PHM Pegasus (1987)

Definitely the amount of action you want on a title screen.

Name:PHM Pegasus
Number:249
Year:1987
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Lucasfilm Games
Genre:Naval Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:2 hours
Won:No (111W/80L)

Naval games haven't really had a good track record so far. I've covered a few submarine titles in the early days, but those were bad. Occasionally, some have popped up on my list, but inevitably turned out to be...well, crap and I tossed them in the trash without further consideration.

When you get down to it, it's kind of odd, because sea games should be very easy to depict, since there's very little to depict. Yet, when I look at games that I would consider things I would play on my own, without the consideration of this blog, the earliest is Red Storm Rising, and then it's all late '90s and '00s titles.

Side note, despite the DOS version coming with EGA graphics, in order to use them, you need to type HF E as you enter. Or HF EGA, it doesn't actually matter. There are two manuals floating around, a plaintext one for the DOS version and one for a C64 multi-pak. (There is a proper pdf for DOS, but its harder to find) You need one with actual pictures, because the game uses pictures of ships from the manual for manual protection. These actually don't match up all that well with the pixelated images, which is fun and not at all an incredibly annoying thing to have to work around.

PHM Pegasus is about the first Pegasus-class hydrofoil...the Pegasus. Of which six existed, before the class was retired thanks to the high cost of maintaining it. See, hydrofoils use foils to fly over water, allowing enhanced speed and maneuverability in comparison to other boats. Choppy water isn't a problem. In addition to these benefits, the Pegasus-class is also gifted with a 76mm machine gun and two Harpoon rocket launchers.

The manual opens up by explaining the real world mission of the Pegasus, counter terrorism and piracy, by a colonel in charge of the presumably fictional Terrorist Action Group, a mildly amusing name in retrospect. This is close to the actual real world mission, only missing narcotics control. Again, they were retired due to high costs. If I had to guess based off playing this, it's that those missions usually don't need the kind of firepower and speed this bad boy has. Maybe in real life this thing can't take out a battleship, but in real life it really doesn't need to.

There are 18 scenarios in the DOS version. Much like F-15 Strike Eagle and other early games which attempted to get past arcade-style endless shooting by giving the player scenarios. For a while, I wasn't sure what half these missions were without playing them, but it turns out these are from a scenario disk, which is unmentioned on the internet, and there is a manual for these.

The scenarios I attempted, in order, are:

One on One, a training scenario where you shoot the PHM Heracles. This is dictated by how fast you can press V to switch view, T to target the enemy ship, then hold down the enter key to shoot. You can change weapons with W, but here there's no point. I know this sounds like a complaint, but considering what a lot of these games tend to do to you, I'm not complaining.

Turkey Shoot, another training scenario. Learn manual aiming to shoot down helicopters. I spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to do this, including a section where I found out that either my imitation N64 controller either doesn't work with DOSbox or this game. Arrow keys aim, well, numpad when it isn't working on numbers. It's a bit stiff, but it works, which is more than some games from this era feel like. Holding the direction down moves it a lot more than I'd like and you don't see where you're aiming until you release the button.

There's a lot of leading against flying targets. This is okay here, where they don't shoot back, but I can imagine this getting annoying. You have to look at the little dots at the side of the target indicator at the top. Even here I feel like it takes me a bit to get the targets down.

There's not much variation in the screenshots, because, you know, naval game.

Battle Training, another training scenario, this time a proper test of skill. Take out ten ships, which come one at a time until you reach the most powerful enemy ship. In theory, since I'm not checking which ship is which in-game and the manual only lists three types of ships. This is the first scenario that feels like I'm actually playing the game instead of just training myself to actually play it, except that this is the first time chaff comes into play. There are two kinds of missiles in the game, ones that the chaff can protect against and ones you either sail away from or shoot. I never managed to shoot one. 

Graduation Exercise, the last training scenario. Take out ten ships at once. In theory, this is harder than the last one, but one I got up to speed and got things down, it was surprisingly easier. Part of it could be that now I was managing my ammo better, but a part of it is that placing it all on you at once does feel like a good way to accelerate learning of how it all works now that you actually know how it all works.

Nobody tell Churchill that it was destroyed without time travel shenanigans before.

Sink the Bismarck, which is a scenario involving you sinking the famous German battleship Bismarck. Why? You've mysteriously gone back in time. This isn't really that difficult, you just go full speed and then wait until you're within firing range. The game includes the ability to speed up time, up to 128 times normal speed. Which is I feel is a subtle admission that they've gone a bit too far in some places. The oddest part of this is two mysterious white objects in the water which charge after the boat for some reason. Torpedoes? My missiles? No idea.

The little text at the bottom is very helpful, since you might not otherwise realize it.

Splash 20, is another scenario like Graduation Exercise. Take out twenty enemy ships who are in a group of twelve and eight. In theory, the manual implies that this is an endless thing, eight ships pop up whenever you clear out one group.

Missile Alley, also like Graduation Exercise, except there are just missile boats. By this point, I'm not terribly worried about dealing with missiles, chaff deals with that problem quite handily. The real problem is that there are a lot of them, and just when I thought I finished them off, there's another wave. This too, might be another situation against endless enemies.

Showing the ever trusty map you get and usually dismiss the second you start a mission.

Pegasus Vice, in comparison to past missions, this one is completely unplayable without a manual. You have to stop four drug runners from bringing "contraband" into Miami, but they're disguised as ordinary speedboats. You have to fire warning shots to get them to stop, then get up close to search them for drugs with your binoculars. Very close. You shoot any speedboat, even a smuggler, and that's bad news for you.

Terrorist Attack, this is the one following Graduation Exercise in the manual. This is where the original game starts to become real rather than training. At least seven boats attacked a seaside resort, and you have to stop them before they escape or nearby forces who are sympathetic to the terrorists. Aiding you is an Israeli Flagstaff II...which amounts to me getting two fancy missiles.

While I hate to criticize a game for trying to make something beyond a simple arcade shooter in this era, the fact is, this is a game where you're going to spend a lot of time waiting around to find enemies. Oh, sure, you can speed time up, but even at max speed and going where the game tells you to go, it can take a while to see an enemy boat. The game does warn you when something finally does happen, but it doesn't take you back to regular speed.

