Futurewar: Stuck in the Future

Remember in my last post, when I was worried that I might be playing Futurewar for months on end?  That this game would consume all of my free time and monopolise the blog, just like several other PLATO games have done before?  That the orange glow of PLATO would once more become the only warmth in my drab, grey life?  Well, nothing to worry about folks, because for now I'm done with Futurewar.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that I've completed the game.  I'm not even sure what completing the game entails, aside from making it all the way to the bottom of the underworld.  No, I haven't finished it, but I have hit an impasse.  For whatever reason, the stairs down from level 7 (The Battle Zone) won't let me pass.  When I enter, the game goes through its usual process of loading the next level, but then it just dumps me back in level 7.  So I'm stuck, with no way forward.  I've left a message in the game's note files, and I see that the creators have responded to stuff there as recently as January.  There's a good chance they might fix the problem, assuming it is a problem that needs to be fixed.  After all, it could be that there's something I need to do (like maybe gain more experience points) to advance.  I don't know, and I'm not going to keep playing just in case.  I'll check back in on the game periodically to see if my question has been answered, and maybe one day I will have completed the game.  Today... is not that day.

LIES!!!

I managed to fully explore all of the human-occupied zones, as well as the War Zone and the Battle Zone.  There's nothing particularly noteworthy to find in any of these levels, and I suspect that there won't be any special encounters in the lower levels either, except perhaps at the very bottom.  All I found were hazards like radioactive waste and sewage, random encounters with mutants and robots, graffiti, and stairs leading down.  Even so, I was rather enjoying the process of mapping.  The levels are mostly quite open and not all that time-consuming to explore.  There are also no spinners, teleporters or darkness zones, so it's a lot less frustrating to map than a lot of later games will be.  My only gripe on this score is that the Barbarian Zone wraps around, but the coordinates are off by one when you cross from one side of the map to the other.  I'll put all of my maps below, so anyone who wants to can take a look.

American Zone

Guerilla Zone

Barbarian Zone

Martian Zone

Cyborg Zone

War Zone

Battle Zone

The game never ramped up in difficulty like I expected.  Once I found some armour, I was untouchable to all but a few enemies, and the vast majority of those that could hurt me were only doing 1 or 2 points of damage per hit.  There was just one enemy that I feared: Man-Beasts.  For some reason, while all of the other monsters were trivial, Man-Beasts could hit me for around 30 points of damage per blow.  At level 30 my current character Dutch has 169 hit points, and that doesn't last long against a group of Man-Beasts. I learned to run away from them the hard way.  Thankfully, Man-Beasts are only found in the Cyborg Zone and the War Zone, so once I was done mapping those I never had to deal with them again.

The monsters I encountered can broadly be grouped into four categories: human soldiers, mutants, robots, and giant bugs/larvae.  (I guess there are skeletons too, but I can classify them as former soldiers if I want.)  It's very much a charming hodge-podge of late 1970s pop culture.  The robots include R2-D2 and Cylons from Battlestar Galactica.  The mutants include one called an X-Man; the character from the X-Men that it most resembles is Cyclops, so I don't feel too bad gunning down hordes of them.  The monster sprites (if they are sprites, I'm not sure how the graphics of PLATO work) look good, and some of them even have animations, moving their mouths and such.  That surely must be a first for a CRPG..

You can also hit CTRL-H during combat, and it brings up the complete stats of the monster you're fighting.  I was tempted to go through and catalogue them all, but that would be a little too much work. I wouldn't risk it against the Man-Beasts, anyway.

Scanning a pair of Slime-Mutants

The game has a wide variety of weapons and armour, but I only found a few of each.  For armour, I found baseball caps, bullet-proof vests, flak jackets and ballistic vests.  The ballistic vest seemed to be the most effective of those, but even the lowly baseball cap was enough to make me nigh-invincible on the levels I explored.  I found three types of weapons: clubs, rifles, and a sub-machine gun.  None of my characters were able to equip the club, and the rifle is just the default weapon that a new character starts the game with.  I was able to use the sub-machine gun though, and I was pleased to see that equipping a new weapon changes the look of the gun barrel at the bottom of the screen.  It even fires multiple bullets per attack.  Unfortunately, I found the sub-machine gun a little glitchy.  It kept defaulting back to the centre aiming position, and it wasn't as accurate as the rifle.  I ended up switching back to the default weapon, and then that character died, so I don't even have a sub-machine gun now. Weapons have been the hardest item pick-ups to come by.

I also found some other items that aid in exploration.  The first was a flashlight, which took me a little while to figure out.  In my last post, I'd mentioned that I was able to see the locations where there were encounters.  That doesn't last; there are levels that are dark, and on those the encounter locations are hidden.  If you use the flashlight, however, you can see them, and it also lets you see more squares into the distance.

The other items I found were a metal detector and something called "super-hearing".  The metal detector will tell you when there's a mine on the square in front of you.  At first I thought that there was nothing I could do about these mines but avoid them, but eventually I tried shooting them.  Much to my surprise, it worked.  The super-hearing enhances an ability that you already have.  If you press shift-H, it brings up a display that shows what's around you for about three squares in every direction.  With the super-hearing that range increases.  Unfortunately, both of these items stopped working for me after a while, and I'm not sure why.

Using my hearing. The o is me, the E is a base, the m's are monsters
and the x is a mine.

I'd been finding money after some encounters as well, but as of my last post I hadn't worked out what it was for.  There are no shops, at least none that I encountered, so it seemed to be pointless.  An old D&D-head like myself should have worked it out faster, but eventually I twigged that the money you take back to base converts into experience points, at a rate of one experience per dollar.  If I ever doubted this game's CRPG credentials, I have none whatsoever after figuring that out.

