Legends of the Lost Realm: Bit by Bit

       

Legends of the Lost Realm is one of those games that it’s hard to believe anyone has ever won. It’s taken me 13 hours, several false starts, a couple of dozen character deaths, and at least three complete re-installations just to map most of the starting level and to get my party to Level 2. And that’s with cheating.

Normally, I try to avoid circumventing the game’s intended difficulty, but I’m sick of losing so many Level 1 characters. Plus, cheating is so much work that it barely improves upon playing it straight. The game writes character deaths to the save file almost immediately, so you can’t “quit without saving” when you die. With a DOS game, you might be able to kill the emulator as soon as things go poorly, but this is a bad idea with Mac emulators because of the whole “shut down” thing. Hex editing is a solution to a different problem, and I don’t have any idea how to use Mac hex editors anyway. Basilisk doesn’t support save states (neither, I think, does Mini vMac), so that’s out. You can back up the game’s save files, but you have to do it somewhere the game won’t accidentally find them (when I tried it, the game loaded the backups at one point rather than the primaries), and there are several to backup, in different directories. I don’t know how to write a script to speed up the process, so I found it easier just to copy the entire Mac hard drive image in Windows and restore it as needed. Imagine telling a 1992 player that one day, your solution to cheating an RPG will be to re-image the entire hard drive every time you die.

Basically, every time something good happens, I have to save the game in-game, quit the game, shut down the Mac inside the emulator, back up the hard drive image, re-open the emulator, re-open the game, go through the copy protection exercise, and finally load the party. When something bad happens, I have to shut down the emulator, restore the hard drive image, re-open the emulator, re-open the game, go through the copy protection exercise, and load the party. I’ve won entire RPGs in less time.

           

             

The copy protection process is particularly annoying, although I realize it’s obnoxious to complain about it since I am functionally pirating the game. When you fire up the game, it asks you to enter a spell code from the game documentation, referenced by spell number and “card number.” I’ve found the appropriate documentation, but it was created (sensibly) by taking apart the original paper document and scanning each folded folio. None of the pages (“cards”) have numbers, and there’s no easy way to tell in what order they would have appeared when folded. I’ve had to guess and then annotate the PDF when I get it right. Meanwhile, the codes themselves are very hard to read–they’re written in a light color against a shaded background to foil photocopying.

When I first started playing, I was resolved not to use “Pete,” the Level 4 fighter-mage who comes with the game, equipped with a “mithryll sword.” (I love how every RPG developer has to come up with his own spelling of mithril, as if that makes it less derivative.) That resolve lasted no more than a couple of hours. He’s the only character that can even hit some of the enemies you find on the level.

            

      

After fielding a few dozen characters, paying for their burials when they died, and finally re-installing the entire game when I ran out of money, I settled on a party of Pete, two other fighters, a thief, a shaman, and a mage. In the first entry, I noted that the game’s six attributes–strength, dexterity, intelligence, constitution, wisdom, and luck–are rolled on a scale of 3 to 18. That turns out to not quite be true. They exist on that scale, but the actual minimum and maximum rolls depend on the character class and sex. The male fighter, for instance, only ever rolls 16-18 for strength, 12-16 for dexterity, 10-14 for intelligence, 14-18 for constitution, 10-14 for wisdom, and 11-15 for luck. Every character class has a very good chance of 18s for his or her prime requisites, and only the mage ever rolls in the single digits (for strength and constitution). See, this the level of detail you don’t get when I can blast through three dungeon levels per entry. Anyway, figuring that I needed all the help I could get, I calculated the odds of an 18-16-18-15 string for the fighter in strength, dexterity, constitution, and luck at 1 in 375 and rolled until I got it. I did the same with the other characters and decided this would be the final party, come hell or high water.

              

          

The 20 x 20 “town” level has several temples, an armory, a bank, a magic shop, a supply shop, the adventurers’ barracks, and the “review board” where you level up. The corners and center of the map all have towers that lead to their own mini-dungeons, and the plazas in front of those towers are guarded by high-level foes, such as wizards, shamans, mountain giants, samurais, and master thieves. Getting strong enough to kill those guardians is a key early goal. 

           

          

A lot of the other squares–particularly any single-square room behind a door–have fixed encounters that repopulate every time you reload. There’s a large section of such rooms in the northwest, in a configuration that suggests a kind of jail, perhaps inspired by a similar place in Might and Magic. Monsters in these locations include rats, bats, spiders, bullies, pirates, burglars, thieves and master thieves, ninjas, barbarians, hags, magicians, and dwarves. In addition to fixed enemies, there are wandering parties of fighters, thieves, archers, mages, and wild dogs.

             

          

If the game makes one thing easy, it’s usually possible to run away when you first encounter an enemy party. But that doesn’t make the party disappear, and it’s easy to get caught in a corridor between two wandering enemy parties, one of which you have to defeat to progress.

Combat in Legends of the Lost Realm follows a Wizardry pattern but with a different kind of interface. Characters have options to attack, hide, cast a spell (which includes using a special ability), use an item, or switch order. Only the first three characters can strike in melee range. You set an option for each character and then hit “Attack.” Unlike Wizardry, you don’t have to specify a target for your action until it actually executes in the round, and you can click a button to have the game auto-select the target for you.