I took out four boats, two regular PTs and two missile boats. Whether they were all terrorists or not hardly matters. It was long, dreary, and nothing much happened. The name of the game, it seems, is to know where all the enemies are instead of just hoping to find them. Which means replaying each mission until you get it right. There are nine more missions, all of which are long hauls like this.

In order to make something like this work, you really need to have some nice visuals going on as you go from point A to B. This is not necessarily wishing this to be a flight sim, but flight sims do have it easier. Without water and a nice model of a ship, I'm looking at a lot of blue and grey pixels without much else to them. It's very dreary.

Weapons:
Despite a very limited arsenal, the four weapons felt pretty good to use. I usually don't use chaff as well as I do in these games, so despite the logical bomb of it behaving like another weapon, it actually helped me. It took a bit of getting used to the way you fire things, but it was the first time I actually felt like I in a boat in a game. 3

Enemies:
The manual lists about a dozen ships, none of which I could see the difference between outside of broad class strokes. Then again, none of them mattered outside of broad class strokes. Whether they were big or small, and whether or not missiles were headed your way. 3

Non-Enemies:
There are missions you get helicopters and have to escort convoys. I can't say how well this works, because even if I played a mission with them, I don't know the keys to get them to do anything. Those are on the command card, which doesn't appear to be available online. 0

Levels:
I appreciate the variety the game tries to put forth, even if it boils down to "arcade shooting gallery" and "long stretches of doing nothing". I know that's probably how actual naval warfare happens, and probably just as fun, but you get paid for that. This is supposed to be fun. 3

Player Agency:
Everything works, but it just doesn't quite work perfectly. There's always a nagging problem. An awkward choice of turning, stiff aiming, my inability to select specific weapons. I could do all those things, but the game just didn't quite do it how I wanted it to. 4

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
Occasional naval action with long stretches of the accurate naval experience. 1

Graphics:
I appreciate the nice graphics of the ships at the top, it distracts me from the reality that most of the game is me staring at my radar and a blue shoreline. 3

Story:
None, even if the manual gives a token plot about terrorism.

Sound/Music:
Simple blips and bloops. 1

That's 18.

As far as naval simulation games go, I would describe it as one. Which is much better than all the sub-based games I've played in the past, which I found to be unpleasant experiences. Maybe next time I return to the see, I'll get something fun. It does feel like it's just catching up to stuff that flight sims did a couple years ago, but whether that's because this is crude or just that the better flight sims are light years ahead of anything else remains to be seen.

Sadly, the big thing in naval sims won't be from Lucasarts, but the next game, the big 250, will be, Battlehawks 1942, which I hope will be quite interesting.

Onesimus: A Quest for Freedom (1992)

Name:Onesimus - A Quest for Freedom
Number:249
Year:1992
Expansion for:Jill of the Jungle
Publisher:Ark Media Publishing
Developer:Epic Megagames
Genre:Side-Scrolling Shooter
Difficulty:3/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes

Onesimus is a minor New Testament figure, the (probable) slave of a Roman in Antolia named Philemon. Both figures are minor saints in various forms of Orthodox Christianity, but generally just overlooked outside of the east. The letter in which these two are named is one of the shortest works in the Bible, and focuses on forgiveness. What Philemon needs to forgive Onesimus for is not mentioned, but it is 1st century Rome, so it's possible that it isn't something that has translated well across the centuries. It strikes me as more unique because it isn't Paul politely saying that the person it was directed to is a terrible Christian.

Why this of all things, is being turned into a Jill of the Jungle mod is beyond me.
 

This is not an exaggeration. This is basically just Jill of the Jungle Episode 4, except now Jill is a male Roman slave in a tunic. Because a woman with a shapely ass is not something a Christian game can have. Unless ass is code for donkey, although I suspect many would question why you're describing a donkey as being shapely. Nearly everyone who worked on Jill also worked on this, hence why I've placed Epic as the developer even if that isn't official.

When I say that this is Episode 4, everything is from Jill except the main character's sprites, which are clearly modified from Jill's, and give the main character, who I presume is supposed to be male, a feminine appearance. Sounds, music, graphics and gameplay. If you edited this to have Jill's sprites, there would be barely any difference.

Even if you discount my theory that this is Epic doing contract work, there are levels here which are from Jill of the Jungle. It might honestly be all of them and I just didn't notice. It certainly is a lot of them, some of which I wasn't so happy to play through the first time around. Oh, sweet, the level where I'm practically guaranteed to take damage, I sure wanted to play through this one again! This isn't even done in a sensical way, near the end of the game there's a level from Episode 1.

The game works somewhere between Episodes 2 and 3 of Jill. There's an overworld, but some levels are multi-part. (Technically, Episode 3 did have this, but it was doing trickery on the final level) The map is different, but clearly based on the already existing map. There's still a maze though, proving once again that if you need to pad out your game's runtime, add a maze.

Don't be fooled by how quickly I managed to complete the game, this is quite long. There's nearly every level that doesn't involve turning into an animal at some point. It's shorter than the whole of Jill, but longer than any individual episode. If this were just a collection of Jill levels without the changes, well, it wouldn't be amazing, since the animal stuff changed things up, but it would be better.

The whole Christian element feels weird. If you've read up about Wisdom Tree, they were a developer who started making Christian games on the NES after Nintendo started cracking down on unlicensed games. The thing is, they were atheists and doing it because selling their stuff via the Christian market bypassed Nintendo's censorship. I have no proof that this is a similar case, but Tim Sweeney is absolutely the sort of person who would cater to a market in the most cynical manner possible.

Now, the reason why this comes off as atheists trying to exploit a market is because the Christian element is mostly performance. The Christian element is as hacked together as the game itself. Slightly modify a few graphics in such a way that superficially seems Christian, then put out of context Bible verses in an apple every stage. By this logic, you could modify any game to be Christian. Even something like Postal, just switch the weapons to something that sounds religiously safe, make the enemies fall in prayer instead of dying. Congrats, you can print that. It would be obvious pandering, of course, but that's never stopped anyone before.

