Richard Garriott's ULTIMA II (1986)

At a time of considerable hedging by software manufacturers, Sierra On-Line were among the earliest games companies in the States to declare unconditional support for the ST, and their recent conversion of Richard Garriott's Ultima II was the first major fantasy role-playing game on the market for the new machine. It is therefore of some interest to examine both how the new 16-bit version compares with its predecessors, and how well it has succeeded in adapting the game to the ST environment.

First of all, congratulations are due to Robert Heitman (who is credited with the conversion) for making full use of the ST's Gem interface in setting up the game mechanics. In general, the essentials of the game are unchanged; the plot line is the same, the maps are identical, and a slightly scaled-down version of the original icons is used. One huge improvement over the Apple version becomes apparent the moment the package is opened; whereas the 8-bit version was spread over two disks and required an extra character disk, making a total of four sides which had to be swapped around the drives, the ST version comes complete on a single disk. Once the disk is copied and booted (using the original as 'key'), no further swaps are required. Needless to say, there is also a vast improvement in the overall speed of play. 

On a high-resolution screen, the first thing that strikes one is how much more information the new version can display. On the Apple version, a 10x20 grid map took up virtually the entire screen, leaving four lines at the bottom for the movement log and current status; on the ST version, a very much larger map (on a 13x21 grid) takes up about a third of the screen. Unfortunately the extra space is not used very efficiently, the principal addition consisting of a large inventory window which is redundant for much of the time.

The principal innovation, however, is the mouse-driven nature of
the ST version. Movement is achieved by placing the mouse arrow in front of the player icon in the direction desired and pressing the left button; the arrow can then be moved around in any direction, with the icon tagging faithfully behind. One immediately obvious bonus is that diagonal movement is now possible. Having done away with the need for arrow keys, Heitman also ingenuously dispenses with multiple keyboard commands by assuming that at every stage of the game there will be a single obvious 'preferred action' which can be initiated by pressing the left mouse button.

For example, since there is no useful transaction with non-playing characters (NPCs) outside of towns, it is assumed that when meeting with one in the wilderness the only likely intention will be combat; the automatic action is therefore Attack. Similarly, upon going through a locked door the action is “Open door with key” (if carried), on reaching a town or castle icon the action becomes “Enter”, and so forth. The pre-programmed reaction can be modified, at least as far as transaction with NPCs is concerned, by pulling down the "Intent" menu which offers a choice of "Transact", "Attack", "Steal" and "Bribe".

The slickness of the all-mouse driven conversion obviously owes something to the relatively unsophisticated nature of Ultima II, and it will be interesting to see how Origin go about converting its much more complex successors. In this case, however, it makes for a very fast game - almost too fast, indeed, since by pointing the arrow and keeping the button pressed down a character can surge halfway across a continent, crash through a succession of combats and enter a town with almost no thought or effort on the player’s part.

Turning now to some thoughts on actual game play, the first thing to consider is initial character creation. A choice of four professions is offered: fighter, thief, cleric and wizard, with only the last two having access to spells - in my opinion, one of the weaknesses of the original scenario, given that this is a single-character game. However, spells can only be cast in dungeons, and as it becomes obvious after a while that going into dungeons is virtually unnecessary (only one item of any importance is to be discovered there, and even that can be found elsewhere, though in small quantities), it makes more sense to opt for fighter or thief. By the same token, it is pointless to build up either intellect or wisdom, as these abilities are of use only in casting spells.

Transactions are limited to comments by NPCs, and the vast majority of these are inane - on the other hand, the few clues provided should be carefully noted. Gold is of critical importance, as almost any progress you make will depend on your finances. Apart from simply exploring, your first concern after surviving the first few hours and learning how to restore hit points will be increasing your abilities. This can only be done by finding one specific NPC in an Earth city and offering to bribe him; the results of this rather irrational transaction are random, and you may well want to revert and start over when you see the results. Concentrate on building up Strength, Stamina and Agility, plus a small amount of Charisma which will get you a better price on a few essential items. Speaking of reverting to a previous position, remember that every time you go through a time gate or enter a site, your game is updated. 

The next major problem will be getting access to the various means of transport, which involves careful exploration of all available sites. You will, of course, need a supply of keys, and getting these requires some nasty fighting - the only relatively safe way of surviving the process is to pick a fight somewhere where you have a quick escape route lined up, before reinforcements arrive. Keep in mind that the most powerful vehicle (the space ship) also requires the ultimate in personal protection, or you could become raspberry jam.

