design trick, actually. It gives the NPCs a bit more personality, and helped turn them into "characters" rather than "information and quest dispensing machines."

Except they keep treating us as "junior adventurers." Smirking a little about how we "rescued" Vi. Like we're the kid brothers playing pretend adventurers, and couldn't really handle any real danger on our own. Okay, granted, they probably have a point. We are wusses compared to just about everything else around us (except rats and green slime). I wonder if that will change later? It seems like our quest involves ascending to godhood. I'll bet people won't smirk and be all condescending THEN!

We had to pay off Myles's bartab, which wasn't so fun, but it was a lot cheaper than pair of leather boots purchased from the rapax arms-dealer in town. And we also went to visit the tower of the Dark Savant. It was naturally guarded by his robot troopers. They repeated a warning Vi Domina gave us earlier about there being a bomb in the tower that would blow up the entire world if we tried to enter it.

I think they're bluffing. But... after dispatching the guards, I couldn't find an obvious way in, so I didn't try to call them on it.

Now, given the era that this game was released - just shortly after Baldur's Gate II - I can see how some players might be dissatisfied with the simplicity of the quests thus far, and the necessity of hunting them down a bit.

There is a large menu of options to interact with every NPC, from topics of conversation to trading and even recruiting them to join your party. Morrowind players would have felt right at home. Granted, the majority of NPCs you can talk to in this town are nameless, disposable guards and priests. But I do like the depth of interaction of named NPCs. As the game progresses, the number of things you can talk about increases. They may have nothing but bored "blow you off" responses to the new topics of conversation, but the impression it gives is that these NPCs might grow more interesting as the game advances - rather than the opposite, as is usually the case in RPGs once you've "used up" the NPC's conversation tree.

An artifact of the technology is that the city is pretty sparse. Buildings are spaced far apart, and it is difficult to make out more than four of them at a time through the fog. To be honest, this wasn't very different from Wizardry 7, with the rectangular walls of the city forming odd-shaped buildings that were only visible to a range of about five squares.

All-in-all, Arnika has been pretty fun so far. I'll have to take Myles up on his bank-robbing idea and see what other trouble I can scare up. There's plenty of surrounding countryside and stuff to explore, yet, so I have not yet run out of things to do. At this point, I am having a little bit of trouble figuring out the next direction to take, so I'm gonna have to play adventurer and beat some bushes a little to find something.

Other Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Matress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School!

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:19 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8: Running the Gauntlet
Since I got started on this discussion over the weekend on my recent acquisition of Wizardry 8, I figured I'd continue this "retrospective." Though it's really more of a first-time play-through for me, as I never played it when it was initially released in 2001. But frankly, this game was a last hurrah (from mainstream developers, at least) of a very fine tradition and style of computer role-playing games that I feel met a premature demise.

Now, if you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember how I complain about how games these days hold your hand and expect you to "brute force" your way through every encounter, never requiring you (or even allowing you) to considering alternatives that don't require killing everything in sight?

This ain't one of 'em.


Yeah, that's 27 enemies, each roughly equal to any of my characters. Nine-to-two odds. The gods of butt-kicking can be capricious and cruel. Or maybe that's the game designers?

Scorpia refers to Arnika Road in Wizardry 8 as the "Terrible Road," and I now understand what she was talking about.

The previous location, the monastery. had a lot going for it. It was full of interesting features (including computers and an elevator), clues as to the "big picture" of what was going on and as to the history - ancient and recent - of the order that dwelt there and the world itself. While it had its share of empty tunnels (I guess the contractors thought they could ad lib a bit and get paid extra for making long corridors that didn't really go anywhere), it was worthy of exploration. And while it had a couple of challenging encounters, it had nothing truly punishing. It was a solid, exciting intro dungeon with lots of promise for the rest of the game.

Arnika Road was something of a let-down after that. And not just because I had my kiester stomped on the second encounter. And the third. And the fourth. That pretty much defined my experience on Arnika Road, and that part isn't all bad. It's just unfortunate that it was pretty much the most interesting part of the journey. But more on that in a minute. Let's talk kiester-stompage.

I tried to be far more tactical and clever after that first defeat, and started using tactical maneuvering on the third. What eventually worked was me "pulling" enemies (just as in an MMO) to a location where I could limit their ability to flank me, and then take them out well away from other enemies who could join them. I did that a couple of times, and then made a run for Arnika. Literally. I stayed to the edges of the canyon to avoid detection as long as possible, and then when combat was joined, I ran like the coward I am. It took me a couple of tries to even do that successfully.

But it worked, eventually. Which, all-in-all, represented a little under two hours of somewhat tedious play. The tedium was particularly pronounced when it came to waiting for massive groups of monsters to move, one-by-one, into position. I found myself thumbing through a book. When I talk about how cool turn-based RPGs are, this sort of thing undermines my arguments. I didn't mind it so much when I was fighting three or even four monsters at a time. But eight... twelve... twenty-seven... that took things to an annoying extreme.

