ForeverdarkWoods
Learned
- Joined
- Jun 25, 2011
- Messages
- 177
Hello, codex. I remember my dad having this dungeon blobber for the NES when I was a kid. I never beat it back then. I remember it being really frustrating and such, but most of all it's just really, really weird. Memories of strange messages in all-caps with lots of exclamation marks, creepy animated portraits and a nonsensical plot surround this game. I'm going to try to beat it now. Being older than 7, it should probably be much easier, though I suspect it will be quite a strange ordeal. So, without further delay, lets play:
So, we start up the game. It starts by asking us if we want to load an old game or start a new game. I choose to start a new game. The following happens:
Yeah, this game is one of those few NES games that supports 4 players. You know, in case you want to play a turn based blobber with your friends. I have never tested this, but I'm sort of assuming that each player would control one character. I, however, ignore the multiplayer and choose one player. I'm prompted by another question.
I create my own party. Character creation is pretty basic, as you can see.
I roll up my valiant character Asshat and make him a warrior. I aimed to get very high stats with all the characters, you actually don't need stats this high (14 is the highest you can roll for any stat), but since it takes below a minute to get really good rolls, why the hell not? I then proceed to roll up Asshat's friends: Sissy the thief, Faggot the magician and Moron the magician.
Now, we can start the epic adventure of Asshat the Warrior and his friends (might as well name them whatever, larping is wasted on this game). We enter a nauseatingly blue dungeon (yeah, automap is kind of nextgen).
Before long we are greeted by a creepy guy with something to say.
Okay. Guess we better find adventure then. We are then greeted by a much uglier fellow.
It's our first battle! We have just a few battle options to choose from. Pressing A attacks. pressing B casts spells (assuming it's a magician's turn) and pressing Select gives you the option to run. Turn order is determined by your stats. I believe it works something like this (although I'm not completely sure):
At the end of each turn you roll who gets to go next, applying a bonus based on the commulative effects of Intelligence and Agility. Even if it doesn't work exactly like this I know that having high Int and Agi lets you have more turns, and the result is often like this battle, where the poor zombie doesn't even get to act once before it's dead. No resistance at all from this fight.
Another cryptic message! I guess we've found adventure.
And then we meet the creepy old man again.
Okay, so now I guess we know what the goal of the game is. Kill dragon, get ruby treasure. Got it.
We continue. Now we run into bats. This time there's two enemies, meaning they might actually get to act before we kill them.
We decide to see what spells we've got.
We decide to try out Flash Fire. It's not very good.
We do, however make short work of the bats. We are still unhurt at the end of the battle.
At this point I decide to get my bearings and take a look at the characters, so I press Select.
Pressing "entire group" shows what level you are on, how much experience you have and how much gold you have. I, however press "one character".
I start by selecting "attributes", and quickly gander through the characters.
Afterwards, i look through the inventories. For purposes of reference, Moron carries the same items as Faggot.
If I press the strange option, "last resort", this is what happens next.
I don't remember what picking "yes" does, but I'm not going to find out right now.
We continue. We face some more enemies and take our first hits. It seems saving our mana for heal spells is a valid strategy. It becomes apparent that some of these can hit quite hard.
Upon further exploring, we find the armory. You can buy stuff here, but I decide to hold that off for now. Since I've played this before, I remember that the best bet to get started is to find the temple on level one, so that you have somewhere you can heal and regain your spell points.
We explore some more, and find another door.
Holy shit! Creepy old man with red eyes!
We keep exploring, however. We fight some more and find another door.
What's behind here, then?
Another message! This one with a period though, and not an exclamation mark.
We keep exploring. We fight some battles. We gain a level. However, now is the point where we start taking serious damage. We face several encounters of 3 bats, and those encounters can actually hurt.
However, we meet the creepy old man again.
It seems we're close to the temple, or at least going in the right direction. Only thing to do is push on. What do you know. We even gain a level in the process, and find some worthless loot. It does, however, become apparent that the encounters with all these bandits and bats are starting to drain our spell points from all the heals we have to cast in order to keep our characters alive. It would be good if we found the temple quickly.
