Author: professor6153

Lost Ship Adventure is the second game we’ve played developed by Charles Forsythe. We had just finished his other game also published in 1980; Dragon Quest Adventure.

Lost Ship Adventure was Charles’ first commercial effort. He published Lost Ship at the age of fifteen and at the time was considered one of the foremost junior programmers in the country. He now joins the ranks of Great Hassett and Joel Mick who also published a string of interactive text adventures at a very young age.

I really liked the start of Lost Ship. It’s different from Scott Adam’s Pirate Adventure in that you begin the game floating in the water in a dive suit. You’re next to an old, abandoned ship. The black flag fluttering above the ship depicts a skull and crossbones which suggests a pirate ship.

Once you climb aboard the ship you’ll soon find out there are not many initial locations to explore. From the main deck you can explore the Captain’s Study which leads to a Crow’s Nest and that’s about it. There is a dog guarding a southern door which you cannot get by so I’m assuming we’ll find an inventory item which will remove that particular obstacle. There is a steak on the deck of the ship but this is a bit of misdirection as the steak is rotten. You’ll find a feather and and a jeweled dagger in the Crow’s Nest both of which become useful later. There are also seagull eggs in the Crow’s Nest but if you disturb them a seagull will swoop down and knock you into the water as well as scatter any possessions you’re carrying.

We have played and reviewed many interactive adventures to this point and one of the things which stood out to me in Charles’ Dragon Quest Adventure was the originality of the locations and puzzles. I thought the use of a rowboat to move to different locations in the game clever as well. Lost Ship is no different in that initially the game shows great promise. The beginning is atmospheric and the brief descriptions of the ship are original.

The book that you find in the Captain’s Study containing the above passage is a great example of atmosphere and originality. The book is giving you a clue there concerning an important inventory item you’ll need to uncover.

Like the rowboat in Dragon Quest Adventure, the dive suit provides another spark of originality and atmosphere. I thought it was extremely cool that you could move around underwater from location to location using the dive suit. The underwater environment is one of two mazes that you’ll need to map out. The second maze is the jungle on the mysterious island you’ll eventually sail to. An important location to discover while underwater is the coral reef.

If you chip away at the coral using the jeweled dagger you’ll uncover some old, coral encrusted bones. You can then take the bones back to the ship and use them to get by the dog guarding the south door on the deck. The southern door gives way to a map room with an X marks the spot. When you EXAMINE the feather you found in the crow’s nest, you’ll find that it is actually a pen. You can use the pen to plot a course to an island you spotted up in the crow’s nest. You then will want to SET SAIL and your next destination will be the island.

This is where the game went off the rails for me a little bit. Up to this point, I’m really into it. But I became absolutely stuck here. I spent nearly 45 minutes with the game up to this point, then spent the next 90 MINUTES ! moving from location to location trying to figure out what I missed. I found a programming book by Bob Liddell which contained all of the code for Lost Ship which shows a secondary deck location on the ship. I could find no way to reach that location. I deduced too that it was a hidden location and a parser issue, much like entering the river in Dragon Quest Adventure, but I could not find this section of the ship. Once the ship arrives upon the island, a fat manatee is there to greet you and it has something in it’s mouth. Is this the same irritating manatee from Dragon Quest Adventure? It is obvious I need to feed or give the manatee something from my inventory but I have not found it yet. There are fish as an object off of the island and I suspect I can catch the fish somehow, but again, I am missing items from my inventory. There is a path on the island which leads to a jungle maze and ultimately a cave containing a dead pirate and a locked chest.

I finally had to reach out and ask for a “nudge” or a push from the esteemed Jason Dyer who informed me it was the same issue that I had with Joel Mick’s Journey Through Time. Argh! I went back to the map room and tried to break the windows in the room; to no avail. Then I merely typed in GO WINDOW which immediately took me to the mysterious secondary deck location. Which really irked me from a pragmatic standpoint because it seemed silly that the only way to reach the secondary deck was by climbing through a window. The crew must have gotten very tired of this. You know what I mean?

Once I discovered the secondary deck I then made my way down to the cargo hold and found a net and a bag of gold. The game went by relatively quickly from there. I used the net to capture some fish. I then gave the fish to the fat manatee who promptly dislodged a gold key from it’s mouth in order to eat the fish. I then took the gold key and returned to the pirate’s cave and used the key to unlock the chest; which was filled with rubies.

I had now reached another point in the game where there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Earlier off of the coral reef that I explored there had been another sandy beach with a sign that read store your treasures here. When I had tried to store the dagger there it didn’t recognize the action but I thought I would go back and try again.

I SET SAILS once again and arrived back at my previous destination and then, with my diving suit still on and my air supply good, I went back past the coral reef to the beach area. It took some experimentation but I found that if you typed STORE then each of your four treasures individually that it recognized what you were doing.

I really thought that Lost Ship Adventure started out very strong in atmosphere and in originality. I found myself less enchanted with the game when I found I had to climb through a window in the map room to reach another area of the ship. It really must have been a bitch for the crew to have to climb through the window each time to store items in the cargo hold. Know what I mean? I also felt that the game sported a bit of an abrupt ending and I was surprised that I was done after only four treasures. So the game began with a lot of promise but transitioned into a bit of a letdown after that strong start.

I am looking forward to Charles Forsythe’s 3rd and last game which we’ll get to in the 1981 batch. There was a lot of originality to like from both Dragon Quest Adventure and Lost Ship Adventure to keep me genuinely interested to try his third programming effort. If you haven’t experienced any of the Charles Forsythe adventures yet you really should.

DragonQuest is an interactive text adventure from Charles Forsythe. It was published in 1980 for the TRS-80. I played the game on a TRS-80 emulator and it took me about three hours to complete.

You begin the game in the throne room of the king and you find out right away that the king’s daughter is being held captive by a dragon. The dragon is going to devour her at sundown and if you save her you will be awarded half the kingdom. Who could pass that up? When the king pontificates that there is not much time left he is not exaggerating. In DragonQuest, you are racing against the clock and if the sun goes down before you have found the princess the game automatically ends and you will have to start over. I actually lost this race against the clock – twice! I’m not sure how many moves I had used each time but be aware that you are on the clock.

I really enjoyed DragonQuest. There was an actual plot to the game and the puzzles and the game’s locations were original and inventive. The map and the number of locations are cohesive, original, and logical.

The game can be on the shorter side but that’s not because the puzzles are easy. There are a couple of challenging puzzles to get through and once you solve them the game moves rather quickly. I did want to point out that I died quite often. I probably had to start the game over about a dozen times.

You’ll encounter a graveyard in the game and having a trusty shovel in my possession I thought to myself is there a better place to dig in than a graveyard? So I dug a hole, naturally jumped into it, and discovered a coffin. Having learned nothing from Scott Adam’s The Count, I quickly opened the coffin. There was a blinding flash of light and I was irrevocably blinded! The coffin and it’s blinding flash of light would force me to start the game from scratch again roughly 3 or 4 times as I tried different solutions to this conundrum.

The game turns a text adventure trope upside down when it presents you with a lamp and a flask of oil in the beginning of the game. When you examine the lamp it tells you that there is no oil in it. When you examine a flask in the beginning of the game it tells you that the flask is filled with oil but that the seal is very tight. So your logical conclusion is that the oil is meant for the lamp but when you go to break the seal in any way the flask shatters and the oil spills all over the place. This dilemma had me restart the game twice as well. Later at a temple, I would find an empty box labeled Aladdin’s Lamp and I had an “aha experience”. In that same temple there is a sword embedded in a stone that you cannot pull out…

I also perished trying to climb a 100 foot pillar in a cavern I discovered. The skeleton lying at the bottom of the pillar with two broken legs did not discourage me from making the attempt. The poor, unfortunate individual also had a scroll lying next to her skeleton. According to the scroll, she had an amulet of flying in her possession that she wants you to take. Unfortunately the amulet was not on the skeleton nor anywhere in the cavern.

So once you have your map to DragonQuest Adventure fleshed out, you can find yourself stuck as to how to proceed further. You encountered an alchemist in his hut who tells you that if you drop a treasure with him he will trade you a magic item for your troubles – yet you have no treasure. You have a coffin which, when opened, exploded in a blinding flash of light leaving you irrevocably disabled, you have a missing amulet, oil that you can’t get into a lamp, and a sword stuck in a stone that you can’t pull out.

The river locations and rowboat should get an honorable mention here. You can only access certain locations on the map by rowing “upstream” or “downstream” in your rowboat that you find attached to the dock. Just another original and inventive feature from this charming game.

The empty box that you find at the temple should allow you to solve your lamp problem and that should cascade into being able to solve the dilemma of how to get the sword from the stone. The hardest part of the game was trying to figure out where the missing amulet was and trying to get past the coffin conundrum.

