Day 7 – Caverns Of Callisto

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This is the one Origin game I don’t actually own (I’ve pinched the cover image above from the Origin museum) and there is very little information about it on the web.  It came out in 1983, was the second game Origin published and was written by Chuckles himself. I can’t say much on the backstory. What I gather from a couple of reviews is that you are on the moon of Callisto for some reason and mutants steal 8 panels off your spaceship. You have to travel into the caverns on the moon, gather the panels and escape.

The game came with a map of the caverns, an image of which is on the origin museum site. I’ve blown up the jpg to a useable size for when I play the game.

I’ve found an apple 2 disk image of the game on the web. Technically I know I should own the game and given opportunity I’d pay good money for it but thats not likely to happen. So far, I’ve just had a quick go so I’ll save the screenshots for tommorow.

The gameplay consists of flying round the caverns on a jetpack shooting hoards of monsters picking up fuel cannisters for your jetpack and reclaiming the panels which are lying on the ground. There are also blue patches on the ground that surround me in a bubble and make me invulnerable for a time.

The controls are a little tricky to master. Your man always faces left or right – if you level him out and press alt-fire you can get him to face straight forwards and then the next direction you fly you will face. Its tricky to turn round and shoot things quickly when they are behind you.

Regarding the shooting, when you go fowards you point down, and when you reverse you point up. This makes it hard to actually hit anything. The hoards of mutants never stop coming either – this game is probably going to be difficult to finish but using savestates should stop it from being impossible.

Your fuel gradually runs out through the game but there are cannisters which refill it. I’m assuming I’ll have to get back to the start again when I have all the panels so I’ll try to be as frugal with it as possible. Your gun heats up as you fire it and stops working for a while if it gets too hot. Avoiding the mutants looks more likely to work than trying to shoot them.

First impressions are this is an average arcade game of the time but with dodgy graphics. My ZX Spectrum games looked better than this.

Day 7

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Out at the west end of the world is a large chasm, if you get down to the bottom and travel along it, theres a cave with a dead ranger in it. He’s got an animal trap and an arrow in there with him which I pilfer.

In the forest, at the start of the game, there was a rock with a load of animal marks round it. I take my trap there and set it up, then wander off for a bit. When I get back I’ve caught a wild boar.

Out to the NW was a chained up starving manticore, which I figure needs the food so I go give him the boar and he lets me past on the bridge (note that I don’t actually release him). There is a desert with a giant rock nest in the middle. I take some feathers from here and then head back out of the desert. This brings me to a set of mountains which Gorn tells me are climbable. I can take a hint so I climb them. Cue arcade game…

 

This is a fairly awful little subgame where I have to move my little man to the top right of the screen while avoiding falling rocks and snakes. Since I’m playing this on an emulator and can save at any time, this is easy enough. After the arcade games, the emulator will crash for some reason but thankfully you get time to save beforehand. When I restored it was working ok again.

At the top of the cave is a spider in a bubble. By saying the strange words from before, its replaced by another orb which I touch with my ring again and it loses its power.  Its now back to the middle of the map and I head off southwest and find a ferry.

Unfortunately, the rope for it has been stolen. I tie the rope to my arrow, shoot it across and its good as new. On the other side of the river is a load of quicksand which I ignore and also a giant falcons head house. Against my better judgement, I climb in through in the mouth.

There is a guy inside who makes me some wings from the feathers but says we don’t look like we will fly too well so only to use it where there is an updraft. There is a firey chasm at the north end of the map so I head straight there and fly off the edge. Cue another even worse arcade game…

This game plays a bit like lander. I have to get to the little pad while avoiding fireballs and arrows on the way down. This would have been quite difficult without savestates but isn’t too hard with them.

At the bottom is a fiery snake. This looks like another time to use the three words and sure enough it turns into an orb and I power it down. That turns out to be the last orb. When I head to Lisa’s fortress, I can walk through the forcefield and straight in the front door. As soon a I enter I fall down into hell (aka a maze).

I really hate mazes in adventure games yet they seem to be almost obligatory. This one is made worse by having to wait for loading every time I make a move. Thankfully the walkthrough gets me through it so I’m saved the tedious process of mapping it out.

At the end of the fortress is Lisa herself. I approach her, the two rings both vanish, she doesn’t want to steal my water any more and better still she’s no longer green.

Gorn gets the girl and I get sent back to Earth. Ah well, who needs women when I’ve got 50 origin games to play through? Overall this wasn’t a bad game for its time, but if you are looking for a text adventure there are plenty of better ones out there.

Next up: Caverns of Callisto.

Day 6 – Ring Quest

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Ring Quest Cover Art 

This is a game I know next to nothing about before I play it. It was originally published by PenguinSoft around 1983 and I think brought over to Origin by its main author Dallas Snell when he joined the company. The game itself is a text adventure with graphic screens for all the locations. Some of these screens are also animated.The plot is set by an illustrated game-book style manual that works just like the old fighting fantasy books I loved when I was a kid. All routes end at the same place but theres a dozen different ways of getting there. It doesn’t serve any purpose as such but its a good idea. Theres also a map, that basically has nothing on it and I’ve ignored since.