What I find questionable most of all is the safe changes to the game seems to make things worse. Instead of demons, there are invincible, flying, moonwalking thieves who throw spinning fireballs. That is really messed up. I think a coin pick-up is supposed to make it so you can get past them without getting, hurt, but I never got it to work. Either way, I don't think a character that's a demon in a human's skin is any better than a regular demon. Just don't have demons if you feel like demons are too risky.

Then there's the change to the weapon. The shuriken, or whatever it was called, is now a rock. It works the same. I'm really not sure why this is supposed to be a safe choice. Weird ninja weapons, for all the criticism they get, are rare and expensive, even if you went back to the era of Japan where there actually would be ninjas walking around. Rocks are not rare and expensive, and rocks can be deadly weapons.

There was some unimportant work of literature, in which one of the characters said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Because getting hit with a rock can kill you. That's why stonings were popular forms of vigilante killings for thousands of years. They were cheap, easy to use, and there was very little you could do to defend yourself against man throwing rock. As your little burgeoning Cain shall soon discover. Say what you will about media that tries to be non-violent, it's better than half-heartedly sanitizing violence only to create something worse.

I'm going to give this a 5, it's not bad, but feels unwieldy and some of the changes have made the experience less fun. If this was your only option, it wouldn't be bad, there's just no reason to play this otherwise.

The idea of cloning/licensing some uber popular game and making a Christian version isn't a bad one. You're starting from a good template, the audience you're selling to might actually enjoy what you're selling, and if you're good enough people outside of the niche might look upon it fondly. There are people who like some of the later Wisdom Tree games, which followed this template. The key thing is, these games were clones, not just the same game with a new coat of paint.

Next time, we'll go out of order to see Lucasarts attempt at making a naval sim action game, PHM Pegasus.

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark (1990)

Name:Elvira - Mistress of the Dark
Number:248
Year:1990
Publisher:Accolade
Developer:Horrorsoft
Genre:Adventure/RPG/Survival Horror
Difficulty:5/5
Time:4 hours
Won:Yes (111W/79L)

It feels good to have finally beaten this game. A grand weight off my shoulders. It was exactly what I expected it to be...because I knew there wasn't going to be something incredibly impressive at the end, just that there would be a sense of yes, I have won one of the hardest adventure games ever made. Even if I did take advantage of maps and had to look a few things up.

If you don't read the playthrough parts, Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a licensed adventure/RPG hybrid that just so happens to perfectly encompass most elements that make up a survival horror game. Who is Elvira? Elvira is a horror hostess, which if you haven't had one or haven't watched one, is someone who appears before horror films on local TV. I'm not sure how legitimate ones work, because the one I grew up with was Svengoolie, who was one of the later ones and who himself played things quite jokingly. Basically, they hype up the film before hand, appear before and after the commercial break to make jokes or state trivia.

Elvira, based on what I know, is one of the more comedic ones. Sort of what if a California bimbo hung around all the horrible monsters. The kind of bimbo who looks at a big nasty monster and goes "look at this jackass". This of course, was a winning combination, which is why eventually Elvira went from mocking movies to starring in one of her own. From this, came these games.

Try being the operative word.

This is a sequel to the first film, which is one of those things I've heard but have never quite been certain if it was true or not. The important thing is, Elvira is a witch, she's inherited a castle in some obscure English hamlet, and as she's renovating it, it turns out to be haunted. By the spirit of her dead ancestor and her army of evil guards. She puts an ad out in the paper, and in comes the player to try to help.

In this game, a guard sauntering out to challenge you is always a bad sign.

And likely dies at the hands of a guard in a gory manner I will neglect to show. There are pictures of it out there on other sites, if you want to see a pixel art depiction of a severed head. They don't skimp out, Lucio Fulci would be proud. It's one of those things that either really motivates you to not die or to die, depending on your fondness for gore. This is actually at complete odds with Elvira herself, who despite showing horror films, disliked the more violent end of the scale. I don't know what she considered the edge, but I'm sure seeing the part where a head was cut off is over it.

Few games give you quite as much a sense of "prepare to die", as this one does.

This act of violence sets the game's tone. This is no kiddy horror experience, you will die, you will die a lot, and the game wants you to die. It's mercies are mostly contained to not throwing you directly into a fight at the start of the game and the adventure side of things. In contrast to most adventure games from this era, there are very few situations where you lose because you used an item elsewhere or missed it earlier in the game. At least in the sense traditional adventure games are known for, you can still lose an item by forgetting where you dropped it or never picked it up. You can just always go back for it. This isn't to say they don't exist, it's just that most require very elaborate acts on the player's part.

Instead, you get screwed on combat. Combat is unrelenting and brutal. There are two attacks, corresponding to roughly half the screen. Click on one side to attack on that side. Which attack works seems to be random. When you defend you also get two defenses, also corresponding to half the screen. Successfully defend, you get an attack, the same is true for your enemy. Usually. You get a second after every failed attack to defend against the next, and most enemies don't have a good wind-up. You can figure out how to defend when a blade is halfway to your neck. Good for ambience, bad for survival.

This isn't to say that the system is bad, it just needs more windup. You need to be able to figure out how an enemy is going to attack before his knife is at your jugular. It's less difficult with earlier enemies, but later enemies can get quite fast, and the proper way to guard from attacks coming on the right has less method of leeway than you'd think. It's less halved and more 3/4ths for the left and 1/4th for the right, probably even less. You can always use the buttons on the side, but these feel like they're making the combat less interesting.

A few enemies switch the combat from the back and forth to having to time your attacks. These basically all happen in the crypt area, the head honcho there and the flying skulls all have to have timed attacks. If you don't know how it works...well, the flying skulls you might be able to figure it out, but the boss enemy doesn't even seem like someone you can take in a fight.

The graphic artist for this game clearly had a lot of fun.