Now, it could be that Arnika Road was designed to teach players the importance of fleeing from bad odds. And it may be that they had some flaw in their encounter-scaling logic that overdid it at level 5. And it could be that the designers deliberately made Arnika Road a speed-bump in the game.

While I couldn't see much of it in my flight to the nearly abandoned city, I really only noticed one "interesting" feature of this area (besides some items sprinkled across the landscape): a building with an impenetrable barred door. I can totally understand the reason why the door was barred, considering the threat level of the creatures roaming the road. And now I'm very curious as to what is inside. That's exploration for you. You get teased by seeing something you can't quite reach, and wonder what lay beyond.

Aside from that, Arnika Road strikes me as "filler." There's another path I can take when I'm no longer required to run for my life. Maybe there's a lot more that way. I look forward to checking it out. But from what I've seen - it's just filler. Not that I mind a little filler in my games. I can get kinda zen-like about wandering off into these kinds of areas and just doing some XP-harvesting. But the difficulty level seemed to get frustratingly difficult at this point, a feature which might not earn maximum gratitude from players in a game's design. Unless, of course, the point was to learn to run like hell, in which case a suggestion that this might be the way to go at the beginning of the gauntlet might be an appropriate way to help train players for future fleeing-like-a-little-girl later in the game.

Upon reaching Arnika, I've found that most of the citizens have fled from the city, fearing attacks by minions of the Dark Savant. As a total meta-meta-gaming aside, I have to admit - it's cool and strange hearing about the Dark Savant in a game. The last time I *really* played Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant was back in '92 or so. It's almost like running into an old friend from high school. Only then, you remember that this acquaintance wasn't actually a friend, but was a total jerk whom you always wanted to punch in the mouth. But while the desire for mouth-punching remains, it temporarily takes a backseat to savoring the reunion out of nostalgia.

So now that I'm off the road (for now), there are once again places to explore, people to talk to, and of course more butts to kick. I'm excited and ready to go!

Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School!

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:36 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Scored Wizardry 8!
I got it!

I finally managed to score a "legit" copy of Wizardry 8 for a reasonable price from E-Bay. I'm so used to games getting cheap as they get old, but I guess that doesn't apply for rare games. Or even uncommon ones like Wiz 8.

Now, ordinarily, I'd be wasting most of this day playing my new acquisition. But once again, I'm working for the weekend (insert strains of the 80's tune by Loverboy here, if you want to share my pain). The extendo-crunch days are coming to an end soon, however, so I may actually have time to... you know... work on my indie game project again. What a concept!

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:25 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
History of Western CRPGs
I've been watching an extensive article on the evolution of computer RPGs by Drunken Irishman at Moby Games grow over the last week or so. His initial attitude pissed me off, but I kept finding myself nodding along in agreement through most of the article. It looks like it has finally reached a conclusion, and I'm going to put it on a Must Read list for anyone serious about computer RPGs. Right, all three of us:

The World of Western RPGs at Moby Games

For the most part, the Drunken Irishman seems to gold the following features as the key elements that make a great RPG:

* Real-Time, Visceral Combat
* Choice and consequences
* High-quality writing / dialog / characters
* Appealing Content

Okay. Now, I do take some issue with the idea that real-time combat is superior to turn-based. Granted, most of my favorite RPGs do feature real-time combat. But I still regard that as a preference, not superiority. If perfection was dictated by majority, we'd pretty much stop at Mario and Halo. Which isn't too far removed from my view of gamer hell. Give Mario a broken controller and make all your Halo opponents 14-year-old boys compensating for an inferiority complex, and you are pretty much there for me.

Anyway, I could quibble the article to death if I felt like it. And maybe I will, someday. But truth be told, he holds the same RPGs I do in the highest regard, knows his RPG history. A couple of great quotes from his briefs on two of the many great games of the 90's:

'While with some RPGs you already knew to expect a satisfying story, none of these stories were really above your typical pulp fiction. Ultima 7 does not tell a story, instead it is about the people; living, breathing, realistic people'

'Fallout still is the apex of Western RPGs. So much that every game was compared to it and found lacking. While much of it is because of rose tinted spectacles, the truth is that we have not had a game as influential as Fallout in this post-Fallout world.'

He makes an interesting point that most of the RPGs of the modern era are either Diablo clones, or descendants in one way or another from Black Isle / Interplay, and show obvious signs of their ancestry in their game design. The one notable exception? Bethesda.

He has an entire section on the indies. Now, he doesn't have much to say on the subject, and doesn't hold many indie RPGs in high regard, but he does mention Cute Knight, Aveyond, Eschalon: Book 1, Spiderweb's extensive RPG library, Mount & Blade, and one indie RPG I'd never heard about called Teudogar and the Alliance with Rome. Of the indies, he says, "I feel that the indie scene has not yet reached its full potential for this genre." I'd say that's an understatement - we ain't seen nothin' yet - but I'm also familiar with a lot more indie RPGs that I'd consider worthy of mention that are really pushing the envelope. I feel that Depths of Peril continues to be woefully overlooked for all of the innovation it provides to the genre, for one thing.

