Game 339: The Caverns of Freitag

According to an article at medium.com, Yoshio Kiya himself tweeted that Dragon Slayer was based on an obscure Apple II RPG, Caverns of Freitag, making this otherwise minor title a rather important ancestor in the history of JRPGs.

Creator David Shapiro would eventually join Origin as a Commodore 64 programmer, and contribute to the design of Ultima VI and Underworld II, having a cameo in the former.

 

Not quite a Roguelike, but bearing the undeniable influence of Rogue, Freitag uses a quasi-realtime system akin to Telengard or Temple of Apshai where the action plays out in discrete turns, but there's a timer, and if it expires without input, then the action selected defaults to "do nothing."

A single-leveled, but fairly large maze houses swarms of monsters, caches of treasure, and one big "dwagon" whose death, as you might have guessed, is the game's objective.

Probably the ideal settings (easy and slow)

Even before play begins, Freitag commits a sin endemic of early, hobbyist-developed computer games - giving too much fine-grain customization to the player too soon. Difficulty levels are fine, but having nine doesn't grant much confidence that they've all been playtested for balance or even viability (see Akalabeth where they absolutely weren't). Playtesting for difficulty balance becomes the player's responsibility, and repeatedly replaying the game until you've found the right level for your skill is sure to take the excitement right out of it. Having 50 different speed settings is just silly.

So let me just say that in retrospect, the easiest difficulty level was sufficiently difficult, and nothing is gained by the timed rounds, making the slowest setting as close to ideal as possible. The fastest setting is utterly unplayable.

...but also kind of funny.

 

I initially had some trouble getting far out of the first screen even at the easiest settings. You start off weak as a kitten, barely able to injure the snakes and moths that pester you from the start. But I soon realized that the inn at the start offers free and instant healing when you step onto it, and monsters can't block you from it if you're adjacent. Fighting the initial pack within an arm's length of the inn and keeping tabs on your health (more on this in a bit) to retreat and heal when necessary works well, and you may gain a level once the starting screen is clear.

Once you can clear the starting screen, which may first require a bit of maneuvering to funnel the enemies into it so they can be dealt with sooner rather than later (you really don't want your way back to the inn blocked by anything when you're hurting for HP if it can be helped), the caverns can be explored in earnest. The monster and treasure locations are random, but the maze itself is the same every time. You earn new ranks, awarded at the inn, rather quickly, and though the monsters also get tougher quickly and even respawn, most aren't horrible by the time they show up as long as you're cautious about making sure you fight them one-on-one, and also careful to retreat to the inn before your HP gets critical.

Not great odds of tanking this, but the terrain offers ample tactical retreat options

Wizards are high damaging ranged attackers that you might need to use arrows on.

Sometimes something nasty blocks your way to the inn. This is why you retreat before your HP gets critical.

Almost there. Best to just run for it.

Made it! All of these monsters are now worm food.

Freitag offers two alternate view modes, none of which tell you everything you want to know.

Mode 2 is probably the most useful, but boring to look at.

Mode 3 shows a zoomed-out map view but no monsters except healers. Navigating in this mode is risky.

Freitag's lair is in the southeast corner of the map, and can be reached fairly directly from the start. It might take several trips back and forth to thin out all the monsters, which may include annoying invisoids who could be anywhere in the openness, but you should max out your level easily. This doesn't guarantee you can steamroll everything, but eventually, the monsters will be sparse enough that you can enter it.

Hey, I must be getting close.

Freitag awaits.

Freitag isn't actually that hard. He breathes fire every other turn, but timing your moves to reach his soft underbelly is no Crypt of the Necrodancer-grade challenge, and then goes down in ten or so hits, doing only a bit more damage to you in return than an average baddy. Then you just have to return to the inn - hopefully not encountering too much trouble on the way back - to win the game.

 

 Notes on the enemies:

• Serpent - Basic enemy.
• Electric Moth - Weaker than serpents, but one of the few enemies that can hit diagonally.
  
• Mad Robot - Average opponents, you can go toe-to-toe with one at level 1, but don't push it.
  
• Coldcrystal - Very durable foes, but they don't do much damage.
• Invisoid - Annoying invisible enemies, but actually pretty weak.
  