You also get a variety of spells to deal with enemies as well as a crossbow. You use these before an encounter starts by clicking on the item and then using it. At least in theory. In practice, the number of attack spells you can get is heavily limited and you need them for certain enemies. The crossbow is also limited to those enemies and three special cases. For all the game hypes up its spells, it's very difficult to get the spells you need, since a lot of the ingredients are hard to find. Not helped by them being a part of the copy protection system and thus no walkthroughs I could find mentioned where they were.

Combat also has other little side bits. As you get wounded, you gradually lose strength and dexterity, which means you hurt them less and they get shots after you hit them instead of waiting until they can defend. Even if you heal yourself, if you've taken enough damage, you can be in a pain state which needs a particular spell with difficult to find ingredients to fix it. There's a reason that savescumming is suggested around this game.

Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty.

The RPG part of this feels like a token aspect put in because it needed to be put in. Strength is your damage, while dexterity, at low levels, prevents you from following up a successful attack. Res is resilience, your defense, get the right spell and you can raise it. There's also a suit of armor, but that means you can barely hold anything else. You have a weight limit and the game doesn't tell you how much you can lift. Life is your health and experience is just the score, apparently. Skill is more esoteric, it depends on the weapon and raises as you attack with it, but I'm not quite sure how it changes combat.

Oddly enough, the adventure half is generally reasonable given the company. Horror Soft tends to have a bad reputation for this sort of thing, but in this game, anything not involving combat is reasonable. Even that tends to be easy to predict after a while. Just move items around and keep an eye on anything you think might be important. The game is not unwinnable in its adventure half, we just tend to forget this because the RPG half wants you dead.

The objective of the game is to collect six keys, so you're going to have to take out that bird, one way or another.

The interface is mostly good. Mostly. Click on an object and what actions you can do light up. The problem comes with your inventory. You don't get a pick-up and drop action, and you need to do both. Instead, you drag objects to the other inventory. Be it yours from the room or the room's to yours. You need to check the room's inventory if you ever left anything there that wasn't originally there. Like, say, putting down spell ingredients in the kitchen.

That said, I did fall prey to the trap that tends to happen in adventure games. How easy it would be to just look up the answer to a nagging question. The only case I felt the game was being truly annoying to pull off was with lighting a cannon. You have magical fire attacks, but as is often the case, you can't light something with magic fire. So you have to find a fire source. Not the hundreds of torches, no, you need to get a piece of coal. Only, the coal is an item you can't just pick up.

Time to reinvent fire.

One of the things I've learned about adventure games is that often developers will go the extra mile in executing their vision instead of doing good enough, even if that isn't something that's going to be readily apparent to a player. On the other hand, you can sometimes notice something might be useful if it seems useless. The player is given a satchel at the start which seemingly has no use. There's an oven in the kitchen that has a piece of coal in it, but if you take it, you get burned.

The answer is to put the satchel in the room, then drag the coal into the satchel. This still isn't enough to light the cannon, because you apparently can't drop the coal onto the cannon that way. Instead, you have to get a pair of tongs from the dungeon. Only, you have to put that into the satchel, then bury the bones of the torturer. If you don't, his ghost comes back to life and kills you. Because apparently he's so much tougher than the other ghosts. At this point, you take both out of your satchel and now you can light the cannon. Of all the times to not be a smoker.

I do feel like the puzzles are less clever than the ones in Personal Nightmare. A lot tend to recall obvious bits of horror trivia or just plain searching places until you find what you want. The ones that don't, well, none of them are on the level of the cannon, but they never really felt clever. Just sort of meh. In a weird sense, this is just about finding out how you can do these things without getting slaughtered by the hordes of roaming guards. And that, in essence, is why this game, despite the difficulty and failings, is fun to play.

Weapons:
For most of the time, you're juggling melee weapons whose only difference is their base damage. Spells and bolts are limited enough that you don't ever seem to use them outside of special situations, making their contribution feel underwhelming. There is a decent selection, at least. 3

Enemies:
For a good chunk of the game, you fight hordes of guards which come in all colors of the rainbow. They vary in strength, but the game uses the same basic guard for most encounters. The only real differing enemies that you can actually find only dwell in one location, one in which you don't want to spend much time in. 3

Non-Enemies:
I don't mind getting insulted for things under my control, but being the constant target of insults when I'm the only one clearing out the castle feels wrong. Though I guess getting yelled at by the hot goth chick is someone's fetish. 1

Levels:
Every area is effectively a circle. Technically it's a square, but you're moving around in a circle, going through rooms one by one. It sounds simple, but in a sense, it works with how confusing the game can get if you don't pay attention. That said, the garden maze is something I would never try to attempt without a map, it's simply insanity. 5

Player Agency:
Attacking isn't as smooth as it could be, but for the most part, everything is easy to get used to and easy to use. 7

Interactivity:
The interaction list could stand a simple pick-up and drop command, but for the most part, I don't have any general complaints about how the adventure half is set up. Specific puzzles vary, of course. 5

Atmosphere:
Elvira is one of the first games to really do horror right. The brightly colored screens serve to hide a horrific and oppressive gameworld. 8

Graphics:
Despite the horror atmosphere, the castles and forests in the game are wonderfully done. Every background is a joy to look at. Human characters, meanwhile, are done well, but in some cases have too little animation. 8

Story:
A token effort, despite the potential for there to be something given the game. We get a background in the manual that could have been anything, and the assumption that we've read it in the game. 1

Sound/Music:
Sound effects are sparse, but effective. Enemies could make a better sound than a high-pitched shriek. The music is properly moody, each area having its own fitting theme. 7

That's 48.

Elvira gets a bad rap for understandable reasons, but this tends to result in people overlooking the game's positives. In a sense, these work too well. A horror game so horrific people fear it. But behind that difficulty is a fun game whenever you defeat those seemingly insurmountable problems. Sometimes a game's true destination is what you get out of it.

I played through the Amiga version, but in the interest of not playing through the game again, I've briefly gone through the rest of the ports.

DOS

From a technical standpoint, this should be better. I'm not entirely sure of the technical details, but VGA is better than the Amiga graphics chip, especially for things based on actual images. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of actual sound, and the soundtrack is less a spooky adventure and more Skyroads. I should really play Skyroads again sometime soon. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it feels less fitting. There's also the option of MT-32 music, which I imagine improves the soundtrack immensely.