But I think for all his bluster and emphasis on sex scenes in RPGs, we do see eye-to-eye on the future of computer RPGs. He writes, "The future of PC gaming is in the hands of small groups of individuals. Just like in the old days when there only 7-8 people working on a game. PC gaming itself will not die, it just loses the exclusivity on the mainstream games, but through the loss it discovers a whole new market."

While not necessarily the same as saying that the future belongs to the indies, I think I'm looking through a similar crystal ball. PC gaming doesn't have the corporate sponsorship of the consoles to push brands down our throat. While it is still possible to sell a single-player PC game that sells in excess of a half-million, the market that puts the "mass" in massive is owned by the consoles now. I think it is still possible to make a business case for a game that sells 50 thousand, 100 thousand, or 200 thousand copies that goes beyond a quick-and-dirty console port. If said games could get the visibility they need above said console ports to sell those kinds of numbers, particularly selling a significant fraction directly rather than dispersing the return through layers of middlemen, I think a team of less than 10 people could do pretty well. They wouldn't be driving fly-yellow Ferraris or Hummers at that rate, but they'd do okay.

I'm of the opinion that a team of 4-8 developers (true developers - including artists, designers, programmers, and others putting the actual game together) is actually optimal. I think they can make a better game - albeit not as flashy - than today's bloated teams of dozens.

Here's hoping.

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:18 AM (Permalink) 15 comments links to this post

 
The First Sequel and User-Moddable Computer Game?
I don't know if we can find a definitive answer to questions about what was the first computer game sequel or user-moddable game. We can't even agree on what was the first video game (Spacewar is traditionally considered the first, but it was predated by Tennis for Two and a couple of other possibilities...)

Each revision of Spacewar could be counted as a sequel, I guess, and every programmer involved in its development was a user making their own mod, so in theory, that might count.

But the game I had in mind came out around 1972. The original game was called Hunt the Wumpus or just Wumpus, by Gregory Yob. He wrote that he had gotten annoyed by all the games that used a cartesian coordinate system (an X / Y grid), and wanted a game with a more interesting map. And so he created Hunt the Wumpus, which used a shape he called a "squashed dodecahedron", though without any specific spacial relationships between the rooms, the Wumpus caves could be in a dodecahedron of the non-squashed variety.

Anyway, the game rules were simple. You started in a room in the cave complex of twenty rooms, each room connected to three others. In two rooms, there were bottomless pits. If you moved into those rooms, you lost the game. In two rooms, there were "Superbats" that would pick you up and drop you in a random room if you moved into them. And then there was the Wumpus.

You were armed with a few arrows that could shoot through five rooms (changing course as they flew). If they went through your own room (since they could circle around, in theory), you shot yourself and the game was over. If they went into the Wumpus's room, they killed the wumpus and you won. Otherwise - if you missed the Wumpus OR walked into the Wumpus's room, he'd get up and move (or stay in the same room). If he ended up in the same room as you, he'd eat you and you lost the game. You could also lose the game if you ran out of arrows.

You could hear the bats if you were next to a superbat room. You could feel a draft if you were next to a bottomless pit room. And you could spell the Wumpus if you were in a room next to him. So the game was basically a randomly changing logic puzzle where you'd try and triangulate the positions of your goal and the threats.

Oh, yeah. And it had no graphics at all. You had to draw yourself trying to figure out the topography of the map.

A few months later, after a lot of people had played a lot of Wumpus (I never could stomach more than a few games, myself), Yob decided to create a new version. Called, astonishingly, "Hunt the Wumpus 2," it was exactly like the original game except for the maps. You could choose one of several maps, or create your own map.

The ability to input your own custom map made it the first user-moddable game, to my knowledge. At least the one to see "publication" - for whatever that was worth in 1976 (long after the game was written, but when the magazine saw print).

There is also mention of "Wumpus 3" in the issue of Creative Computing issue where the program saw print publication. The third game was written by a third party, but supported by Yob, which included random events that included earthquakes, bat migrations, and a "turnareo." So... Wumpus may also have been the the first trilogy. Again, those times were on the frontier of computer gaming, so even this "first" is debatable, but sticks (for me) because said event was published in a public record.

Now how's THAT for going back on the wayback machine?

Hmmm.... I wonder of Lady Ada Lovelace ever wrote a game for Babbage's Difference Engine? That could be "the first computer game canceled because the hardware never launched."

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:48 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
Favorite Abusively Difficult Games
After our discussion yesterday, numerous (but not all) folk suggested that people who preferred more challenging "do it yourself"-ness in games were in the minority. I admitted that I, too, get frustrated in games, and while I usually do not want to be led by the nose, I often find myself saying, "Okay, I give, what am I supposed to do now?" For me - figuring it out for myself and conquering the tough challenges on my own is a big part of the fun. But there's a fine line between "fun" and "frustration" when it comes to difficulty or confusion level, often related to the quality of the game.