Aside from the occasional Man-Beast encounter, I hadn't been discouraged in my mapping by combat, but I had been blocked by hazards such as sewage and radioactive waste.  Some of my first few characters had died after walking into them, so I was reluctant to try it again, but once I'd exhausted all other mapping possibilities I had to bite the bullet.  With enough Hits I was able to survive walking through them, and explore the areas I'd missed on my first pass.  There wasn't really anything to find beyond them, but filling in my map was satisfaction enough.  There are still some infuriating areas that I can't get to, because they're blocked by pits or rubble.  Apparently I can get past those with a jetpack, but I never found one.  (Oh, and the squares that I thought were fire last time were actually rubble.  I blame that misconception on the game's Help file, which mentions the former but not the latter.)

Here's the current status of my character:

I gained a level while I was getting some screenshots for this post.

That's about all I have to report on the game, I'm afraid, unless the current game administrators come to my rescue.  I've tried going down every set of stairs on the first seven levels.  I've tried falling down every pit.  I advanced myself to level 30 on the off chance that would unlock access to the lower levels.  None of that worked, which is a shame, because I've been enjoying the game.  I think I was appreciating having something to sink my teeth into.  As much as I complained about the length of time that the other PLATO games took to beat, something like that is a lot more satisfying than the string of one-post games I've been on lately.  I was getting into the challenge, and the tension of perma-death.  Perhaps I'll be able to get back to it in time, but for now there's nothing for to do but move on.  (I won't assign a RADNESS Index just yet, though. It's possible I'll be back at Futurewar sooner rather than later.)

NEXT: My next game is Mystery House, the first of the adventure games on my Priority List.  I've also been replaying some of the earlier games from the blog, so expect some more back-tracking posts on those.  I'll try to schedule those as a bonus, rather than as replacements for my now-standard Sunday/Wednesday posts.

Game 42: Futurewar (1977)

The square in the centre shows one of a few different 
images each time you start.

Ah, the warm orange glow of PLATO.  On the one hand, I spent so much of my gaming time a few years ago playing PLATO games that it has a certain nostalgic factor. On the other hand, I spent far too much of my gaming time on PLATO during those years.  Those of you who've read the blog from the beginning will know what I'm talking about. Games like Moria and The Game of Dungeons took me roughly a year each to complete, and as historically interesting as they were I'd rather not get bogged down in a similar scenario.

That brings me to Futurewar, a game that I wasn't entirely sure qualified as a CRPG, mostly because when I googled it I saw it described as a primitive 3D shooter.  Which it is, sort of.  But it also has randomly generated statistics that affect your chances of success at various activities, experience points, level advancement, turn-based combat, and the explore/fight/loot/return game loop that is the bread and butter of the CRPG genre.  A part of me want to say "alas, it qualifies as a CRPG", but really I started this blog to play more games of the genre (and more adventure games, of course).  So instead I will give a tentative "huzzah, it's a CRPG!" and hope that I can finish it in a matter of weeks rather than months.  Or god forbid, years.

The first version of Futurewar, created by high-schoolers Erik Witz and Nick Boland, was made available to play circa 1977, and it was updated a number of times between then and 1980.  The version at Cyber1 (the PLATO emulator that I'm using) is based on a printout dated December 1979.  If I'm reading the intro correctly, the game code is the same as that used in 1979, but some of the graphics had to be recreated from memory.  Apparently there are still some bugs, and it doesn't run on Cyber1 exactly like it used to on PLATO, but it's the only version out there so it's the closest I'm going to get.  It was re-released for the game's 40th anniversary in 2017, which is why I didn't cover it on my first pass (and presumably why it doesn't seem to have been covered on other chronological CRPG blogs).

A brief history of Futurewar.

Futurewar has a first person view and grid-based movement, and in those respects it's similar to  other PLATO CRPGs like Moria and Oubliette.  I was pretty delighted to discover that I'd be breaking out the mapping tools for this one.  Hazards and monsters are scattered throughout the mazes, along with treasure, and aside from some aspects of its combat it feels much like many other first-person CRPGs I've played.  Although Oubliette was the obvious primary inspiration for Wizardry, I wouldn't be shocked to discover that there's a bit of Futurewar DNA in the mix as well.  It's also similar to Moria and Oubliette in that it allows for players to team up in multiplayer parties. On PLATO, it seems as though the multiplayer CRPGs outnumber those that are designed for single players.

The backstory begins in 1978, with the player as a member of an elite SWAT team sent on a secret mission to infiltrate the lair of the evil Doctor Brain, who is gathering an army of mutants from Earth's post-apocalyptic future.  Before he can be stopped, Doctor Brain escapes to the future in his time machine, and the player is caught in the time warp as well.  In the far-flung future of 2020 AD (gasp!), a nuclear holocaust has devastated the Earth, and the remnants of humanity live in the mutant-infested underworld.  It's up to the player to navigate to the lowest depths and thwart the plans of Doctor Brain.  It seems that Futurewar does have an endgame, although what exactly that entails isn't elaborated upon.  What it does mean is that, even if it ends up being geared more for multiplayer parties, I won't be abandoning it as lightly as I did Oubliette, which had no goal.

It also appears that Futurewar might be the earliest sci-fi CRPG.  It's certainly the earliest one I've played for the blog.  The previous holder of that title was Space for the Apple II, which was released in 1978, so Futurewar definitely beats it.

The game begins with a poem, of all things.  It's called "Monstrosity", and it's by an actual poet named Steven Curtis Lance, who seemingly gave his permission.  It's a little overblown for my tastes, but by the standards of 1970s video game writing it's tremendous.  Too bad that the cursive font makes it hard to read.

More like Fontstrosity, am I right?

Following that there's a short animation that shows your character being caught in the time warp, then it's on to the title screen and character creation.

The first step in character creation is to pick a team.  Humanity has banded into five distinct groups: Americans, Guerillas, Barbarians, Martians, and Cyborgs.  The Americans are a mixture of patriotic rednecks, bikers and ex-convicts.  The Guerillas are what remains of the police and the military.  The Barbarians are those humans that have returned to a more primitive state.  Martians are the remnants of a Mars colony that have returned to Earth, and teamed up with the last nerds and dorks, apparently.  Finally, the Cyborgs are those that have been enhanced using the latest cybernetic technology.  The group you pick determines which zone of the underworld you start in, and seems to affect your starting stats as well.