I probably spent about an hour at this point moving from location to location using assorted objects in my inventory and trying to find hidden locations; which is exactly what I found, well, not exactly hidden. When you reach the dock there is a rowboat attached to it so my mind immediately leaped to the conclusion that I should get into the boat. On a whim I tried to enter the water from the dock and you can indeed do so! When you do enter the water you spot a manatee; and you just happen to have some food on you…

Once I made that discovery the game went smoothly and was extremely entertaining. I obtained the missing amulet from the manatee, used it to get by the coffin’s trap where I then found a ruby inside, gave the ruby to the alchemist who generously gave me a magic shield, and off I went in search of a dragon.

I was feeling pretty confident at this point, drinking my Mountain Dew Zero and enormously pleased with myself, when I suddenly found that I lost the game and had to begin again. You see, Charles Forsythe ingeniously laid a psychological trap for me. He armed me with a silver sword and awarded me with a magical shield. So my lizard brain immediately leapt to this idea that I needed to slay the dragon. But that’s really not what I was there to do. My primary mission was to rescue the princess. So when the dragon fell asleep due to my magical shield, I chose to attack it. My attack woke the dragon up and he promptly ate my face off.

So once again I went through the entire game, made my way into the dragon’s lair for the second time, and this time allowed the dragon to remain asleep. I went north and discovered a sleeping princess, rescued her and took her back to her father in the castle.

I really enjoyed Charles Forsythe’s DragonQuest Adventure. I thought it was inventive and contained original puzzles and interesting locations. Charles did a great job at turning a couple of adventure trope ideas upside down and excelled in fooling the player with his misdirections. If you are a fan of text adventures this one was a pleasant surprise from the 1980 list and a must play in my opinion.

Oldorf’s Revenge was developed and published by Highlands Computer Services in 1980 for the Apple II. It was originally titled Wizard I and then Highlands later changed it to avoid confusion with Wizard and the Princess which was released by Sierra On-Line that same year. There are still a few copies of the game with the Wizard I title floating around out there. The game was released for the Atari 800 in 1981 but it’s title was changed yet again to Warlock’s Revenge.

It’s hard to classify the type of genre in which Oldorf’s Revenge falls into. It is listed as an RPG however that’s not entirely true. It does have some RPG elements however it is also an adventure game, a text adventure and a graphic adventure using wire-frame graphics all rolled into one. This is not particularly surprising as I characterized the role-playing game genre in 1980 as feeling it’s way around in the dark a little bit. You were likely to encounter more RPG hybrids in 1980 than any other year. This wasn’t a misconception by the developers. Most of them, in my opinion, merely wanted to translate their table top role-playing game experience to the computer as best they could. They were severely limited by the hardware they had to work with so the result were several different kinds of hybrids.

What Oldorf’s Revenge brings to the table is something very unique which we have not seen before. When you begin the game you are presented with seven different character classes listed as follows: cleric, thief, gladiator, strongman, magician, elf and wizard. You must pick one of those classes to begin the game with. Now here is the unique feature that we have not seen anywhere else. You can switch between the seven archetypes at any time in the game by choosing the letter C from your keyboard. Each of the archetypes have special abilities that will be needed to bypass traps, obstacles, adversaries or special terrain in the game. There is also strategy involved in these decisions. You can only switch to each archetype 5 times; and each time you make the switch it deducts 10 points from your Strength score. You begin the game with a strength of 100.

Switching between seven different character classes or archetypes to solve puzzles specific to their class and having only a limited number of times you can do so was extremely unique and something never seen before in 1980. Doom Cavern did have you start the game with a fighter, cleric, and magic-user and each would use their special abilities as you explored the dungeon but Oldorf’s Revenge offered a completely different take and is worth pointing out.

I actually got all the way to the end of the game and realized that I needed my Wizard to solve two more puzzles yet. However I had already used all of the wizard’s slots so I had to begin the game all over again and economize my actions. This is what I meant by there is a strategy to your choices. You want to avoid changing classes too often and plan out when and how you’re going to make the switch by studying your map.

You are presented with a locked door at the very start of the game. So if you chose to start with any of the other archetypes other than the thief, you’re going to have to switch to the thief archetype to unlock the door for you. This will already cost you a slot and 10 strength points. It was fun determining what the different strengths of each archetype were and how they were used.

The map itself sports over 100 different locations and in and of itself is one of the puzzles of the game. You have the option of moving north, south, west, east, up and down. Each location doesn’t always describe the type of or number of exits from the spot. So no matter what the description reads you have to methodically test each location for hidden exits. There are several hidden areas and/or treasures that need to be located this way.

The map or game can be divided into four major areas. Their is a toll bridge that you need to cross to advance to the next area of the game however in order to cross the toll bridge you need 50 gold pieces. The gold pieces are scattered all over in the caverns and your first obstacle then will be to find all 50 gold pieces. There are a couple of spots that are tricky and both involve using the special abilities of your character archetypes correctly. Once you have the 50 gold pieces you can then pay the toll, cross the bridge and then advance to the next section of the game.

The ultimate goal of this game is to get through all four sections of the game with 14 different treasures or 300 points. Once you have all of the treasures in your possession you can then make it through one last door and then you will be presented with your final stats.

Oldorf’s Underground Castle represents the second section of the game. It was relatively short and the puzzles were not very hard however they were enjoyable.

The third section of the game was a bit more difficult and involved not only Snotgurgle’s Palace but exploring the Land of Lxor.

There is a puzzle in this section that can only be solved by the wizard archetype so this is a gentle reminder to try and economize the number of times that you must switch classes. This is the section of the game where you must use different classes more than once which might ultimately prevent you from finishing the game later. The roman numeral puzzle on this level really stumped me for a time and caused me to backtrack around the level for about 45 minutes until I had that “aha experience”. I’ve already said too much about it so now you won’t have the same difficulty that I had with it.

The puzzles in the last section of the game were not hard however the map itself was and you’ll want to take your time here mapping out this last section to avoid spending more time with the level than you need to.

I enjoyed the game for it’s unique style. It was not a GREAT RPG nor was it a GREAT text or graphic adventure but what it did do was introduce a completely different element that we have not seen before and I enjoyed playing the game and jumping between the different character archetypes.

In April of 2018 I began a blog with the ultimate goal of trying to play as many CRPGs and adventure games as humanly possible with one caveat: to play them in the order in which they were published. I was a big fan of Chester Bolingbroke’s CRPG Addict blog as well as Jason Dyer’s excellent Renga in Blue and Nathan Mahney’s CRPG Adventures. I enjoyed reading about their exploits and I found myself envious of the adventures that they were having. I also found that I was fascinated with the history of gaming and how early games influenced the games which would come later. I decided not to watch from the sidelines any longer but to embark on my own personal journey. They say imitation is the best form of flattery and this is a passion project of mine and nothing more. So here we are now in July of 2021, almost 2.5 years later, and I find myself having completed my 100th game on this personal journey. I have to agree with Chester; it is an addiction but also a labor of love.

I went back and recently read my very first post I made here on the site. I then moved on to my second post, One Game To Rule Them All, where I shared that Wizardry was the game that got me hooked on CRPGs for life. I wanted to do something special to commemorate reaching my 100th game and so I jumped to 1982’s selection and decided to play through Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds. Before I begin to get into the game, I wanted to say that I haven’t really deviated from my plan that I initially set for myself. I am still playing the CRPGs in the order in which they were published though I am also playing text adventures and graphic adventures. In 1980 and 1981 there were many, many more text adventures than computer role-playing games. So you will notice that I jumped ahead to 1981, played through the entire selection of computer role-playing games published that year, while going back to 1980 and systematically continuing to play the text adventures from that year. I have still not completed the adventure games from 1980 but now find myself playing the CRPGs that were offered in 1982. Now that I have completed Wizardry II, it is my intent to go back to 1980, play two or three more offerings from that year, then come back to the 1982 computer role-playing games. The RPGs are my first priority however I am still set on playing the others AND (emphasis here) I am greatly enjoying doing so.

Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds uses the same game system and rules as the first game. The spells and the game mechanics are exactly the same. It is not so much a sequel as it is a new scenario for the first game system. Wizardry II boots on it’s own however you do not have the ability to create new characters as you did in the first game. You TRANSFER characters who have completed the first Wizardry scenario into the second scenario. The player is then presented with an entirely new scenario and six new dungeon levels to explore and conquer with those same characters. In hindsight, this is where I believe the creators of Wizardry made a mistake. It was a HUGE seller and money maker for Sir-Tech but I think the series could have become as popular as Ultima if they would have presented each new game as a stand alone offering. Still allow players the opportunity to transfer characters but also give them the option to create new characters as well. By presenting Wizardry II and later III as scenarios, they never stood a chance of increasing sales. They were never going to sell more than what the original Wizardry sold. Their decision to present the games as scenarios cost them the opportunity to increase their fan base over time.