• Burbleblort - Scary enemies at low levels, fodder after level 5 or so.
• Flamebat - Weaker than they look.
• Griffin - Stronger than they look, better kite these.
• Thunderbug - Glass cannons that move fast and hit quite hard but go down in one hit.
• Phoenix - The strongest normal enemy in the game. Half as tough as the dwagon and hits even harder. Kite them whenever possible.
• Mimic - Chests that kill. Their attack hurts bad and traps you until you kill them.
• Wizard - The only enemy with a ranged attack apart from the dragon. If you can hit them at an angle, great. Otherwise, this is the best use for arrows, and you might want to go back to the inn after fighting even one.

 

I wondered after this, can the game be beaten on the hardest skill setting without resorting to savescumming? So I tried. And after several false starts, I found it turns out you can.

But not if you start off like this.

There's a few differences on the harder levels.

• On the easiest setting, the initial monster population is limited to moths and serpents, and tougher ones start spawning later. On the hardest, anything goes right from the start.
• XP requirements are way higher on the hardest setting, but so are the XP gains.
• The direct path to Freitag is blocked off, requiring a much more roundabout one.

 

With some patient monster farming near the inn, with pathfinding manipulation to lure them out one at a time whenever possible, and some luck in avoiding spawns that can one-shot you, you'll eventually reach levels high enough that the first point no longer matters at all, and the second one is already partly offset by the fact that the more powerful monsters give more XP.

The much longer path to Freitag, though, means you have to be extra careful keeping tabs on your HP. Kiting monsters gets you a lot of mileage, as most can't hit you at diagonals, making it sometimes possible to avoid damage completely, depending on the terrain and the monster types.

 

Can't touch this.

 

An efficient kill-tunnel.

But every monster you kill causes another to spawn in a random space, and statistically, some of them are going to spawn on the path behind you. You do not want to be backpedaling from a dangerous phoenix only to to bump into a deadlier wizard and get sandwiched between them, but the more you kill without re-clearing the path behind you, the more likely this is to happen. Constantly going back and forth is quite tedious, but can save your life.

You want to be cautious about treasure chests too, as while you need some gold for buying arrows, you don't need that many, and while chests may contain precious sword or shield upgrades, they are just as likely to have teleporter traps, which amount to near certain death on any difficulty setting. Make it far enough and you might as well just avoid them completely. And if you see a treasure chest where you don't remember there being one before, that is a mimic.

Exploring is a bad idea too. Even though monsters respawn randomly, some of them will respawn in parts of the map where they can't reach the critical path. Those monsters are effectively out of the game and out of your way forever as long as you don't go looking for them. Find the path to Freitag (hint, go south at Dr. Cat's signature), stick to that path, and the total number of monsters on that path will gradually go down as they start being redistributed elsewhere.

All of these monsters are effectively out of the game, if you don't go looking for them.

 

It took me almost two hours of tedious back-and-forthing, but I eventually made it to Freitag and killed him like I had on the easiest setting. I hadn't even maxed out my level or gained any weapon upgrades.

And then I replayed on the easiest setting and had a lot more fun, using the lessons learned to utterly dominate Freitag and his minions.

Some miscellaneous notes:

• You can turn into a bird at any time, which doubles your movement speed and in theory lets you escape from a bad situation, but I found that in practice, you more often than not just retreat into a corridor blocked by another bad monster, and you can't attack it for multiple turns. So I didn't use this.
• "Healers," which look like computer chips, can be consumed for a partial heal, but I rarely did this unless desperate, as they spawn like monsters and no doubt count toward the spawn limit. Each healer that you don't use therefore represents a monster that won't spawn.
• Wizards are very dangerous foes that retreat while throwing lighting bolts at you from a distance, but are kind of stupid and tend to get caught on complex terrain. I could sometimes kill them by standing on their diagonal and just hitting them, unable to retreat or attack.
• There's no pausing, which sucks.

 

GAB rating: Average.  The Caverns of Freitag isn't very substantial, or polished, or all that well designed, but it grew on me after coming to grips with it. It's just a shame that, thanks to the endlessly respawning enemies and low level cap, exploring isn't viable.

Game 313: Beyond Castle Wolfenstein

Package for Mr. Hitler, C.O.D.