You will need a specific item in hand before you can approach the endgame with any hope of survival; getting authorisation for this requires a very long journey, and you can get the first clues about it from clerics in any castle. Precise information as to location is available elsewhere. Once you have secured authorisation from the right person, you must claim the item from another NPC. Unfortunately, an inconsistency in the scenario suggests that what this particular NPC does is give you a clue as to its whereabouts - in fact, you have to get the item from him. This being an extremely venal game, try Bribery.

There it is: an extremely efficient conversion of a classic game which, though in some ways dated by comparison with its more sophisticated successors, has been given a new lease of life thanks to the speed and power of the ST. 

First published in ST User, Summer 1986 
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder

Two Games from Epyx (1986)

Epyx Software recently released two colour-only games for the Atari ST: Rogue and the Temple of Apshai Trilogy. Rogue has a long and honourable history as a mainframe programmed game, but both these games were originally designed for the Commodore 64, and frankly, despite boasting greatly enhanced graphics, it shows. Both are, by modern fantasy RPG standards, unsophisticated dungeon crawls in which a single character roams through various levels, clobbering monsters and collecting treasure. There's literally nothing more to it than that, since whatever magic comes into the game is tied to objects such as weapons or potions - you don't actually get to cast any spells.

Temple of Apshai is a real non-starter; the graphics are primitive and the levels boringly repetitive, while the ‘trilogy’ bit in the title simply means that the levels are split up into three groups (a total of 12 levels). You very quickly realise that all you can do is march up and down, bopping creatures (mostly giant insects) on the nose and running for home when supplies get low. None of the monsters are at all impressive, and there isn't even much in the way of progression from one level to another; this was confirmed when, out of sheer boredom, I ran a roughly fourth-level character through some of the twelfth-level rooms and got him out again in one piece. Apshai could, I'm afraid, be described as Packman with none of the excitement.

Though very far from state-of-the-art, Rogue is a much better game than its stablemate. The original game's ASCII characters have been replaced with graphics - a touch cutesy but quite competent, with a nice line in shadows (look for the hovering bat, for example). An elegant touch is the fact that every time you descend a level, the map of the dungeon, its contents and monsters are generated afresh, so there's no point doing any mapping; you can switch from large-scale view to an overall map of the level which takes up the entire screen, except for a window on the right which shows all your possessions in the form of icons. 

A large number of characters can be generated and saved, but be warned - if your character is killed, his file vanishes even if previously saved. The only way of surviving to the bottom of the 26-level plus stack is to keep a blank disk in the second drive and copy a character file over every time you save. Things get tougher and tougher as you move down, and I can guarantee that making it all the way through without several ‘resurrections’ is impossible.

There are lots of magical items to collect, the most important being rings, staffs and scrolls. You will need a Scroll of Identify in order to find out what most of these items do, particularly as their function is randomly allocated each time a new character is created; a ruby ring might protect you in one game, but in another it might simply infuriate monsters. However, within each character game it pays to experiment and keep notes.

Probably the most essential item is a Ring of Searching, without which you keep falling into traps and missing secret doors. Next you will need a good selection of long-range and offensive staves, of which my favourites are ‘Teleport Monster Away’ and the Staff of Polymorph, which changes the monster type (though you may, of course, get one that's even nastier). Staves have a limited number of charges, so go easy on them. Also crucial is a ‘Make Visible’ ring, without which phantoms remain invisible but still lethal.

Your way back up to a higher level is magically blocked until you reach level 26 and find the Amulet of Vendor, which allows you to travel in either direction. The best strategy, therefore, is to thoroughly explore every room on the way down in order not to miss any important items; once the amulet is secured, you can hightail it back to the upper levels and renew your armoury before plunging ever deeper.

The program includes a Guildmaster’s Hall of Fame which lists the top 10 characters, including name, rank, amount of gold gathered and an icon of the monster which killed them. Alas, this is a posthumous honour, and the only way of getting on the list is by being killed or resigning - which amounts to the same thing, since in both cases the save file is wiped. The ranking, incidentally, is based on the number of gold coins carried.

Rogue is clearly not very strong on plot or imagination, but it's fun in small doses and might even become addictive after a while. I can recommend it as a kind of ‘solitaire’ RPG, something to play for a few rounds in between more serious pursuits; as such, it could keep you amused on and off for a long time. Oh, and beware of the Drain Life staff - it drains it from you, not from the monster. Nice touch, that. 