This got me thinking about really hard games. I'm talking the practically abusive games that we love. The ones where you think the designer(s) had some kind of passive-aggressive hatred of players, and wanted to punish them. The kinds of games that seemed to want to bend you over, spank you with a pledge paddle, and make you say, "Thank you sir! May I have another?"

You don't see many of them these days. At least, you don't see many of them where there isn't some kind of difficulty level setting so you can dial it down to taste. I have been playing a couple of old Nintendo games from the 8- and 16-bit era, and noted that designers of the era still had that coin-op arcade-game mentality, killing the player within two minutes as if the NES needed a constant diet of quarters.

But some games are worse than others. Even some arcade games just seemed to reach out and almost physically pimp-slap the player. At least, they did to me. Maybe it was just because I sucked. But, for some reason, a few of them I still loved, in spite of our abusive relationship. The games turned my crank as they beat me to a pulp. I never really grew to be their master, but in some cases I played long enough and hard enough that I could at least hold my own for a while.

Here are the most abusively difficult games that I still loved in spite of - or because of - the punishment they doled out on me:

Sinistar
I heard in an interview with one of the developers that this arcade game was originally a lot easier, but the manufacturer was worried that it would not suck down the quarters fast enough. So they cranked up the difficulty to a level for release, and now simply beating the first level is something of an accomplishment. I think I've made it to level three once or twice. Once Sinistar becomes "live," you'd better pray you've created enough Sinibombs, because that giant space station with a face will hunt you through the entire map, knocking asteroids out of his way, and then EATING YOU. In space. The game is sheer evil, and is one of my favorites from the arcade.

"Beware, I live!"

The Bard's Tale
Okay, I'd forgotten about how horribly difficult this one was just to get started on. If you decided to create your own party - one without the bard's starting gear of a magic horn (am I remembering this correctly? Help me out here, guys... it's been a while), you ended up facing some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing where the survivors of a dozen failed attempts to get through the first two hours of the game would end up getting together into some kind of "super-party" which actually had a prayer of making it through fifth level or something. Again, the details are sketchy, and I don't remember how easy it was to save or load games. But I imagine the overpowered default starting party came about as a result of playtesting, when the QA guys screamed bloody murder about how they would NEVER see the end of the game.

Falcon 4.0
The game had a manual with lessons in it that mirrored actual flight school for F-16 "drivers," co-written by an actual F-16 instructor. And you needed to go through them, because the game was hopelessly complicated. Just getting your missiles armed and ready to fire and in a radar mode where they could actually hit something took some serious effort. In real life, this all makes sense, because you don't want pilots accidentally thumbing the "A" button and sending a missile off to blow up whatever little passenger plane happens to be within 20 miles in front of them.

The first time I got into a particular type of stall, I swore the game was bugged, because it didn't behave anything like a real aircraft. I later discovered a whole chapter in the manual devoted to this condition, which arises because the F-16's on-board computer gets confused by the fact the plane is going "backwards" (it's dropping tail-first). You have to first hit the "manual override" button to disable the fly-by-wire interpretations of your control inputs. So, I guess you could say it's a bug, but it's actually an accurate simulation of a real-world bug and standard operating procedure of the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Add to this some enemy missiles that were practically impossible to dodge, bombs that would blow YOU up if you dropped them too low, insanely complex operating procedures for locking and firing a maverick missile at a tank, landing gear that felt like it was made out of glass and required HOURS of practice just to learn how to land properly, and a dynamic campaign that felt like drinking from a firehose with sheer task overload, and you had a torture device masquerading as entertainment. Amazingly, I thought this was incredible fun. I still do. Blowing up a tank in a video game is no big deal. Blowing one up in Falcon 4.0 was an accomplishment that almost made you believe the Air Force could set you in a cockpit of the real thing tomorrow.

(Incidentally, Lock-On: Modern Air Combat is just as psychotic in its adherence to realism, though I haven't really gotten into it like I got into Falcon 4.0 back in the day.

Streak
This was a game created by my old company, Singletrac. I wasn't on the development team, but I loved the game. Streak was Singletrac's poorly-marketed attempt to go with a new publisher (our new owners) and IP with what we'd learned from Jet Moto. The game was about hoverboard racing, and your maximum speed was based on "confidence" that you built up by doing ridiculously tricky and risky stunts in the middle of a race. And yeah, there were other games that came later and stole our thunder (and got accolades for their innovation), but we were there first. But the game was also pretty vicious in its difficulty level. It was designed, tested, and produced by veterans of the Jet Moto series, and they made a game which was moderately challenging for them. Which meant practically impossible to unlock the last levels for anybody else. But I loved the game. Maybe because I was a Jet Moto development veteran who thought the game was only somewhat too difficult.