Character stats are randomly generated, generally ranging from 5 up to the low 20s.  These stats are Strength, Quickness, Endurance, Technology and Intellect.  I'm not entirely sure what these all do, and there's no explanation of them in the game's Help file. I'm pretty sure that Strength helps with bashing down doors, and Quickness with running away from monsters.  Endurance seems to affect the player's resistance to damage.  I only know these because the stats increase with use, and I've occasionally seen them go up after certain activities.  I haven't figured out what Intellect and Technology are for yet.

Characters also receive scores in Power and Hits.  Hits are just hit points, while Power is your ammunition.  Weapons use up power when you fire them, so you only have a limited number of shots before you have to return to base and recharge.

The character status screen.  The image of the character in the middle
revolves with a pseudo-3D effect.

There are eight occupations to choose from, although the ones offered are dependent on the character's stats.  The occupations are: Leader, Techno, Soldier, Hunter, Spy, Medic, Assassin, and Holy Man.  Hunter is the occupation that I've qualified for most often, so I suspect that it's the one with the lowest stat requirements.  I've also played as a leader and a medic, though I didn't notice much of a difference in gameplay.  Then again, I didn't survive all that long with either.

Each of the human groups has it's own zone, a 20 x 20 dungeon level that's populated with weaker mutants.  These are the levels where I've been doing most of my exploration so far.  Below those is the War Zone, which is said to be the place where players will most likely meet members of the other groups.  Players in Futurewar can meet each other in the underworld, and form teams if they want. I haven't encountered anyone else so far, and much like my experiences with Moria and Oubliette I suspect that my time with Futurewar will be a solitary one.

Below the War Zone are fourteen more levels, each with its own title.  The lowest level shown in the Help file is "The Pits", but it mentions that there's rumored to be another level below that.  Perhaps I'll never see it, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

"The Lethal Zone."  Don't beat around the bush, then.

There are lots of hazards throughout the dungeon levels, including the human zones.  Sewage, fire,  and radioactive waste all deal damage to the player, but they're visible and easily avoided.  Sometimes they block passages though, and there are certain areas that I've been unable to map because of this.  Mines can't be seen, and will simply explode when stepped upon.  I've had some deal 1 or 2 points of damage, and others deal as much as 20.  Characters begin with around 15-20 hit points, so they can be deadly.  Pits will drop the player to the level below, but they're also visible (even though the Help file says they aren't).  Apparently there are transporters as well, but I haven't encountered one yet.

I think that's fire ahead of me, but I haven't walked into it to make sure.

The squares where mutants are lurking are also visible, so it's rare that the player will be taken unawares by an encounter (it basically only happens when going through a door).  Opponents range from humanoids, to mutants, to robots.  I've even encountered groups of R2-D2s, and some skeletons.  So far I haven't met any groups with more than four monsters, but I expect that will change when I delve deeper.  I also haven't met any creatures with special abilities, like poison or breath weapons.  The Help file has warned me to expect this kind of stuff, so I figure the game's been going easy on me in the various Human Zones.

There's a combat encounter in the square ahead of me.

Combat is turn based, although opponents vary in quickness.  Against some foes, I've been able to make four or five attacks before they can act.  Against others, I've had to wait while the enemy attacks me four or five times.  The player begins the game armed with what appears to be a rifle.  It sticks up from the bottom of the game window, which is part of what makes Futurewar feel like a 3D shooter.  When it's your turn to attack you press 's' to shoot, and a tiny bullet can be seen before your informed whether you hit or not.  I assume your stats play into this process somehow, but your gun's positioning is important as well.  The monsters move about during their turn, and you have to reposition your gun in order to have a better chance of hitting and doing the most damage.  Like a lot of games of the era it boils down to hitting the "attack" button repeatedly, but the importance of gun positioning does make it a little more engaging.

I should mention here that, like every other PLATO CRPG before it, Futurewar has perma-death.  If you lose a character, it's gone for good.  So far this game has been a little more forgiving than its contemporaries, but I suspect that won't last.

Aiming my rifle at a "Bone".  You can see on the right that my Endurance
just went up to 23.

The Help file has a list of technological devices that appear to be usable in combat: things like sleep canisters and thermonuclear warheads.  They appear to be the game's equivalent of magic, but I haven't found any yet so I don't know how effective they are.  The Help file also says that only Technos and Holy Men can use them, but I've yet to qualify for either occupation, so I may never actually get to try them out.

Killing monsters earns you experience, which can be used to gain levels when you return to base to recharge.  Gaining levels increases Hits and Power, and also grants the occasional boost to your stats.  Some monsters I've fought only grant a single point of experience, while others are worth hundreds.  My current character, an American named Chuck, has 34,726 experience and has reached 6th level.

Some monsters also guard boxes or chests.  Some of those explode and deal damage (because of course they do) and others contain money and items.  I'm not sure what money is used for.  I've found thousands of dollars, but every time I go to recharge it disappears.  I'm not paying for the recharge, because you can do that when you have no money at all.  I've also found one weapon (a rifle) and two pieces of armour (a baseball cap and a ballistic vest).  The only other item I've found is a flashlight, although I haven't found a use for it yet.

One nice touch that makes exploring the game a little more interesting is the graffiti that's scattered around the dungeons.  I'm pretty sure it's made from combinations of stock words, but I haven't seen a duplicate yet. They look cool, and some of the are quite amusing.

They can be a little hard to read, though.  I think this one says "end of burn".

My progress has been reasonably slow.  I started playing on Sunday night, and I have mostly complete maps of the Martian Zone, the Guerilla Zone and the American Zone.  I suppose mapping three out of twenty dungeon levels isn't bad, but I expect that my mapping progress will get much slower when I hit the actual dungeon.  I'm on my ninth character, so the game hasn't been overly deadly, but I've also been exploring what are effectively the town levels.  Most of my deaths have come at the hands of super-fast enemies, especially ones called "Worleymen".  That changed when I found my first piece of armour; somehow wearing a baseball cap made me impervious to all damage.  It ain't logical, but I'll take it because I just know that this game is going to get much harder in the War Zone and below.  My hope is that it's doable for a single player.  If the game difficulty is geared for multiplayer parties, I'm going to have to abandon it eventually, and I'd really rather not do that.