I had beaten Wizardry II once before when I was in my early twenties. I am fifty-five year’s old now so that was many years ago. My initial thought was that I would allow the completionist in me to take over and that I would fully map out each of the six dungeon levels. I was certainly able to do so with the very first dungeon level.

My final impression with the game, now having approached it for the second time and much older, is that the combat is greatly unbalanced. The first dungeon level seems to go well and then the combat begins to go off of the rails the deeper you go into the dungeon. The five different “artifacts” that you find throughout the dungeon help to greatly unbalance the game as well. You could almost play the last two or three levels with only one character. It would be an interesting challenge. As an example, you may randomly encounter three Earth Giants on the 3rd dungeon level. If they hit you, which is very likely unless you’re wearing the magical armor from Level TWO, they do 78 points of damage. You will encounter Ogre Lords who cast MABADI (ouch) and Level 8 or 11 Ninja who decapitate your characters with one blow. So combat is extremely unforgiving. I found myself resurrecting my fighter, Sturm, so many times I wanted to rename him Kenny. This idea of “who killed Kenny” started to become a recurring theme.

It is in the first dungeon level that you discover the plot hook for the game. You need to locate and recover the five symbols of Gnilda’s favor and return them to her to prove your worthiness.

It is in the first dungeon level that you also discover the first of the five symbols: an animated suit of magic armor. Once you defeat the armor in combat then you can claim it and even equip it. Equipping the armor GREATLY reduces your armor class and also causes you to regenerate hit points. Equipping any of Gnilda’s five symbols greatly affects the balance of combat.

You also need to solve a riddle/puzzle in order to get to the armor. I thought this was a great twist introduced into the series. The stairway to the next dungeon level is always adjacent to your battle with one of the five symbols in the game. You will battle magic armor, a magic shield, a magic sword, a magic helm, and a pair of magic gauntlets. The magic armor is found on Level ONE, the magic shield is found on Level TWO, the magic sword can be obtained from Level THREE, the magic helm is found on Level FOUR, and the magic gauntlets are found on Level FIVE. The sixth level is there to provide you with three clues to help you solve the riddle of the sphinx and your final approach to Gnilda.

It was my goal to map out every single square of each level to present to everyone in my blog. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to play Wizardry I or II to do your own mapping. Creating a map of the dungeon level as you plod along and explore is part of the entire experience. I discovered quickly however that mapping every square inch was going to be a difficult task to accomplish. I had mentioned earlier that the combat is very unbalanced. All it takes is a surprise round by your opponent or suddenly bombarded with a high level offensive spell and you can be wiped out almost instantly. It was then that I realized I had to change my philosophy on how to “beat” the game.

One of the things that is very different about the second game as opposed to the first is having direct access to high level spells right away. Remember you transferred powerful characters over from the first scenario into this one so you don’t have to necessarily grind for new spells. What you will need to do is familiarize yourself with the manual and all of the spells contained within because you will use them all often. One of the spells that I hardly used at all in the first Wizardry game was MALOR. MALOR is a teleportation spell that is able to be cast by your wizard. However in this second scenario the use of the teleportation spell is encouraged; and you will be using it often and in a tactical manner. You input specific coordinates and you can teleport anywhere.

While I was mapping out the second dungeon level I realized I was using too many spells to try and stay alive and I would have to turn around and go back to the castle. Then I had an “aha experience” and I realized I was going about things the wrong way. I knew my maps were thus far accurate because of the DUMAPIC spell which which tells you exactly where you’re at in the dungeon. So once I entered the dungeon what I began to do is teleport myself to where I left off mapping in the game OR to a key stairway. Once I found one of the symbols on a dungeon level and the stairway to the next I realized there was no need to map out the entire level and that trying to do so might spell the end of the game for me. This new method worked very well and proved to be economical and efficient. I always had to keep two slots available for my MALOR spell. One slot to get to where I needed to go and I always held one back so that I could escape the dungeon if I needed to. There are no side quests or anything of that nature in Wizardry II and while I was not aiming for a “rush” through the game or anything of that nature I also did not want to perish because I wanted a complete map level.

It was on the third dungeon level that I encountered the magic sword. You could certainly equip one character with all three items found thus far but what I chose to do was split the three items between my three fighters to balance them out a bit more.

I found the fourth dungeon level to be a bit of a pain because there were a lot of pits you could fall into and rocks from cave-ins that you could bump against for damage. It took me awhile to find where the magic helm was located on the map as well. The magic helm seemed very easy to beat compared to the other three items which was surprising. I had expected each symbol on each level to get progressively harder to beat but I found that the opposite was true.

The fifth level battles became extremely difficult. It was already very difficult to get this far but now every single battle and who or what you would encounter became a “nail biter”. I actually got very very lucky on Level FIVE. I fell down a chute which deposited me on Level SIX – in the dark! I groped along and actually stumbled across the stairs going UP to Level FIVE! What a stroke of luck because the stairs were always adjacent to the symbol you had to find. So I climbed the stairs and then moved one space and underwent combat with the magic gauntlets. Once I defeated them I teleported back to Level One and made my way back to the castle. Falling down that chute probably saved me at least two more hours of mapping. Sometimes I’d rather just be lucky than good.

The sixth and last level of the dungeon is just dastardly. I had played and beaten Wizardry II when I was in my 20s and I remembered the answer to the sphinx’s riddle however I couldn’t remember any of the other details concerning this last level so I set out to find as much as I could without seeing the whole thing go up in a ball of flames. There are three hints that you’ll find scattered about the level to help you with the sphinx’s riddle.

When you have the five symbols in your possession, and the answer to the sphinx’s riddle, only one member of your party can return to the first level of the dungeon and visit Gnilda. If you give her the correct answer to the riddle, and you have the five symbols in your possession, she takes them from you and then presents you with the Staff of Gnilda.

Once the staff is in your possession all you have to do is head back to the castle and you’ll receive the following message:

I still love the Wizardry series; particularly the first game. I really enjoyed coming back to the series and getting into a good old fashioned dungeon crawler. I love the turn based strategy involved in the combat. I like the idea of taking your time to think about how you want to handle or best approach the situation and then watching it play out. I appreciate again that Wizardry remains the first series to present multiple party members each with different skill sets, spell lists and special abilities. It quite literally paved the way for others which would come after. The series is solely responsible for creating a sub-genre of role playing games known as Dungeon Crawlers. I also liked the plot hook in this second scenario and I liked how each dungeon level had it’s own personality. In the first game I remember that levels six through nine felt a little “sterile”. This second scenario seemed to have more flavorful text than the first game.

What I thought was a glaring weakness with this second scenario was the combat balance. The first dungeon level seemed appropriate and then I felt like was starring in a Quentin Tarantino film for levels two through six. Many of the combat encounters could be extremely deadly and I found myself starting over multiple times. I have the feeling that Wizardry fans wanted a high level, high octane scenario and that is exactly what they got. Playing a second scenario with seasoned, high level adventurers is a double-edged sword though. Sure it was really fun to transfer your characters over from the first game along with their hit points and spells. The downside is that you transferred old characters with all of their hit points and spells. What I am trying to say is that the game seemed to lack a certain excitement because the characters didn’t really improve or advance through the adventure. The focus WAS the adventure and there was no emphasis on level progression and there really were no spells to try and get; the characters had them all. The characters I was controlling did end up advancing 2 to 3 levels each (remember to make a level they needed like 250,000 experience points) but that was about it. In most cases all that did for me was give me another hit point and I got to watch my ability scores move even lower – yes that’s right I played the DOS version. My understanding is that the PSX, Saturn and SNES ports do not have such a drastic ability score drain when making a level.

So while I was ECSTATIC to return to the Wizardry series, had an amazing time with it and thought it was still stronger than most of the CRPGs I’ve played thus far, I encountered some chinks in it’s armor. I believe that most of my complaints were addressed and ironed out in Wizardry III which I will get to play and discover for myself when I get to the 1983 selection.

I played Wizardry II on my PC using DOSBox and it took me about 20 hours to complete. If I had the luxury of time and didn’t have lists upon lists of games to get to (gleefully rubs hands together) I would like to play Wizardry I and II on all of the different game systems that it was ported to and compare them all from a first hand perspective. I think that alone would likely take me over a year.

In Search Of Dr. Livingston is an interactive text adventure written and developed by Becky Fullerton, Ralph Fullerton, Carl Russell and Karen Russell. It appeared in the September 1980 issue of Softside magazine as a type in for the TRS-80. I played it on a TRS-80 emulator and it took me roughly 2.5 hours to complete.