I played the original Castle Wolfenstein back in 2019, and found it to be an infuriatingly inconsistent mishmash of stealth and action gameplay, which occasionally offered excitement, but mostly just irritated me with its endless footlockers you had to open up so damned slowly and that deadly combination of unresponsive controls with unforgiving gameplay.

The sequel, Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, is mostly known for being a game where you blow up Adolf Hitler in his bunker, and not so much for its gameplay differences. So, is it just more of the same, or did Muse Software dream up some meaningful improvements in the three year interim?

I think it's both, to some extent.

I wound up playing the 4am crack version on MAME, as even though AppleWin's WOZ support has come a long way since 2019, the game froze on me during my first attempted playthrough using it.

Führerbunker guards get more exercise than their Schloß Wolfenstein counterparts do

So, firstly, the controls are as awkward as ever, where QWEADZXC are used for chunky eight-way movement and S to stand still. At least this time, when you bump into things, the screen goes crazy for only a brief fraction of a second and all you hear is a little ding, which is far less annoying than the original game's seizure-inducing noise patterns, but still raises the question of why this happens at all.

You can also, finally, manually holster your weapon with the 'H' key instead of having to deliberately walk right into the walls to achieve the same.

Unlike Castle Wolfenstein, where you could just shoot the Nazis with impunity, and were better off doing so until you located a uniform, here, shooting them is a bad move that will almost always alert the bunker and bring more heat your way, and if anyone sounds the alarm, then you might as well give up. The good news is that patrolling guards no longer shoot you on sight.

Kommen Sie, barks your Apple ][ with an uncanny clarity

Instead, they'll demand your pass, and you get two chances to show the correct one of up to five available before they arrest you. Bribes always work, so the best technique is to guess, and if wrong, offer a bribe, and the next time you encounter a guard, try a different pass. You'll guess right eventually, before the money runs out, and then you'll have free reign of the floor, able to simply show the correct pass whenever you are spotted.

Many rooms contain a locker or two, and a bomb, which you need to finish the game, is located in one of them. Others contain useful supplies, like money, passes, ammo, and keys. They may also, as before, contain useless things like Hitler's diary, coats, and paintings. Some are locked, but instead of passively waiting as long as four minutes to pick the lock, as you did in the first Wolfenstein, there's a sound-based minigame where you guess the three-digit combination and hear a faint 'click' when one of the digits is correct. It's still not exactly engaging, but compared to the system it replaced, it's a massive improvement. Guards will sometimes be alerted if they see you rifling through a locked cabinet, and this can sometimes mean genuine tension as you carefully watch over your own shoulder, worrying about getting caught by a patrolling guard while you try to guess the combination.

I soon found a dagger in an unlocked cabinet, which is far more useful than the gun. Stabbing is fiddly and risky - sometimes guards break their patrol patterns and instead of pulling off a perfect backstab you just lunge, dagger point out, right into their clutches and get immediately busted, and sometimes you fail because the keyboard controls weren't responsive. And you definitely don't want to even try this in a room with more than one guard unless they are quite isolated from each other. But a successful backstab kills instantly, alerts nobody with their scream, and is often the simplest way to ensure you can crack open a locker without being bothered. It also makes exploring the maze-like bunker much quicker when you don't have to show your pass in rooms you've already been in.

Getting caught isn't the end of the world either, as you can retry with the same bunker layout. You'll need to figure out the correct pass again, but the locations of items won't change.

Desk guards are one of the few times you might actually want to shoot, as they can't be stabbed, and they will sound an alarm if you search a locker in their line of sight. Just make sure you have the gun equipped and not the knife when you draw your weapon, and make sure you can leave the screen after shooting before reinforcements show up.

You can also bribe them to find out what the current floor's correct pass is, but if you've lived long enough to find a desk guard, you probably already know.

Once you locate the bomb, which according to the manual is always on the first floor, you need to find the elevator and descend to the next.

The timer is, incidentally, basically irrelevant, as you can reset it any time. You don't want anyone to see you doing that, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find a private alcove should it get too close for comfort.

Level 2 will have a different pass than level 1 did, but the same procedure applies for deducing it. If you found the dagger already then there's no need to search the lockers here either - all you need is the bomb and the dagger and perhaps some spare passes, which can be found easily enough on the corpses of backstabbed guards. Your goal here is mainly to find the elevator to level 3.