Atari ST

It's basically the Amiga version without music and an ad for the movie at the start.

PC-98

Somehow, not just an inferior DOS copy. The combat is a lot slower. Which changes the oppressive atmosphere of the game slightly and makes it a bit easier. The soundtrack is the same as DOS though.

Commodore 64

Basically, a novelty. I tried playing it, but either there's an emulation issue or the game forces you to use a joystick as a mouse cursor. Which is always fun, but here it presents new and exciting challenges! The sad thing is, I couldn't even get combat to work at all. It's cool that they managed to convert nice, shiny Amiga graphics to the C64 though.

Next time, Onesimus, a Christian game using the Jill of the Jungle engine.

Elvira: Won

One of the nicest sights in this game.

Now that I've done what I remember, I need to get started on what I don't. Around the main courtyard area are towers, most guarded by guards on both the ground floor and the top floor. These guys are here for the easy experience, more experience means my skill goes up, and skill going up is good. Down on the towers leads to the catacombs, which I need to deal with somehow later, for now, I can only deal with upstairs.

This is mostly just a way to remind me of what I needed to do. There's a cannon up here which has a convenient fuse and is pointed at one of the towers. The tower in question holds a knight who is invulnerable in melee combat. Somehow I know this just walking towards him...which got me thinking, maybe I could use a spell or a crossbow bolt. Because invulnerable in melee is one of those exact wording things games like to use, and I'm right, because a crossbow bolt knocks him off the battlement and into the moat surrounding the castle. I file this away as something that will be useful in the future. Clear out the easy enemies and hard ones will appear in their place.

The layout of this room in relation to what's outside is weird. This only makes sense if it's an L-shaped room with the entrance being off to the right, which it isn't.

At the front entrance of the castle, where I came in, there are two rooms. One which has a bunch of nice stuff you can examine but otherwise has nothing, and one containing the captain of the guard. He's tough, possibly the toughest regular enemy. He's fast too, just a general tough cookie. Which is why using a few spells on him is the best policy. The room has a few pieces of paper which reveal quite mundane things. But if I take one of the notes off the noteboard you can get a key, primus. Still nothing that opens any doors I've seen.

There's a wolf no one will confuse for being friendly.

The next part is to deal with the werewolf, a guy hiding out in the stable and turns into a werewolf when I get close. In order to take him out, I need a silver tipped crossbow bolt. That's what the silver crucifix was for, not dealing with the vampire. Turns out I already had everything I needed to kill him. There's a forge on the same side of the castle. Just drop the crucifix and a bolt into a crucible, put that crucible on the fire, then return to the werewolf and just use the bolt. For my efforts I get some horsehair and if I check one of the walls, the secondus key. That's four out of six. Surprisingly far all things considered.

I've been carrying the bones the entire time, since I'm not really sure what the point is.

I decide to do one little cheat, find out where the key to the herb garden was. It was my bad for not exploring the garden shed more, it turns out they were in the seed packets in the tin there. Sometimes a bit of knowledge can be a bad thing. Anyway, after taking out two of the lizard people, I can now clear out the herb garden of everything useful. After taking the herbal honey spell I prepared earlier.
 

If you see this bit, alas, its already too late for you.

Now it's time to deal with the part of the game that gave me the most trouble, the garden maze. Here you need a ton of spells to deal with the pesky little goblins that pop up here. See, you can't fight them in melee combat, they explode. Since it's Elvira, this is a problem. That means using the crossbow, of which I have a limited amount, and spells. As I go to start mixing spells, I realize I'm lacking in many essential components to make any offensive spells. I'm lacking nightshade, belladonna and surprisingly enough, bird eggs. These aren't in the kitchen, the herb garden or anywhere else I've looked. This is what I mean when I say even the walkthroughs are no help.

In retrospect, I made a mistake in going after the captain of the guard, that lightning spell would have been a help in this maze. It's entirely luck if I can reach the end of the maze successfully. You can't fight goblins, if you try, they explode and set you on fire. Or steal stuff. Which in this game is worse than slowly dying. The one attack spell I had ahead of time is useless against the goblins, so basically I have to hope I have enough firepower to reach the end of the maze where the goblin nest is. You need to hit that twice with a bolt or a spell. But inside, is all the rest of the lovely spell components and Elvira's Ring.

Considering how this sort of thing goes elsewhere, putting the object in the convenient hole seems too logical in retrospect.

 I decide to try out the chapel, since this is the only place where a jeweled object fits in. There's an altar covered in fancy objects, a cup, a cross and two candlesticks. There's a slot in the cross that just so happens to correspond roughly to the size of the ring. I put it in and the altar explodes in a flash of light, revealing a set of stairs down.

Continuing Horrorsoft's fondness of putting corpses in walls.

Inside is a room with a crown and a mural showing a king getting knighted by an angel. There's Latin writing I don't understand. Take the crown out of the room, and the room collapses. Remember that Bible verse I had from upstairs? Turns out that's the answer. I looked that up because I assumed the game expected me to translate the Latin and I'm kind of tired of dealing with that. This reveals that there's a skeleton inside the mural, which I can put the crown on to get the Crusader's Sword. Which is presumably more powerful than the one I'm using, but still decreases my skill for the moment. I find it somewhat amusing that they couldn't code the sword's skill to count for two weapons.

Unfortunately, I lack a number of easy foes to clean out. I still have the battlements, of course, but I don't know how many trips I have up there. The catacombs have a monster I'm not sure how to deal with, which leaves the dungeons and the upstairs part of the castle. Going around the dungeons results in significantly less enemies than I was hoping and the upstairs castle has suddenly cranked itself up to max strength.

Yes, this is a guy I want to fight.

So I decide to do the catacombs. You enter here through one of the southern towers. This is a scary and dark place full of creatures which are not easily killed. Including an ogre monster which I assumed was invulnerable to physical damage, but it turns out you just need to use a certain weapon and then click it in certain places. This comes off less as a matter of cleverness and more as a matter of luck. Until this section no enemies have required anything more than just getting the correct attack.