The plot in the manual is a bit tricky to summarise since there are loads of ways of getting there but basically goes as follows. You are on a beach and run into an old man who wants to tell you a story about the rings of power. There are two such rings, the ring of order and the ring of chaos. The ring of chaos has the power to change the world but the ring of order only has the power to control chaos, which is infact true power. At this point the story branches, but one way or another you wake up not on earth, retrieve the ring of order and then get transported away again to meet a wizard and warrior (Gorn) who give you the games actual plot. Lisa the enchantress (yes, really) has been possessed by the ring of chaos and you must go and save her with Gorn. The ring then teleports you both off and the game begins.

I do own the apple 2 version of this game but I’ve no way of getting the disk onto my pc to run in an emulator. I searched the web for a rom but the only versions I’ve found have a PenguinSoft brand in the intro – I’m thinking the intro will have been different in the Origin release but since this is all I’ve got, I’ll play this version. I think my patience for a 25 year old text adventure game, may be short so I’ll probably make liberal use of a walkthrough.

The game starts with an intro screen, which I guess looks better than anything in the Ultima games so far, then even though I’ve not done anything yet I have to swap disks to get into the game proper, which starts at an 8 way crossroads. The picture draws a polygon a a time and takes quite a while – I’m immediately put in mind of playing the hobbit on the spectrum although the graphics here are probably better. The speed they draw at is a bit frustating – by pressing enter again I can swap just to text mode or back again.

 

Theres a forest to the east so I head for that, the game pauses while it loads off the disk every time you move(I’m going to have to get used to waiting). I find a spring in the forest which on closer examination contains a dagger which I take as well as refilling my waterskin. Rather than a static screen the spring actually bubbles which is a nice touch. I carry on through the forest and eventually come across a boat with an ogress in front of it – rather than attacking us she hugs Gorn. I’ve no idea what this is about so head off again.

  Suddenly I’m paid a visit by Lisa herself. Shes described in the text as a beautiful woman but looks more like David Dickinsons wife in lime green instead of mahogany. She casts a spell which takes all my water so I have to trek back to the spring to refill. She seems to keep paying me random visits throughout the game. Today  shes nicked my water, confused Gorn so we go in the wrong direction, and once stopped him being able to understand me. These effects (apart from the water) wear off after a while so its no great hardship.I found a man in a hut who offered to help me for cash – I give him 100 gold and he tells me my more about my quest. Lisa has used the chaos ring to create a forcefield around her fortess. This field has separate power sources which must be destroyed before I can gain access. He also gives me three funny words to remember.

 

I ran into a werewolf who Gorn finished off with the dagger, and also a timber wolf. By saying the three odd words to the timberwolf, he vanished and was replaced by a glowing orb, which is apparently one of the power sources. By touching it with my ring it stops glowing so thats one of them gone.

Elsewhere I find a very stoned looking troll. In the game his eyes flash which adds to the effect. He nicks my stuff if I go past him, but by dropping everything before I go past except my gold I can hold onto the important things and get them when I come back later. On the other side of his bridge is an ogre who looked like he was going to attack me then apparently smelled Gorn and followed us instead. Gorns body odour obviously has some sort of effect on ogres. I take the ogre back to the ogress, they both disappear off together and the way is cleared for me to get into the boat. In here I picked up a rope and a ruby, then headed back to the cross roads. I’ve still not tried out half the directions from here so will explore more tommorow.

I’m not sure what I think of this game so far – with a couple of exceptions text adventures were never really my thing – I was more into the Sierra games and the like. The speed of the graphics are quite frustrating here and I’m tending to stick to text mode if I’ve seen somewhere once. There haven’t really been many puzzles yet, and if theres only 100 locations I must have seen at least 1/3 of the game. The box does say something about arcade sequences but theres no sign of any.  As text adventures of the time that I remember go, its above average. Its definitely better than Zork (which I never liked) but not exactly up there with A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Day 6

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Exodus has been exorcised so I’ve finished the first trilogy of trilogies. I didn’t spend long at all finishing up – I used the same trick running round level 8 of the perinean depths to get my frontline fighters up to level 20. My cleric and wizard could now cast a mass death spell which levelled them up easily also.

The mark of force was on the bottom level of the dungeon of fire – I just used spells to get straight down, get the mark and leave, then headed for Castle Death.

All the monsters in here, are preset so you know what you are going to get but they are also extremely tough. To make things harder there are random fireballs going off all over the map which mean it hurts to stand still too long waiting for your magic points to build up again. Waiting to get them back, and casting mass death still hurt less than fighting conventially though so I stuck with that approach – I barely made it to Exodus. I probably should have levelled up a bit more before I tried this.

When you get to Exodus, he turns out to be an old fashioned computer just like in an old Star Trek episode. Hes also guarded by four lots of invisible monsters – thankfully these die in one hit, so they are pretty easy to finish off by grouping my party together.

To kill off Exodus you insert the four cards in the correct order and that presumably crashes the computer and it blows up a square at a time. A brief message appears inside the map window, congraulating you and plugging Ultima 4. I’ve seen the end of the game described as anti-climactic but the battle to get to Exodus is difficult to say the least and there isn’t really a hint that Exodus will turn out to be a computer so it would have been a surprise to anyone playing it at the time.

