Black Crypt: What Genre Was I Playing Again?

So some interesting things happened with food and rest when I started this entry. After a certain amount of water, it started saying my characters were full. Which is kind of obnoxious in more simulationist RPGs, but here it's bizarre. I'm guessing it's here to force you to not just drink water alone, but it seems to remain in place for a considerable length of time.

Resting, on the other hand, is very fast to heal your wounds but not quite as fast to heal your stamina. The game gives zero sign of how long you have left and I sense that if you're in an area that isn't cleared this is an incredibly bad idea. It seems like it's going to take a very long time to restore the meter by any real margin.

Enough of me stalling, it's time to go down a floor. And we're pretty much straight next to that two-headed ogre, because once you head down the stairs there are two doors leading to a large area with pillars. It's not there right away, but I know it's there. I know it. The game even gives subtle clues that something's wrong, a death gem, leather leggings and a pack.

Death gems, as the manual explains, are basically the corpses of your dead characters that you lug around until you can resurrect them. Outside of scrolls, only the cleric can do anything with them. I have a life scroll, which can resurrect a character three times, but it's not supposed to work with the death gems you can just find. Which I confirm after trying it. Probably too difficult to code in a friendly NPC.

The pack has a scroll saying that he died to the double-headed ogre and how he wished he had the Ogreblade. Gotta love that this guy, knowing of his impending doom, just started scribbling on this scroll. I double check upstairs again, but no, I'm pretty much stuck up there, there must be something down here I can interact with. So I carefully look around.

This doesn't really work out, because once I get close enough he can apparently see me in the darkness. I can hear his thudding footsteps, so I run behind the door...which he destroys. I was kind of expecting him to open it, but no, just tear it away. Against my guys he isn't doing too much damage, but none of my attacks are doing anything, so I reload. If only the game had signposted that I need something to fight this thing.

Since the solution to this is either that I missed a switch somewhere on floor 1 or there's something behind the two-headed ogre, I continue to run around the guy on my second try. In one corner of the big open space is a switch next to a pair of chain leggings. This teleports you to an area next to the arena with two one-way walls into it and a path elsewhere.

This hidden area is a maze, complete with a few spinners. I was wrong, despite the obvious screen movement and noise, I got tripped up by them a few times. Not very nice. Unfortunately this area doesn't seem to have much of anything I can actually use. Just a switch which doesn't seem to activate anything and a chest with a few potions in it. Useful for the future, but for now I just have to find out what this switch opened.

After a bit more exploration, I find a newly opened passageway which leads to a plaque on the wall, and another wall which opens. The plaque says "patience is a virtue", which doesn't quite seem right when the wall opens right away. A couple more eyes, starting to get dangerously low on both food supplies and health, and then...another resurrection scroll and a throwing dagger. It does bring my wizardess's supply up to a full bag of spares. The very end of this section has a belt...which is a...belt. It then loops back into the maze.

I wander around some, before trying for the hidden area again, only to find out there are multiple areas hidden behind the walls that disappear. The second doesn't have much, just an eye and some food, but the third. It's here that I get my hands on some fancy new gear, +1 throwing daggers for my wizardess, and a rune which looks like the fighter's symbol. Taking a chance, I used it on my fighter and he got an addition point of strength. Then a key. I think I can find where this goes.

There's actually a teleporter nearby, which I didn't realize was supposed to be a teleporter design, which leads back to a door on the first floor. This, finally, leads to the little area where the Ogreblade is, along with the Necromancer's Guide. A spellbook for the magic user which adds a strength spell, +2 to strength, remove glyph, which removes a glyph in front of us, dispel and freeze, another attack spell. Note, none of these have anything to do with the words necro or mancy.

The fight with the ogre goes better than I expected. Which is to say that my fighter doesn't take any damage and protects the nice and fragile druid behind him. My cleric gets murdered, can't hurt him any, and soon enough the same happens to my wizardess. But the ogre goes down. Fortunately, scrolls of life have three uses of raise dead, perfect for this situation. That gives a resurrected character very low health. I decide this is a good time to start exploring, after giving back the dead characters their stuff and making them memorize their spells again...only for them to quickly die again.

I reload my save and realize, hey, this is a Dungeon Master clone, why am I not doing a combat waltz? This time around I get in a dozen shots without him ever landing one, and this time my guys once again get another level. Man, by the time I get some of these spellbooks, I'm going to be able to use all the spells. The ogre drops another key, this is his sole contribution, and I'm not sure where it goes. Also, the ogreblade isn't hurting me yet, so I'll hold onto it for a while. 

The moment after I wrote that, I find the door. Which I could swear I didn't see before, but it was under threat of a dangerous foe. There's also another area with a door, which I'm guessing was destroyed. There's only a teleport scroll there. The locked door has an eye which deals a surprising amount of damage, but otherwise isn't special. Really hoping there's going to be another regular enemy at some point. Plenty of stuff, better armor, magic bracers, magic crown, and oh, a rune wall. I click on it randomly.