The reason why this becomes a thing here is that you have to deal with flying skulls here. I'm not sure the proper method of dealing with them, but what I'm doing is clicking where they are and eventually they die. Eventually the flying skulls get used as a weapon by fishmen. Which is still weird, but mostly works by the usual rules.

The giant is holding a stone with runes on it, and guarding a tomb which has a key in it. Lots of graves in here, including one room with two empty coffins. Only problem is, one of them leads to under the well and floods the room. The other is where I guess you're supposed to put those bones I've been lugging around since I cleaned out the dungeon. What this does is unexplained. Also unexplained, a random vial of dragon's blood in the entrance to a random set of coffins. I have no idea how you'd figure this out without a map explaining where everything is.

There's a spell to read the runes, which just tells me there's a secret passage in the catacombs. Useful, but unless that's the tomb that fills up with water, I'm probably going to stumble upon that sooner or later. I mix up the last of the spells I think I'll need, turns out that I used up all my nightshade and I'm not going to be getting anymore, so no super powerful attack spells for me. I do realize that I should make a light spell so that Elvira can go through the area behind the dumbwaiter to the left of the kitchen.

An entire jungle of stuff that doesn't matter.

One key left, which is outside, in the moat. The key I got from the tomb is not one of the six numbered ones, it's one that opens an actual door. Or rather gate to the outside. The moat is accessed from the well, which is where there's some moss, after I've given up on using the rest of the spells. The moat is a risky area, because you get very little warning before you die from lack of air and the whole area is wide and vast. There's probably spell components here, but good luck finding them. Instead, I just need to grab a key off the knight I shot earlier. Finally, the set is complete. Now what?

It's kind of disappointing that this is what most of the game has been building toward, instead of the final fight, but it makes sense that the evil witch lady would be easier to reach.

This allows me reach the chest, and after using the six keys in order, I get a dagger and a Scroll of Spiritual Mastery. Now to find where the villain of the game is, which is in the Catacombs. Thank god I have a map. Random women pop up to throw fireballs in my face as I explore now, because I've been having too good a time lately and the game needs to remind me I'm its bitch.

Considering what kind of license this game is, it's surprising that something like this isn't an entendre.

From the entrance I take, to reach Esmalda, you have to go right then left. It's a random hole in the ground, which is always nice. Examine, the put the stone in. Finally, the confrontation, and it's somewhat underwhelming. There's a hole in the center there which obviously requires...something. I took a leap of faith and guessed that it was the Crusader's Sword I needed to use, and it was. From there, it all falls into place. Use the Scroll, and she's further stunned, and the dagger finishes her off.

I get the feeling that these guys lacked the talent to write dialog, which is a mistake for what this game should be doing.

There's no grand ending, just text saying that Elvira is calling our name, and then an image of Elvira giving us a come hither look. No points for sex jokes, that's basically what's happening in-universe. I wonder if they knew that was going to happen when they signed off on this game?

This Session: 2 hours 30 minutes

Final Time: 4 hours

Elvira: Introduction

Welcome to friendly castle Killbragant, which may or may not have a moat depending on where you are.

This is not a playthrough of honor. This is a game I have tried to win for over 10 years at this point. I'm going to play through this entire game in a state of frustration, trying to figure out things that have eluded me in this time. At the end, despite this difficulty, I'm going to recommend it, because despite being very hard, it's fun and interesting.

Elvira - Mistress of the Dark is a weird game. Not necessarily in regards to the world and design of it, though that is true too. A sequel/adaptation of a movie that takes an incredibly graphic horror tone to a character intended to be incredibly campy? It's very strange. What's always intrigued me about it is it playing like an early survival horror game, and you being in a constant fight to survive is not something that only applies if you know what you're doing, this is a constant slide downward you need to fight against. Which is why it's taken me so long to get around to trying to win at it.

Probably not.

The game puts me down in front of the entrance to the castle the game takes place in. There's not a lot to do here, except I can examine the sign there to find out I should enter the office. You can avoid the office, but the end result is the same anyway. I meet a pleasant looking gentleman, who proceeds to tell me that I'm doomed, which is probably accurate, and then has you thrown in the dungeon.

Hey, it's not my fault that the English banned my assault musket and butter knife!

I'm freed by Elvira, who then proceeds to berate me for getting captured by a guard who is undoubtedly stronger and more capable of fighting me right now. She then tells me what I have to do, find a chest which contains some stuff I can use to destroy Emelda, which in the manual is explained. Inside is The Scroll of Spiritual Mastery, and I need to find six keys to open it. Otherwise Emelda will come back from the dead and probably do something terrible. Before I'm sent off, I'm given a dagger, a healing spell and an attack spell.

The game proper starts in the courtyard. There's about eight guard towers, a couple of other exterior rooms, a path to the garden area, a door to the dungeon and a door to upstairs. Enemies pop out whenever you reach certain sections, here it's guard towers, exterior rooms. You get the opportunity to attack first, which is basically you using a spell or your crossbow, neither of which I have right now. You can run, by turning around and then, well, running. But if you turn after the guy behind you starts chasing after you, you enter combat anyway. Chasing after you, in this case, is him stabbing you in the back. Which they'll do once and then sort of politely wait for you to do something.

Few games give you such concentrated "I'm going to kill you" energy like Elvira does.

Combat is straight-forward. Click on the left or right side of the screen to defend or attack on that side. You defend based on which side the guy is attacking. Attacking is more luck of the draw, really. I'm not sure there is a method to being able to do it perfectly, you just hit whenever the game decides you hit. I think the skill stat is tied into this, but despite the simplicity of it, the combat system here has some depth to it.

In contrast to a lot of other games, Elvira is gory. Very, very gory. Dying results in you getting to see very graphic results of what happened to you. In most cases, this involves seeing your slashed throat. Since these are modified photos of real people, it feels a lot worse than the more campy gore of what games would have over the next couple of decades. This, oddly, is in sharp contrast to what Elvira tends to promote herself as. More campy, goofy Halloween fun rather than some dude getting mutilated. Even if she tends to show those films anyway.

My goals this early on are all based around the spells. This is one of the most important aspects of the game. At this moment, Elvira is in the kitchen, and once I get her the spellbook, she can whip up more spells for me. There are a few that are necessary, but the ones that will sustain me throughout the game are healing and pain removal spells. See, if I get hit enough times, it doesn't matter that I'm healed up, the pain still causes my stats to plummet. I also need salt, the spell that identifies spell components, and those spell components.

This last bit is quite tricky, because the game's copy protection is the spell system. Which is not unreasonable, except that because of this, walkthrough makers seem to skip over the whole, where can you find the components, part of the game. Also, the official cluebook has something obscuring text, so you can't find the components with the versions online.

You can pick up the plates...because you can.

The first part is easy, go inside the castle. The library is to the left of the entrance. I just need to grab the book. This is oddly, the only action not built into the interface. You get all the usual adventure actions, but picking things up is exclusively click and drag. Elvira is in the kitchen further down the hall, along with a larder stuffed with food, some of which are spell ingredients, which at the moment, the most important is honey.

I also take the opportunity to enter the armory, after fighting off the guard. There are weapons in here, as well as a suit of armor. I just stick to a sword, dropping the dagger I started with, and pick up a crossbow. Now I just need to find some bolts. Unfortunately, I don't remember where they were. So, for now I'm going to enter the garden area.

If you somehow haven't been killed until now, this is the point you'll realize this isn't quite a fun, fantasy adventure.

The garden area is where most of the spell ingredients are. Unfortunately, most are hidden behind a locked door at the moment. So I go all the way to the far side of the area, past the falconry area and the hedge maze, to the garden shed. Where an old man has had a door fall on him, his throat slit, and maggots crawling on his corpse. Which is as charming as it sounds. There's also a sledgehammer and a crucifix in here, which might be useful later. There's other stuff, but it's all food I don't think I can use.

Shouldn't she be looking towards the camera more?

I'm not really sure what I can do next, so I decide that what I'll do next is clear out the upper floor of the castle. First, I need to get a stake from the living room, because there's a vampire just snoozing in one of the upstairs rooms. Not sure what the logic is, because if you go near her, despite being, you know, day, she'll get up and bite you...assuming you don't have the crucifix. Which I'm glad I got, because I forgot I needed the sledgehammer to drive in the stake. It's odd how often vampire media forget that you need a lot of force to drive a stake through someone's chest. Guess this was before people forgot that.

After returning with a sledgehammer and staking the "vampira", I get the dust she turned into. The rest of the place is mostly killing lizard people and then grabbing random crossbow bolts inside the rooms. Yeah, lizard people, as in lizard men wearing robes and swinging various weapons. The exception to the rooms is the central room, which is a bathroom, which only contains Laudanum, a kind of opium, and a locked door for which I have no key. I also get a Bible page for some important reason.

Four bolts turns you from a rank amateur to a master. (the fourth hit the forest)

Now that I have the bolts, I can return to the garden, getting past two respawned guards. Here, there's a target which I can fire a few crossbow bolts at and suddenly I'm an expert marksman. Just use the crossbow and you hit someone with a bolt. In general, this is useful, but there are specific enemies you can only take out using this thing. The first, and nearby, is a weird hawk and falconer combo. Hit the hawk with a bolt and the falconer disappears. You get a feather and a key labeled tertius.

As I return to Elvira to drop off the stuff I don't need, I hear a scream and see that she's left the kitchen because of a lard bucket. That means I can't return there under penalty of death without the salt. Where is the salt? In the basement, where more creatures and spooky things are.

If you make a joke about him, that'll probably be the last joke you ever make.

There's not just salt down here, there are skeletal guards. These differ from regular guards in that you can't tell how wounded they are from how they look. There's also bugs, centipedes, spiders, beetles and earwigs. And of course, spider webs, all of which are useful spell components. You basically just explore every room, clicking on the same hotspots to try to find the same things. At about halfway through the area there's a sort of boss skeletal guard, who wears pink, and takes quite a bit of swordfighting to take down. I've also noticed that the tougher enemies swing their sword faster, which is screwing me over on occasion.

The area he's guarding contains the salt and a few other things. There are tongs on the table, which if you grab, kill you. The spirit of the torturer around here comes back and burns your eyes out. I've always assumed that it's just another one of those things that kills you, but seeing as I have a satchel that seems to be just flavor. Maybe it's one of those puzzles where the game plays against your assumptions? The satchel and the seemingly unobtainable tongs. Surprisingly, it works.

There's an iron ring on the ground which, when you attempt to take it, opens up an old grave, which has skeleton bones and the quartus key. Then it's just a finishing ring around the dungeon until I get out. I was surprised that I managed to pick up what was seemingly all the cobwebs, because they're not in the rooms like the others, they're out in the halls.

You're welcome. I'm so glad I decided to help you.

Now that I have the salt, I return to the kitchen, slowly wait for the right time to toss the salt at the cook, and everything's back to normal. Elvira thanks me, and I unload all the bugs I've been carrying, and now this place is a bizarre mess of bugs, poisons and other assorted odds and ends.

Unfortunately, this has all been the easy part. This is all I really remember solving. There are minor puzzles I've solved everywhere, but what those are escape my mind at the moment. The bigger problem, of course, is that enemies respawn, and as they do they get tougher and faster. I've already taken out three guarding the path to the garden and there's at least two trips there left for me. What that eventually means is something I'm afraid of.

This Session: 1 hour 30 minutes

Welcome House 2 (1996)

Name:Welcome House 2 - Keaton and His Uncle
Number:247
Year:1996
Publisher:Gust
Developer:Gust
Genre:"Survival Horror"/Adventure
Difficulty:3/5
Time:2 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (110W/79L)

There's a certain measure of apprehension when you see a video game sequel released the same year as the original game. By default, it means that unless you carved up a bigger game into smaller chunks, you've spent less than a year on this game. This isn't really a problem during the '80s, because you generally just focused on a gameplay loop, or even during the early '90s. Id did their best work in around four years. But by the time 3D models started getting good enough to resemble something?