Guards can get in the way, but if you know which pass to use, you're perfectly safe.

Level 3 is significantly smaller and more linear than the first two. Once again, you'll need to learn the pass, and when you do, you can go anywhere as long as you don't do anything stupid like be seen with your gun or knife out.

Neither stealth nor bullets will get you through rooms like this.

 

Your goal here is literally Hitler.

Getting close! Hope you figured out which pass to use

The worst conference ever. You're basically doing the senior officers a favor.

Drop the package outside the door, reset the timer, and leave. Your maps and pass notes should be enough to get you back to the starting room on level 1 without any trouble and with plenty of time to spare, and the more guards you've stabbed along the way, the more spare time you'll have.

Try as you might, only one man can kill Hitler, but you'll have the chance to replay on a higher difficulty. I did, having attained the rank of "allied intelligence agent." The chief differences I noticed were that more of the cabinets were locked, and guards were more numerous, often patrolling rooms two at a time in areas where there would have been one or none, making it that much more difficult to open some of the locked cabinets without getting busted. There were no elite guards like the SS officers seen in Castle Wolfenstein's NG+ mode.

There was one big problem. This time, the bomb was nowhere to be found on level 1! Nor on 2, or even 3. I checked and double-checked every room, but just as the war plans eluded me on a subsequent playthrough of its predecessor, so did the bomb in a subsequent run of this game. I don't know if this is an emulation bug, or a consequence of an incorrectly dumped or cracked disk image, or if there's just something special you have to do in higher difficulty levels to find the bomb, but whatever the reason, my motivation to keep playing was, once again, kaputt.

GAB rating: Average. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein feels much like what I expected the first game to be - a somewhat simplistic predecessor to Metal Gear-style stealth. It mitigates many of its predecessors most serious problems, making it so much more playable, but by removing combat as a viable tactic, it's also less interesting.

Both games, though, suffer from the same fundamental problem, that no amount of polish could fix and elevate into "good" territory. The randomized level design (not to mention the unpredictable gameplay mechanics and sometimes unresponsive controls) just isn't conducive to stealthy, tactical gameplay. Sometimes you can sneak around Nazis on patrol, sometimes that just isn't possible, and to compensate, both games offer tools that can completely trivialize the task - uniforms in the first game, and passes in the second.

I mentioned near the start that bumping into walls is now 80% less annoying than in the first game, due to the much shorter period of visual disorientation. The problem is significantly lessened, but the fact that this is a problem at all still seems pretty strange. This is actually a pretty good summary of the sequel itself - many of the serious problems with Castle Wolfenstein are mitigated, but none of them are truly fixed.

There are also a number of strange, seemingly purposeless gameplay elements, which make me think Beyond Castle Wolfenstein shipped unfinished.

• Keys can be found in some cabinets, and take a weirdly long time to collect. The manual states they are used by pressing Ctrl+K (why not just a single keystroke from an otherwise unmapped key?), but this doesn't seem to do anything. They don't open locked cabinets, and unlike Castle Wolfenstein there are no locked doors.
• In one playthrough I found a secret passage in a cabinet, and a corresponding "secret passage upstairs" in another on level 2, but I found no way to use either of them.
• The manual states that desk guards, if bribed, offer you cryptic clues. In my experience, they either flat out tell you which pass to use on the current level, or they tell you a combination to some cabinet on the level without identifying which one. Either way, useless, but also not cryptic at all.
• The alarm reset switch is concealed in a cabinet somewhere in the bunker, typically under close guard, but if you tripped the alarm anywhere other than very same room as the reset switch, you'll probably be dead long before you get the chance to use it. Especially if you don't even know where it is yet.

 

Beyond Castle Wolfenstein did not have nearly as much commercial success as its predecessor, and Muse Software folded not long after its release, having produced only one more game, a preschool-oriented educational title, the following year. Founder Silas Warner would continue active work as a freelance developer, working with MicroProse on multiple Commodore 64 games throughout the rest of the 80's. His final game was Virgin's The Terminator for Sega CD. Though both Muse and Warner are long gone, the Castle Wolfenstein legacy lives on as a forerunner both to stealth action games and to shooters, having bequeathed its namesake to the latter genre's seminal title.