I’ve been very impressed by the quality of this game – I would go as far to say its the first classic in the series. The first games were more experiments in programming, whereas this comes across as a fully-rounded and structured game. Twenty-five years after it came, out it still had me hooked and not wanting to stop playing. I don’t feel that I got the full experience,however, as I knew how to finish the game before starting. I was too young to appreciate a game like this back in 1983 (when I’d only just got my first computer – a 16K ZX Spectrum) but for anyone who played it at the time this must have been something special.

Since this is the first game published by Origin, this is technically only the first game on the list finished. I’ve not counted but there must be about 50 to go… Next up: Ring Quest.

Day 5

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I made loads of progress last night. I carried on raiding the 1st floor of the same dungeon until all my characters had 9999 gold – this really didn’t take too long. By then they were all around level 4 except my cleric who was still level 1. I then tried delving a bit lower into the dungeons to gain some experience and found a fantastic spot at the bottom of the perinean depths. Its an easy dungeon to get to level 8 on anyway as there is a ladder that goes all the way down from level 3, but when you get there, there’s a square corridor with brands in two corners, and poison curing  and health fountains in the other. This means you can walk round in circles, keep all your guys on max health all the time and fight all the level 8 dungeon creatures for loads of easy experience.

Rather than dishing out the same experience randomly for every creature, Ultima 3 has a set amount for each type – an orc gets you 3xp, a balron 20xp for each killed. This makes far more sense and is actually rewarding me for surviving tougher fights.

I got my party up to level 6 or so – my cleric was still lagging behind at level 2. He only has the one combat spell I can use, which kills large amounts of undead, but you don’t seem to run into undead that often. The levels only affect your hit points – an extra 100 per level. I decided they were tough enough to survive so I then set out to explore a bit and look for a ship.

There aren’t a huge number of towns in Ultima 3 that I’ve found so far, maybe around 8 or so. They don’t feel any bigger than in Ultima 2 but they are definitely more Ultima-esque. Some of the names are even the same – theres a town called yew in a forest thats full of druids. The silly comments are gone from Ultima 2 when you talk to the people in these towns. They all just give a one line response which can be just “Good day” or clues to help you to complete the game i.e. “Dig for exotics”. Its not exactly a conversation system, but its fun exploring the towns, trying to gather these clues and a big improvement on the series so far.

The moongates make a return in this game and this time they work just like later Ultimas by the phases of the moon. The moon phases are just shown by numbers at the top of the screen rather than graphics. The moongates aren’t entirely neccessary except for the fact that one of them gets you to the dungeon of the snake which is otherwise inaccessable. I explored my way through all these towns gathering clues and looking for an ever elusive ship – eventually a ship finally showed up (they seem to be extremely rare in this game) after I’d popped through the moongate that leads to exodus castle and behind the snake blocking the way out. The odds of a ship turning up here must be astronomical – theres only about 4 squares of ocean. I fought the pirates and commandeered it but without the mark of the snake there was no way to get it past the great earth serpent. Something that just occurs to me is, if a ship pops up here you could beat the game without ever getting the mark of the snake, or finding out the password to get past the great earth serpent.  I didn’t much fancy waiting for another ship to show up though so I decided to attempt to get the mark of the snake on level 8 of the snake dungeon so I could get past the snake and use this one.

The fact is my party really wasn’t up to this dungeon yet – I tried several times and the only way I could get close was to use my cleric and wizard spells to go down and up levels wait for their magic to charge and repeat. I got the mark and got out again eventually with all but one of my party dead, limped to the first town and paid up to get everyone healed. I now sailed off to find the exotics, I could remember they were both on different 2×1 islands. The game world isn’t too large so this didn’t take long. It was now time to find Ambrosia.

For anyone who’s not played the game, there is a little whirlpool that randomly moves through the sea. If you sail your ship into this you are washed up into an entirely new world map. This is just like the idea of the underworld you got in later Ultimas. This map doesn’t have any random monsters, although there are a few preset ones, and its basically a big maze with four shrines in it. Each of these shrines raises one of your stats by 1 for each 100 gold you offer when you pray in it. Finding these shrines really isn’t that easy – I was using a map from the cluebook and still struggled a bit. This is still a good way of raising stats though. It makes some sort of sense (more than a hotel clerk) and you don’t need to do it too often if you bring plenty of gold with you. I maxed out my clerics wisdom, my wizards intelligence and everyones strength, and had a bit left over to raise my thiefs dexterity. While I was there I searched all the shrines to get the four cards, and then sailed back into the whirlpool to get to the surface world.

My last job of the day was to find the timelord in the dungeon of time – with my cleric and wizard now having maximum magic points this was dead easy. The timelord himself just tells me the order of the cards and is made up of world tiles with a moongate in his chest. I guess you have to use your imagination.

My party is now up to level 11 apart from my level 4 cleric and I have 3 of the 4 marks. I think their stats are probably high enough without another trip to Ambrosia so I just need to get the last mark, level up my team and then I’m ready to take on Exodus.