Maze Master: Diminishing returns

Level 4 has a lot of empty space in it.

 

Level 3 is mapped out, and as I've cleared it of weaker encounters, my experience level has steadily risen. Monsters that used to be total party kills remained challenging, and towards the end I still could only endure one or two fights before being forced to retreat to the surface, but it's a noticeable improvement from when I started this level.

Gold XP Base A Wolves 34 12 B Orcs 36 12 C Lurkers 38 12 D Ogres 40 16 E Werewolves 48 16 F Maze Shadows 50 16 G Trolls 44 20 H Ogre Magi 54 20 I Mercenaries 58 20 J Stone Giants 56 24 K Wights 62 24 L Fire Dragons 60 28 M Spectres 66 28 N Green Dragons 72 32 O Gorgons 78 32 P Fire Giants 74 36 Q Clue R Stairs up S Stairs down

The XP rewards have gotten better as well, letting me level up every two or three sessions. My characters' core stats are maxed out, except for Fred's intelligence which he wasn't using anyway. The wizards' spell points have gotten high enough that I can finally afford to cast the AC-boosting Shadow Shield magic before combats, though combat boost spells still seem not worth it when group-targeting damage spells almost always kill half the mob or more.

 

Next, as I map out level 4, with 42 spell points between my wizards, the loop is a little different.

1. Enter the maze and cast Shadow Shield (5 SP).
2. Teleport to an unexplored portion of level 4 (5 SP).
3. Cast Cat's Eye (2 SP).
4. After any fight, teleport back to the surface. Be quick about entering coordinates - taking too long can trigger the infinite monsters bug. If I haven't got enough SP to teleport back, then just explore the level suicidally.
5. Restore any dead characters.
6. Update the codes of the survivors.

 

This is 17 points for utility magic, which leaves 25 for combat. That's enough for four firestorm spells, and any combat encounter that can't be cleared with four firestorms isn't going to be winnable with any other tactics. There's no reason not to return to surface after each combat either; a return is a free heal and SP recharge. Continuing just means your next encounter might be a total party kill that erases your gains.  If I can win a fight with just two firestorms, then I might press my luck and keep exploring until I fight another, but otherwise, it's one fight per session.

Survivable combats get me an average of 250XP/character, so I'm leveling up basically every four of these microsessions.

I've also bought everyone a $1500 Ring of Accuracy. Not the most useful upgrade, as magic is my main damage dealer, but meaningful equipment upgrades past that start at $4000 now, which will take some time to earn; combats down here are earning me $60/character on average.

Other items remaining include:

• $4000 - Wrathblade. The ultimate melee weapon.
• $5000 - Staff of Light. No description, but sounds useless if it doesn't do anything that Cat's Eye doesn't do.
• $5000 - Amulet of Healing. Also no description, could be great, could be useless, depending on how much healing it does.
• $6000 - Mithril Coat. The ultimate armor.
• $10000 - Hawk Blazon. No description.

 

You can't pool or transfer gold, so every character has to save up on their own.

 

Even at the end of the level 4 expedition, with over 28,000 XP accumulated and only the floor's strongest monsters remaining, my success or failure against them depends on luck. If I get to go first, then I thin their ranks with a pair of firestorm spells and likely finish them off unscathed the next turn. If they go first, then whether I survive the first turn or not is entirely up to the RNG deciding how many of them hit and how hard.

Level 4 is now completely mapped, and each character has over 30,000 XP accumulated.

One unique floor feature here is that the lower-left corner contains unending monster encounters, but this is not a bug.

Gold XP Base A Maze Shadows 50 16 B Ogre Magi 54 20 C Mercenaries 58 20 D Stone Giants 56 24 E Wights 62 24 F Fire Dragons 60 28 G Spectres 66 28 H Green Dragons 72 32 I Gorgons 78 32 J Fire Giants 74 36 K Ogre Kings 80 36 L Minotaurs 84 40 M Black Dragons 100 40 N Black Wolves 92 44 O Samurai 112 44 P Ice Giants 108 52 Q Clue R Stairs up S Stairs down T Infinimonsters

 

One floor left. The Balrog awaits. Hey, at least it's only five levels and not fifty.

Maze Master: Destiny personified

Even with over 6000 XP, this still happens.

I've settled into a gameplay loop.

1. Enter the maze and cast Cat's Eye.
2. Explore and map an unexplored portion of it.
3. Return when I run out of mana or if anyone dies - often after just one fight.
4. Restore any dead characters.
5. Update the codes of the survivors.