Either way, it looks like I'm sticking with Futurewar for a while.  My current plan for as long as I'm playing it is to post about Futurewar on Wednesdays and whatever other game I'm playing on Sundays.  The next game on my schedule is Mystery House, the first graphical adventure from Roberta Williams, and the first adventure game on my priority list.  Looking further ahead, I can see that my next priority CRPG is Rogue, which is somewhat daunting.  I could get into a situation where I'm alternating between Futurewar and Rogue for weeks on end, which could destroy my sanity.  Still, I got through Moria.  I got through The Game of Dungeons v8.  If I can beat those games, I'm ready for just about anything.

Swords and Sorcery: Finished

I'm done with Swords and Sorcery, which I ended up playing for much longer than I thought I would. There's a simple reason for that: I was enjoying it. But while some games remain enjoyable for a long time, there are others where you eventually hit a wall, and they stop being fun. In that regard, Swords and Sorcery has one of the sharpest declines that I've ever experienced.

As of my last post, I had around 130,000 experience points, and the missions I was getting from the king involved killing Demons. These were not too hard; in a head-to-head battle, I would generally earn just enough XP from killing a demon to offset the damage taken. Using maneuverability, ranged attacks, and the protection of the magic circles, I was able to beat them without taking much damage at all, gradually increasing my XP (which double as hit points).

Soon I was getting missions to kill Invisible Demons, which were about twice as tough as regular Demons. Their invisibility could definitely be a problem; it was easy to get into a rhythm while clearing out weaker foes and not realise that an Invisible Demon was attacking me repeatedly, draining 1,500 XP with every attack. The best way to beat them is by using the Magic Lantern, which reveals their location. The duration of the lantern is limited, but generally long enough to last a whole mission.

After that came Goblin Kings, which looked like regular Goblins but were a whole lot tougher. Each one had around 20,000 hit points, and it was taking me around a dozen hits to kill just one. Luckily they're weak to arrows. Especially effective were the magic arrows that fire three shots at once. With those, as well as the ever-useful magic circles, I was soon beating them and earning even higher rewards. I'm pretty sure that your XP reward for killing a monster is equal to its hit points, so the Goblin Kings were granting me some hefty rewards.

Finally, the king started giving me missions to kill Men. This is where the game really took a turn. Each man had over 200,000 hit points, and on a successful strike would deal a like amount of damage. I had around 1 million XP by this point, but even so just a few hits from a Man would be enough to wipe out hours of progress. My return strikes were only doing about 2,000 damage, and my arrows were even less effective. I was able to kill them from the safety of a magic circle, which was a lengthy process that usually involved breaking a number of swords. This would have been fine, because my regular readers will be aware that I have a lot of patience and persistence, but not every section of the forest has a magic circle. Eventually it's necessary to kill a Man without that protection. I was able to do it, by staying out of range and peppering him with arrows, but that took me over an hour. It was lucky for me that I'd acquired a quiver with an infinite amount of arrows; without that I surely would have run out first. Regardless, at that point I realised that I had four more Men to kill to complete the mission, all without the aid of a magic circle, and that's when I gave up. The time-to-fun ratio had definitely dried up.

That said, it now occurs to me that I could have switched to playing in 1x1 forest maps, which would guarantee the use of a magic circle against all foes. I'm tempted to keep playing now to see if there are any enemies beyond Men. There was a weird jellyfish icon on the opening screen that I haven't encountered yet.

Fighting a Man from a magic circle. His icon is the same as mine.
You can see in the bracketed text below how many hit points he has left.

Still, I'm done with Sword and Sorcery at least as far as the blog is concerned. Time for a Final Rating.

FINAL RATING

Story & Setting: The story is simply that a king keeps sending you into a forest to kill increasingly stronger monsters, with no end-point in sight. That's fine for a game set-up but it's not going to score a lot of points. The forest is a novel setting in what has been a dungeon-heavy genre thus far, but it's not a particularly interesting one. Rating: 1 out of 7.

NPCs & Monsters: This game has a solid number and variety of monsters, but as is usual at this time they're differentiated only by icon and number of hit points. The Goblin King had a noticeable weakness to arrows, so it's possible that there were other weaknesses and immunities that I didn't catch onto. The Invisible Demons also added an extra challenge. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: The graphics were clean and functional, and I've always marked the PLATO games up a little for that warm, cozy orange glow. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: This is a tight, well-designed game, at least up to a point. The combat is tactical in a way that I haven't seen in any other games on the blog, relying more on maneuverability and ranged attacks than items and spells. The advancement system is rudimentary, but I appreciate the way that it cuts out the middleman by using XP directly as health. I have to mark it down a little for the very steep rise in difficulty, though. I'm also not super keen on the way the movement controls work, but they were fine once I got used to them.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: Right up until I started getting missions against Men, I was prepared to rate this game pretty highly in this category. Before then, it maintains a really good balance, with the monsters ramping up in difficulty just as things start getting a little easy. It's possible that I missed a weakness that might have made killing Men easier, but they really did make the game stop being fun very quickly. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: The influence of this game seems to me to be negligible, but as far as RPGs go it represents a play-style that I haven't seen in the blog so far: the tactical RPG. That's probably to do with its roots as a Star Trek variant. The only other game I've played so far that felt at all similar was Richard Garriot's DND1, and there was definitely no mutual influence there. So it gets some points for originality. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Fun: As I mentioned in the last post, this game was dominating my thoughts but I did get sucked into it whenever I found the time to play. When the challenge was still there, it remained enjoyable, and I'm a little disappointed that it stopped being fun with such abruptness. Rating: 3 out of 7.