Game 98: Castle Wolfenstein

As I write this in 2019, Castle Wolfenstein is as distant a memory as WWII itself was in 1981. And they’re still releasing official Wolfenstein sequels. I understand that the latest spinoff has the mainline protagonist’s teenage daughters fighting Nazis in the 80’s. Perhaps in this alternate history, there’s a hit title Flucht aus Schloß Volchiykamen for the Volkcomputer 48kb.

The manual outlines the premise – it’s WWII and you, an allied soldier, have been captured behind enemy lines and are held in the Nazi headquarters in labyrinthine Castle Wolfenstein. A dying cellmate gives you a gun and ten bullets, and you must escape and find the war plans if possible.

Rules of play are reminiscent of Berzerk. The castle is randomly generated, but you always begin in the lowest level. Guards patrol the hallways, and you can shoot in eight directions. Exits may appear on any side of the screen, or as stairs to a different level. Supplies may be found in chests or on guards, and useful supplies include bullets, grenades, keys, armor, and uniforms. Failure (usually) restarts the game in the same castle layout as before, although if you happen to blow up a chest full of explosives with a grenade, then the castle blows up and will have to be rebuilt for your next game.

The manual also has, as an appendix, a dodgy German phrasebook for POW’s. Everyday phrases like Achtung! and Schweinhund are in there, but it’s nice of them to mention that Kamerad means I surrender.

There is a dump of this game in the WOZ format, which was only released in August 2019. WOZ images emulate the disks’ copy protection, rather than bypass it as conventional DSK images do, ensuring that the game behavior itself isn’t changed. Furthermore, a WOZ release indicates that the disk was dumped in pristine condition, which is notable for Castle Wolfenstein because the castle generation process actually changes the data on the disk! The WOZ format release is the only realistic way of getting a copy of the game in its original, out-of-the-box state.

The game was also re-released in 1984 with a different title screen, and possibly some other changes. Both versions have been WOZ’d. I went with the 1981 version.

AppleWin currently supports reading from, but not writing to, the WOZ format. This is a big problem – not only does Castle Wolfenstein use the disk for saving your game, but it also writes to the disk to update the state of the game! For instance, you should be able to kill a room full of Nazis, leave, come back, and see your corpses where you left them. Instead, the room just resets to its original state, as the data on the WOZ indicates their state was untouched. Saving, of course, doesn’t work, you can’t get promotions, and generating a new castle layout freezes the game.

MAME, fortunately, does support writing to the WOZ format. Sort of. Presently, MAME will remember changes to the disk in memory, but won’t actually modify the WOZ file. The effect works fine until you close MAME or perform a hard reset – then the state of the disk reverts to the pristine file, and any changes are lost.

So, I decided I’d use two copies of the game for now. The WOZ format for my first playthrough, so I could see the first out-of-the-box castle layout, and the “4am crack” release for subsequent playthroughs.

Starting a new game, the program offered some tips as it generated a new castle.

The tip screens go by a bit fast if you have enhanced disk speed emulation enabled, but the gist of it is:

• SS troops will follow you from room to room, and can only be killed by grenades.
• Supply chests may contain supplies, and can be shot open.
• Uniforms will fool normal guards, but won’t fool the SS.
• The war plans are in a chest somewhere, and worth a lot to allied command.

The first thing evident about this game is that keyboard controls are really awkward. You can move in eight directions by using the QWEADZXC keys, but you move by tapping a direction to start walking, and then you tap the S key in the middle to stop walking. That wouldn’t be too bad, except that when you bump into walls or footlockers, which is constantly, the screen goes haywire and the machine makes a horrible screeching sound.

To be fair, this is an accurate simulation of what drunkenly stumbling into brick walls in a Prussian Schloss feels like.

Your gun can be, likewise, aimed in eight directions with the IOPK:,./ keys, and fired with L in the middle. This part game me a lot more trouble, partly because I kept forgetting which keys were for aiming (I kept instinctively going for JKL instead of KL;), but also because when you need to aim your gun, odds are it’s because things got hot, and the game has a nasty tendency to drop inputs when things get hot.

Things can be interacted with by pointing your gun at them and pressing U or Space for different actions depending on context and key, but most of them involve picking locks or searching for items. Guards can be held up by pointing your gun at them at point blank range, but it seems unwise to do this and then not shoot them, because they’ll follow as soon as you move or reposition your gun.