          

         

I’ve found that surviving early combats means casting the shaman’s “Cure Light Wounds” just about every round and trying to keep up with hit point loss among the lead three characters. Mage spells are pretty useless at the first level, but some of them, like “Pain,” “Slow,” and “Weaken,” can take the edge off large parties. Any enemies capable of attacking at range–including archers and  spellcasters–are a priority because the rear characters have lower armor classes and hit point totals.

I also learned early how to manage which enemy parties are in melee range. Only the “lowest” two groups on the combat diagram can attack in melee range, so if you face more than two groups, you want to get one of them down to 1 member and then leave him there, blocking one of the more numerous groups from coming forward. 

          

        

Slowly, I began to amass a bit of gold. Things got easier after I was able to purchase plate armor, helms, and gloves for all three of my lead characters, lowering their armor classes and making it easier to keep up with hit point losses. I bought bows and arrows for the rear characters, which didn’t help much because they hardly ever hit with them.

It took a long time to get to Level 2. Each character needed about 1,000 hit points, and each battle delivered an average of about 60 (for the entire party, not per character). It took almost 100 successful battles to level up, and of course that was interspersed with many fatal battles and reloads. And all Level 2 really seems to have brought are more hit points and spell points. I haven’t noticed that the characters are significantly more effective in combat. I won’t get new spells until Level 3.

           

          

Another annoyance in the game has to do with food, water, and fatigue. They all deplete rapidly, limiting the amount of time you can spend on an expedition. (This is especially true of you forget to activate the pause feature while you step away from the game.) You can buy food and water in the supply shop, but it’s a chore going through each character and having him eat and drink, particularly because each “gulp” of water only restores 10%. Fortunately, returning to the barracks restores everyone to 100%, so it’s not as much of an issue on the first level as it will be later in the dungeons.

Miscellaneous notes:

           

• A “tax man” lurks around the barracks and skims from any character who has more than 100 gold pieces. This forces the party to visit the bank before returning to the barracks area.

• There doesn’t seem to be any way to sell excess equipment. You just have to drop it.

• As I mentioned last time, if you can’t afford items, you can buy them on credit. But you have to pay off your debts before you can level up, so it’s best not to abuse this.

• There was a fixed encounter with a “horrid beast” who was tough to kill. He left a can of beer. No idea what that’s for.

• Special skills are “cast” just like spells. For instance, the thief “casts” PICK to pick a lock. 

           

        

• There are some keyboard redundancies, but most of the game involves a lot of pointing and clicking. There are a lot of non-obvious commands that require you to read the manual. For instance, using item “0” in combat means that you attack with bare hands. “Casting” a dollar sign ($) attempts to bribe enemies. Adding a “D” to the end of a spell code causes a caster to delay until the end of the round.

• For whatever reason, the “review board” un-equips all of your weapons and armor when you level up. Also for whatever reason, you can rename characters during the process of leveling up.

           

• The magic shop lets you pay 5 gold pieces to consult a book for hints. Examples: “The central tower is most difficult on the west side”; “Some puzzle pieces are not used”; “Stay in the t’s in the teleport maze, and you will be OK.” There’s also a “monster lore” book that you can read for 1 gold piece. It offers hints like “the rat is vulnerable to archery” and “an enchanter may be slapped around” (a hint to attack unarmed, probably). That’s an original feature.

           

           

• The developers clearly played Wizardry (character creation, permadeath, prestige classes), The Bard’s Tale (the review board, spell codes), and Might and Magic (map design and the nature of many of the encounters).

         

        

Several messages have given me the impression that the game’s quest will involve finding 16 clues among the various sub-dungeons. So far, I’ve found seven entrances to those dungeons: the four towers in the corners, the one in the center, a grating behind a hidden door, and a door in the magic shop. (There might be more; there are some locked doors and enemies I haven’t been able to pass.) I guess it’s time to stock up on food, water, and torches and try one.

*****

Regrettably, I’ve had to bail on Sandor. It’s become clear that I have a freeware version of the game and there’s no way to register it. I keep running afoul of demands for some code that I can’t enter. Rather that write a new entry, I’ve updated the original entry with some more information and a best-guess GIMLET.

Looking ahead, I rejected some games from the bottom of the 1989 list:

• Universe 3 isn’t an RPG (only GameFAQs had it as such). It’s a sequel to an adventure/simulation series and maintains that genre.

• Two Vikings is an interesting C64 game from a diskmag–the German Magic Disk 64. It uses Ultima-esque tiles (some of the graphics seem to be copied directly), and it has hit points, but there’s no character development, and combat is all action. It’s a competitive game in which two players, using only joysticks for inputs, try to accomplish something as their hit points and food rapidly deplete.

            

One character explores a town while another fights Ultima II-looking monsters.

            

• Tower of Light for the ZX Spectrum is an adventure game with a text interpreter in which the characters have hit points. Again, there’s no character development, and combat success seems to be based solely on luck and the type of weapon equipped.

           
Those eliminations get us closer to the end of 1989 and a return to a single list.