Suspended
Sheer evil in a text adventure, by Infocom. You played some dude in suspended animation, who is supposed to be the "brains" of a facility that controls a terra-formed planet. However, you are stuck inside your chamber, unable to physically interract with the world. Instead, you control a handful of robots, each with dramatically unique capabilities and temperments. For example, only one robot has visual sensors and can actually "see" a room. Only one other can hear what's going on. One can perform diagnostics on the machinery, but it always recites its findings in the form of abstract-sounding poetry.

You wake up with the planet in a state of crisis because the machinery falling apart. There are a whole bunch of colonists who are trying to break into the facility to kill you and replace you with another controller. So you have a limited number of turns to use these robots to repair the damage and make things right again. If it sounds nuts, that's because it is. I can't recall how many times I played this game before giving up, unsure if I'd really made any progress.

Okay. There's my list. There are plenty of harder games I've played that I considered (anybody else play one of the first graphic adventure games, "The Wizard and the Princess," by Sierra? Nasty ultra-lethal maze in practically the first room! Well, first location in the desert), but they weren't games I really liked as much as these.

So - your turn. What are your favorite, abusively difficult games? Do you have any?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:13 AM (Permalink) 25 comments links to this post

 
King of Kong
Besides watching plays and hiking canyons, during my little two day escape, we also watched King of Kong (subtitled "A Fistful of Quarters") . I had been looking forward to this documentary for a while, and was just told that it was available on Netflix as both a DVD and as an "Instant Play" streaming video.

King of Kong shows the secret, seedy underbelly of the underground competitive retro-arcade gaming scene. Well, okay, not quite. The geeky competitive retro-arcade gaming scene. Surrounding, in particular, the game of Donkey Kong.

Billy Mitchell is, in this case, the home-town hero who enjoyed his claim to fame in the wild popularity of arcade gaming in the 1980's, and has enjoyed a twenty-year record as the world's best. And he comes across as being pretty ruthless and petty when it comes to using his influence with the tiny 'establishment' to protect his long-standing authority and records. Steve Wiebe is the outsider, the not-so-young gun who believes he's got what it takes to become number one, fighting not only one of the most challenging and popular arcade games in history, but an "establishment" that has invested in Mitchell as their hero, and seems to be unwilling to allow this interloper to dethrone their reigning champion.

Petty? Silly? Lame? Laughable? You know, even as a ... well, formerly hardcore gamer and a huge fan of retro-gaming, that was what went through my mind the first half hour of the movie. The posturing and interviews and big talk of aging geeks for whom the golden era of the arcade game never died sounded like a joke, like a parody of sports heroes. But they were plainly, completely serious. At first, it seemed almost like a deadpan "mockumentary," a This Is Spinal Tap style bit of silliness with Twin Galaxies chief Walter Day proclaiming the utter gravity and importance of this competition with the full conviction of over two decades of his life's work poured into it.

But you know what? Fifteen minutes later, we were sucked in. We were still laughing at points, but the meaning started hitting home. Maybe we weren't talking about big professional sports heroes. It doesn't matter if you are talking about the Olympics or world championship Chess tournaments, or a high-school volleyball finals or the regional debate team championship, the story of competition between people who care about can be intriguing, and they can have power to infuse their own meaning into their efforts. And it works.

Yeah, there was drama. The stakes may be small and intensely personal, but they do grow a bit larger when the Guinness Book of World Records gets involved. It's exciting. It's frustrating. It's the whole "thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" pitched by ABC's Wild World of Sports when I was a child, but surrounding an upright cabinet of Mario's first game (back when he was only anonymously referred to as the "jumpman.")

And it's all about arcade games.

In the end, I have to recommend the movie highly to anyone with a passing interest in video. Just get it, watch it, laugh at it, and see if towards the end you aren't cheering and pissed and thrilled and even interested in firing up a game of Donkey Kong and seeing how you rank.

My highest recorded score is still only 16,900, so I think Wiebe and Mitchell don't have much to worry about from me at the moment.

Labels: Movies, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:53 PM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Favorite Deaths
In video games, death is simply the game's way of telling you, "Neener, neener!"

It's frequently a meaningless penalty requiring you to reload or, in older games, simply an expenditure of "lives." In the new 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, it sounds like (at epic levels) its something your characters are more-or-less expected to endure on an almost daily basis (Yeah, that's always sounded silly to me).

But sometimes... sometimes... it brings a smile to my face. Or is simply memorable for one reason or another. Sometimes its a little more than an annoying game mechanic. Sometimes it is spectacular. Here are four of my favorites:

Death #1 - Zork
Text adventure games - particularly the old Infocom games - often had great deaths in 'em. But leaving it at only one, what sticks out in my mind was an item that was described as resembling a tube of toothpaste. Attempting to brush my teeth with it revealed that it was an industrial-strength adhesive which killed me in a very amusing paragraph.