The game also offers joystick controls, which don’t offer enough buttons for all available actions. Plus, I could picture the rather stiff and sometimes unresponsive game controls feeling all wrong on a joystick or gamepad. Then there are paddle controls, which seem insane – rotate one paddle to determine walking direction, and rotate the other to determine aiming direction. I stuck with keyboard controls.

The very first room, presumably the dungeon, was featureless, except for stairs leading out.

Past the stairs was a guard, patrolling in a way that most of the room was outside his line of sight.

Footlockers can always be picked, but it takes time. Sometimes a pretty ridiculous amount of time for an action game; I’ve seen them take upwards of four minutes! If nobody saw you or heard you approach the footlocker, odds are nobody will see or hear you while picking the lock either, so this is just dead time spent waiting.

Coming soon – Golden Lockpick DLC

Granted, the “four minutes” is usually more like eighty seconds. Seconds pass quickly in Castle Wolfenstein, even with authentic speed emulation, but it’s still a long time to do nothing while nothing happens. Contents are often useless – I’ve found medals, cannonballs, and schnapps, but since my secondary objective is to locate the plans, I felt obligated to open every chest. The process can be hastened by shooting, but it doesn’t always work, and is probably a bad idea overall unless ammo is plentiful and if all of the guards in the room are dead.

Speaking of which, killing guards generally seemed like a good idea, at least on this floor. They tended to patrol in isolation, usually carry bullets (and sometimes keys), and shooting doesn’t attract attention from guards in other rooms. That said, one slip-up can ruin your game, as the controls are too wonky to be reliable in a pinch, and if an alerted guard even gets close to you, you are arrested.

I quickly found a bulletproof vest and a uniform. Vests make you resistant to bullets, but you’ll still be arrested if you get too close to an alert guard, and getting shot will still kill you sometimes. Uniforms make you nearly invisible, allowing you to even bump into patrolling guards without alerting them, but they will still be alerted if you point your gun at them, or if they hear you shoot. I couldn’t find any way to manually holster, but did realize that you put your gun away when you bump into walls, so I made a habit of doing this any time I didn’t anticipate an immediate need to shoot anyone.

I did get caught several times, mostly while fumbling around on the controls, but restarting not only didn’t change the castle layout, it didn’t even change the contents of the chests! And so I included these while making maps, knowing which ones I could skip on replays. Chest supplies are also infinite, so if you find a chest with bullets or grenades, you can keep coming back to it for refills.

I diligently mapped out the floor, which had a 3x3 layout, and had no more than two guards per room, and no plans.

Up on the next floor, I soon encountered a room with three guards!

Trying to fight would be madness, but I didn’t have to. With my uniform on, I just walked through, being careful not to point my gun in their faces.

I mapped out the floor, unmolested by any guards. This one was 5x5, and also had no plans. Some rooms had as many as four guards. I went for the stairs, and got arrested by an armored SS officer faster than I could react.

Achtung!

Retrying yet again, which didn’t take long as I had a map and had no reason to retrieve more than bullets, grenades, and the initial accoutrements, I found that this guard not only saw through my disguise, but my bullets wouldn’t harm him. I ran into the alcove, and was, despite his vest, able to hold him up. But unloading my entire magazine did absolutely nothing.

So, I threw a grenade.

This killed him, but disoriented me, and cost me my vest and uniform for some reason. They were nice while they lasted. In retrospect, I really should have just retreated and gathered more – I knew where I could find some chests that would have them – but I didn’t feel like fighting through all the guards that I had ignored on my way. Onwards and upwards.

I very quickly got caught on the next floor, when I walked into a room with three guards, noped right back out, and walked right into a respawned guard in the previous room. But then retrying, I found a better way to deal with the bulletproof SS – lure him into the alcove and throw a grenade while far away.

It takes some finesse, and the controls don’t always cooperate, but you keep your disguise this way.

On the next floor, I ran past such a bulletproof guard, and unpleasantly discovered that they can follow you from room to room if ignored.