When the game begins you find yourself in your bedroom with the bedcovers turned down. You’ll want to explore the closet and it’s content before you climb into bed. This text adventure sports one of the most creative and unusual adventure beginnings to date. The game obviously wants you to examine the timeworn book. The book title is Land of the Unknown (Africa) by R. U. Redde (ha). The book along with the game’s title suggests that this may be loosely based on Dr. David Livingston, a British explorer who was presumed dead while exploring the African continent. If you type in HINT here, which is the only time you’ll receive any kind of help in the game, the games suggests that the answer lies within one of the book’s passages. If you type in READ PASSAGE you get this:

It took me some time here but if you type in the word DRIFT you are then magically transported to a rowboat just off the shore of what seems to be Africa. I first thought that this was a dream sequence of some sort but it seems more in line with the use of magic to teleport yourself elsewhere like we’ve seen in previous adventures. Pirate Adventure by Scott Adam’s comes to mind.

Once I was able to wrap my head around that surreal beginning and began to explore the environment I realized that this was, albeit unique, another treasure hunt game with the key focus on finding Dr. Livingston. One of the most frustrating things about this game was the creation of the map and moving about the map.

There were three big stumbling blocks for me in this game: 1) getting by the beginning sequence; 2) trying to create the map and avoid confusion; and 3) dealing with the parser and what the game wanted when finding Dr. Livingston.

The map presented me with issues because I began to notice that going in a particular direction was not static. The game would change the rules or directions as you continued play. An example of this, if you look at the map, is the Uljii Village. When you travel EAST from the Plains Village it almost always takes you right back up to the sign location; emphasis on almost always. Every once in awhile when you travel east it will then take you to the Uljii Village. This was not the only time in which the game does this. I had a terrible time mapping the cave complex as well. I was lucky in that I randomly stumbled upon the village and then realized what was happening. I believe this is the first time I encountered this. From a game play perspective I can’t understand the reason for developing the game or coding a game in this fashion. If the goal is to make it harder I think it detracts from the current goal or story and seems to violate fair play rules.

Most of the puzzles in the game are inventory based. You obtain a few of your treasures by trading in the villages. There are two different villages and a trading post where you can trade for items. I was confused where to drop or store your treasures for points and it turns out it was back in the bedroom. You can return to the bedroom through the cave complex by saying SWAMI which is the second of the two magic words in the game. You can return to the dark continent by merely climbing back into bed with your book and saying DRIFT. I never did figure out how to make it by the leopard which guards one of the cave mouths but you don’t have to. You can always circumvent the leopard by going into the caves from the opposite side. This becomes rather easy once you have the map figured out.

The last stumbling block involved finding Dr. Livingston. I typed in GET LIVINGSTON and I kept getting the response Dr. Livingston? and I felt like I was trapped in the Abbot & Costello ‘Who’s on First?’ routine for a little while. Then it finally dawned on me to type I PRESUME at the Dr. Livingston? prompt and then he joined me.

Most of the treasures were obtained through solving inventory puzzles. The blue sapphire was particularly hard. Once you’ve whittled your charming little flute you can then CHARM VIPER and add the flaccid VIPER to your inventory. When you encounter the wild dog in the jungle if you drop the viper from your inventory this occurs:

I finished with 192 points out of 250 and I suspect this had more to do with the number of turns it took me to find the items rather than missing anything large in the game. The game was frustrating enough that I really don’t feel like testing that theory and I am happy to move on. The beginning of the game was original as well as the plot to find Dr. Livingston even though other treasures were thrown in to find for good measure. I am impressed with many of these type in adventures that we’re encountering from Softside. The mapping experience however was very frustrating due to the randomization of directions within the game. I don’t like that attribute and found that it detracted greatly from the experience.

Medieval Adventure is an interactive text adventure which was introduced to users through CLOAD. It introduces a unique twist in that the game can be played by two players. Player #1 and Player #2 each submit a name and then begin the game in different areas of a castle. The goal is to solve puzzles and collect as many different treasures as you can and then each player deposits their treasures in different locations. Each player takes turns and you can take as many actions as you deem necessary. Once you elect however to move to a new location of the map then play control reverts back to the other player.

I found Medieval Adventure to be an extremely satisfying experience. True, it is another treasure hunt, however the game ran incredibly smooth, I had no problems with the parser, and while the puzzles are all inventory based, I found many of the castle locations and items to be unique and original.

I was surprised to discover that the game was written and developed by Hugh Lampert. Lampert was responsible for another CLOAD game called CIA Adventure which I had covered earlier. I remember being extremely impressed with Lampert’s CIA Adventure which sported an interesting plot and tight, cohesive map locations.

I am equally impressed with Lampert’s second offering. It is another very strong entry and another very impressive CLOAD title. In my opinion Medieval Adventure is a stronger entry than many of the published text adventures that I’ve played. I can also appreciate that Lampert tried to do something different here by presenting a text adventure in which two players compete against each other for points. Whether you like the idea or not you have to give the man kudos for attempting to break the mold.

I wasn’t quite sure how to handle Player #1 and Player #2 so I affectionately labelled each player Chester and Jason respectfully (snicker).

I found that after experimenting for a few turns I could command one player to WAIT which immediately relinquished game control to the other player. I found the game environment and puzzles to be interesting enough that I wanted to give full control to one character and so essentially play “solo”. I had Player #2, Jason, WAIT on each of his turns and then set out to explore and collect with Chester who was Player #1.

In Medieval Adventure you will encounter a pit of alligators, a sorcerer in his workroom, an evil witch, and a large hornet’s nest as adversaries or obstacles that you have to deal with. All of the puzzles are inventory based and so a couple of the puzzles may involve some experimenting on your part. I felt that not only were the adversaries presented in an original manner but that the inventory items you collected were a breath of fresh air. I though many of the inventory items were extremely original. Loose clay and a mold with which to make a key (needed to get by a locked steel door in the game), a bar of nitric acid, a horn filled with gunpowder, an ancient blunderbuss, a very sharp dagger and a jar of magic cream are many of the examples of items that you found which would help with the game’s puzzles.

Like CIA Adventure, I found this game’s map locations to be cohesive and make logical sense. I loved the use of the drawbridge, the steel door, and the large statue to introduce new map locations. I felt that Lampert’s map structure for both games exhibited an intuitiveness and maturity that some developers only gain through experience and time.

The game also featured a ferocious dragon which kept appearing randomly to harass each of the players. The dragon could be attacked and driven away as long as you possessed one of the following items: an iron sword, a well forged battle axe, or an ancient blunderbuss (you’ll need to possess the ram’s horn filled with gunpowder in order for the blunderbuss to be affective). If you have one of those items then the wounded dragon will then slink off into the darkness to lick it’s wounds. There was no way that I found to permanently kill the dragon.

You deposit each of the treasures that you collect into the alcove that’s been assigned to each player. There is the possibility of 210 points and at the end of the game each player could then compare scores to see who scored more. Remember I wanted to experience the game locations and puzzles in a “solo” manner so I always had Player #2 WAIT.

It appears that the only two adventures that Hugh Lampert wrote were CIA Adventure and Medieval Adventure, both of them offered through the CLOAD subscription service. I can find no evidence of Hugh Lampert having worked on any other game other than these two and I find that to be a real shame. I very much enjoyed both of his offerings and found both of them to be “diamonds in the rough” so to speak. If you love interactive fiction and you have not yet introduced yourself to Hugh Lampert’s offerings I suggest that you do so.

The Starquest series was an attempt to pay homage to and capitalize on pulp science fiction heroes & stories. The manual even dedicates the game to Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Hawk Carse, James T. Kirk, and others. Automated Simulations uses the Dunjonquest engine again but this time adds new commands and science fiction elements.

The 31 page manual which comes with the game is once again top notch.

Automated Simulations has a history and reputation for producing amazing manuals to coincide with their games. In Temple of Apshai their dungeon room descriptions offered a deeper level of immersion in the early days of CRPGs and made them an early industry darling. The manual was huge in size, beautifully rendered, and perfectly executed. They did not want to break this recipe for success and continued producing top quality game manuals for all of their products. SSI would later replicate this same system for their Gold Box series.

Veterans of the Dunjonquest series will feel right at home. The Display setup is the same as well as many of the movement commands. New features have been added for this science fiction setting. You now have a powergun (or a zapgun) with strength settings ranging from 1 to 9. You also have a Thunderbolt Mark II blaster which is more powerful but makes more noise and can draw the attention of enemies. You have a shield which works much like the starship shields in Starfleet Orion (a 1979 science fiction based wargame from Automated Simulations). The shield is connected to your energy pack and you can turn the shield on and off with a simple keyboard command. The shield acts like a force field by absorbing incoming energy and thus reducing damage done to you. Lastly you have at your disposal an AMBLE unit which stands for accelerated movement through bio-electronic enhancement. This unit has been biologically implanted into your system using bionic implants, bone reinforcement and drug triggers, Activating AMBLE allows you to move extremely fast but greatly reduces your Fatigue rating.