Oh, shoot, was one of those things cursed? Wait...is this copy protection? It's one of the spells. It is, and it's blocking the path down. I still take the opportunity to fill my party's rest meter, which surprisingly doesn't remove full status. I forgot that I just found another spellbook, Prayers of Orlin.

There are two spells I can't use yet, healing 2, self-explanatory, and God's Fury, high level damage spell. The two I can use is Chant of Orlin, a scaling attack spell, 2-8 +2 per level past 3, not sure if that's going to be the most useful spell, and create food. Which creates food. I'm a perpetual motion machine now, baby!

Floor 3, at least what I can access, has a lot of information and a lot of doors I can't enter. One needs a key, another is a strange gold design, but two others are just closed without a switch. There are lots of notes warning me about the unseen, which based on a slight flicker of the sprite when they attack, are giant centipedes. One note says they only attack if you have weapons, another says to come back with a mask of true sight, and either way, I see no point in aggravating them. Floor 4 is right there. Oh, and there's a ring of location that I gave my cleric. 

Floor 4 starts with a noise and as I approach the passage, I try to get a sideways view. Then this thing steals my druid's bow. I'm glad it wasn't an important weapon. I go through my currently prepared attack spells and it goes down after most of them. No damage, but that could be because my fighter is now an iron wall of defense. By the time something can hurt him, everyone is screwed.

Around the corner is what appears to be another teleporter and a niche with more stuff. A Hopeblade, which I give to my fighter. The Ogreblade hasn't drained his health, but better safe than sorry. The worrying part is the continued noise and a potion of cure poison. There's another enemy, this one hangs out on ceilings but doesn't seem too tough. Another one of those neat little hangers that Raven loves so much.

There's another scroll here. This tells me that in the nest of thieves, the skull glyph is an illusion. Okay, I feel like this is a bit early to tell me that when I have no idea what I'm supposed to be worried about. And then I realize what the problem is in both respects. The hanging enemies poison you, but worse, as if there's something worse than poison with only one cure, is that the nasty-looking goblins can leave before you kill them. My massive assault on the first one was sheer luck, if it goes away that's just it, that weapon's gone until I find out where they leave them. Those hangers ain't going to be kind to me.

Now, there is an option I can do, two actually, fakeout weapons and just not having one out, but I'd prefer to try the overwhelming force technique again. And, you know what? That's not working out for me. I either got very lucky with the first one, or there's some heavy randomization with enemy stats. I think I'll need to just wait out a full selection of attack spells and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the hangers are poisonous. I got in another fight with one, I won, but if they poison you, it's over. Poison doesn't wear off on its own, you need to cure it. There's only one cure so far, and that's not even enough for one fight. I repeat, that's not even enough for one fight. One of my two guys needs to completely avoid getting hit, which as much as I liked it, still applies to my fighter, he just isn't going to die in a fight unless he gets really worn out or gets poisoned.

Since I'm done here either way, I look up in the guide when I'm going to get the spellbook with a cure poison spell. I couldn't find it, but I saw the maps of this floor. It's very complex and I'm not looking forward to it. I had to look up one on Lemon Amiga, which says it's floor 10. This last part was clearly the training wheel section, because the difficulty has jumped up. I may have to go back up if water is truly its own thing and not tied into food.

My completed map of floor 2.

There are a few other things I've noticed this session. While reading the guides, I found out that the false scroll bit is applying to the text scrolls, not the spell scrolls. I actually think this is neat, that some scrolls are full of false information, that's probably what the life-stealing bit was. I like this, I'm not going to use the spell to reveal if its true or not. The other is that I don't seem to need the read rune spell to read the walls. Not sure what it's actually for.

This Session: 2 hours 20 minutes

Total Time: 3 hour 20 minutes

Black Crypt: Introduction

Going back to Raven Software's debut after years of having covered one of their later games feels like a fitting statement on the game in general. If you've ever played it, it was generally something you did after playing their other games. 1992 was arguably the Amiga's final commercial hurrah, but in America, that feels like it already passed and DOS had already begun its inescapable domination. Why such a strange choice to develop a game on?

Well, when you read about the development of this game and find out that instead of being into action games like you'd expect, they wanted to make Dungeons and Dragons modules and then decided to make a computer RPG like Dungeon Master. As in, Dungeon Master just came out and they changed their plans. From first steps to out the door, it took five years, three before EA agreed to publish it. A far cry from what they would do at any other time.

Reading the manual, it's very clear that this is DnD-derived. Our antagonist is a cleric, Estoroth Paingiver, who was cast out from the country of Astera. Twenty years ago he brought forth an army of foul demons and "other undead creatures", until four men from the Four Guilds of Astera defeated him. Now he's back and you control four champions who shall take him on! Not sure why demons seem to be related to demons, but the idea of a cleric leading demons and undead is very DnD. The Four Guilds, incidentally, are fighters, clerics, magic users and druids. An odd selection, if I do say so. I am probably going to refer to the magic users as wizards, since I've already forgotten it once and magic user is a lame class name.