Welcome House, in case you forgot/missed it, is a Japanese-exclusive PSX game centered around a man called Keaton visiting his uncle's mansion. These days, it reads as a strange parody of survival horror games. There's no real enemies or threat of violence, but it plays like the genre, looks like the genre, and feels like the genre.

There's going to be a lot of this, often just as "telegraphed".

This time around, Keaton's been living with his Uncle Parkinson for a while, but uh-oh, it's the Fourth of July and his prankster Uncle has set a whole bunch of explosives off in his room. Turns out, he's set the entire house up with similar exploding presents. So much so, that he's rigged phones to explode. You better get used to this, because everything in this game explodes.
 

There's going to be a lot of this.

Which sounds like an exaggeration, but the game is practically non-stop explosions. The game really ramps up the physical comedy, to the point that it centers around it. Were it not a comedy game, the mansion would be a deathtrap. Bombs, phones turned into bombs, pits, mechanical traps and even bear traps. Parkinson probably got himself on a few lists with the purchases he made for the events of this game.

Control-wise, the game is unaltered from the first game. Tank controls, circle opens your item menu, square functions as your general action button. Once to use something in front of you, hold down and move forward to run. Start pauses, opening a map, press it again and you get the save menu. In general start functions as an accept button and cross as a cancel button. Which caused me a bit of confusion at first. 

Unlike in more serious games, a sign labeled danger is an indication that you should use it.

Much like the original game, this is advertised a polygon cartoon. In this case, it feels more like a description of gameplay than the general style of the game. You only interact with the game just to engage the game's jokes in the sequence the developer wanted. Everything else is an illusion, you get things like descriptions of objects and rooms, but they don't ever tell you something beyond what you can see in front of you. It's one long joyride.

But the game does have a problem. While it does flow well for the most part, once you stop for whatever reason, it becomes apparent that the game is basically just a series of events that happen, and your contribution is just advancing the plot. Actions that advance the gameplay are either a matter of gameplay, using an exploding phone, obvious, key and door, or random luck, walk through a doorway in a certain way.

One of the descriptions you get when first entering a room.

A good example of this is a room on the second floor with four big cabinets. You can enter here beforehand, only to find nothing inside. What you actually do is wait until later, when Napoleon the Dog flees in here after you get stabbed by him in military regalia. This makes no sense in context either, you just randomly turn away while chasing him around the room. Once you get him inside, whenever you open a cabinet, he appears in the opposite row. How do you solve this? You go to another room, sit on a random chair, which puts a "kick me" sign on Keaton's butt.

Which is not helped by the game following this up by making you give this axe to a lady of the pool, as in, a water elemental that appears in Parkinson's pool, who then gives you the choice of three axes, only one of which advances. I'm also reasonably sure that in order to get this axe exchange, you need to actually go down, talk to the guy repairing the diving board, go up to the second floor where a set of stairs upwards are, which somehow causes the board to be repaired, then return. Not exactly a series of puzzles which tends towards anything but random actions, but at least I understand the logic to axe lady of the lake and axe against chain of same color.  

Keaton gets his revenge against a statue.

Unlike the last game, there is no long awkward backtracking sequence once you seem to reach the end of the game. Instead, it's put all across the game. In a certain sense, the game suffers for this. It's obvious what the really big things you need to go back for are, but all across the game you get little ones which make you go back and forth across most of the mansion. For a game that isn't that long, it's odd that there's such blatant padding in it.

There's voice acting this time around, which is nothing special. They're doing the job you expect them to do and doing it well, but the job isn't special. Nobody rises above the level of the archetype they're expected to do. Because of what the game is, this wasn't ever not going to be the case.

Admittedly, out of context it just looks like a guy laughing at a dead dog, which is a different kind of weird.

The ending of the game is quite spectacular. In order to stop Napoleon from pranking you, you need to bait him with a bottle of booze. Which is in the spirit of what this game is imitating, but damn, it's pretty ballsy to do something like that. That seems like a risky move, even in the '90s. Then, after finding all the objects you need to open Parkinson's secret bedroom/viewing room, you get treated to one, spectacular final explosion. No wonder there wasn't a Welcome House 3, there was no house anymore. Onto the rating.

Weapons:
None.

Enemies:
None.

Non-Enemies:
With the exception of Allegro, most of the characters are one-note and only state and offer simple things, only ever being more than scenery when the rare puzzle comes up involving them. 1

Levels:
Not having a last-minute point in the game where you have to go all across the mansion again and seeing the bizarre changes the game has made over the course of the game does wonders to improve the quality of the place. 4

Player Agency:
Same as last time. I feel like the game could have used a sidestep function, it really, really could have used that. 3

Interactivity:
In addition to the usual look/use actions, you get a lot of choices. Sure, these choices are often for things you have to do, but you get the option. 3

Atmosphere:
While I didn't much care for playing the game, I must admit, the cartoon violence and what awful prank Keaton would fall victim to more than made up for it. 6

Graphics:
It's cartoony, but charming. Keaton gets a wide variation of animations for the various calamities that befall him, albeit he's pretty much the only character with more animations than the usual you'd give a character who walks and talks. That said, it is very obvious that whenever something calls for an object to lose part of itself, the model completely changes. 5

Story:
It's the Fourth of July and let's just have the most explosive one ever, and boy howdy, does it ever deliver. 4

Sound/Music:
Low quality but fitting sound effects and a smooth jazz soundtrack. Unlike last time, when the tracks played in different rooms somewhat randomly, you get some degree of control, since there are radios in numerous rooms you can change the song on. Which doesn't apply to the licensed songs you can find around. These still only work on the jukebox, all one of them that I found. 5

That's 31.

I feel like I was very harsh on a few aspects last time. Despite taking longer than I should have on it, it was enjoyable as an experience, at least. One of those odd games where it could be said that a let's play is the better experience than actually playing it. Since you won't get the joys of wandering around a big mansion wondering what you have to interact with in order to advance.

Next time, another spooky game, albeit, one that's also not quite the usual fare. It's Elvira - The Adventure Game, an adventure/RPG hybrid which is one of the first games to lean into horror more seriously.