Game #187: The Standing Stones (1983)

The Standing Stones was written by Peter Schmuckal and Dan Sommers and published by Electronic Arts. It was released for the Apple II in 1983 and the Commodore 64 in 1984. I played the Apple II version using an emulator and it took me roughly 19 hours to beat.

The Standing Stones is a first-person grid-based dungeon crawler using wireframe graphics much like those found in the Wizardry series. It is a very difficult game if played as it is. If you choose to use save states; you could probably subtract 5 to 6 hours from the total game time.

I realize that playing video games or ANY kind of game for that matter is a highly subjective experience. I also realize and appreciate that the authors of any game work extremely hard and that the finished product is very much an art form. Having said that, there was a lot that I just personally found wrong with The Standing Stones.

I should warn that I am not a fan of mixing comedy with my fantasy. I want a serious dungeon crawl not an irreverent walkabout. I knew that I might be in for some trouble when I started to read through the game’s documentation. The premise for your quest is as follows: Merlin apparently decided to throw the party of the century. All of the best food and drink were served and many hours later the guest and host alike were passed out drunk. All save the krafty Kormath. Kormath used this opportunity to steal not only the best cutlery, but the Holy Grail, Mithril chain mail, and Excalibur. He then beat a hasty retreat to his private abode which just happens to be a 15 level dungeon located beneath Stonehenge. Silly right? I read the material with my mouth slightly agape.

I wish that were the only thing I had a problem with but it was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Character creation was a very easy random roll of virility, intellect, holiness, agility, and initial hit points. Once your random rolls are complete you then choose a name for your character. Your character has the ability to cast both wizard spells AND cleric spells.

Once your character is complete you’re ready to tackle the dungeon. Let’s be clear – I love getting out the pencil and graph paper and mapping out the dungeon levels – old school style. So I was pretty excited to begin. This game, however, found a way to ruin even that for me.

There are 15 different dungeon levels and each level fits to a 16 x 16 grid pattern. There are pits and secret doors and secret one-way doors and chutes and other tricks and traps that you’d normally find in any good dungeon crawler. I did not have a problem with any of this. Here is what I did have a huge problem with: the stairways connecting each of the levels.

In your exploration of the 1st dungeon level, once you’ve found the stairs leading down to the 2nd level, and decide to descend the stairs, 7 out of 10 times you WILL be taken to the 2nd dungeon level like you’d expect. But sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, randomly, much like how a chute works, as you descend the stairs, you’ll suddenly read “WHAAAAAAAAA!!!” on your screen, and then inexplicably find yourself dumped onto a random lower level. This seemed to violate all fair play rules with me. It made mapping extremely difficult as well. A weak character might suddenly find themselves lost on level 3 or 4 with permadeath a very real threat. Once this happened to me more than a few times and I found myself beginning the game all over again I instituted a “fail-safe” with this particular game. I chose to use the save state ability on my emulator right before I took any stairs. I did not feel like this was cheating as I found the game mechanic that the developers threw in there to be just ridiculous. It was a very droll and unfair way to try to create a more difficult game with a longer playing time in my humble opinion. So on each level, just before taking the stairs, I’d save the game. I found that sometimes I would have to reload/restart three or four times in a row before a staircase worked correctly! Now that is just nuts! I was tired of scrutinizing my maps to discern where I was. There is a Divine Guidance spell available that might RANDOMLY tell you what level you are on but I found the spell to be largely useless. So there is no spell or game mechanic that shows you a compass or your current coordinates. This made exploration of 15 dungeon levels much more difficult.

Below is my hand drawn map of the 1st level and attached is a post-it-note of all of the creature types that I encountered on that 1st level:

Pictured below is the 2nd dungeon level as well as the denizens I encountered on that level

This goes on and on like so through the other 13 levels. There were no text descriptions or unique dungeon dressings or details like you see in the Wizardry games and so this made dungeon exploration largely unexciting. On levels 5 and 10 you can find an Oasis where you can heal and replenish your magic points.

There are no tactics involved with combat. When combat ensues you choose to (B)ribe, (F)ight, (G)reet, or (T)hrow a spell. Offensively you get to cast one fireball per excursion and then based on your spell points you have a number of lightning bolts you can hurl – however there is the chance they rebound and hit you as well. This caused my death a couple of times and so I found I rarely used them as I went deeper into the labyrinth because permadeath is a very real issue.

One of the more unique spells that I did use quite often was Etheralness though it depletes BOTH mage spell points and clerical spell points. Etheralness allows you to walk through walls and doors which are normally unpassable. While you are in this etheral state you cannot pick up any treasure or items and when you encounter most creatures they cannot touch you. I would use this spell generously to help me map the level and save hit points doing so.