Now there is some backstory, but I suspect it's just mood. Basically just hyping up Estoroth as a magical protege whose lust for knowledge let him to the dark arts. If I thought this game's story was going to matter, I might care more. But there is some...interesting bits hidden here. It describes four lieutenants, a sea beast, a medusa, a "possessor demon" and a ram demon. (That last one is probably a normal-looking demon) That said, a sea beast? I feel like that sort of creature is an oddly prominent theme in Raven Software games.

There's no intro, just a credits and then the title. The Raffel brothers, along with Gokey, Johnson and Schilder would be the core of Raven Software for most of the '90s, though the two programmers would eventually leave. The soundtrack is starting off very well, Schilder is handling the Amiga very well. I am feeling very hyped up right now.

So, our actual objective is to head into the Tomb of the Four Heroes, where the last four guys fought and presumably died against Estoroth. For some reason there are words, items and symbols on the right. Not sure if this is something I'm supposed to be writing down or not. It sort of conforms to the four classes, except that a fighter has a shield and a wizard has a sword...unless that's a wand. You can tell this is their first game from the pixel art.

There's a configuration menu, mostly just to select your keybindings. Which is rare for Amiga games, now that I think of it. But first I have to make my party, and uh...gotta say, looking at the portraits, I'm wondering if Mr. Paingiver is actually the hero here, because it's looking like I'm about to play as a rag-tag team of villains. Also, the symbols don't quite correspond to how they appeared on that last screen, which makes more sense. The shield belongs to the druid and the sword belongs to the fighter. 

Before I get into the characters themselves, I'd like to talk about the portraits. Each class has nine of them and as you can see in this helpful bit pasted together image, there's some reuse between the classes. Some are explicitly reused and others are very, very similar. It's very possible to have "Angry mustache man" and his three brothers, along with "The chain coif twins" and "The green elf twins". (But not the last two in the same party)

That said, there are some semi-consistent ideas spawning throughout the portraits. The undead or otherwise evil-looking dudes, facial expression aside. The token woman character, and then there's the anime-esque dude. Not sure if that one's intentional or just coincidental. I'm more interested in the echoes of future Might and Magic games by the random minotaur and vampire portrait.

As to the characters themselves, we get three magic characters and one attack character. Technically, all get spells, but the only fighter spell is "show coordinates". Assuming that this is going to be like Dungeon Master, fighting in the front, magic in the back, I've made the cleric a second front-line fighter. Since you get twenty five points and no attribute can go over twenty, this isn't as hard as it sounds. The primary stat can easily be maxed out, the question is, what else do you do? I'm guessing that magic runs off DnD rules, wisdom for divine spellcasters, Cleric and Druid, intelligent for arcane, wizard/magic user. Bears out with the starting stats, anyway.

After some time figuring out how to save to disk and waiting for said saving for disk, I make it to the game world. No real explanation of anything beyond what was in the manual. No music either, lame. Here's my four guys, they're in the Black Crypt! (Or something) From upper left, fighter, cleric, magician and druid. Decided to go all in on the "maybe they're bad guys, maybe they ain't" theme I got from the portraits.

The interface here is mostly explainable by what you interact with. Very smooth too, to the point that its smoothness is far better than a game at this point should have. As in, this is so smooth that I fear the game may sacrifice something else for it. Neat little animations and scrolling text when you click on an item. Or rather hold one. There's a niche in front of the starting point with a wooden shield and a backpack.

Right-clicking on the status box with the AC (Armor Class) on it and you get the inventory. The backpack is a subtle sign that there are inventory items. Basically, items that allow you to carry other items. Something that usually only happens in really simulationist games. Why I get multiple item pouches on a character here I do not know. I do know that it feels odd here. Certainly, it's typical for DM-clones to have food meters, which I can already see is here, but this amount of inventory feels at odds with what seems like a more simple game. Just give everyone the same number of slots. 

The book icon, which was greyed out on my fighter, shows what spells my guys get. Or rather which ones they can use from the starting spellbooks they have. Since everyone is level 1, that means the most basic of basic spells. Click on a spell to memorize it, which means you can then use it. Two get a simple protection spell, the requisite healing spell for my cleric, a light spell. The two odder choices are "Chaos", an attack spell from the druid, the only one at the start, and the wizardess gets "Wizard Sight", which maps out the dungeon. Finally, taking the clunky mapping process out of a game genre which revolves around mapping!

I guess I need to travel around a bit first, but one square ahead isn't...terrible I guess. It's more that you'll have to go into every nook and cranny in order to figure out what is what. More terrible is the loading screen when you press F5 to open or close the map.

There's also a read rune spell, which reads this stuff. Glad I did, because a rhyme about my likely death is definitely helpful. You only get one use of a spell per memorization, and some length of time must pass before you can use it again. But if you let enough time pass, you can actually memorize a spell multiple times. Which undoubtedly will be useful when I pick up a spell that isn't just "light attack" or "little bit of healing".

Speaking of which, monsters are already roaming on this floor. I'd complain, but eh, it wasn't very troublesome. Left-clicking on a character's portrait causes them to attack. If they're able to. This is very much Dungeon Master rules, guys in the front attack, guys in the back cast spells and shoot arrows. In this case, because I wasn't about to waste a spell on my first enemy, my druid did nothing. My wizardess didn't do much either, but at least the throwing dagger she has was an attack. The damage screen for your characters is a tad overdramatic, since it shows a skeleton. Gave me the wrong impression the first time I noticed it.

The stairs further down are also in plain sight, right next to another set of runes I need to cast a spell to read. This time with a rhyme about needing a magic blade to pierce a twin's skin. Guessing that means that whatever it is my fighter is using won't work. Good to know.

The starting area is a small side section, with an unlocked door and the stairs down. There's another alcove with stuff, including a dagger pouch for my wizardess. The path out without the door is to a small, ring area with little niches and another of these eye enemies. There's another passage leading to another unlocked door. The ring is where I concentrated my effort on first, there's another niche with an eye blocked off by a pillar and a little fire trap preventing a complete ring around. Careful search reveals a switch.

Pulling the switch causes a wall to disappear, possibly more than one. Another eye pops up, but this one isn't the pushover his brothers are. Instead, he just slaughters us. Twice, the first time I thought I just got accidentally shanked, but no, he's properly tough. Guess my efforts are better spent elsewhere.

So, I find a few more items on the ground, a key, no idea, a "life scroll", which might be for resurrecting dead characters, and an old scroll which warns me that the "Ogreblade" is cursed and drains the wielder's lifeforce. If so, I like that one of these style of games is actually warning me of an item's effectiveness.

The path off the side of the circle is where I go next. It has this thing that is so obviously a trap I decide to step on it for giggles...it's a pressure plate. A really, really, stupid-looking pressure plate. This opens a nearby door which has leather armor and a waterskin. Food is a concern, but I think this waterskin is just counting as food. Another normal eye.

As I continue through the south of the floor, I notice two standard dungeon crawler hazards and how the map feature actually acknowledges them. The first are the spinners, the things that spin you around on the spot you're at. Very noticeable, but more importantly, the map actually shows them. The other is that some walls will disappear to allow you to go on a one-way path. It's kind of annoying because what state the wall current is in, existing or not, is what you see on the map. The only way to know if that's a bogus wall is to go through it the right way.

I also level up. This doesn't change much in obvious ways, except give me more spells. My cleric gets a poison cloud spell along with reveal truth. That one exposes if a scroll is a fake. My wizardess gets compass...because I needed that with wizard sight. My druid gets dispel magic, which the manual implies is only useful for trap squares. Guess there's not going to be any negative effects I need to cancel, then.

That level up was behind a passage I can't go back, and the only way forward is down. Oh, well, I'll just find a way back. My cleric dies on the landing, and I hear strange noises. Could be the landing, could be something else, I don't know where I am.

Ah, I've gotten myself another game over. Good thing I saved before the spinner section.

Going back to the other door, there's another door behind it, which doesn't have the usual chain to open. Taking this as a clue, I use the key I've been dragging around to open it, success. This is a wide open area and I have no idea how many enemies are here. The first eye I spot feels like it almost cost me my team, but I manage to take it out. Unfortunately, I have to go after some of the knives my wizardess threw.

As I find it, I spot this strange rainbow barrier. Before I get a chance to examine it, I'm accosted by another eye. I feel through the door I can actually open and cost. Gotta let my guys rest somehow. There is a rest function on the menu, but I wager on just waiting around to be able to healing spells again. Curiously, it's at this point that I realize I have no mana meters. At first I assume it's a water meter, but after I found one later, I realized that it had to be something else. The manual sort of alludes to it, but it's a stamina meter, or rather, rest meter.

Speaking of the inventory screen, there are various options, to simulate multiple sets of equipment. Your armor, clothing, then accessories. Just press the torso to the upper right to switch between them. Since I've only seen about four pieces of armor, two of which are shields, this seems to be overcompensating.

When I no longer feel in danger of dying, I go back to the rainbow barrier. The eye has gone in front of the closed door. He's another regular one, which thankfully brings my characters back up to level 2. Now I can dispel that force field. I continue back in, finding a water fountain, which prompts my realization about how the blue meter can't be a water meter either. Lots of items, including a bow, which I give to my druid. The manual implies that some weapons can only be used by some characters, but the druid hasn't hit that problem yet.

The room doesn't take much more effort to clear out, since individual eyes usually aren't troublesome. There's another barrier blocking the way out and a switch nearby. Thinking this might be a puzzle, I pull it and cause another barrier to pop up. Huh, guess I need to wait to get another use of dispel. Or because that forcefield was guarding a scroll of dispel, use that?

That leaves the ring area and the switches that spawn the super eyes. Now that I have a decent attack spell, I try it again. It works, not entirely sure if it's because I overestimated them or because the poison cloud was the edge I needed to handle the fight. Since all this does is expose a few more switches, one of which reveals another door I can't open, the other seems to do nothing, I decide to see if the cluebook included with the manual includes monster statistics. (Shadowcaster's did, in case you forgot.)

Which accidentally reveals that this is more like Shadowcaster than Dungeon Master, nearly thirty levels, and judging by the map of level 1, 25x25 in scope. No signs of monster statistics, but I did find out I missed an area which has the Ogreblade and a spellbook. Well, I can take another look around and see if I just missed that.

Turns out I missed something more, a whole area in the center of the ring. Another eye spawns when I make my way in, as in, it comes up from somewhere behind me. Interesting. There's a helmet here along with a "glyph" scroll, whatever that is. This is pretty much all I can do for the moment, so I'll end it here.

Final observations for this session include, I am mildly annoyed by the movement controls. It's arrows + delete and page down. It's just enough that I don't feel compelled to try to change them but not good enough that I actually like it.

This Session: 1 hour

Cad-Cam Warrior (1984)

Name:Cad-Cam Warrior
Number:257
Year:1984
Publisher:Taskset
Developer:Andy Walker
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:5/5
Time:1 hour
Won:No (115W/85L)

Another game from the world of weird gravity, which somehow is a theme with developer Taskset/Andy Walker. We've seen him before on Gyroscope, and while I didn't know it at the time, Taskset published the more well-known Bozo's Night Out. Note, published, since Walker himself was the developer of all but three games currently listed on Lemon64.

And I have to say, that despite all of them coming out in three years, that's some impressive work. All of them have something uniquely interesting about them, even if they probably aren't as good as one might think. Cad-Cam Warrior is in the middle, probably not too far away from when Gyropod was made given the whole gravity focus.

Cad-Cam, which is supposed to be CADCAM, or Computer Aided Design Computer Aided Manufacture, is a type of processing unit in the vague future of the game's very long backstory. Seriously, this has a lot of pages for an action game from 1984. A fancy, newly designed one has stopped interfacing with humans, and it's up to the player to figure out why. You play as a robot, Micro Assembly Droid 2 sent inside the CAD CAM, trying to reach screen 8192. By defraging every screen you go through with a gun or something that makes sense.

After the title screen, you're thrown into the first of many of these screens. Controls are simple, they just use the joystick, move and shoot. It's very stiff, but I don't know if that's just me using a keyboard instead of a gamepad. One shot on-screen at a time, and nothing I encountered takes more than one hit. By the same consequence, so do you.

The big gimmick the game has is the split-screen level design. The top half and the bottom half are linked by various holes, go in one, you come out the same way you came in. Once you go in, you're locked in until you finish the animation going out. Because of the nature of this, it's very easy to accidentally get yourself into a loop of going back and forth. If an enemy does an inopportune movement, it's over for you.

Enemies are weird. I think there's a difference between the four kinds, but in practice I'm not sure I've ever seen any do anything differently. There seems to be a bit different in their behavior, but it's mostly variations on randomly wandering around. They all shoot and just move to their whims. There are also meteors which pop up after certain amounts of time to hit the location you were at when it spawned. Hope you weren't pinned down. 

These factors combined make getting very far in the game difficult. It's hard to not die on a screen, and each time you do, the screen restarts completely. Every enemy is back. I can't use save states to store my process. Which means, this game expects you to play all the way through, in one session. There's no pausing either. Hope you don't need to pee halfway through the game.

Levels aren't just variations on where the holes are, there's actual different elevation. Unfortunately, all this means is you walk up to one edge and jump up to it. Nobody can shoot over it, and because touching means your death, this is actually to your disadvantage. I didn't feel like the controls were smooth enough to handle this sort of thing, I was just gambling that I'd get lucky and an enemy wouldn't camp out near an edge.

Normally, at this point, I'd say how far I got, and then talk about how it had an interesting idea but just couldn't do anything with it. There's some genuine tension to having the screen divided up like this and having to multitask. It's just that you're so fragile and the controls are so stiff that there's no reasonable way to do this without cheating in some manner. The tape I got offered unlimited lives, which I naturally took advantage for.

This actually allowed me to reach somewhere I wouldn't have otherwise reached. The second zone, which is at about the thirty level mark. At first, nothing seems different, then you fire and a mine drops on your current position. This will explode if you or an enemy step on it, no friendly fire avoidance here. You seem to be able to use an unlimited number of these at the same time.

The thing about mines in most games is, they're a specific item in a game full of useful tools. Most people won't ever really use them properly, and otherwise just use them quite simply. Exploit simple AI so you can take them out without really thinking about them as traps. This doesn't work here, because the AI is too random to properly bait. You're spamming this in the hopes it'll take one out. One badly thought out level and you could very well be stuck forever. 

This was about as far as I could get just casually picking it up, and a dedicated playthrough would have to be a one time affair. More than one, and frankly, I'll just find the game far more annoying than it should be. But it's on this playthrough that something interesting happens. I start picking up the random letters that spawn in sometimes...and it starts revealing information about the level I'm about to go to. Two of these are dedicated to it, one to the rules and another to other information. The ability to understand what screen you're about to go on is a power-up so obtuse you might not even realize it exists.

Despite feeling like I was going to be stuck there forever. I get to the third zone quickly enough. More interesting, there are paths. This is connected to another power-up, the branch. A third power-up, zapper, functions as a smart bomb, killing everything on-screen. Not sure what the others do, but the manual helpfully tells me that I'll need to write down passwords and the ilk soon enough.

Zone four switches up to a stun and drag attack. You stun an enemy, then touch it and bring it to a hole. Good thing I had the information icon, or I'd take a while to figure that out. It's a very finicky method. Hitboxes are small for very good reason, and if an enemy is on the edge of anything, like one of the holes or a raised area, you won't be able to reach it. At this point I could either fight through this tedium or give up. Guess what I chose? Both, actually, I gave up then but tried again. 

And finishing that rewards me with an advance to the next larger grouping of levels. This time with broken graphics which I believe are supposed to be bigger holes. Which means I get another set of levels with plain old shooting to kill, then another mine, and so forth. Then repeat it again and again and again. There aren't any new levels at this point, each smaller grouping repeats the same levels. I suppose something changes eventually, but I was disgusted at this point and just gave up.

This is a very frustrating game. I could never see much consistency to the enemy behavior, and the gave loves throwing you in situations where you can't easily get out of their path or just stuck behind a hole. If the game didn't have an infinite live mode in the version I played, I never would have gotten anywhere in this game. Not that there was much point in doing so, but at least I saw something.

Weapons:
Basic gun, except when the game forces you to use mines. 1

Enemies:
I'm still not sure what the difference between the different enemies is. 1

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
A hundred versions of ten levels. It's like Lemmings if the developers were very limited in what they could do. 1

Player Agency:
I can do everything I expect from a game of this style, but not very well. 2

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
The game has a real sense of get up and go thanks to the fact that you're always on a timer. On a level, not just with how many levels you can go ahead, but also avoiding meteors. In-between levels, because if you wait too long, you gradually lose your place on the circuit board. It's especially frantic because if you aren't using infinite lives, you basically get no rest. 2

Graphics:
There are graphics and animation. I had no trouble distinguishing anything. It didn't look very nice though. 1

Story:
None in-game.

Sound/Music:
Simple bleeps and bloops, with one very strange heartbeat mechanic whenever an enemy gets close to you. It doesn't really add much, but I guess it's something. 1

That's 9...the exact same score I gave the last 1984 game. Huh.

From what I saw, reviews could be described as "Hey guys, the check from Taskset cleared" or "Putting the eh in meh". Most of them were short blurbs, so I guess this went by mostly unremarked.

That's about it for Taskset. I was thinking about covering Seaside Special for the sheer oddness of a political game from the early '80s, but decided that I wouldn't have much interesting to say about that.

Next time, something I really should have started a long time ago, Black Crypt, Raven Software's first game.

Resident Evil (GBC): Neither Itchy or Tasty

Since last time I used maps to show where I was going, I'll continue again here, but since the in-game ones are of poor quality, I'll instead be linking to Evil Resource's maps for the PSX game. Differences in items I'll mention.

Still on the ground floor, let's go for the "Itchy, Tasty", room located in the central hall on the west side. I'm concerned I won't be able to get anything here, but at least it isn't anything important. Just some ammo. There's no turning around in time to deal with a zombie directly behind me. 

And...uh...well, I feel like this is a damning statement even if this unfinished. The zombie's just already out? Given the way the file system works, it's not like picking it up even does anything. You've already got most of the Itchy, Tasty journal in there, along with a message from a researcher to his girlfriend Alma. Most of it, the last bit's gone. All that creepiness, gone.

One hallway south, and I enter the piano room. It's fine, I guess. The sheet music's on a shelf in the corner. Use it on the piano and the game fades in and out, revealing a passage in the wall. A quick jaunt to an itembox, then to the dining hall to pick up wooden emblem, and the freshly dropped blue jewel. Replace the golden emblem inside the room. Do the reverse in the hallway and the grandfather clock in one corner moves to reveal the Shield key. I briefly looked it up to make sure there was nothing this game was missing, but no, that was always the sequence. I expected the clock to need a specific time, but that is a common puzzle.

I continue on through to the entrance, going first through the door on the northeast side. There's a zombie inside here, easy stuff, but curiously, I didn't find any items. It's perplexing, but most of it was just ammo, which I don't really need, so small loss. Second trip through the southeast hallway gets no zombie dogs either, but judging by the weird scripting going on, I suspect this is just something the game is incapable of dealing with.

Eastern-most door leads to an outdoor herb garden, guarded by two zombies. Probably confusing this with the remake, but I could have sworn there were dogs here. Once again, only one of the herbs gives you herbs, but in this case, it gives me three red herbs? How very generous. I got so confused by this mess that I went to the way to the second house, only to find no dogs there. Well, we're not going to be meeting any until we go outside then.

The gallery puzzle proves to be annoying thanks to something I haven't really mentioned, hotspot trouble. Now, this wasn't enough of a problem in the original that I don't remember any issues off-hand, but here, it's a pretty big issue. You can only turn in about eight or so directions, and where you can pick something up and what your character looks like they can pick up are two different things.

Normally, this hasn't been much of a problem beyond the usual one this game is giving, it's very tedious. Normally. Here, this sort of has an odd effect, because you actually need to use the paintings in sequence. From the cradle to the grave goes the painting that I couldn't activate. Unfortunately, one of the paintings is situated that you can only activate in an odd way. I didn't get it right a couple of times thanks to this, but the crows aren't here, so it doesn't matter. 

I head to the set of bedrooms located above the eastern safe room. There's a zombie, more camera awkwardness, and Barry again. It's another cutscene, where Barry shows Jill the Researcher's Will, the document I mentioned last time. It's the start of the traitor plotline, where we all wonder who could possibly be the traitor. The cutscene is very strange in this version, partially because it doesn't actually show you what is being read. 

This is only the beginning of this screen's awkwardness. There's something in the coat by the door and believe me, this is a pain to get...only its an ink ribbon. Oh, I worried about that? Ha. The second is that there's a hidden item here. At first I thought this was something I needed an item for, but just flip the switch and it reveals some shells. Where it's actually supposed to be grenades. I looked up this room to find out what the note was. Guess I'm not using the Bazooka then.

The other room also has shells, in addition to a red herb and the lighter. Finally. This means I can head all the way to the end to the fireplace and get the second floor map. Since the game is only letting me look through maps I've acquired, it's nice to be reminded of where I'm going...and if you've guessed that it doesn't actually do anything, you've started to figure out that this game isn't playing nice.

I'm going to go ahead to the trickiest crest next. The one guarded by the snake. The entrance here is south on the eastern reverse C-shaped hallway. Richard's in this opening room, the usual conversation about how he found a snake demon and is badly wounded. In this case, it looks like his head has been taken off. The cutscene is weird, because there's no sound except the music, so once again the only indication there's something here is when it actually pops up. A quick jaunt to get the serum and I have the radio.

Before I reach the attic, I need to clear out the two areas before this. Even if there's no point to picking up ammo. First problem, the zombie in the area between Richard and the snake is programmed to come out of the wall. Not literally, this game just has poor design so it only looks that way. Lucky I didn't get killed. Otherwise this area goes as you expect it to. The other room with candle to reveal...shells. I go back to the west safe room, do the blue jewel in the tiger room, and load up on health items. 

I was worried about this fight for a while. The snake is a tricky enemy when you have good agility. Here I feared it might genuinely stop the game. I wouldn't be able to dodge and fight successfully. Not at all. Dude's cute as a button and doesn't even move. Is this what all boss fights are going to be like?

Right, final crest, the one with the push puzzle. The easy puzzle where you push statues over vents. It's just so simple in the original...and yet that simplicity doesn't come over here. I died for the first time, possibly ever, on this puzzle. Between the moving of these objects and how poor you can see some things, I missed one of the vents. A problem that didn't exist in the original.

The four crests are in, still no dogs, and it's time to see what's in the shed. For once, you don't need to push the stairs to get the square crank. There's also another small key. Eh, that just opens ammo caches, I don't need that! I get interrupted in my search by accidentally activating the door out.

Ah, outside. Now we'll fight some dogs. I carefully advance screen by screen only...for nothing to pop up except Brad trying to contact someone to find out what's going on the ground. There's a map of this section and if you guessed it does nothing, you'd be correct. There aren't any herbs either. You know what, I will grab that small key. There's also nothing else from here to the second house. No snakes after you use the crank, no dogs, not even any herbs. Just emptiness. Also, that crank is a pain in the butt to use. Hotspots in this game continue to be terrible.

The guardhouse starts off uncomfortably empty. There are no blue herbs here. Which I hope means there is no poison. Really hope that. In the meantime, these areas are surprisingly empty of anything unrelated to advancing the game. Sure, there are still zombies, but seemingly no wasps or anything else. The traitor plots advances as we find Barry talking to someone over the kidnapping of his family, but at this point, everything seems pointless but seeing what little remains of the game.

Downstairs is surprisingly mundane. There's just one block to push, and there are no sharks in the water. The water doesn't even really exist as a thing, just as another visual. I'm not doing the whole V-Jolt thing, so the meeting room is pointless, but oddly enough, trying to enter the room next to the control room is a problem. Moreso because keys tend to just disappear when they should be used...except here it does it and now I can't enter anywhere.

After reloading, I get the third key inside the armory and head for the third dormitory. Red book in the place where the white book was. I did not forget where that was, no siree. As you might expect, Plant 42 is disappointing. There are many disjointed angles and I'm not sure that shooting it is doing anything. Probably because if I touch it nothing happens. It's just...there. The key is in the fireplace as usual, and now it's time to find out if there are Hunters.

First though, there's a conversation with Wesker in which he deflects concerns about his disappearance and tells Jill to go to the other house. Presumably, that part didn't get put in despite the game being otherwise perfect at depicting the text of a cutscene. There's also Brad asking for a sign on the radio when I'm outside, since the radio Jill has can't send messages.

Back in the mansion, I walk through the opening hallways with tension. There will be no cutscene of course, but if something happens, something will at least appear on-screen. I make it to the room off to the side. There's the usual, magnum rounds which look suspiciously like grenade rounds, and the second doom book. I enter the room outside the save room, only to encounter nothing. There's nothing here. They only programmed in zombies.

Most of the rooms opened by the Helmet key have no point now. There's a herb in the room off to the center of the entrance, but otherwise, it's straight to the second fight with the snake. Who has the AI of a zombie. Eventually I manage to break away and start unloading...and he dies in four shotgun blasts. It's not obvious where the place to go next is, because nothing changes after he pops up.

Randomly pressing A around the area that the hole should have appeared when the snake popped up eventually gets me to the hidden grave. Which doesn't have Barry appear, for some reason. Instead, you just walk over to the grave, the rope has appeared, then walk back and Barry does his apology speech. What, is waiting too difficult for these people to program in? You can't do anything inside the grave besides this, and the game doesn't give you the passcode. Instead, you just have to guess that. Or look it up.

The passcode opens a door on the second floor, one which has more zombies and originally had some blue herbs...and still does despite there being no poison enemies in the game. This area is pretty much the same as it was in the original. Just the puzzle with the statue is simplified owing to how the game can't let you push something in more than one direction. I come out of it with the MO disk along with the battery for the second elevator. Which means I can reach the area hidden by the waterfall back outside.

Underground has no Hunters, no boulders and no Barry. We still have Enrico...at which point Barry shows up. He explains the whole traitor plot, and as he starts to explain that Umbrella caused all this, he gets shot. By someone. Could be Barry, could be Jill, really, nobody knows with this engine's cutscenes. He gets shot so hard his corpse disappears and so does Barry. Hex crank shows up where the mysterious assassin is, and a janky action later, I can go through the rest of the caverns.

The only thing that pops up is the spider room. No spiders, but the door is still webbed and thankfully, there's a combat knife here. I drop it off in the safe room a bit down. I've nearly filled the item box, so that's nice. I have actually been ignoring some items for a while, since it isn't like I'll need a clip/magazine or magnum rounds...ever. The rest goes pretty much as you would expect this would go, janky, simplified versions of already simple puzzles, and I have the two medals for the fountain and the second MO disk.

The lab is somehow both completely intact and quite a bit broken. Enemies in the main corridor are less in number, and sometimes are beyond the planes of existence. The game simply isn't capable of showing four enemies on-screen at a time. They managed to bring in the whole computer password puzzle.

There are none of the Chimeras around, so putting in the power is easy. Getting the passcodes is trickier, hotspots in this game are trash. This brings us to Wesker and the revelation that he's the traitor. The game keeps cutting to a strange, broken image for some reason while this dramatic cutscene happens. I will say that having this all in text form does reveal how some of the weirdness of the game's dialog is down to the voice acting, but a lot of it is just very strange writing.

The cutscene stops and I'm moved inside the Tyrant room. The Tyrant is just there, in front of the tube. The only reason why he's the Tyrant is because of context, otherwise he's just a black creature which turns into noise if you shoot him. Four shots, like everything else. At this point, a cutscene is supposed to show up. It doesn't. So I look around for about five minutes, trying to find a key, only to get nothing. This is as good a place as any to end.

This Session: 3 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 4 hours 15 minutes

Normally, I would summarize my thoughts in a separate entry, but I don't feel like this deserves a rating. Yes, it's bad, a terrible adaptation and the ilk, but what annoys me most of all is how they've done so much and so little. Reading up on the production, I got the impression this was nearly finished. It...it isn't. What is here hasn't really been through any kind of quality testing.

As a tech demo, this is impressive, however, I feel like this should have led into something original rather than attempt a 1-to-1 remake of the PSX game. It's very impressive, yes, but there's a lot that the PSX version has that a GBC game simply will never be able to do. I'm not talking about voice acting, there's simply so much in the cutscenes that can't be done here.

I could talk endlessly about how the game fails, but I think that's worth talking less compared to what this game is actually a useful example of. How any game can go wrong if certain factors are changed. More importantly, how some games are simply doomed due to the scope of what they're trying to do and the limitations of what they can do.

Next time, something from 1984.