Knowing better than to let alerted SS live, I mapped out the next floor, which was 4x4 rooms, with little trouble. There no more SS officers beyond the first one, and I could simply walk through most of the rooms. Occasionally I had to shoot open a locked door that my keys couldn’t open, but this never attracted more attention than what I could shoot my way out of. Some of the rooms had so many guards patrolling that I couldn’t avoid bumping into them, but there was no chance of getting caught while wearing a uniform, as long as I kept my gun holstered. The war plans were here, in a footlocker near the middle.

The next few rooms on the next floor gave me no troubles. There were no armored SS, no locked doors that my keys wouldn’t open, and therefore no need to fight anyone, and no need to search footlockers for supplies. I’d just walk from room to room, searching for the exit. But then I had a close call involving a locked door, and some odd game mechanics.

You see, to open a door, you have to point your gun at it and then press an interact key. The guards don’t mind seeing you with your gun out, but point it in anyone’s face, and they’ll all be alerted. That’s exactly what happened as soon as the door opened, and I mashed the keys in a mad, desperate attempt to mow them down. It worked, but it could have easily failed.

The room to the south had an armored SS, but I could easily slip past his patrol evading his line of sight. The final room on the floor had five patrolling guards that I simply walked past in uniform.

A grainy voice uttered “auf wiedersehen, schweinehund” as I left Castle Wolfenstein with the war plans.

Victory, and a promotion to corporal! To aid replay, Castle Wolfenstein increases the difficulty of replays as you rank up, which is achieved whenever you escape with the plans. At this point, I surreptitiously switched to the cracked DSK so that it would save my rank permanently.

And so I replayed.

I quickly discovered that, despite the new castle layout, the general arrangement of rooms was the same. The contents of each room were different, with different interior corridor layouts, different guard patrols, and different chest positions and contents, but the maps I made of the first castle were perfectly valid here. Stairs were all in the same places, the starting floor was still a single room with no exit except the stairs, the room it led to would always be in the lower-left corner of the second floor, with an exit to the north, the second floor would always be 3x3 rooms, etc.

I also discovered a new and nasty surprise. SS guards can enter rooms just about any time! Unfair, I thought, as at this point I had no means of killing armored guards. But in my fumbling of the controls, I accidentally held him up, and then searched him.

Heh, heh, heh

Deprived of a uniform near the start, and with more guards, I found corporal mode almost unreasonably difficult. And this really stems from a big problem with Castle Wolfenstein. Combat and stealth are both a mess. Controls don’t always work, shooting doesn’t hit all of the time, even at point blank range, the stealth mechanics are inconsistent, with guards sometimes seeing you when it seems like they shouldn’t, and sometimes ignoring you when you walk so close in front of their faces that they ought to be able to smell you. Sometimes their pathfinding works, and sometimes alerted guards just run around uselessly in circles.

Sometimes you walk right into a room with guards already on top of you.

Oh, come on!

Sometimes you throw a grenade at an SS officer and it sails right past and harmlessly explodes behind him.

Really?

And sometimes you can get to cover undetected, and then pop out and waste a team of Nazis, and feel like Clint Eastwood.

We’ve got company. Wait, no we don’t.

But nothing feels consistent, in terms of mechanics. Even the hold-up mechanic sometimes fails, and when it does, arrest is 100% unavoidable.

I must also confess that during this second playthrough, I didn’t play completely fair. The footlockers seemed to take even longer to open than before, shooting them seemed to work less often, and I really didn’t want to attract attention or waste ammo, so I used MAME’s turbo button to speed this up.

It took me lots of tries, but with persistence, and diligent note-taking on my map, I was able to escape again with the plans, and reach sergeant rank.

With sergeant rank, I hit a wall. Repeated failures, most of them feeling like the game was cheating, wore on me. So many times, an alerted guard would walk into my gun, and instead of throwing his hands up and shouting Kamerad!, he’d shout Kaputt and arrest me. Or I’d miss at point blank range – instant Kaputt. Or an SS nowhere near me would shout Achtung! while I was weaving through the patrols of the lower ranking guards. Kaputt.

After hours of this, and all the while unable to find the war plans despite searching every chest of every room (and thank MAME for the turbo button), I reached the final room, which had two unavoidable SS officers, and I was out of grenades. Hours even later, I was able to reach the final room fully loaded and have everything cooperate – the controls, the guard behavior, the aiming – to blow them away with some grenades, and to finally search the room.