First published in ST User, Autumn 1986
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder 

An Introduction to Computer Role-playing Games (1986)

No doubt about it, there's nothing like a sophisticated computer adventure game to really draw you into a new world of the imagination. Picture it: there you are in room 125 or whatever, a fire-breathing dragon hot on your trail and only a simple wooden door between you and your goal, the amazing magical Fiddler's Briefcase which transmutes soap coupons into Cayman Island bearer bonds. Fingers sweating, you type in the magic words “Open door with key” only to see the sickeningly familiar message, “Which key: the blue key, the green key or the key given to you 548 turns ago by Slugfoot the Wombat ?” - which of course you lost ages ago.

Once you've sorted out that little lot, and dealt with the incidental fact that the idiot program refuses to recognise the words “floor”, “window” or “go”, you devote your energies to polishing off that dragon. You'll probably be there a long time, though, since you will only succeed by typing the command “Kill dragon with small yellow toothpick hidden in Wombat's left wellington boot”. Yes indeed, there's nothing like a good text adventure to stimulate the mind and make you drive a fist through a perfectly innocent screen...

It needn't be like that, however. Though the overwhelming majority of adventure games released in the UK tend to be text adventures, with or without the addition of useless pretty pictures, the American market is increasingly dominated by role-playing games; Computer Gaming World magazine's influential Adventure Ratings have been headed by the classic Wizardry I for the last five years, while the current top four are all role-playing games. As more powerful computers trickle down the market, all the signs are that the same thing is due to happen in Britain.

Role-playing games, as the name implies, are games in which the player creates one or more alter egos with specific abilities and powers, which are then lead through a long (10-75 hours!) series of moves to the conclusion of a quest or adventure. The great difference between text and role-playing adventures is that in the latter, moves and actions are carried out by means of set commands (arrow movement N, S, E or W, for example, or key [O] for 'open') with the additional option of keying in transactional messages, and that the player is given a functional view of his or her surroundings and can move around them - all in all, much more realistic than being told “You are in a goblin's laundry room” and having to figure out exactly how the program must be told to “open latch”!

RPG scenarios tend to either science-fiction or fantasy, with fantasy much the more popular. This is, of course, that oldest of fictional landscapes, the timeless world of sword and sorcery which stretches from Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queen to Tolkien's Middlearth; anybody who has ever travelled in spirit with Jason and the Argonauts or Corwin of Amber will feel at home here. If the text adventure fan gets his fun out of puzzle-solving and double-guessing the programmer, in the best fantasy role-playing games the player suspends disbelief and immerses himself completely in an imaginary world - that is you running desperately through the forest with a pack of werewolves on your heels, not just a blip on the screen. 

Depending on their design, fantasy role-playing games can be divided into two distinct categories: on the one hand the older dungeon-based of game, exemplified by Sir-Tech's Wizardry series, and on the other what might be called 'open-field' games, exemplified by the Ultima series. With small variations, every game produced over the last five years comes under one or the other of these groups. 

Plain vanilla: A dungeon in the original Wizardry I

The first category includes the three Wizardry games (still the best of the lot), Bard’s Tale from Electronic Arts, and Alternate Reality, a curiously half-baked game from Datasoft. With the first four, you start out by creating up to 20 player characters of different races and professions; for example, you could get yourself a human priest, an elven mage, two dwarf fighters, a hobbit thief and so on. At birth, your characters receive a number of points in various useful attributes such as strength, vitality, piety, and luck, as well as an allocation of hit points which represent their hold on life - any damage reduces the total, and zero hit points equals a dead character. Formed up in parties of up to six, they must then equip themselves with armour and weapons (paid for in gold - financial considerations play an important role in all these games) before sallying forth into the dungeons. 

The “dungeons” in question may represent catacombs, mines, vaults or the streets of a city, but in essence they consist of stacks of one or more two-dimensional mazes through which the party must fight its way. The key on-screen visual is a 'point-of-view' representation of the maze directly in front of the party, complete with junctions and doors; the player moves in three or four directions using either keyboard commands or a mouse/joystick. Other screen windows provide information on current status and a log of ongoing activities.

Accurate mapping is essential in dungeon games, and could be said to represent the main strategic activity. Each successive level is tougher than the previous one, both in terms of navigational trickery and in the strength and numbers of defending monsters. Fortunately, the invading party's abilities also increase; successful encounters provide not only gold and booty in the shape of improved hardware and magical items, but also generate 'experience points' which eventually allow characters to move up a level. Each promotion brings an increase in attribute points and hit points; and in some cases allows certain characters to join more exalted professions - for example, a fighter might become a lord. The game ends when the party has penetrated to the end of the maze and accomplished its objective.