However, we finally stumble upon a door.
And it seems to be the temple. We now have a way to restore our spell points and heal ourselves.
We decide to start moving back to the armory to better equip ourselves to be able to handle the rest of this level. We dispatch some resistance along the way.
As we reach the armoury, we press A when prompted. We start by checking out the store. We find this to be availible:
That appears to be the best item in the armory. Unfortunately, we aren't even close to being able to afford it. Instead, we settle for a broadsword and a shield for Asshat.The broadsword is better than the sword we already have, and the shield allows us to get an Armor Class of 3 in combination with the leather armor. We equip them. We also discover that Sissy the thief is able to use both the broadsword and the shield, so he also gets one of each.
Freshly equipped, we decide to keep exploring the level. We fight some enemies and find a new spell.
We keep exploring, gain another level, and find another cryptic message.
We continue exploring, and find a place where several men seems to be standing guard. We decide to explore the rest of the level before going there. The enemies are starting to get extremely easy. We also find another message.
We explore the rest of the level, and then we look at our stats. We see some things have increased as we have gained levels.
As there is nothing left to do here except grinding, and the enemies are really easy at this point, we decide to hit that place where people were standing guard. We are greeted by 6 bandits.
In this game, multiple weaker foes are way worse than just one really strong foe. This is the first fight since we visited the armory that can't just be beaten by spamming A repeatedly. I try out the new Sting spell during this fight, but it seems pretty useless. I'll just manage by having Asshat and Sissy hacking away and making Faggot and Moron heal as required. The bandits start dying after a short while.
At this point we come to a stairway. We've completed the first dungeon level. Now there are 16 or so more to go. This level wasn't really that hard (if you don't beat level one it means your party sucks), but if I don't have a distorted view of this game based on my childhood memories of not beating it, it gets way harder once you descend a bit.
At this point, however, I decide to save and end this session. Next session will be about level 2, and it will come when I'm bored enough to play this again. I am greeted by one of those things that really make this game the strange specimen that it is when I try to save though. It uses a very odd password system for saving and loading. You need to write down five(!) really long passwords in order to save the game. One for each character and one for the general progress you've made. Maybe I'm just uneducated, but I don't know of any other RPG that works like this. Here is what happens if you save:
So, codex, see you next time I'm this bored.
So, we start up the game. It starts by asking us if we want to load an old game or start a new game. I choose to start a new game. The following happens:
Yeah, this game is one of those few NES games that supports 4 players. You know, in case you want to play a turn based blobber with your friends. I have never tested this, but I'm sort of assuming that each player would control one character. I, however, ignore the multiplayer and choose one player. I'm prompted by another question.
I create my own party. Character creation is pretty basic, as you can see.
I roll up my valiant character Asshat and make him a warrior. I aimed to get very high stats with all the characters, you actually don't need stats this high (14 is the highest you can roll for any stat), but since it takes below a minute to get really good rolls, why the hell not? I then proceed to roll up Asshat's friends: Sissy the thief, Faggot the magician and Moron the magician.
Now, we can start the epic adventure of Asshat the Warrior and his friends (might as well name them whatever, larping is wasted on this game). We enter a nauseatingly blue dungeon (yeah, automap is kind of nextgen).
Before long we are greeted by a creepy guy with something to say.
Okay. Guess we better find adventure then. We are then greeted by a much uglier fellow.
It's our first battle! We have just a few battle options to choose from. Pressing A attacks. pressing B casts spells (assuming it's a magician's turn) and pressing Select gives you the option to run. Turn order is determined by your stats. I believe it works something like this (although I'm not completely sure):
At the end of each turn you roll who gets to go next, applying a bonus based on the commulative effects of Intelligence and Agility. Even if it doesn't work exactly like this I know that having high Int and Agi lets you have more turns, and the result is often like this battle, where the poor zombie doesn't even get to act once before it's dead. No resistance at all from this fight.
Another cryptic message! I guess we've found adventure.
And then we meet the creepy old man again.
Okay, so now I guess we know what the goal of the game is. Kill dragon, get ruby treasure. Got it.