The plot of Rescue at Rigel reminds me a bit of Datestones of Ryn but with a science fiction twist. You are taking on the role of Sudden Smith (a character from the Orion games who is introduced to us via a short story in the manual) who has teleported down by transporter beam inside a six floor, sixty room complex inhabited by an alien race, the Tollah. Scattered throughout the base, which has been hollowed out of an asteroid orbiting Rigel, ten humans are held captive. You have to make your way through the six floor, sixty room complex to find as many of these captives as you can and beam or teleport them out. You have 60 minutes to accomplish this mission and then your teleportation window to the rescue ship closes.

The teleportation part of the game is very well done and entertaining. When you discover a prisoner you move into contact with them and then hit T for teleport. This will beam the prisoner to safety aboard the rescue ship. The sound effects and visuals of the teleportation beam are reminiscent of Star Trek which is what I believe they were going for. When you are ready to beam out, and are by yourself, you can hit T at anytime and you will be teleported safely to the rescue vessel as well. Your goal is to find as many of the ten prisoners as you can before your allotted time or your energy pack runs out. If your energy pack runs out you will not be able to power your powergun or the teleportation device. Delilah Rookh, Sudden Smith’s love interest, is one of the ten prisoners and you receive bonus points for teleporting her to safety.

It is necessary to map out the six levels of the alien base. The game introduces drop shafts and lift shafts which act much like elevators between the levels. You’ll have to correctly map out where these are located on each level. Each level has the same basic room types however they are in a different configuration on each level. Certain doorways will also instantly teleport you to a different level. These can be an advantage when you want to quickly reach that level or they can be a bane when you need to rescue prisoners on the level you are on and then suddenly you’re teleported elsewhere. When you’re on a 60 minute rescue clock this becomes a problem. Once you have the map complete it remains the same throughout the game. It is not randomly generated. Once I had mapped out the entire complex and was familiar with the mechanics, my rescue attempts became more successful. I moved from rescuing to 2 or 3 prisoners to 5 and then 8. I am sure I could have rescued all 10 with only 1 or 2 more tries but quite honestly it didn’t have enough replay value for me to continue.

All of these additions to the dunjonquest engine and science fiction nuances sound great on paper but still resulted in a “flat” experience for me. I enjoyed using the zapgun and teleportation beam for awhile however I couldn’t help but feel that this entire adventure seemed like nothing more than a retread but with new trappings. I had explained earlier that the scenario reminded me of Datestones of Ryn but with a science fiction veneer. I also couldn’t help but feel that the alien race in the game, the Tollah, simply looked like “retreads” of the ant-men from the Temple of Apshai as well.

The biggest disappointment for me is that for all of the new science fiction trappings; there was no roleplaying game experience left. It had all been stripped away. Your only connection to this character is by way of a short story in the manual. There are no inventory items to find, no experience to be had or levels to be gained. There is nothing in the way of puzzles. Your only goal is to find the prisoners and quickly teleport them out. This may have been advertised and sold as a dunjonquest game with science fiction trappings but it is really nothing more than an arcade snatch and grab game.

I had always wondered what the science fiction version of the dunjonquest engine was all about and was excited to have found a copy to play. I had never played any of the dunjonquest titles while growing up and I am enjoying taking a historical trip through time with each of the entries in the series. I played the Apple II version of the game and probably spent about 2.5 hours with it.

Chameleon Software is responsible for developing three games under the Maces & Magic umbrella: Balrog Sampler, The Stone of Sisyphus, and Morton’s Fork.

The CRPGAddict was able to determine that Chameleon Software was a side-project for three Indianapolis medical professionals. The games were not a financial success and they never went on to work on any other games. An interesting side note: apparently TSR, the publisher for Dungeons & Dragons, sent Chameleon Software several letters threatening litigation claiming that any two alliterative fantasy sounding words separated by an ampersand was a threat to their trademark.

Up to this point, Morton’s Fork had been the only one of the three games that I had been able to play and finish. I found this trio of games to be extremely interesting and so I became obsessed with trying to find a good working copy of Balrog Sampler. The allure of the game was becoming my white whale. I thought Adventure International hit it out the park with the cover art and in my opinion it represents some of the best cover art for a text adventure during that period. I was also infatuated with Chameleon’s alliterative Maces & Magic idea for a series of adventures under that heading. Finding working files of Balrog Sampler and getting them to work with any emulator has been an almost impossible task. I never did give up my pursuit and I was finally able to sit down with the game.

The copyright for Balrog Sampler is 1979 and it was originally published under the title Dungeon and then later changed. The game is another example of a text adventure/CRPG hybrid and there were a number of these during this period. The limitations of the technology had developers feeling around in the dark for a satisfactory way to emulate a Dungeons & Dragons tabletop session. These hybrids seemed like the perfect solution for many.

I guess quoting Woody Allen on the title screen should have warned me about what was to come. When you create your character you’re asked; “What’s your handle good buddy?” which was another clue as to the game’s use of humor; and there is a lot of it. The game is darkly comedic almost to a flaw. It’s textually irreverent exterior masks an extremely deadly interior. There is SO MUCH humor in the game that I found it ran cross current to my own gaming logic and I found myself becoming frustrated with it. Let me explain why.

The title itself is rather tongue in cheek for those who have actually played the game. Balrog is a creature from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and a Balrog Sampler seems to imply a bit of a “taste” of some medieval or fantasy adventuring. However this game is anything but a sample. It takes you through an extensive character creation process whereby you choose both weapons and armor. The list of weapons and armor to choose from mirrors that of an encyclopedic catalog. There are weapon and armor names within the lists that I actually had to google. Once you create your character you’re ready to begin your adventure. The outdoor areas of the map consist of about 25 locations and then once you find the dungeon you’ll eventually discover that there are over 100 locations. The game, especially for this time period, is immense. It had more relevant locations filled with descriptions, encounters, traps and conversations than any text adventure to date with the possible exception of Empire of the Overmind. There is a lot of meat on the bone where this game is concerned and quite a bit to unpackage. And it is DEADLY.

The game is like Eamon on steroids. There are not only set pieces where combat can take place but as you’re moving around from location to location you also have to deal with wandering monsters. The wandering monsters are completely random and can happen anytime and anywhere. Your character, in the beginning, is not strong enough to handle ANY of these encounters. A run in with a wandering monster near the start of the game is instant death. You will face silly creatures called speckled cruds, brain moles, speed demons, killer bees, black holes, tribbles and more and the encounters are frequent.

The room descriptions and locations play out like a pick your path to adventure game. Once you are done reading a description or encounter you are then given a series of choices. Many of the choices that you make result in instant death. No saving throws, no puzzles to work through, just instant death. I have been working my way towards making a point here – which was to explain why I started to become very frustrated with the humor. The Monty Python like humor begins to grate on your nerves when your death is the cost of the joke. Some of the rooms, locations, and encounters are merely to be avoided. There is no solution or way around them without the cost being your life. So through trial and error and careful mapping you know which areas to avoid. However the game is immense in size and scope. There are more than 100 dungeon locations, multiple treasures to find, puzzles to solve and creatures to deal with. You WANT to see what lies around the next bend. The writing and encounters are creative; however the humor and constant dying conveys a tone of apathy or irreverence which runs crosscurrent to the high stakes decisions you have to make. When it came time to try and solve a particular puzzle, I would hesitate at doing something which made the most sense, because of the humor used in the game. There are times where logic is thrown in your face and in my opinion this hurts a game that offers such a vast world to explore.

The above is an example of humor used well. I laughed out loud when I tried to force my way over a bridge only to find that I was dealing with the nephew of the Dungeon Master. This encounter doesn’t kill you but merely provides levity. Clever and appreciated unlike some of the other “you chose poorly” situations you’ll encounter in the dungeon.

The parser is rather unique and it is a staple in all three of the Maces & Magic games. You receive the room description and after presented with a series of choices the parser will hang with the cursor flashing. It is at this point that you can use certain commands: (g) for get, (l) for leave, (p) for pack, (s) for status, (w) for wait and lastly (i) for inventory. When you choose (p) for pack you go to your inventory screen and you can pick an item from your inventory. When you choose the numbered item the game will then ask you what you want to do with that item and it is waiting for a two word command. Many of the puzzles that you find throughout the three games, especially in Morton’s Fork, have a non-combative solution or a puzzle to work through. There are a few of these in Balrog’s Sampler but the Chameleon Software trio seem to get better and better at their craft as the games progress.