 

Leveling up is strange. There are no 'levels' per se, but for every 1024XP earned, you improve a little bit. One of your core stats (Str/Int/Dex) is randomly picked to go up a point, but if it's already at 18, you're out of luck. Constitution, which functions as your maximum HP here, always go up, usually by multiple points, and maxes out at 255. Fighters get a bit better at combat. Wizards never get any better at combat, but gain one additional spell point per 'level'. Right now, my wizards have 7 SP each, which lets them cast Cat's Eye, one moderate damage spell, and one major damage spell per trip between the two of them. Just another 2048XP, and they'll be able to cast Cat's Eye, one moderate damage spell, and two major damage spells per trip!

The result is kind of an inverse power curve. You improve at a linear rate, but the XP requirements are flat. Deeper dungeons have tougher monsters and bigger groups of them, so as you gain enough power to take them on, the number of fights it takes to level up gets smaller, not bigger. On dungeon level 2, I'm earning an average of 80XP per character per fight, compared to 20XP when I started exploring level 1.

Bigger groups also mean more chances of someone getting killed in the first round. If a group of seven pirates - not even an especially tough monster type - gets to go first, there's a chance that someone will get hit twice and die, or get hit with a critical blow and die. And there's nothing you can do to mitigate this except to keep your sessions brief (which I am) or to cast AC-reducing spells ahead of time, which seem prohibitively expensive for how little they do. One such spell effectively makes the wizard casting it useless for the rest of the session.

Another reason to keep sessions brief is that the longer you stay in the dungeon, the more you risk encountering a wandering monster, which is bad because it can trigger a bug that deletes the stairs to return home. At least this doesn't happen much if you always keep moving.

If someone dies, this isn't a big deal, unlike Wizardry. "Restoring" characters is free; you just create a new one and enter their last code (which is why you always note their updated code when returning to town). It's also more efficient to farm XP this way; when there are two survivors, XP per-character is doubled, and when there is only one survivor, the XP reward is quadrupled. One time, a group of six trolls flattened Fred and Jin instantly, but Houdini countered with a firestorm spell, earning him 560XP.

And if you suffer a total party kill, just restore all of your characters and avoid that part of the map until you're stronger.

In combat, Maze Master provides a much smaller variety of spells than Wizardry, but has given me little reason to use anything but group-damaging spells. The fighter hits hard, but can only kill one monster per turn. Big groups of monsters, as mentioned, can do lethal damage to a healthy party in a single round. Armor-boosting spells may provide some protection, but you know what else does? Just killing the whole group with a firestorm spell or two. Monsters never do anything but hit anyway, and they never resist damage spells. Maybe this will change later on, when my party is strong enough to withstand an initial round of melee combat, and the monsters are strong enough to survive an initial volley of offensive magic, but for now it seems pointless.

As I publish this, I've mapped out the first two levels and am halfway done mapping out the third. Everyone has over 8000 XP, and the gameplay loop hasn't changed much, but now the wizards have enough SP that we can cast Shadow Shield (-2 party AC for the session, non-cumulative) ahead of time and have enough left over to squeeze off two firestorm spells, provided we live long enough. Shadow Shield doesn't do a lot, but it's the only way to be proactive against surprise attacks. Fred can hit twice per round now, and equipment upgrades are few and far between, as gold rewards don't scale at the same rate that XP does.

The tougher monsters on level 2 still have a good chance of killing someone, especially the Ogre Magi, who seem to hit very hard and accurately relative to their XP worth. Fire Dragons are lucrative targets, awarding 140XP per character if you kill a group of four. I wish it were more. Combats on level 3 give about 150XP on average, but the tough ones are usually total party kills - which I don't mind, as I'm still making progress mapping it out, and it does not take long to restore the party and walk back down to it.

 

Level 1 map:

Gold XP Base A Kobolds 14 4 B Thieves 16 4 C Goblins 18 4 D Scavengers 18 4 E Dwarves 22 4 F Rogues 24 4 G Skeletons 26 4 H Warriors 30 4 I Pirates 32 8 J Zombies 32 8 K Bladesmen 34 8 L Berserkers 40 8 M Wolves 34 12 N Orcs 36 12 O Lurkers 38 12 P Ogres 40 16 Q Clue R Stairs up S Stairs down

 

Level 2 map:

Gold XP Base A Rogues 24 4 B Warriors 30 4 C Pirates 32 8 D Zombies 32 8 E Bladesmen 34 8 F Berserkers 40 8 G Wolves 34 12 H Orcs 36 12 I Lurkers 38 12 J Ogres 40 16 K Werewolves 48 16 L Maze Shadows 50 16 M Trolls 44 20 N Ogre Magi 54 20 O Stone Giants 56 24 P Fire Dragons 60 28 Q Clue R Stairs up S Stairs down

Game 451: Maze Master

 

Our next whale, Michael Cranford's The Bard's Tale, has a predecessor.

When The Bard's Tale came out in 1985, originally on the Apple II, there were plans to port it to several computer systems, including the Commodore 64 which had comparatively few RPGs at the time, and didn't even have a version of Wizardry yet.

It did, however, have Cranford's first game as a lead designer - a Wizardry clone, Maze Master. The Bard's Tale would expand on the Wizardry formula, but this one is greatly pared-down to fit a 16KB cartridge format.

I'm not going into this completely blind - specifically, I already know that it has an absolutely awful bug which can be averted through a bit of system abuse. As in Wizardry, each dungeon floor has a set of stairs leading up, but hitting random encounters can lead to a situation where infinitely spawning monsters block the stairs, making your return impossible. The trigger seems to be fighting a random encounter right after hitting a non-encounter square, so I will need to be mindful to avoid that.

To even the odds and preserve my sanity just a little, I intend to abuse a system which is also there because of technical limitations. Your characters aren't stored on the cartridge; the system doesn't support this. Instead, character sheets contain a 21-digit code, a two-way hashcode of their state, which can be entered during character creation to "restore" the character. If someone dies, I can simply "restore" their last healthy state upon returning to town by re-creating them with said code.

 

Character creation is the first simplification; your party has room for three characters, and only two classes exist; warrior and wizard. The manual advises a fighter be in front, so I aimed for a party with one warrior for protection and two wizards for maximum firepower, and rolled about twenty of them before settling on three that I liked best:

• Fred the Fighter, 18 strength, 6 int, 13 dex, 17 con
• Houdini the Wizard, 18 strength, 18 int, 8 dex, 14 con
• Jin the Wizard, 12 strength, 18 int, 10 dex, 18 con 

 

I restored these characters, bought some basic gear, and went into the maze.

 

I explored a bit, first casting the cat's eyes spell to increase visibility, and almost immediately got total party killed by a small group of rogues.

 

I soon reload the characters and try again.

 

Some observations as I explored and mapped out the maze:

• Graphical responsiveness is nearly instant compared to Wizardry.
• There's a realtime element to exploration. Light spells expire after a set number of minutes, and random encounters can occur without your input.
• Fixed-encounter squares always have the same monster types. The door directly to the north of the initial stairs always leads to a fight against rogues, for example.
• Combat is quite brutal early on. Monsters can easily deal 10 damage per hit, nobody gets more than 18 HP to start with, and surprise attacks aren't uncommon. Even with this rather powerful party, I can lose people in the first round of fighting. Every expedition to the dungeon consists of one fight, where I unload my best spells and immediately return to town once it's over.
• Monsters in fixed-encounter squares stay dead forever, even when you return to town, or even after a total party kill. Only restarting the system brings fixed encounters back.

 

On combat rules:

• Each character may spend their turn attacking with their weapon or casting spells. Despite what the manual says, there is no option to escape from combat once it has begun.
• Wizards have access to all spells from the start. Only your mana reserves limit the possibilities - Houdini and Jin have 4 points each, and the most high-end spells cost 6.
• Spells are cast by entering a "spell number" from 1-18 rather than a spell name. You need the manual to know what spells are available, what they cost, and what they do.
• All of the combat spells either do damage, lower party AC, or raise hit accuracy, in varying increments.
• There is no way to query remaining spell points during battle, and if you try to cast something when you're out of them, there will be no feedback. Your wizard just attacks instead.
• Gold amount awarded is determined by monster type, not monster quantity, and everyone gets a fixed amount. E.g - defeating kobolds gives everyone $14, no matter how big your party is.
• XP awards are convoluted. Start with a base number determined by monster type (typically 4-12 on this level). Multiply by number of monsters, plus 1. Double the result if you have only two party members left, quadruple if you have only one. Algebraically, it's [Base]*(Monsters+1)*(2^[3-Survivors]).

Progress is pretty slow; combats yield an average of 20XP per encounter for each character, and it takes 1024XP for a level up. As of this writing, I have begun to accumulate enough gold to buy some second-tier equipment, but we're barely halfway to our first level up, and floor 1 is already cleared of the weaker monsters.

And the medium-strength ones can one-shot me.

 

It might be time to reset the game but reload my characters, so I can beat up the weaker enemies again.

 

A question for readers - on this post, I have set my images' aspect ratio to 0.75:1 PAR, which accurately reproduces the C64's NTSC aspect ratio, but this comes at the cost of pixel clarity. This might not work correctly if you're viewing on a mobile phone and there's nothing I can do about that. If they do appear aspect-corrected, you should be able to click the images and see them rendered with square pixels.

My question is, what do you prefer? Images with perfect, square pixels, or images with fuzzy pixels accurate aspect ratios? I can't have perfect clarity and correct aspect ratios unless I also make the images much bigger, which I definitely don't want to do.

 

Level 1 map (so far):

Gold XP Base A Kobolds 14 4 B Thieves 16 4 C Goblins 18 4 D Scavengers 18 4 E Dwarves 22 4 F Rogues 24 4 G Skeletons 26 4 H Warriors 30 4 I Pirates 32 8 J Zombies 32 8 K Bladesmen 34 8 L Berserkers 40 8 M Wolves 34 12 N Orcs 36 12 O Lurkers 38 12 P Ogres ? ? Q Clue R Stairs up

 

Game 450: Space Harrier

 

We’re jumping a bit ahead of schedule as this past weekend, I had an opportunity to play 1985’s Space Harrier on an original deluxe motion-cabinet at Funspot, NH, and wanted to do a writeup while it was still fresh in my mind.

Space Harrier was never my favorite Sega game, though my experience with it until now had only been through ports and emulation. It seemed quite repetitive, with little to distinguish the moment-to-moment gameplay of its 18 stages other than visual variety, the pseudo-3D shooting action clumsy, imprecise, and full of unfair deaths, and its much-praised Super Scaler technology just felt visually incoherent, providing nothing to look at but a vast, empty void with a large number of smoothly-scaling objects flying at you at warp speed. It's very colorful, sure, but the monochromatic wireframes of Star Wars and even Elite offered a far better sense of 3D space and perspective.

 

This deluxe sit-down cabinet, similarly to the deluxe cabinets of OutRun and After Burner (which also feature at Funspot and are placed right next to it), tilts and pivots as you push the flight stick to move your character around the screen. It's definitely an added dimension to the trippy experience that emulation can't replicate, but it's not quite as immersive in this early iteration. OutRun's moving seat bounces as you drive across bumpy terrain and physically leans into your turns, and After Burner's moving cockpit syncs with the chase-camera perspective, tilting and pitching as your F-14 Tomcat does, but here, the pseudo-3D perspective isn't tethered to your character's movements as he zips around the screenspace, and the cabinet motion doesn't feel as connected to the action as it might have. One suspects it might have made more sense in the first prototypes where you actually flew a harrier, instead of a guy with a jetpack and a space bazooka.

I played through Space Harrier's 18 stages for the first time at Funspot, and while the motion cabinet doesn't do anything to enhance the gameplay, it does enhance the experience. I'll note that I'm very grateful for the tertiary fire button located physically on the cabinet, as repeatedly squeezing the joystick trigger gets very, very tiring. I then played through for the second time at home, using a USB flight stick to steer and the left-ctrl button on my keyboard to shoot. The game has no limit on the number of times you're allowed to continue, and no penalty when you do. Therefore I had no incentive to replay and try to play more optimally or use fewer of them.

The game controls quite well with either setup, but is still very shallow and very repetitive. Each of the 18 worlds has a distinct color scheme and visuals, but it makes little difference whether you're shooting at giant Moai heads while dodging their fireballs and avoiding stone pillars on the ground or you're shooting at harriers while dodging their missiles and avoiding steel towers on the ground. Basically, never stop moving, never stop shooting, and try not to move into oncoming obstacles.

Space can be a tough place, and you will eat flaming laser death.

Bosses, at least, provide a bit of gameplay variety, but they're pretty brief and a lot of them are still samey. There are also two rounds where you ride a Luck Dragon and just try to smash through as many obstacles as possible for bonus points, and the final stage is a boss rush and considerably easier than the stages before it. There is, of course, no plot and no context at all for why you're here or what you're doing.

I will give some credit here, for lack of a better place to mention it. Space Harrier's audio design is quite excellent, with a psychedelic FM soundtrack, clear voice samples (AHHHHH!!! .... get ready!), lots of rumbly explosions, zippy cannonfire, a distinctive 'bloop' sound of enemies unloading clusters of fireballs in your general direction, and convincing stereo separation effects behind it all.

GAB rating: Average. Another cutting edge Sega game pushes their signature sprite-scaling technology even harder than Hang-On did, but colorfully trippy visuals and break-neck speed can't make up for overly simplistic and monotonous gameplay, and unfair quarter-munching design.