Death #2 - Karateka
The whole game, Jordan Mechner's precursor to the Prince of Persia series, centered around rescuing the princess. However, after defeating all the minions and the final boss, you enter the princess's cell. If you run to her arms, the two of you embraced in an early 80's version of a cinematic, and the game came to a satisfying conclusion.

If you approached her in a martial stance, she let her open arms drop. Come closer, prepared for battle, and she kicked you in the head. And killed you in one shot. You do not MESS with this princess! I think I fell out of my chair laughing when this one happened to me. And I always wondered how in the heck the villain managed to capture this deadly gal in the first place.

Death #3 - X-Com
I swear, the AI for the aliens in this game was programmed to be vicious. Whenever you'd pull out a grenade, you had to prime it and then throw it. I never had enough time units to do both on the same turn. The aliens seemed to ALWAYS target the guy with the primed grenade.

In this occasion, the dude with the primed grenade had just gotten off the ship, and was bunched up with a bunch of other squaddies at the base of the ship's ramp. They shot him. He dropped the primed grenade.

Boom! I lost half my squaddies before the third turn of combat.

Death #4 - EverQuest
I could fill this thing with MMO deaths. But here's just one: We were resting after a combat in North Ro. In the early days of EverQuest, there were Sand Giants in North Ro. A few months later, you'd almost never see them, because they'd be killed by players within two minutes of appearing. But back then --- they ravaged the population, as there was almost nobody over level 20 on the entire server.

I was 9th level. We were chatting with each other while resting (via text). My only warning was to see my companions stand up and run away, suddenly. I guess I hadn't heard the 20 foot tall giant sneaking up behind me. I'd also never seen that much damage done in a single blow at that point! And my companions could either type out a warning, or escape with their own lives. I couldn't blame them for their sudden, silent abandonment.

Okay, there are my favorite "death scenes" in games. What have you got?

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:22 AM (Permalink) 12 comments links to this post

 
Going Beyond the Monitor
The last few weeks, I have been spending some quality time re-browsing some old, classic RPGs. Call it research. One of the things I've been looking over has been the game manuals.

Remember those? Okay, some of you may not.

The manual for Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is 128 pages long. By comparison, the entire Player's Handbook for 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was also ... 128 pages long. Now, the former had slightly larger type and was only half-sized, but still...!

Checking out this manual, and the one for Might & Magic: World of Xeen, I was struck by the thought that they'd only have to add a section for dice-rolling and you'd practically have a playable pen & paper RPG with these manuals alone. They even included a section for new gamers explaining "what is a role-playing game?" Clearly, they were trying to emulate the pen & paper experience for computer gamers as much as possible.

Since I am doing this as research for that little gaming project of mine, I'm finding the books even more interesting now than when I originally played those games. They were thorough, informative, and filled with "fluff" that was of interest to maybe only 10% of the players. In the case of the Wizardry 7 manual, it was apparently a big part of the job of Brenda Braithwaite, formerly Brenda Garno. The hefty game manual had quality born of some sincere attention paid to it as part of the gaming experience. .

The "offline" paper manual has all but disappeared in recent years, aside from flimsy jewel-case inserts that warn of epileptic seizure risks, provide installation instructions, and try to upsell you on more products. With digital distribution becoming ever more popular, I don't expect to see them return. Besides, having the instructions there, in the game, is usually more useful. The paper manuals were there because it was too unwieldy to put all that text on the two 1.44 meg floppy disks, and to serve as a horrible copy-protection mechanism, to instruct the user on how to play the game, and to entertain the players and help draw them into the game's setting.

It's that last part that I miss.

Now, I'll admit - even back in the day, I didn't read through most paper documentation fully. I'd browse through the docs while waiting for the game to install, for looking up questions in the middle of the game, and for those times when I had to pause in my gaming for an extended bathroom break. But I actually read through the very good ones just for their own entertainment value. Browsing through the Wizardry 7 manual - which has gathered dust for something like sixteen years - I'm discovering a few things I didn't know when I was actually playing the game. Maybe that's why I never finished it! My bad.

But there were quite a few that were genuine pleasures to read. They were entertaining in their own right, and reading the documentation actually contributed to the enjoyment of the game. Reading the manual (often while waiting for the game to install) exposed you to promises of the amazing adventure the game had to offer. They helped provide context for the game, immersing you in the fiction or setting in a way that the underpowered computers of the day could not. And the best ones extended the experience of the game beyond the computer in a way that modern games can not.

Origin had some of the best documentation for their games back in the 80's and early 90's. They tried to turn their "accessories" into things that would go beyond merely informing and assisting the player. Their game manuals posed as official documents from the game world. They were entertaining, informative, and extended the fiction of the game beyond the confines of the computer. The Wing Commander manual posed as an issue of the ship's official magazine, and the game included technical spec sheets on each of the fighters (lamentably, those specs were also used as copy protection...) The poor graphics of the older Ultima games were compensated for in the documentation with Denis Loubet's excellent sketches and evocative cover art. Much of the detail that was lost in those early games due to technical restrictions was poured instead poured into the booklets that shipped with the games. The Ultima games also included other accessories - like cloth maps, moonstones, ankhs, and other little touches to try and make the game come more alive in the minds and hearts of players.

