Battlehawks 1942: Introduction

Lucasarts, or Lucasfilm Games as they were known at the time, is known for their adventures, FPS and space sims. Generally speaking, these are all well-regarded classics, except for the weird, early years which we generally excuse for...well, being from the weird early years when games were very experimental. One of the lesser known aspects of their output is that they published four flight simulations over the years, the first three coming out at the arguable height of the genre.

The first thing I did was fire up a training mission. There's manual protection, annoying when you have to check a PDF, but otherwise not a problem. Because the important thing is how the game controls. Around this time period, my gold standard is Dynamix simulation games, their flight sims, even when I'm limited to keyboard turning, just feels right. Lucasfilm Games could never disappoint me, could it?

Movement is done with the usual arrow keys. Left and right turn you at the expected awkward angle that most planes turn at, up and down go up and down. The issue with using keyboard controls is that this is incredibly stiff. Either you carefully inch across the screen or risk going full throttle in that direction. Very bad if you want to go up or down. Thankfully the mouse controls fix most of this issue.

What isn't easily fixed is speed. Most of the good games I've played so far have the number keys tied into how fast you go, with a general throttle option for fine-tuning. If you press the numbers here, you look in various directions, as if you were using the numpad. Which in a way is clever, but annoys me when it comes to actually playing. I ever so rarely use the view options in a game like this, and speed is an important thing to handle. This isn't even an issue with Lucasfilm doing something else, they did this with PHM Pegasus.

This is the last time you'll see something like this without it being at the end of some insane effort.

I don't know how much of this is on the flight model directly or just on the plane, but flying is more difficult than I'm used to. This could either be a crappy plane or just more realism than I'd like. More than anything else, my plane wants to go down to the ground. Gravity is a harsh mistress, but if I try to raise my nose at all, it feels like I'm in danger of stalling. I feel like I'm handling it all worse than I did back when I played Red Baron, which is odd considering that Red Baron definitely had worse planes.

That's your basic fighter training. Fighter against fighter. What about other training missions? There's also bomber escort and that really doesn't make me feel better about my flight abilities, because I only win because the bombers also fight back against the enemy planes. This is a sign, I can tell.

Also, every time you start a new mission (as opposed to replaying one you just exited) the game has you select an image of a plane out of the manual again. And when I say image of a plane, I mean it's just the direction and angle of it. This is by far the most annoying and tedious manual protection I've ever seen. I hate it. The worst thing? It's actually disabled in the copy I played, I could have been typing anything at all.

Next up is dive bombing training. I try a few times, failing miserably. At first because I can't figure out how to look down, then because I forget the dive part of dive bombing, and the obvious errors continue. Even when I'm actually dive bombing, though, it seems like I haven't the faintest idea of how to actually hit the ship. Something that occurred to me after a long amount of time was, hey, why don't we get a sight for the bomb? Sure, I can look down, but that tells me nothing about aiming the damn thing.

I check the manual to see how much I'm going to need this. The very first mission is a dive bomb mission. There's no getting away from this, I need to figure out how to do this. See, the manual goes into great detail about the history behind the missions and the real world tactics in the planes. The manual also lies and tells you that you can just focus on the gameplay. To say I'm a bit upset that the manual lied to me is an understatement. I could understand if there was something that was intended to be a secret, but this is something that I need to know if I'm going to do anything besides shoot other planes in the sky!

The flight and tactics sections of the manual are actually very helpful. Functioning as a beautiful primer on both the physics of flight and general tactics. I don't need to know that I need to lead my targets, but a nine-year-old who hasn't played a flight sim before might. More to my point, it tells me that Japanese planes are more agile than American ones, which I didn't actually know and found very helpful.

As to divebombing? It gives a general idea for how you should do a bombing run. Start at about 10,000 feet and dive at full speed. You're going to be a sitting target, so weave if you can. Then when you're at about 3000 feet, let loose the bomb and level out. This isn't actually specific help, just general advice. The actual answer is that you just have to practice until you estimate the size of the ship sprite and when to level out. Oh, and approach a ship length-wise, not width-wise. The training mission puts you in width-wise, of course.

There's one more kind of training mission, torpedo divebombing. In which you drop torpedoes which should then charge forward and hopefully hit a target. The problem is this doesn't come off very well in either gameplay or this test, because the only difference between this and regular divebombing is that the torpedoes are smaller.