I'll give this game the coveted bonus point, because I wasn't done wanting to play it when I had to stop. The above scores total 20, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 40. That's a very respectable score, placing it 10th out of 27 games overall, and 6th out of 11 CRPGs. It's not quite up there with the games I would genuinely recommend, but it's a solid, very playable game that would have scored even higher without such a steep rise in difficulty.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  For CRPGs I'm using a Combat category.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Combat: Combat on its own is pretty simple, but using your mobility gives it some extra tactics, as does using missile weapons and magic items. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0. This game is unlike any others on PLATO, but it had no influence at all on the CRPG genre.  I'm not entirely sure it qualifies as a CRPG at all, so I'm going to refrain from givign it a bonus.

Swords and Sorcery gets an impressive RADNESS Index of 36. It's a tight game, and although it may not really a CRPG I enjoyed my time with it.  It ends up equal 9th on the list, and equal 4th out of twelve CRPGs.  It's equal with Oubliette and The Dungeon (pedit5).

NEXT: If I can't get Daniel Lawrence's DND up and running (and it looks like I probably won't be able to), I'm done with 1978. I'll do a wrap-up for that year, hand out some awards, and then it's time to start with 1979. Looking at some of the highlights for that year I see Adventure for the Atari 2600, Akalabeth, Temple of Apshai, and The Count (which I've heard is Scott Adams' best game). I'll probably kick off the year with Akalabeth, because I'm a total stan for Ultima, but I haven't decided for sure.

Game 31: Swords and Sorcery (1978)

Monsters on the battlements from left to right: demon, werewolf, zombie,
goblin, dragon, unknown, and wizard.

Ah, that familiar orange glow. Despite all the grief that the various PLATO CRPGs have given me  - I'm looking at you Moria, and you The Game of Dungeons - going back to that system almost feels like going home. There's something warm and comforting about it.  It could be Stockholm syndrome, or it could just be that the best PLATO games are so much better than their contemporaries on home computers. It's one of those.

(While I'm on the topic of Moria, Ahab over at Data Driven Gamer has just started playing it. If you didn't get enough of that game during the eight months that I was immersed in it, that blog has you covered.)

Today's game is Swords and Sorcery, which as far as I can tell is the second-last PLATO game I'll be covering. It was developed by Donald Gillies, who was a student at Urbana High School at the time, where he had access to PLATO. Its inspiration was a game called think15, created by Jim Mayeda, which is another one we have to chalk up as having been deleted by an overzealous system administrator. Following think15 was another game called think2, which Gillies describes as running incredibly slow. Development of Swords and Sorcery started in 1976, but the full game wasn't playable until 1978. Thankfully, Gillies made the game available again on cyber1.org back in 2003, so we can still play it today.

 Apparently, this lineage of games is heavily influenced by Star Trek from 1971, which is a very important piece of early gaming that I've never actually played. In that game, you fly the Starship Enterprise around a map with 8x8 quadrants, blowing up Klingons and seeking refuge in starbases. Swords and Sorcery takes the same idea and applies it to the fantasy genre.

There's no back-story in the Help file (no Help file at all, which is unusual for PLATO games, which normally have manuals that go into excruciating detail). It's set "1200 years ago," and you play a warrior or a knight undertaking missions for the king. These missions take place in a forest, and usually involve killing a certain number of a specific monster, except for a character's first mission which requires chopping down trees or collecting treasure chests.

Before you are given a quest, the king will ask you to determine the dimensions of the forest you'll be exploring. You can go as small as a single screen (1x1). I'm not sure what the upper boundary is on size; I'd test it out, but I don't want to get locked into a mission that might take me over an hour to complete. The larger the forest, the more monsters you have to kill to complete the mission, and the higher the reward you get from the king when you finish. I generally default to a 2x2 configuration, which is 4 screens. In the note files for the game, Gillies says that playing with a single screen is the most efficient way to advance, but I find that I rely on shifting from one screen to another quite a lot to survive. There's not a lot of room to maneuver one just one screen.

Moving around the screens takes a bit of getting used to. You need to type M (for move), followed by a direction, followed by the desired speed. You can move in all eight directions, using a number pad (or the arrow keys if you only want to go north, south, east or west). If you don't have a number pad the directions are mapped to different keys, but I can't remember what those are. The speed you set determines how many steps you move in one turn. Normally you can move from 1 to 3 steps, but by using adrenaline (which you can buy or find in phials) you can move 4 or 5. The trickiest thing to master is the inertia mechanic, where once you start moving in a direction you keep moving that way until you stop or change direction. I spent a lot of time early on killing myself by bumping into trees, because I couldn't figure this out. Once you get the hang of it it's not too bad, as you can stop your movement by pressing 0.

Loads of monsters, three chests, a Magic Circle on the far right,
and me at the bottom, surrounded.

Each screen will be filled with monsters, which will move towards you and try to kill you. Melee combat is a simple matter of hitting S (for sword) and choosing the direction you want to swing. Either you do enough damage to kill the monster, or you don't and it gets to retaliate. The weakest monsters are goblins, with about 10 hit points. Moving up from there are thugs, zombies, werewolves, dragons, wizards, and demons. Worst of all are the invisible demons, which have about 10,000 hit points, deal almost 2,000 damage per hit, and can't be seen. I've lost a number of characters to them without even realising I was being hit.

You can attack monsters from a distance with arrows, which do more damage than your sword early on. Arrows can be fired the length of the screen in eight directions, but they're in short supply; you need to buy them or find them. There are magic arrows that do extra damage, and can fire through multiple foes.

Some screens have treasure chests, which are opened by pressing T when you're next to one. Most of them contain bags of gold, but occasionally you'll find gems, jewels, or a magic item. Gems and jewels can be sold, and are extremely valuable. Much like original Dungeons & Dragons, finding valuable jewels is the quickest way to advance in experience. Magic items include swords, shields, boots of flying and the magic lamp (which allows you to see invisible enemies). I've found a few cursed weapons as well. Your character will normally default to the best weapon and shield, but a cursed item will force you to use it instead.