Even though I was finally able to play through Balrog’s Sampler it was not an easy experience. My copy of the game was extremely “buggy”. I could not save my progress at any point in the game nor did I have any kind of save state capability. Each time that I perished I had to begin the game all over again. There are many, many, one more, many instant death scenarios you will fall victim to within the game. The wandering monster and creature encounters are brutal. The ONLY way that you can come out on top of these encounters is to build up your stats. There are a couple of ways to do this which I will detail later but in order to do so you need time and the ability to move from location to location freely. If you are subject to a sudden random encounter while you are in the middle of building your stats up, you will die and you have to begin play all over again. This became sort of a “Groundhog Day” nightmare. I know what I needed to do, I knew which step to take next, I had progressed a little deeper into the dungeon, but I could not begin exploring again until I restarted the game and built my character’s stats up sufficiently enough to be able to explore. Sometimes after a death and a restart, it would take me one to two hours before I could begin adventuring and exploring again. It required incredible perseverance on my part to continue and as a result I probably spent 30 hours with the game or almost an entire week of gaming.

Furthermore, to add insult to injury, the more that I played any one game, the treasures which I found would disappear from my inventory. I would still retain the points or the score for finding them, but they would be completely missing from my person. So when I went to the vault to deposit my treasures I could not do so because they were no longer on my person. One extremely irritating thing which happened twice to me; there is a pirate who steals your treasures from you much like the thief in Zork I. You later encounter the pirate in his lair and can even kill him in his sleep. He is guarding three treasures which you get to collect as well as any treasures that he previously stole from you. It was a relief to find him and kill him; because I thought I would be free from him randomly taking my treasures.

Well, lo and behold, I’m mapping out the Monster Maze in the game (which is huge) and suddenly the pirate which I previously killed pops in, takes one of my treasures from my inventory, and runs off. I was like; “What the hell…” I go back to his lair, the pirate was there in one game and absent in another, but the item he took WAS NOT. AND points had been deducted from my score. The game is rife with a lot of these “buggy” or “glitchy” moments with no save game feature available to me. When I tried to save my character my stats I built up would revert back to normal and I would lose all of my inventory. I had no choice but to start over each time and make each new game a one and done scenario.

The first thing that you really must do is build your stats up so that you can survive the wandering monster encounters and the set piece combats. There are a few ways to do this scattered throughout the dungeon such as a Personality Machine, a Dungeon Doctor and a Wheel of Luck but the best way to build up your strength is in the library (no I’m not kidding). You can check out a book on Physical Strength for 10 gold pieces and when you do so a drill instructor appears and has you do push ups. This will raise your strength by 2 and you can do this as many times as you want. Be warned, a wandering monster can easily interrupt this process before you’re able to get your strength to a respectable level and you may have to begin your game all over again.

The treasures that I found in the game are as follows:

• Bag of jewels – found on an island in a buried chest
• Emerald orb – found in the spaghetti maze
• Diamonds – found in the monster maze
• Chalice – found through the gargoyle archway in the monster maze
• Necklace – taken from the skull box
• God of Waterfalls – found at the top of the falls
• Singing Harp – found in the home of the giant at the top of the beanstalk
• Clock – also found in the home of the giant
• Collar – taken off the Roc around the clock (yes that’s right)
• Golden Eggs – taken from the gigantic goose in the giant’s castle
• Pearl – taken from the giant oyster
• Ruby Skull, Silver Pirate Ship, Chest of Jewels – taken from the pirate’s lair adjacent to the Daddy Dragon room
• Silver Tiger – found in a northern hallway near the Oracle
• Ruby – found north of the Wizard’s lair in an alcove guarded by traps

I ended my last game with 1450 points earning me the role of knight though I did have 1650 points before the pirate who I had killed turned up and took a treasure that never appeared in his lair again – and I lost the points! I also was extracting the Ruby during this latest run when the game dropped due to an illegal error. I suspect because I had so much inventory. The game is rife with bugs and can be very fragile so I know my 1650 score would have been at least 100 or 200 points higher I can’t remember how much the Ruby was worth.

There are some puzzles that were extremely difficult to figure out. The Daddy Dragon being one of them. The only way past the dreaded adult chromatic dragon is by RELEASING MICE which causes it to flee. You might now understand why I was becoming frustrated at the humor and game logic. It requires patience and trying each item. Doing so with no save game feature however made the experience enormously long and admittedly started to fray at any enjoyment I was having exploring the dungeon.

There are a couple things in the game which I never did get to solve. There is an alcove in the library that can only be reached by a ladder and I suspect some kind of treasure there but any attempt to reach the item meets in death or one of my items getting chomped in half. I’ve tried several items including an iron bar which I thought would jam the trap. So I’m curious what the solution to this puzzle is if someone happens to know. There is also a room that has a spiral drawn on the wall with a red stone in the middle embedded into the wall. I felt this was likely a puzzle of some kind but all my interactions didn’t work. Lastly I was curious what the Black Globe that you find in the library does. Balrog Sampler contains a lot of puzzles which you’ll get to work through.

If there were no technical issues, a proper save game feature and greater accessibility to copies of these games, I think more gaming circles would have been talking about this series. It sports one of the largest dungeons to date and some very interesting text. The bugs, no chance to save, combined with many instant death scenarios, makes this a game only for the most dedicated of historians and retrogamers. Thirty gaming hours and a week later however; I’m still glad that I finally got the chance to explore this most elusive of games.

John and Patty Bell ran their own small computer store, Crystal Computers, in Sunnyvale, California. John Bell also developed his own adventure games and published them under a label known as Crystalware. Quest For Power and Forgotten Island, which we played through, were also from Crystalware. In 1981 John wrote and developed the largest game for any personal computer at that time. Adventure and role-playing games were gaining in popularity but the majority of them were text only. Fantasyland had more than 400 screens of graphics and took up 400kb of storage. 400kb may not seem like much, but in 1980 and 1981 most of your games were taking up 40kb. John Bell wrote Fantasyland for the Apple II and in the spring of 1981 Michael Potter walked into the store and showed off his Atari 800 games he had developed. John Bell was so impressed he hired Potter, and in June of 1981, Potter converted Fantasyland to the Atari 800 and added some enhancements to the graphics engine. Both the Apple II and Atari 800 versions of Fantasyland were released at the same time, at a retail price of $59.95 which is equivalent to $296.00 today. Mike Potter would end up converting 11 other Crystalware titles to the Atari 800 but in 1982 they went their separate ways over royalty disputes.

The game features 6 different worlds to explore with each world taking up it’s own side on three doubled-sided 5.25 floppies.

–The graphic routines developed by Mike Potter and John Bell are incredible and the Crystalsonics sound is amazing!! The price is $59.95 and is worth every penny. The documentation is almost as fun to read as the program is to play!! It is an incredible experience!! After playing this game for over 87 hours I have rated this program the absolute BEST I have ever played, including all games for all computers, all adventures and even Star Raiders. Yes, I repeat this game is better than Star Raiders. Hard to believe? Well it is FANTASTIC!! I have rated this program on a scale from 1 to 10, an incredible 2041!! I recommend it for every owner of an ATARI 800 or 400 with a disk drive to purchase this program over all else!! It is worth it!!

The above is a review for Fantasyland 2041 A.D. found in the Atari Computer Enthusiasts Newsletters Volume 1

The manual, which came packaged with the game, was very high quality and reminiscent of something you’d see from Automated Simulations (which would later become Epyx). It consisted of 40 pages which contained a short story introducing the reader to each of the six worlds. Combat and game mechanics were explained in detail and there were also small hints contained within the reading to aid in your experience with the game. There was professional artwork scattered throughout the manual as well.

Fantasyland 2041 A.D. IS huge. It took me roughly 14 hours to complete the game. I sat down with a PDF of the manual and read through the entire thing before starting play. Inside is a short story that explains the premise of the game and I must say it immediately reminded me of the movie Westworld; written and directed by Michael Creighton. I checked and Westworld was released in November of 1973. You can watch a trailer for the movie HERE and I can almost guarantee it was a huge influence on Bell.

Fantasyland 2041, much like Creighton’s Westworld, is an amusement park where you can pay an exorbitant amount of money to become embroiled in epic fantasy.

Guests of Fantasyland will move through a series of adventure worlds which are populated with animatronics and cyborgs. The scenarios include: Congoland, Arabian Adventure, King Arthur’s Camelot, Olympus, Captain Nemo, and Dante’s Inferno. The ultimate goal is a rescue mission. Before you begin play you choose to rescue Guinevere or Lancelot from the depths of hell. You then begin play in the Hall of Heroes and must venture through Congoland first.