And at this point I realize that the training missions have multiple modes of play, but I've avoided the actual campaign itself for long enough. The best teacher is experience, after all.

There are four campaigns of four missions for both the Japanese and the American side. These missions all take place in the key battles of the Pacific side of WWII. They are the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, and the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. These, judging by the manual's description, were chosen because they were fought with the only base being an aircraft carrier, AKA, they didn't have to put things like islands or land down.

The Battle of the Coral Sea is where the game begins; helpfully next to a small text box telling me that the Brewster Buffalo fighter and Vindicator dive bombers are pieces of crap and that the people who fly them are all dead. Not in the philosophical sense, in the "should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground." Reassuring and very comforting.

The historical background here is fairly simple. The Japanese are plotting on expanding their holdings in New Guinea, aiming to eventually reach Australia. To this end, they've assembled two task forces to invade and hold Port Moresby and Tulagi Island. Unfortunately for them, the Americans have broken their secret codes and have sent a counter attack force. A fairly even match-up that resulted in the Americans winning the battle in terms of strategic importance, but neither side really winning overall in terms of ships sunk. In-game, every mission is either defending a ship or attacking the enemy's ship.

I'll be alternating the sides best I can. The mechanics of how the campaign works is either borked in general for the DOS version, borked in the version I have, or just borked in general. If I play as the Japanese, everything is fine, missions are automatically counted. If I play as the Americans, no missions are ever counted. Not that it seems to matter, since I get every mission by default. The only thing I'm really missing is the dozens of failed mission attempts on the American side.

The first mission involved the damaged Japanese light carrier Shoho. On the American side, I want to sink it. The mission involves three bombers, the player included, what might be a few fighter escorts, and a whole bunch of enemy fighters. As the first proper mission, and one labeled easy, this is a terrible introduction.

To start with, my plane, a Dauntless, is a tub of lead that barely flies. Unless you crank your speed up to the red, you lose speed going level. Bombers do get a rear gunner position, but oh, guess what? The player has to switch seats to shoot at enemies from the rear. That means you're going to either ignore getting shot at or fight back and miss your shot at the carrier. That said, I do enjoy being a rear gunner more than actually flying the plane, so there is that.

Then we have the act of bombing the ship itself. There are three Dauntlesses, and how many are needed to sink the ship is random luck. Technically, the other two don't matter at all, what's important is that you hit the ship. Everything else is irrelevant. The other two bombers destroy the ship while you take out three enemy fighters? Doesn't matter, even if you just downed two of them with your front guns. If you didn't bomb the ship, it doesn't count. If you bomb the ship and then have to bail out, it still doesn't count.

What about the Japanese side? Where you defend the Shoho? Well, unlike the American mission, this is hard. One quick jaunt through and it's easy to see why. Unlike the American side, you fight solo against six bombers. Saying I'm not happy about a lack of assistance is understating things, but the bigger problem is...it's the same flight experience as in the Dauntless.

It's not the exact same. For instance, I can actually climb a bit without worrying about my plane going into a stall. My secondary fire is a cannon which might do more damage. In practice, it just means for the first sixty bullets I fire off, I get double the amount of shots. Everything else falls into the category of, yeah, well, it might be better, but in practice, a game of catch-up is going to result in my failure. Not that it matters, since the bombers have real guns, and the only way to avoid those is to be lower than them, which means you need to climb.

I cannot win this, I cannot. In some screenshots, you may see bullets marked by bright trails. Rather than simulating drop-off, they have a maximum range. I get it, but god is it frustrating. The enemies know when I'm within range perfectly, I have to open fire early. I actually wish the images weren't there, I have no idea if I'm hitting enemies or wasting ammo. 

As to what I can do, if I attack head-on, I can take out maybe two in a group of three. This is still enough for the ship to get taken out. If I take it sideways, it doesn't seem to go much better either. If only I had a single friendly plane, who could help take out one or even two bombers.

This actually ticked me off enough to look up how the real sinking of the Shoho went. The manual only mentions that it had a small Zero fighter cover and was hit by thirteen bombs and seven torpedoes. The important thing is, it was in waves and yes, there was more than one plane defending the Shoho. The capacity of the thing was 30 planes, but even if we assume there was half of that, program in a friendly plane or make a different starting mission of the Japanese. At least with the American side we can excuse my inability to hit a boat as my fault. This is just adding insult to injury.

I get the feeling this is going to be a sign of things to come.

This Session: 1 hour 30 minutes

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.