The forest will have a number of Magic Circles, which are vital to your success. Once you step on a Magic Circle, you can't be damaged by attacking monsters. You can retaliate, though, so it's a good place to fight back against those monsters that are more powerful than you. You can also sell gems and jewels here, trading them in for bags of gold. The Magic Circles are also where you can buy experience points (1 gold piece buys 25), arrows, and adrenaline. You can also pay for the ability to fly, but this isn't something I've tested out much yet; the one time I did it I accidentally left the forest and was executed by the king for failing my mission.  If your sword breaks (which occasionally happens during combat, even to magic swords), and you don't have a spare, you can buy one here or beg to have the king send you a replacement if you don't have enough gold. A sword costs 50gp, but you're better off spending that money on experience points, then begging for a free sword. Speaking of swords, don't swing one at a magic circle; the circle will become hostile, and you can't use it any longer.

Enjoying the protection of a Magic Circle.

Experience points are the most important thing in this game. Not only do they measure your progress, but they double as your hit points. You can buy them, and earn them by killing monsters, but every hit you take reduces them, and if you go below 0 you're dead. It's a fairly elegant distillation of the Dungeons & Dragons system, in which earning treasure grants you experience points that allow you to gain levels and more hit points. Swords and Sorcery does away with levels, lets you spend your treasure on experience directly, and uses that experience total as your hit points. A simplified system like this works for a simpler game.

I found this game to be very Deadly at the start, to the point where I started to despair of ever making any progress.  The first mission can be tough, because you begin the game with 0 experience points. Any damage will kill you, even bumping into trees as I mentioned before. Combat is right out, because you start out not being able to do enough damage to kill even a lowly goblin in one hit, and the return strike will absolutely be fatal. One method of survival is to outmaneuver the enemy, and either collect the required treasure (or chop the required amount of trees) without entering combat. Another is to try to nab a treasure chest and then find a Magic Circle, where you can buy some experience and arrows. The third method, the one I eventually came to favor, is to find a Magic Circle and use its protective power to kill your enemies without taking any damage.  Also useful is switching from one screen to another; you'll never be attacked on your first move into a screen, and the layout will rearrange every time you enter. So if there's a Magic Circle that's too hard to get to, just leave the screen and return and it might be in a more convenient spot.

My current character.

Using these tactics I'm making slow and steady progress. My current character has about 130,000 experience, and is mostly being given missions to kill Demons. I'm enjoying it quite a bit; it's not the sort of game that dominates my thoughts when I'm doing something else, but when I do play it it's very easy to get into a rhythm and lose a few hours. It has that thing where a mission is just short enough that it's always tempting to play just one more. I could probably finish this up in one post, but I want to keep playing, and I suspect that there are more powerful enemies that I haven't encountered yet. I'll give it one more week and see how it goes.

Oubliette: Defeat.

It's time to call it a day for Oubliette. This is something I need to do for my own sanity, because I very nearly decided to persevere with it and try to map all ten dungeon levels. I could probably do it if I applied for a few more cyber1 log-ins and used them to create multiple characters. It would take a long time, though, and it would also be setting a dangerous precedent for multiplayer games. I may have decided differently if the game had an end goal, but as far as I'm aware there's nothing to achieve in it beyond obtaining loot and more loot. So this is me dusting my hands of Oubliette, and PLATO in general for the time being, albeit reluctantly.

I had set myself two realistic goals when I started the game: try every character class, and map the first level. I managed to do both, so here's a map of Oubliette dungeon level 1.

Oubliette dungeon level 1

As you can see (and as I've mentioned before) this game pioneered a lot of the tricks that Wizardry and Bard's Tale (among others) will put to irritating use in the years to come. There are plenty of secret doors, which can only be found by bumping into walls (or using a light spell if you have one). There are pits, which damage you with no warning and no way to avoid them even if you know they are there (although there is a levitation spell for mages that I never got to try out, and a detect traps spell for clerics that might work). The teleporters move you to another location on the same level, and with no way to display your coordinates, mapping is the only method of figuring out where you are. Thankfully each teleporter sends you to a fixed location, so once you've worked out where they send you they become less of a nuisance; some of them are even helpful for getting quickly back to the castle. The darkness squares extinguish your light source, or blind you temporarily if you have infravision. Finally, the spinners turn you in a random direction when you enter the square, and are a nightmare for accurate mapping; the game doesn't display your coordinates or provide a means of telling what direction you're facing, so I only discovered some of the spinners when it became obvious that my map was incorrect.

I found the stairs to level 2, and did quite a bit of exploration there as well. Not only are the monsters stronger, but the pits are deeper as well. On level 1 the pits dealt roughly between 3 and 12 points of damage, whereas those on level 2 were routinely doing 20 points. My character at the time only had about 50 hit points, so my mapping of level 2 involved a lot of returning to Ligne Castle for healing. Some of the pits were positioned so that the area beyond was a dead end, leaving me with no choice but to suck up the damage on the way back as well. There's a level of deviousness to the dungeon designs that hasn't been seen in any CRPGs before this one.

I died before I was able to map the entirety of level 2 (poisoned by giant centipedes), but I found a fan-site that has all of the maps, and a lot of other useful information. This is their map of level 2.

Pits! Chutes! Stairs! Improbable Architecture!

This level presents another first: walls that spell out words when the level is fully mapped. The other levels all have interesting and varied designs, some with lots of tiny rooms, and some with long winding passages. Level 4 is arranged similarly to a noughts-and-crosses board. Level 8 has a room that looks suspiciously like a hand giving the middle finger. They're easily the best level designs to this point, and I was really enjoying the process of mapping them until my character's unceremonious death.

I don't have many images in this post, so here's one of a random tunnel.

I probably ran through about 50 character, most with terribly short lifespans. There are fifteen classes in Oubliette, but playing them all was more difficult than you would think, because a good number of them have strict requirements based on ability scores, race and gender. Before I get into all of the classes, I need to mention something that I forgot in my last post: this is the first CRPG to fully implement a class system. Most of the previous PLATO games started you as a hybrid warrior/spellcaster (pedit5, dnd, Orthanc) or allowed you to join a guild (Moria). This is the first that lets you choose a class at the beginning, and it's a massive leap forward for character customisation.

I'm going to run through every class in the game below, and relay my meager experiences with them. There were a bunch that I was only able to play for about a minute, so I may not have much to say that's useful.