We continue. Now we run into bats. This time there's two enemies, meaning they might actually get to act before we kill them.
We decide to see what spells we've got.
We decide to try out Flash Fire. It's not very good.
We do, however make short work of the bats. We are still unhurt at the end of the battle.
At this point I decide to get my bearings and take a look at the characters, so I press Select.
Pressing "entire group" shows what level you are on, how much experience you have and how much gold you have. I, however press "one character".
I start by selecting "attributes", and quickly gander through the characters.
Afterwards, i look through the inventories. For purposes of reference, Moron carries the same items as Faggot.
If I press the strange option, "last resort", this is what happens next.
I don't remember what picking "yes" does, but I'm not going to find out right now.
We continue. We face some more enemies and take our first hits. It seems saving our mana for heal spells is a valid strategy. It becomes apparent that some of these can hit quite hard.
Upon further exploring, we find the armory. You can buy stuff here, but I decide to hold that off for now. Since I've played this before, I remember that the best bet to get started is to find the temple on level one, so that you have somewhere you can heal and regain your spell points.
We explore some more, and find another door.
Holy shit! Creepy old man with red eyes!
We keep exploring, however. We fight some more and find another door.
What's behind here, then?
Another message! This one with a period though, and not an exclamation mark.
We keep exploring. We fight some battles. We gain a level. However, now is the point where we start taking serious damage. We face several encounters of 3 bats, and those encounters can actually hurt.
However, we meet the creepy old man again.
It seems we're close to the temple, or at least going in the right direction. Only thing to do is push on. What do you know. We even gain a level in the process, and find some worthless loot. It does, however, become apparent that the encounters with all these bandits and bats are starting to drain our spell points from all the heals we have to cast in order to keep our characters alive. It would be good if we found the temple quickly.
However, we finally stumble upon a door.
And it seems to be the temple. We now have a way to restore our spell points and heal ourselves.
We decide to start moving back to the armory to better equip ourselves to be able to handle the rest of this level. We dispatch some resistance along the way.
As we reach the armoury, we press A when prompted. We start by checking out the store. We find this to be availible:
That appears to be the best item in the armory. Unfortunately, we aren't even close to being able to afford it. Instead, we settle for a broadsword and a shield for Asshat.The broadsword is better than the sword we already have, and the shield allows us to get an Armor Class of 3 in combination with the leather armor. We equip them. We also discover that Sissy the thief is able to use both the broadsword and the shield, so he also gets one of each.
Freshly equipped, we decide to keep exploring the level. We fight some enemies and find a new spell.
We keep exploring, gain another level, and find another cryptic message.
We continue exploring, and find a place where several men seems to be standing guard. We decide to explore the rest of the level before going there. The enemies are starting to get extremely easy. We also find another message.
We explore the rest of the level, and then we look at our stats. We see some things have increased as we have gained levels.
As there is nothing left to do here except grinding, and the enemies are really easy at this point, we decide to hit that place where people were standing guard. We are greeted by 6 bandits.
In this game, multiple weaker foes are way worse than just one really strong foe. This is the first fight since we visited the armory that can't just be beaten by spamming A repeatedly. I try out the new Sting spell during this fight, but it seems pretty useless. I'll just manage by having Asshat and Sissy hacking away and making Faggot and Moron heal as required. The bandits start dying after a short while.
At this point we come to a stairway. We've completed the first dungeon level. Now there are 16 or so more to go. This level wasn't really that hard (if you don't beat level one it means your party sucks), but if I don't have a distorted view of this game based on my childhood memories of not beating it, it gets way harder once you descend a bit.
At this point, however, I decide to save and end this session. Next session will be about level 2, and it will come when I'm bored enough to play this again. I am greeted by one of those things that really make this game the strange specimen that it is when I try to save though. It uses a very odd password system for saving and loading. You need to write down five(!) really long passwords in order to save the game. One for each character and one for the general progress you've made. Maybe I'm just uneducated, but I don't know of any other RPG that works like this. Here is what happens if you save:
So, codex, see you next time I'm this bored.