The overall gameplay is linear as the movement through each of the six worlds is fixed. However you are going to have to manage food and equipment along the way, battle all kinds of different adversaries, and solve different inventory puzzles. You will also ultimately have to figure out how to move from one world to the next as most of the portals are cleverly hidden or you need a particular item and/or magic to be able to move on.

Even the game manual doesn’t think you’ll make it:

You may conclude that it is impossible to ever finish or win this game. We had to make it pretty tough. The average adventurer will probably never see the Throne of Lucifer or make it past the gates to the Underworld. We hope that just the experience of a single adventure will be sufficiently entertaining to satisfy our most critical hobbyists.

What is it that makes Fantasyland 2041 so hard? It is a culmination of several things and I’m not surprised to find evidence that only a handful of people ever finished the game. The food and inventory management is brutal. Like Ultima, each time you move on the overland map it depletes your rations. The more people you have in your party, the quicker you go through the rations. There is usually one town or village in each world where you can buy rations, but treasure in the game is finite. You find just enough through exploration in each world to allow you to survive; assuming you’re managing your inventory and party properly. There are individual powerful enemies on each world as well as random parties of enemies that can attack you constantly. It doesn’t matter whether you are moving or standing still. So you need enough individuals in your party in order to survive this constant combat; but not too many so as to deplete your food supply too quickly. The armor and weapons which you purchase or find can help to increase your attack score as well as your defensive score. When you lose equipment or party members; these scores will drastically decrease. The game emphasizes encumbrance or the amount of equipment and items you may physically carry. If a couple of your party members are slain; you may suddenly find that you are too encumbered to move. So then you need to go into your inventory and begin dropping items. This kind of equipment shuffling and inventory management becomes a constant monotony.

You begin play in the Hall of Heroes where you assemble your party. It is here that you can purchase your initial party members, equipment, and rations. It requires some careful planning; more than you might initially think and I encourage you to study the manual a bit before beginning gameplay. I found that, for me, the optimal starting party size was 12 knights. You’ll see that you have options ranging from squires and archers to marauders and Argonauts as well as headhunters and Zulu warriors.

Once you have assembled your party and leave the Hall of Heroes you find yourself in Congoland. Each world has physical features that are dangerous to bump into. So you have to constantly avoid touching them in each of the world’s you traverse. If you accidentally come into contact with them you can lose pieces of equipment or companions. What you lose is completely random. There were numerous times where I accidentally “bumped” into a physical terrain feature and lost a key piece of equipment that I needed to win the game or progress forward. So I would have to quit and go back to my last saved game. You DO have the option of saving anywhere and I suggest you save often and use many different saved game titles. You die quite often or run into issues with inventory management or funds. The game is also extremely buggy. You may find that suddenly you are just missing pieces of equipment for no explicable reason or you may find that one of your saved games no longer loads correctly or works. So save often, and do not keep saving to the same game file. Create numerous save files that are all self-explanatory. Each world also has random environmental affects that have the same affect as the dangerous terrain. Examples of this are sandstorms in the Arabian Adventure world or high winds and storms in the Olympus world.

Congoland is one of the easier worlds to traverse. The key here is that you must find King Solomon’s Mines and ultimately King Solomon’s Temple located within.

There are two things that you will need in order to escape Congloland:

1. A light source. If you travel through the mines without a light source; every few steps you lose a random piece of equipment or a companion to the darkness. You can obtain a lamp by finding the village. You can buy, sell or trade there and it is located to the east and just north of the river. You have to cross the river but beware the piranhas. Then just north of the village is the maze that you must traverse in order to find King Solomon’s Temple.
2. You’ll need the Witch Doctor to JOIN your party. Many of your encounters will be with the Witch Doctor until he is in your party. Once you have the Witch Doctor his Earth magic accompanies him which is what you will need to get by the guardian standing before King Solomon’s Temple. Just USE the Earth magic and you’ll be able to move on to Arabian Adventureland.

The USE command in Fantasyland 2041 A.D. is something that you will use a lot. It is extremely tedious. Each time you press U for USE you have to scroll through every individual item you are carrying and sometimes this spans multiple screens. By the end of the game I was ready to tear my hair out each time I had to press U for the USE command.

You arrive in Cathay once you make it through the other side of King Solomon’s Temple. In this land you deal with dust storms which can cause you to lose equipment and personnel so save often. There are ruins in the northeast quadrant of the map that are locked. However you may uncover a key in one of the chests you find. If you are awarded a key then make your way to the ruins to find more gold pieces. What the game awards in each land is completely random so you may not even find the key to unlock the ruins at all. It is not necessary to win the game but the extra gold does help with inventory management. You will encounter Turks, marauders, snakes, camels, and spiders on this level. Your goal is to find Baghdad. Baghdad is your gateway to King Arthur land. There is only one item you will need to make your way through the Baghdad gate:

1. You need to encounter the GENIE and have him join your group. The GENIE is accompanied by his AIR magic which is what you need to bypass the guardian at the gates of Baghdad.

Once you find yourself in King Arthur land or Camelot the game changes and gets considerably harder. There are several things you will need to do but it is important that you save often on this level.

You must also beware the wandering Black Knights and Mordred. The encounters with the Black Knights are much harder than any of your previous encounters and it is likely that you will not be able to defeat them without more personnel in your party. Mordred is an even tougher opponent and very hard to beat without about 30+ members in your party. You also have an opportunity to obtain the sword Excalibur on this level! Getting your hands on Excalibur gives a nice boost to your combat statistics. However Excalibur is protected a Dragon which is about 15x more powerful then Mordred.

King Arthur land introduces a new “wrinkle” on this level. Much tougher opponents but a new command feature. Now instead of Fighting or Running you can choose to Greet your opponents to see if they will join your party. It is possible to create an extremely large party in this fashion. A word of caution, remember that the larger your party, the faster you go through your food supply.

I found it easier, rather than building up a small army and then dropping personnel after combat, to simply avoid the Black Knights, Mordred, and the Dragon all together. In an arcade style format, it is possible for you to sneak into the Dragon’s Lair, grab Excalibur, and then flee from the Dragon avoiding any kind of icon contact. This allowed me to continue to keep a handle on my food supply and items. This advice that I am giving now was learned through much trial and error.

There are several things you must do in order to escape from King Arthur land. The gate to Olympus is found in Merlin’s Hideaway. The only way to find Merlin is to traverse another maze. Remember that you will need to USE a lamp once you are in the maze to avoid the hazards of darkness. The following things need to be done in King Arthur land before continuing on to Olyumpus:

1. When in Camelot, purchase King Arthur’s signet ring from the store (the manual, if you read carefully, warns you to do this) You will need the signet ring as one of the three items to rescue Guinevere from Lucifer in the Dante’s Inferno level.
2. Make sure you encounter a Sorcerer before finding Merlin’s Hideaway. FIRE magic will accompany the Sorcerer when he joins his party and you will need this to get by Merlin. However if all you have is the FIRE magic, Merlin will not allow you to proceed to Olympus. You need the first Ring of Power.
3. The first Ring of Power is found on this level and obtaining it is a bit of a puzzle and it took me quite some time to figure out. When you loot some of the chests that you find in King Arthur land, without the game telling you that you obtained them, you will suddenly begin to find a Holy Grail in your inventory. You want to keep opening as many chests in King Arthur land as you can until you obtain the Holy Grail. Once you have a Holy Grail, travel to Stonehenge and stand in the middle of the structure. USE the Holy Grail and then suddenly the first Ring of Power will appear in front of you. Add the Ring of Power to your inventory. You will need it near the final phase of the game.
4. The last item you may want to obtain is Excalibur from the Dragon’s Lair. It is not essential to win the game but it gives a huge boost to your combat abilities and it is the best weapon in the game that you can obtain.

Once you have the Sorcerer in your party, the signet ring which you purchased, and the first Ring of Power, you are ready to move to Olympus. Casting FIRE magic will allow you to pass from Merlin’s Hideaway to Olympus with the Ring of Power in your possession.

Olympus changes the rules of the game yet again. In Olympus you’re going to trade your horses for sails. You’ll need to purchase SEVERAL very special items that you will need for this last leg of your journey. All of this level is spent traveling the ocean looking for islands.

WARNING: As I stated earlier, be sure you are saving often. Do not save to the same save game file either but keep adding save files. The game begins to get continually more buggy as you get deeper into the game. Obviously protein bars and cans of Red Bull were not invented yet when the programmers worked late into the night. TWICE I had two of my save game files become corrupted and I had to begin all over again. It was nauseating.

There are SEVERAL things you will need to do in order to be successful on this level. I found this level and the next level to be very difficult in terms of gauging personnel and equipment so I can tell you exactly what you’ll need.