Peasant: This is the baseline class of the game: it has no requirements whatsoever, so it's a kind of fall-back option for when you roll terrible stats and can't be bothered re-rolling. They don't have any spells or special skills, and don't get many hit points. I think their only benefit is that they gain levels faster than any other class, but it hardly seems worth it. The only peasants I played never survived beyond their first battle.

Cleric: Clerics need a Wisdom of 12, and have to be of Lawful alignment. (I'm not sure what effect alignment has on the game, but I suspect that it might determine what other characters you can team up with.) They can cast spells, dispel the undead, and the best weapon they can use is a mace. It's all very Dungeons & Dragons. The clerics I played did quite well, although I never did advance one to 2nd level.  I made a lot of use of their light spell (MORPIC), as it has a permanent duration and reveals secret doors.  I tried to dispel some undead - skeletons and zombies, mostly - but never had any success.

Demondim: This class was no doubt inspired by The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant novel series, in which the demondim were an ancient race that spawned various nasties in that world. In Oubliette, they're exactly like Clerics, except that they are restricted to Chaotic alignment.  It seems that the creators of Oubliette just took the name, and nothing else. (I wouldn't be surprised if this class was a later addition to the game; the first Thomas Covenant book was published in 1978, and it should always be remembered that PLATO games were in constant development. The game that I'm playing is probably not the same as it was when first developed.)

Courtesan: Courtesans need a really high Charisma (19+), can't be Lawful, and must be female. I found the class reasonably easy to qualify for as an Elf, but I didn't survive long once I'd done so; they can't wear armour better than leather, and don't get many hit points. They can disarm the traps found on chests, but their main ability seems to be that they can "seduce" their foes. The documentation is unclear what this achieves, and the few times I tried it it didn't work.

Hirebrand: Your basic fighter, and the only class that I had any success with. My best character (the unoriginally named "Habgab", who succeeded his brothers Hobgob and Hubgub) was a 6th level Hobgoblin Hirebrand. They don't get any special abilities, but they get loads of hit points and can use the best weapons and armour.  I managed to advance two Hirebrand characters to 6th level, but both died from poison.

Mage: They have low hit points, but can cast magic spells. I tried a couple of mages, but the sleep spells I cast (NARGOR) were ineffective. Needless to say, these characters died quickly.

Minstrel: Minstrels have requirements in every ability score, and it took me about half an hour of rerolling to qualify for the class. They can cast mage spells and wear chain mail armour, and they also have the ability to charm enemies with their music. Alas, as with many other classes in this game, I never got this ability to work, and I died quickly. I probably spent ten times as long rolling the character as I did playing him.

Ninja: Man, I was excited to play a Ninja, and it took me a looooong time to meet the requirements - every stat except for Charisma needs to be high. They can disarm traps and are immune to poison, but unfortunately they're not that strong in combat. My Elf Ninja, despite sounding like a super-badass thing to play, was not long for the world.

Paladin: Paladins are super-difficult to qualify for: they must be Lawful, they must be male, and they require high scores in every stat except Dexterity. They can dispel undead like Clerics, and cast Cleric spells once they hit 9th level; they also get to use the best weapons and armour. My Paladin lasted a little while, but he didn't have enough hit points to survive for long.

Ranger: I was stoked to try the Ranger, as they can cast both Cleric and Mage spells. I spent a good hour trying to qualify for the class, a task made more difficult by the requirement that they must be Human. Of course, what I didn't realise was that Rangers don't get spells until they're 7th level, so I kind of wasted all that time. Do I even need to say that my Elf Ranger died quickly?

Raver: In the Thomas Covenant books, the Ravers are a trio of evil entities that can take possession of any creature. In Oubliette, they're Paladins with a Chaotic alignment. This may be significant, because evil Paladins weren't introduced to D&D until 1980. There's always the caveat that PLATO games were in constant development, but it's possible that the concept was introduced here first.

Thief: Thieves can disarm traps, and they can hide in combat. What they can't do is fight very well, so my thief didn't last long. I got through one fight by hiding while the Ninja companion I bought from the store killed everything, but in the next fight my hide skill failed and I was slaughtered by Undead Bears.

Sage: Sages are super-cool, in that they're not all that hard to qualify for and they can cast both Mage spells and Cleric spells. I suspect that a high-level one would be really good to have in a party, but the one I created wasn't viable as a solo adventurer. He died.

Samurai: Although this class is called a Samurai, it's more like the traditional Monk class that you'll find in later games: it can't wear armour or use weapons, but its Armour Class drops every level, and its bare-handed damage is better than that of other classes. The best thing about them is that they get two attacks per round; killing two monsters at once is very satisfying whenever it happens. The class is hard to qualify for though, so I only played one. I enjoyed it for the short time the character was alive, though.

Valkyrie: Super-difficult to qualify for, with high stat restrictions and a requirement to be female (your gender is randomly determined along with your stats, which makes it even harder). They have good fighting ability, can cast Cleric spells at high level, and also get the same "seduce" ability of courtesans. It's weird enough that the two female-only classes have seduction as a special ability, but the best armour that a Valkyrie can wear is a breast plate - let's just say that the CRPG scene in the early days was not exactly the most mature. Anyway, the Valkyrie that I played lived for about five minutes, so I can't say much else about it.

As you can see above, survival in this game is far from assured. I found that the best bet was to create a character with a high Constitution and Dexterity, and choose the Hirebrand class. A lot of hit points are essential, as is a high Dexterity for avoiding surprise. I liked to play as Hobgoblins; they had a high bonus to Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, as well as the ability to see in the dark.

Perhaps this character would be best served by returning to his farm.

Reading over the documentation (and some other notes on the fan-site I mentioned above) I've come across a bunch of other interesting things about the game that I never got to experience first-hand. I'll run through some of them below, as well as some things I noticed myself while playing.