In the case of Wizardry it is possible (indeed, mandatory from the first to the second scenarios) to move characters from one game to another, whilst Bard’s Tale provides an intriguing bonus in that it will accept characters from any Wizardry scenario or from Ultima III. Alternate Reality is an odd game with a maze consisting of a single 64x64 line grid, a large number of inoperative commands (i.e., the options are there but remain "not available") and no discernible objective, so that a player can rattle about forever without accomplishing much other than surviving - it gives the impression of a game clumsily cut down from a vastly ambitious prototype.

Dungeon scenario games are basically linear, depend largely on navigation and carnage for their kicks, and can generate a high adrenalin count: there you are, six levels deep with one fighter dead and two more badly wounded, your priest got you hopelessly lost twenty minutes ago, the mage is down to one cheap spell for cheating at pinochle and the thief is dying of poisoning - what are the odds on anybody making it out alive?

Open-field games, on the other hand, are much more complex, include a greater element of true fantasy, and require more imagination to play. The grand-daddy of programmers in this field is unquestionably Richard Garriott, whose Ultima II is still selling briskly from Sierra, while his own company, Origin, has produced two sequels (with another in the pipeline), Ultimas III and IV. Origin is also responsible for Moebius, a so-so martial arts RPG adventure, while wargames giant SSI is now plunging heavily into the fantasy RPG field with Questron, Phantasie, Phantasie II and the recent Wizard’s Crown.

All these games have as their principal arena large, two-dimensional scrolling terrain maps (the main map in Ultima IV is on a 256x256 grid) which use variants of the familiar wargaming icons for different features such as mountains, swamps and forests; travel across these is “bird’s-eye view” with the player or group icon always occupying the centre of the screen. Terrain considerations affect movement speed and (in the more sophisticated versions) visibility, and the maps also contain symbols which represent towns, villages and other structures. The player can “enter” these, whereupon the countryside map is replaced by a larger scale map of the site through which the party moves to visit shops, temples, oracles and other essential establishments.

Finances are still important, but a new wrinkle is often added in the form of food supplies, which diminish with each move and must somehow be replenished before starvation strikes. Most movement is on foot, but other means of transport may be available such as horses, ships and even flying devices. Gold, booty and experience accumulate as in the dungeon-type games, but overall strategy is more complicated; there is no obviously “right” way of doing things, and much travelling back and forth and transaction with non-playing characters will be necessary in order to collect vital clues to the environment and even the quest objective. Dungeons in one guise or another are usually still a feature, but they are only a small part of the game and tend to pose fewer navigational problems; in general, plot line is what counts, and there are few or no puzzles to hold up the action.

As far as combat is concerned, in most dungeon-type games the screen view of the maze is replaced by a static image of the enemy, and commands are issued to each party member in turn along the lines of “fight”, “parry”, “cast spell” and so on, with the computer resolving each round until one side or the other is wiped out (or, where allowed, flees). In open-field games, combat takes place between party and attacking icons with a greater or lesser degree of complexity depending on the game; in the two latest Ultimas and in Wizard’s Crown, for example, the location map is replaced by a detailed battlefield map, and each party member can be fought individually.

A quick overview of currently available open-field games confirms that Ultimas still have the best scenarios. The early single-character Ultima II lacks the sophistication of its later siblings and depends unduly on mayhem, but remains a highly-playable classic. My favourite is perhaps Ultima III: Exodus, which maintains a very real sense of enchantment and wonder throughout the entire game. Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the most complex roleplaying game around today, is a miracle of programming which makes a determined effort to come up with a new and different objective and is only slightly let down by a rather inconclusive endgame.

SSI's games betray their wargaming pedigree; they are slickly programmed, but the emphasis tends to be on ingenuity rather than true suspension of disbelief. The oldest, Questron, is to my mind one of the best, but it never achieved great popularity and a projected sequel appears to have been axed. The two Phantasy games are fast, very good on detailed procedure and fun to play, but betray what might be described as an ‘engineering’ rather than a ‘creative’ design philosophy; for example, it should have been possible to come up with more imaginative place names than Hobbitown and Greentown! Only just out, Wizard’s Crown looks like being a success. I haven't had a chance to go into it very deeply, but the main wrinkles involve an extensive selection of skills and attributes which must be built up, and a very complex tactical combat option which includes such varied parameters as kinds of blows, position, direction and individual tactical assignments. 

First published in ST User, Summer 1986 
Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder