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