• Apparently when you form a party your arrangement of characters makes a big difference, as only the first three characters can fight in melee. Monsters can even attack from the rear, which makes things potentially deadly for any mages and thieves in the back rank. It's suggested that large parties have fighters at the front and back, which is a level of tactics far in excess of anything in CRPGs prior to this.
• If you buy a companion that is a Mage or a Cleric, said companion will cast spells in battle. Apparently some Mage spells can catch you in their area of effect, so those companions aren't really recommended.
• I didn't mention it above, but the last character I played was killed when an enemy hit him with a sleep spell. This was the point when I realised that there was nothing I could do to guarantee survival for a solo character, and quit the game for good.
• The Patriarch's Temple in Ligne Castle can be used to remove curses or identify magic items, but it requires a hefty donation before the Patriarch will see you. I tried it once, donating 12,000 gold pieces, and the bugger was still "too busy" to grant an audience. It didn't stop the temple from pocketing my gold, though.
• Higher-level characters spend a lot of time resting in hotels to regain hit points and spells. You can restore hit points at the House of Healing, but it costs a lot of gold. It wasn't unusual for my 6th-level character to rest for over 200 days between dungeon forays. Characters in Oubliette age as well, and can presumably die when they get old enough. (And yes, different races have differing lifespans. This game thinks of everything.)
• When you die, you can opt to either abandon your character or leave its body in the dungeon for others to find. You can pick those bodies up and return them to the Castle, or loot their gear, but I never found any. I suspect that, if there are any still there, they'll be on the lower dungeon levels.
• There is a large variety of magic items to be found in the dungeon, or bought at the magic shop. I found a scroll and a sword, but wasn't able to identify either. The sword must have been cursed, because my character died as soon as I equipped it.
• The dungeons don't have any fixed encounters as such, but every level has a special room where the fights are tougher and the rewards greater. I found one of these on Level 1; that's where I got the scroll mentioned above.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of this game; there's obviously much more to it than I've experienced. As such, I'm not entirely comfortable giving it a Final Rating, because there's no way that I can do so accurately. Still, in the interests of comprehensiveness I'll do so, and note that my experience of the game was incomplete.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Oubliette has no story, beyond the presence of the dungeon and your character's desire to loot it for treasure. Like most other PLATO games, it takes place entirely inside the dungeon, but I'm tempted to mark this higher because the levels are well-designed and full of tricks and traps. The lack of special encounters hurts it though, as does the absence of backstory. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There are no NPCs in the game, although I suspect that lack was made up for by interacting with the other players. The monsters, on the other hand, are numerous, with a wide array of special abilities. Yes, they're plucked straight out of the AD&D Monster Manual, but they're well implemented, with lots of different weaknesses, resistances and special abilities. I'm disappointed that I never got to encounter more, but the ones I did find were consistent with their D&D counterparts: mages cast spells, centipedes can poison you, shadows are immune to normal weapons, etc. There's no doubt that the monster selection and variety here is better than anything in any other PLATO CRPG. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Aesthetics: Oubliette's dungeon is depicted from a first-person perspective, with wireframe walls and doors. The viewing window is - as it was in Moria - ridiculously small. The screen isn't cluttered with character info like it was in Moria though, and the expanses of black on the screen make it feel suitably claustrophobic. And I do love that PLATO orange... Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: This might be the hardest category for me judge fairly. On the one hand there's just so much stuff in the game: loads of monsters, an extensive selection of spells, tricks, traps, guilds, multiplayer options, the list goes on and I only saw a fraction of it. On the other hand, I found a lot of it frustratingly opaque. Combat was especially irritating, because the messages flash by almost too quickly to read. There were a number of occasions in which I died while just walking around, with no indication of what killed me. (Pits, as I later discovered.) So there's a lot in the game, and much of it is well implemented, but there are things about it that annoyed me a lot. I'm going to split the middle here. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This game is lethal to the point of unplayability, but then again I wasn't playing it as intended by the creators. If it were a solo game I'd give it the minimum rating and leave it at that, but I'm going to bump it up a point in acknowledgement that it's really a multiplayer game. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: The number of things appearing for the first time in a CRPG is staggering, and it would be impossible for me to name them all. There's a definite debt that the game owes to Moria, but there's plenty of originality on display as well. Oubliette was also massively influential on Wizardry, to the point where some have called Wizardry a rip-off. I wouldn't go that far, but that's a debate for another time. Wizardry is an influential CRPG in its own right, which makes Oubliette one of the most important games of the PLATO era. Rating: 7 out of 7.

Fun: This is the most purely subjective category in my rating system, and unfortunately, despite all of the innovative things about Oubliette, I didn't have a great time with it. Most of the enjoyment I derived came from mapping. This would be a far different score if I'd been able to survive with any reliability, but as it is I have to mark the game low even though I know it's probably unfair. Rating: 1 out of 7.

I'm going to award the bonus point to Oubliette, both because I recognise that I should have played it with other people, and because I'd like to go back to it at some point. The score above totals 22, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 44. That's a respectable total, and puts it just below pedit5 and Orthanc, and well above Moria. I've no doubt it would have scored higher had I been able to experience more of it.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for CRPGs with a category for Combat.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Combat: The many character class abilities and spells give this game a wealth of options, and the monster special abilities mean that different tactics may be required.  Unfortunately, I never really got to experience this game to its fullest, but from what I did see I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. Oubliette is the primary influence behind Wizardry, one of the most important games in the genre. It also seems to have been the PLATO game that did the most with its multiplayer functionality (not that I got to see any of it).

Oubliette's RADNESS Index is 36. It's in equal 7th place with The Dungeon (pedit5), but with a proper community in place I'm sure it would have scored much higher.  In terms of CRPGs it's equal 4th out of nine.

NEXT: It's on to Aldebaran III (more well-known by its filename of A3 to those who know it at all), a text adventure created using the Wander system by the system's originator Peter Langston. Langston's first effort, Castle, involved the exploration of a castle, the rescuing of a prince and princess, and an awkwardly sexual ending. A3 is a sci-fi game, and from what I've played it really ups the ante as far as story-telling in adventures games goes. It's also going to be a welcome change of pace to play something that's not a stupidly large mainframe CRPG; I'm looking forward to it.