I skipped over an Infocom game this year - one of my favorites, actually; A Mind Forever Voyaging, simply because I've played it too much already and would gain nothing from a replay. Infocom's first game to use the new V4 format required a then-luxurious 128KB of RAM and allowed much bigger worlds than ever before, more interactivity, more vocabulary, and more in-depth game mechanics. This one, designed by Hitchhikers' Steve Meretzky, is set in a near future ruled by neoconservative technocrats, and downplays puzzles in favor of narrative, as you'd observe and interact with a 60 year time-lapsed computer simulation of your hometown's projected future.
This format's requirements completely locked out the Commodore 64, the most popular computer of the day, and required anyone with a stock Apple //e - the second most popular computer of the day, to upgrade. It would be reserved for select prestige titles. V3 remained Infocom's popular format and continued to be used in more games, including our next whale, and conclusion to the Enchanter trilogy - Spellbreaker.
This one, authored by Enchanter's Dave Lebling, is marked Expert Level on the box. In fact, this is the final Infocom game with that label. This would have once intimidated me, and it still does a little, but I've had a pretty good track record with enjoying expert-level Infocoms, if not always with finishing them without help.
Infocom's box feelies are, once again, dissatisfyingly thin - all we get here are an Enchanter's Guild pin, a set of six Topps-style trading cards of famous enchanters, and a manual that takes the form of a Frobozzco wizard's catalog, whose only concession to the game's premise - the decline and fall of magic itself - are a "Special Crisis Edition" hallmark on the front, and a listing for conventional swords within alongside the expected potions and scroll parchments.
We begin in the Council Chamber, where a meeting of the guildmasters is taking place. Do you know how difficult it is to make butter pastries by hand?, sniffs the boulanger. Now 'gloth' hardly works, and when it does, it folds the dough too often! Far more troubling, though, is the brewmaster's dire warning - Without magic, there isn't going to be any beer! Murmurs run through the room, and fingers are pointed, mainly at us, and just before the Poets Guild has a chance to drop some devastating burns in rhyming verse, everyone mysteriously turns into newts! Everyone but us, and an unidentified figure in the back of the room, who I pursue.
It's a short-lived chase, though - I go out the chamber door, past a buffet in the grand hall, and out the door to Belwit Square, where the suspect, obscured by a black cloak (of course), vanishes in a dramatic billow of orange smoke.
I take a moment to review my inventory - it consists of a knife, a magic stylus, and my spellbook, which contains:
- Blorple - Explore mystic connections
- Yomin - Probe minds
- Rezrov - Open locks
- Frotz - Illuminate
- Gnusto - Inscribe scrolls into the spellbook
- Malyon - Animate
- Jindak - Detect magic
- Lesoch - Wind
The game specifically notes that we've never seen "Blorple" before, but Jindak and Lesoch are new spells too.
A cast of Lesoch clears the smoke from the square, leaving a white cube on the ground. Jindak takes a few tries to get right, but eventually reveals that the cube is magical.
Normally this where I'd start Trizborting, and I do, but there's not much to map out! Belwit Square extends infinitely to the east and west, the way south is blocked by a guard, and there's nothing in the Enchanter's Guild to the north but a bunch of frogs and a banquet hall, from which I help myself to some bread and fish.
I try out Blorple on the magic cube - instantly I'm teleported into a pitch black, subterranean chamber, and I quickly Frotz the spellbook so that I don't get eaten. And here, I start Trizborting.
East from the initial chamber, which has exits in all four cardinal directions and a hole leading down, I enter a stone hall leading north and south. To the north, an ouroborosan serpent fills a circular passage. To the south, a vast field of ruined pillars and water stains, and a zipper, which I take. But I find no passage back to the initial chamber.
Soon I grow tired, and unable to find any sort of bedroom, I just sleep on the floor, where I dream of mages viewing premonitions of violence through a magic mirror.
The zipper seems to be a bag of holding. I can open it, put things inside, even enter it myself. Inside is a Gnusto-proof scroll of girgol - time stop. Casting Blorple on it takes me to an empty room, which exits right back to wherever I came from.
Unable to make any progress with the serpent - it reacts to Yomin but only informs me that the serpent is punished for its pride - I Blorple the cube again, and return to the underground chamber. The north exit is magically sealed, but south leads to a new set of rooms - a sheer cliffside, which as I attempt to ascend, gives way and dumps my body down a ravine!
Death isn't necessarily the end in the Zork universe - the cloaked figure appears, mocks my failure, and sends me to a corridor of bones, from which I can exit back to Belwit square and Blorple back into the cube again to resume my task.
I return to the cliffside - a spell of Throck - "cause plants to grow" - is found and can be Gnusto'd into the spellbook. Climbing down, I find a cave guarded by a sneezy ogre, who pounds me flat as I try to explore.
The shade warns me that I'm on my last try as I resurrect one more time, and return to the cliffside. Girgol freezes the ogre in place and lets me pass - this is probably not the correct solution; Infocom would not waste bytes on details such as his hay fever if it weren't important - but it works, and I enter his lair where I find a bed, a golden box, and a scroll, which I cannot interact with until the spell wears off. And as soon as it does, the enraged ogre charges in after me and curb stomps me.
"The game specifically notes that we've never seen "Blorple" before, but Jindak and Lesoch are new spells too."
ReplyDeleteJindak and Lesoch are new in the sense that they didn't exist in the earlier games, but they are in your spellbook from the very beginning, while Blorple only appears there after the attack.
I suspected that, but didn't have a chance to verify yet.
DeleteInfocom's marketing department, despite the usual dumbed-down mostly-paper feelies, did this game a great service by renaming it to "Spellbreaker" instead of "Mage" - not only does it describe what happens in the game better, but it's a more tantalizing title to see on the shelf in contrast to the platitudinous "Mage," which could describe a bevy of games.
ReplyDeleteIf you play Release 63 of the game, there's a 1% chance that the "version" command (or anything else that causes that text to be printed) will call the game "MAGE" instead of "SPELLBREAKER". That was removed in a later version, though I don't know if it was because feelings had cooled down or if it was simply to reclaim some space for bugfixes because Spellbreaker is one of the larger V3 games.
DeleteI think Release 63 was the one I played back in the late eighties. Not that I remember ever seeing the other title, but I do remember encountering one of the bugs that was fixed in a later release. (Without going into spoilers, it had to do with destroying an object while you were sitting on it. The object was removed from the game with you still "inside", rather than moving you off it first. Hey, I was getting frustrated!)
"Mage" is a very bad title and I'm glad they changed it.
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