1. You will need to purchase **ARGOS** This will be your ship to sail the seas and allow you to continue with your quest. This boat usually costs around 2500 gold pieces on average so be prepared to have to spend A LOT of your money on this level. Once you buy **ARGOS** it can be boarded on the west side of the island.
2. In order to get to **ARGOS** you are going to need to purchase a longboat. The longboat gets your crew from the boat to the several islands so that they can be explored.
3. You will also need to purchase an Anchor. The Anchor allows you to Anchor your ship next to an island. You will use the USE command to access the Anchor when it is needed.
4. You will also need to purchase Oars. I chose to purchase Oars and extra food rather than sails. Sails will save you greatly on your food supply but it can be very difficult to maneuver and there are many obstacles. Like the other lands, if you run into an obstacle you may randomly lose an important item or crew members. You cannot afford either on this level. So again, save often! Oars can be accessed via the USE command so that you can row the ship in any direction you chooses.
5. You will also need to purchase the **TARDIS** before you leave Olympus. This is the sub that you will use in Captain Nemo land. If you do not purchase it beforehand and bring it along, it will not be there for you to use when you go through the gateway to Captain Nemo land.
6. You will need to purchase FUEL and AIR for the **TARDIS**. Each of these you have to manage just like food. Yes, it’s a nightmare. 50 to 100 of each depending on the size of your party might be enough. I made the mistake of going out, finding the gateway, and then realizing I had no submarine and I watched everyone drown. I loaded my saved game (thankfully) and purchased the **TARDIS** this time around but didn’t realize I also needed to purchase FUEL and AIR for the submarine. I then watched as everyone asphyxiated on the bottom of the ocean floor.
7. You will need more bodies if you have only 12-19 individuals in your group. The first island you will need to find is the Isle of Circe. Her island is in the upper northeast corner. She is very hard to beat and just as powerful as Mordred. It took me 30 individuals and Excalibur in order to beat her. Once you defeat Circe you will find the 2nd Ring of Power. You need the signet ring and the two Rings of Power in order to take Guinevere from Lucifer. So it is imperative that you beat Circe.
8. You will need enough food now to get you to the end of the journey and the confrontation with Lucifer and then back to Olympus.

So you will need all of these things and thus plenty of gold and things to trade once you arrive in Olympus. Be prepared for this management nightmare.

Once you take the 2nd Ring of Power from Circe you can head due east on the map and just south of the Isle of Circe and you find the gateway to Captain Nemo land.

Captain Nemo land can be even more of a nightmare than Olympus. It is crucial that you monitor your AIR and FUEL supply here because you have to have enough to make it back! It was very close for me. It was excruciating to explore this level so I was greatly relieved when I discovered Atlantis. Atlantis is your gateway to Dante’s Inferno and the last level. You can find Atlantis in the upper northwest corner of the map. There is nothing you need to do on this level other than to find that gateway. You can hire divers and obtain treasures off of the ocean floor to increase your score but once I had made it this far I could have cared less.

The Dante’s Inferno level is brutal. Your adversaries are brutal. Save often. There is one last chance to purchase food and supplies in the upper northwest corner of the Dante’s Inferno map.

It is extremely important that while you are in this city you purchase a PLANK. The PLANK will allow you to cross a molten river later in this same level in order to reach Guinevere. You can also finally purchase more food here as well if you are running low. You cannot purchase AIR or FUEL for the **TARDIS** here. That can only be accomplished in Olympus.

Once I used the PLANK to get across the molten river I encountered this vile ceremony in progress. I mistakenly thought that was Guinevere in the middle there and that I had to rescue her. Many of the demons on this level will not attack you unless you come into contact with them. My rescue attempt failed miserably and they ripped me to pieces like a guest star on the Walking Dead. I luckily was saving often and once I had my game reloaded I proceeded to carry on.

I finally reached Lucifer and because I had the signet ring and two Rings of Power in my possession he was forced to relinquish Guinevere into my care. However; much to my shock at this point in the game; he told me I had to make my way all the way back through the six lands with my prize. He dared me; “Now try to get back…”

I could not believe I had to work my way all the way back through these lands. This is why I cautioned make sure you have enough AIR, FUEL, and FOOD to not only reach Lucifer but to get back to Olympus as well. It was tedious but I did manage to make my way all the way back.

There was a contest that Crystalware was running with Fantasyland 2041 A.D. I still have no idea what “mystery” they wanted the user to solve or what solution they wanted the user to send in. Winners which qualified were awarded a $1000 cash prize. If anyone has any information as to what the winning answer was I’d love to hear from you. I had decided early on not to worry myself over trying to solve this 40 year old mystery and instead just focus on trying to finish the game.

This game was immense and very hard as well. I am probably in rare company with others who have finished this game. I felt the same way after I spent almost an entire summer playing and beating Moria. I played the Atari version of Fantasyland 2041 A.D. on an emulator. If you, dear reader, decide that you want to try and take on this beast, I would plan at least 10 to 20 hours to finish depending on your personal schedule and perseverance.

This was the biggest game ever created up to that point in 1981. Nothing else comes even close. Time Zone, a graphic adventure from Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line, would surpass Fantasyland’s size in 1982 as the largest game ever released. John Bell always seemed to think and dream big and I can’t help but think this game would have been even bigger had the technology been better. Did I enjoy the game? There were several spots in the game that I highly enjoyed and I thought them to be inventive for the time but getting to those spots was in some ways excruciating. The slow wait time for certain commands began to wear on my nerves a bit. The game did get increasingly “buggy” as well once you got deeper and deeper into it. The company advertised that the game was hard and that many would likely not finish and they were not wrong. It was because of some of these things however that when I did finish the game I felt a great sense of accomplishment. The last four levels took a great amount of patience and perseverance in order to finish. Overall I enjoyed my time with Fantasyland 2041 and I appreciate it’s place in computer gaming history.

Journey Through Time represents the last of the Joel Mick games. It is an interactive text adventure that was published in 1980. I never did find any kind of box or cover art for any of the three Odyssey games so I suspect the games were mail order only. Joel Mick, like Greg Hassett, was a wunderkind, writing and publishing his four games between the ages of 12 and 14. He wrote Burial Ground Adventure in 1979 and then published his Odyssey Series in 1980 consisting of Damsel In Distress, Treasure Island and Journey Through Time. Joel Mick would go on to work for Wizards of the Coast as a game designer for Magic the Gathering.

Journey Through Time is the first game I’ve encountered that deals with time travel. The bare bones plot involves you journeying through time and “collecting” or stealing a treasure from each time period you visit and then depositing that treasure back in the present. So we’re looking at a glorified treasure hunt. I would think, with limited computer memory and resources, that crafting a time traveling text adventure would be very difficult. This original premise is pulled off quite nicely with merely the click of a button from your “time machine”.

There are six different time periods that you’ll have to visit and each time period will have a treasure to collect and bring back. There really is not much in the way of puzzles in each time period; you’re merely going through the trouble of going there and getting back. The minor puzzles are found in the beginning of the game and revolve around finding and getting the time machine running.

The time travel idea for a computer game is a first; however; Mick pulled off what I deem to be another first with this game. The room in which you’re supposed to deposit your collected treasures for points is not accessible. It is locked with no way to enter other than by a key. The only way to access the room and deposit your treasures is to find this particular key. You cannot get to the key until you have in your possession one of the six treasures that you’ve collected. I can’t remember a game to this point for home computers where the depository area for your treasure collection was blocked or inaccessible until later in the game. Zork I and other games have played around with the convention and have made it more difficult to get to but I don’t remember this variation of a theme done in quite this way.

Journey Through Time is a very quick and easy game with the exception of this last puzzle. It probably took me a total of 40 minutes to get the time machine working, travel to all six periods and obtain the treasures, and then make my way back. It then took me more than an hour to finally figure out how to access the room to deposit the treasures and finish the game. I didn’t do it on my own either I had to receive a nudge or a hint in the right direction as well and even then I think I spent almost 40 minutes trying different things until I hit upon the solution.

There are doses of humor which shine through when you’re collecting the TRS-80 PROTOTYPE or the GUTENBERG BIBLE and this is the first use of humor Mick has used in all four games. We are not provided with any specific reason why we’re traveling through time and collecting these various treasures; only that we need to do so. This paints us as time traveling thieves which again finds us portraying another dark character as we did in the previous two entries.

The game was short but it was highly original in that it represents the first game dealing with time travel and the actual game mechanic of traveling back and forth through the six different eras was well executed. Joel Mick also turns the Treasure Hunt trope upside down; playing with the depository room convention by making it the hardest puzzle in the game.

The three Odyssey games by Joel Mick are incredibly hard to find but you can find them here. You’ll need an emulator to play them. If you decide to check them out on your own I hope you have a great time with them.