One of the best game manuals of all time came with Their Finest Hour - The Battle of Britain by Larry "X-Wing" Holland for Lucasfilm (later "LucasArts"). The book is still wonderful long after the game has been wiped from my hard drive. Besides instructions for playing the game, it also includes detailed information on the aircraft of the era, combat tactics, and the history of the Battle of Britain, and it has a number of stories and vignettes from the battle told by actual participants on both sides of the conflict.

I don't know if we'll see the like of these manuals again. Most of the required function of game manuals has been fortunately pulled into the game itself, in the form of user-friendlier context-sensitive help and tutorials. I'd still much rather jump right into the game than spend twenty minutes getting "prepped" by reading a book. But that little extension of the game outside the confines of your monitor or TV set that the better documentation provided - that was pretty dang awesome.

Can we still have that? Maybe. While it loses its bathroom-and-bedroom reading potential, there are some games which have adopted the Web as the place to make the game come alive with supplemental materials. Depths of Peril, in particular, has provided short stories, news, instructions, and a small "monster manual" on its official website. While many of these elements can be (and are) incorporated into the game itself, when you are playing a game, your brain goes into a different mode that - at least for me - isn't quite so conducive to reading (unless I'm playing a text adventure).

Are there other ways of capturing this aspect of the silver age of gaming, short of actually printing out 128-page manuals and sending them to players in the era of digital distribution?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:58 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Requiem for the Arcades
Earlier this week, GBGames posted a link and commentary on an article in the Chicago Tribune entitled, "Video Arcades' Last Gasp." I was kind of surprised to feel as much nostalgia and sadness reading the article as I did.

I guess there's a thing about the "formative years." You assume life will always be the same as it was when you were thirteen - except the things you personally want to change, of course. For me, Gary Gygax was immortal (as was everyone else around me), Vinyl LPs were THE medium for music, Van Halen was going to rock forever, Harrison Ford was perpetually 40, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were always going to make great movies, and video arcades and coin-operated video games were going to be permanent fixtures of American culture - though they'd just keep getting better and better.

In 1981, the video game craze was just starting to hit full force. Expert pundits were daily proclaiming that video games were only a passing fad, soon to be as forgotten as hula hoops and pet rocks. "Pac Man Fever" began sweeping the nation, even garnering nods from Time Magazine. Coin-op arcade machines were found almost everywhere - from the neighborhood 7-Eleven to the corner nooks of any casual restaurant. Handheld gaming hadn't come of age - rather than bringing a DS around with us, we kept quarters in our pocket. Video gaming was rarely more than a couple of blocks away.

But the real action was in the arcades. While not ubiquitous, by 1983 they were fixtures of almost any shopping center. You'd see a supermarket, a Radio Shack, maybe a record store or Chinese restaurant, a video store, and - hey, there'd be the arcade. They were usually dark (the better so see the screen, and the better to scare the parents, making them doubly attractive to us), noisy, poorly decorated, and a garden of geekly delights. There's be the strains of music from a radio (or even a juke box) pouring out - some classic rock or 80's pop, usual. Something by The Fixx or Foreigner or Van Halen or even... Men At Work. Or Journey. If not from the radio, then from a pretty awful video game bearing their name, digitized faces, and the synthetic beeping of their top tunes.

Illumination often came from colored neon lights, theoretically there to make the environment more like a science-fiction setting, but often more closely resembling that of a bar. The neon could have just as easily spelled out "Budweiser." Either way worked for most gamers. You'd hunt down a particular noise first, the unusual clanky-clanky sound of a change machine. And you'd find out if the arcade took quarters or tokens just by the noise the machine made when the currency of the realm hit the metal cup. Tokens sucked unless you came to that particular arcade all the time (the use of tokens is, naturally, designed to encourage that).

In the back of the room, you'd find the old standbys - the "classics" that had stood the test of time (time being measured in months - a two-year-old game that still attracted quarters was by definition a classic. That's where you'd find Defender, Asteroids, Pac Man, Galaxian, Space Invaders, Tempest, Centipede, Joust, Robotron, Dig-Dug, and several others. You'd also find some overlooked oldies that just had no resell value, or the owner picked up for a song. Or something. Sometimes the back of the arcade felt like digging for buried treasure. You'd occasionally stumble across some "antique" that was all of two years old that you'd never heard of before. And once in a while, you'd find that it didn't suck, and you'd find yourself blowing a couple of bucks on some quirky old game that you'd never really played before.

Pinball machines stood side-by-side with the video games at the time, borrowing from the technology of their younger siblings to include more advanced sounds and behaviors, little marquee mini-games and visual effects, and advanced game logic and stages.