There were also spells that allowed you to move up a level or down a level but these always randomly deposit you on the level and sometimes they don’t work correctly. So for example, if your party finds itself on Level 7 and exhausted and you need to get back to the dungeon entrance to heal, if you cast 6 jump spells, choosing UP each time, you would THINK you would move from dungeon level 7 to dungeon level 1 but oh NO! Perhaps one of the castings instead moved you DOWN rather than UP…or perhaps it didn’t work? Each Jump spell deposits you randomly, so with no compass and no way to detect what level you are on, you have to pull out all of your graphed dungeon levels and try to discern where you are. So these spells become as frustrating as using the stairs. And the game is NOT turn-based, it is in real-time, if you delay and there is an encounter, because perhaps you’re drawing or perusing your maps, your opponent keeps multiplying. So one angry china plate might become two angry china plates then three angry china plates – I’m sure you get the picture – until you make a keyboard choice for combat. All I can say is: ugggggh!!!!

The graphics in the Apple version of the game are very poor. In some cases you can’t even make out what it is that you are fighting. There were silly creatures that you encountered on each level too that just resonated poorly with me. By mocking the seriousness of the game it diminished my own perseverance and overall feel for the game. For example on the 2nd level you encounter a lot of brutal china plates that want to attack you. I probably sound like a whiny bitch but I just completely detested the humor and irreverence here.

Each of the levels have very silly dungeon denizens that you encountered. On one level I encountered savage cereal bowls.

On level 10 I began to encounter what were called Glitches:

On Level 13 I found Excalibur and on Level 14 I found the Mithril Armor and it was finally on Level 15 that I encountered the Holy Grail and this is where the game just became extremely weird.

When you enter the Chamber of the Grail you have to switch disks and the game suddenly reverts to an interactive fiction game.

The old man then proceeds to grill you with a number of questions that you have to answer correctly or the game abruptly ends!! Some of the questions are just plain ridiculous. For example: Who is the leader of the club that is made for you and me? Mickey Mouse was one of my choices and happened to be the right answer. In another question I had to solve a math problem. Other questions quizzed me about game details. For example: What dungeon have you been tramping around in for awhile? In which of the levels do you find an oasis? The last question was: Who Killed Arthur? The Merlin choice was the right choice. Another question asked me: What is first officer Spock’s father’s name? I really just couldn’t believe it. If I had been put off by the game’s premise or by the monsters I was battling; this trivia game to get into the Grail Chamber was the icing on the cake.

Once you have answered all of the questions correctly you are then allowed to move forward to face the dragon. I’d like to say; “I have no words”; but this is a blog after all and words are exactly what you are looking for.

The dragon sequence plays like an arcade game. You are dumped into blackness and see nothing but a white dot up ahead. The white dot happens to be the dragon. If you get too close to the dragon without finding the scattered items lying about the area the dragon will pulverize you. When you get close the dragon appears in all it’s magnificent glory.

Scattered about the ground you can find a missile launcher (seriously), a smoke grenade (really not kidding), and a potion of fire resistance. When you find and use all three of these items they will aid you in your battle with the dragon until you finally prove victorious. Once you beat the dragon you can then claim the grand prize:

They are rare – but I have finally come across another game in my journey that I would NOT recommend to others. There is just so much that bothers me with this one. The game plays a bit like a Mony Haul campaign with a dose of drunken humor thrown in.

As you make your way from level to level you gain experience and levels extremely fast. There are piles of gold that you randomly stumble across at almost every turn of the dungeon. And even though you’ve already traversed an area it doesn’t matter more gold will randomly spawn scattered throughout. You will also find treasure chests that have 10’s of thousands of gold pieces and these increase your experience points as well. I think I was level 200 when I encountered the dragon on Level 15. Here the caveat though and it was yet another thing that bothered me about the game: the game seems to have an algorhythm in play that causes more random encounters to occur as you acquire more gold. If you find yourself on Level 5 and have picked up a chest containing 100k gold pieces you are in big trouble. Every third step you take there is suddenly an encounter. Some of the objects you find are fixed and some are random. When you come across a chest for example, whether you open it or not, monsters are also attracted to that gold spot. So if you already have a lot of gold and randomly stumble across a chest, even if you choose not to open or take the newly found chest, you are suddenly besieged by encounter after encounter making it almost impossible to step away from the spot. Once you move away from the treasure square you then get some relief but I found it to be an extremely frustrating facet of the game.

You can also find books and potions scattered about the dungeon but the books harm your character and statistics as much as they do help. It was like playing Russian Roulette so I just started avoiding picking up any books and even potions. Finding scrolls was usually the most helpful because 75% of the time they restored some of your magic points back to you. When your deep within the dungeon these proved invaluable.

So the game’s mechanics had me hating stairways and mapping the game in general and the way the game handled experience and items and encounters it had me avoiding all treasure and items past the 10th dungeon level. The last three levels were exceedingly hard to map and because of my distrust and dislike of – well – everything – I almost missed Excalibur on Level 13.

I can honestly say I was greatly relieved to put this offering in my rearview mirror. It was clearly not for me.

Next up on the docket for me is Oubliette.

Until next time…