The real action was in the front - the new games. As time went on, these became depressingly predictable, with the new "hit" games appearing in every single arcade. But like the search for buried treasure in the back, the new games putting in their rotation. Usually they were dominated by one to five older kids who had "mastered" the game in the last week, hogging up the machine for a half-hour on a single coin. But it was almost as entertaining to watch these strangers who has mastered a game as it was to play it yourself. And these kids usually drank up the attention. It was community at an infant level, but it was something. Regular arcade-goers got to recognize each other by face and by game, even if they didn't always know each other's names. It was enough to greet each other with a "hey."

The arcades also exposed players to a wide variety of games, all at once. Rather than choosing to play what was being hyped the hardest in magazines, websites, or on TV like we do today, players chose their games based on browsing the actual selection and seeing the game in action. Granted, there was a layer of insulation there between the producers and the players (arcade operators tended to choose games based on the hype at the industry level and at trade shows), but it did allow more dark-horse winners to emerge. Like Pac-Man and Defender versus the AMOA favorite Rally-X. There was also a fairly immediate Darwinism that took place. They were designed to kick your butt within two minutes. They had to hook you, thrill you, and then beat you within that time. Games that could do all three would fill their tills quickly. Those that did not were replaced.

But it was awesome to be confronted with a real, playable GAME that you had never tried before in the back of an arcade, or in a convenience stoor, or nestled in an alcove of a pizza parlor. I remember discovering Qix and Mappy at a local Pizza Hut one afternoon. I would have forgotten to eat, had I not run out of quarters. I had no idea a sequel to Asteroids existed, but I found Asteroids Deluxe in a grocery store on a road trip with my family. My brothers and I spent half the trip talking about what the rest of the game MIGHT be like, had we had enough time to play more than a two games.

The arcade games were the big brothers to the consoles in that era. The "console wars" were Intellivision versus Atari versus Colecovision versus some various other platforms that could only offer a crude approximation of the arcade experience. So crude, in fact, that the skills and techniques did not transfer from platform to platform. We were invariably disappointed with the home versions of games, but we bought them anyway. Because a crappy Pac-Man was better than no Pac-Man at all. But that was the relationship - the coin-op titles were always superior.


As game developers in the mid-90's, we all hoped to work on coin-op games. A coin-op title was prestigious. The feeling still lingered that the coin-op titles were superior to what was on coin-op. But with the advent of the 32-bit machines, it was evident that this relationship might not be sustainable. Even with the 16-bit games on the SNES and Sega, nearly arcade perfect home versions were no longer a rare exception. The superiority of the arcade games over the home consoles was based on the pace of video game technology dwarfing all that had come six months earlier. No more.

For the new generation of game developers, arcades have lost their glamor. They may have fond memories of the last of the glory days, when Street Fighter II and its peers ruled the less-common-but-still-surviving coin-op world. But the developers coming out of school today were still young when the X-Box and Playstation 2 were released, and it has always been renting the newest games from Blockbuster for their consoles, or contributing to the endless churn of used games at GameStop in much the same way.

I still can't walk into a mall without expecting to see an arcade or game room somewhere on the bottom floor, though it has been almost two decades since they were common. Only a few years ago, I heard some rumblings about what it would take to bring back the arcades. None of the strategies made much sense to me, but I still rooted for them. I would love to see the return of arcades.

But would I go any more frequently than I do now, when there are about three coin-op game rooms within a reasonable driving distance? Probably not. The home gaming systems and computer, with Internet capability and affordable peripherals, have managed to absorb almost all of the benefits of the arcade experience. Game developers can no longer crank out a new game every six to nine months (well, except for certain driven indies) as required by that business to keep things current.

The arcades were largely an artifact of the technology of the era, like record studios, videocassette recorders, and pay phones. Technology moves on. As much as I miss the experience, I really can't see how they can make a comeback, or find a reason why they should other than, "it would be cool."

And they really were.

Labels: Biz, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:45 PM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
The Return of X-Com?
Well, this is news to me: X-Comeback at Rock, Paper, Shotgun

So... what do you think a 2K Games version of X-Com will be like?

I personally predict a first-person shooter. Hopefully a squad-based first-person shooter. Real-time action, of course. And you know what? I don't think it will suck.

I remember when I got really hooked on Rainbow Six, and at one point came to the realization that the tension and "feel" of the game - my emotional state - wasn't so far removed from X-Com. The chance of getting drilled instantly as you turn a corner - never being entirely certain where a very deadly enemy may be positioned - planning your assault as you go trying to get the drop on your enemy... Man, it was plenty of fun.

And I could totally see that as an X-Com game.

I hope that they'll try to get away from the kitschy retro 50's feel that they adopted in X-Com: Apocalypse and that horrible space combat game I have almost forgotten, and embracing the feel of the first two games - which, I felt, was more X-Files, Aliens, and Project Blue Book than Plan 9 From Outer Space.

But yeah, I can see it. It could be very cool.

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