The war plans weren’t here! I left the room, escaped the castle, received no promotion, and saw no point in continuing. My patience for this was kaputt.

I really wanted to like this game better. It’s the kind of game that’s legendary, and yet, I suspect, played by few who sustain its reputation. Wikipedia’s description of the gameplay is rife with inaccuracies and even references features that don’t exist. I love stealth games, and hoped to see and appreciate it as a progenitor of the genre, but its baffling design decisions made me hate it. Why did Warner think it would be a good idea to make the computer have a virtual seizure every time you bump into anything? I expect this was influenced by the lethal walls in Berzerk, but Berzerk had smooth, responsive controls, and Castle Wolfenstein, performing at its best, doesn’t. Why should footlockers take so damned long to open, when opening all of them is practically a requirement for finding the war plans? Why isn’t there a better way to holster your gun, when it’s so easy to accidentally blow your cover with your gun out? This, combined with the ridiculous necessity to point your gun at footlockers to open them or take their things, is a frequent nuisance, and at least once was a game ruiner.

I would have liked to see stealth be a little more reliable and useful, and perhaps the uniforms a little less useful (though granted, the higher prevalence of SS officers in later difficulties would take care of that in a hurry). Maybe the tedious search for the war plans could have been alleviated if guards’ keys could open footlockers, or better yet, if you could have interrogated held-up guards for the war plans’ location (and in Escape! fashion, sometimes they’d lie or refuse to answer).

The game did grow on me over time, especially once I decided to use MAME’s turbo key. Between uniforms’ invisibility and the turbo key, it actually became easy. On occasion I’d screw up and have an exciting firefight on my hands, and also on occasion the SS would show up and completely change the rules of the game. But as the game got harder, and SS guards more frequent, I came to hate it again. Between bad controls, inconsistent gameplay mechanics, and random layouts that frequently provide no chance of pulling off a stealthy approach, the game became frustrating when it wasn’t boring.

Before writing all this, I imagined that I might reach the final rank (Field Marshal) and post a video of a victory at the highest difficulty. That’s not going to happen now, and such videos actually do exist right now (from these I learned, too late, that you can yoink armor off the SS when holding them up) but there’s something else I’d like to discuss instead. Castle Wolfenstein was home to one of the first computer game mods, Castle Smurfenstein. It’s not, contrary to some reports, the first of its kind, or even the first by its own developers, who had previously developed Dino Smurf as a mod for Dino Eggs, also on the Apple II.

Castle Smurfenstein isn’t much more than a graphics and sound hack, but it’s a landmark nevertheless. And there doesn’t seem to be any footage on Youtube, so I’ve recorded a session to fill that niche. And I’ve turboed through the many footlocker openings. Good lord there are so many.

Note that you need to emulate the Apple //e to play this properly, because it uses lowercase fonts, which the Apple ][+ doesn’t support.

Enjoy! If you don’t feel like watching the entire thing (and I can’t really blame you), be sure to watch the last minute or so. It’s worth it. There's also a strange Easter egg at the 10:40 mark, and a fight involving an SS Smurf at the 12:45 mark.



Here’s a general map of Castle Wolfenstein, made with the assumption that the starting floor is high up and the stairs all go down. I find that this makes more topological sense than the manual’s claim that you start on the lowest floor – how would you leave the castle from five stories up? This map works across all possible castle layouts, and works in Smurfenstein too.

Games 96-97: Maze Game & Escape!

The next game on the whaling log is Castle Wolfenstein, designed at Muse Software by Silas Warner, whose earliest game credits were on PLATO, when it came to Indiana University in 1972. I’ve already covered his oldest extant game, Conquest, an early variant of Empire, which originated as an RTS-like game. Conquest may well be the only record of that early iteration.

Warner was among the earliest adopters of the Apple II computer when it was released in 1977. In 1978, he, along with two friends that he met while employed by CDC, founded Muse Software as an Apple II developer and distributer. Warner’s debut title for Muse was a simple 16KB BASIC title (as so many early personal computer games were) called Maze Game. A few months later, he released an expanded version called Escape!

Game 96: Maze Game

This game requires paddle controllers to play. I used my Atari paddles, but if you’re playing and don’t have any, you may want to bind an analog joystick to the paddle inputs. Go to File->Show Tab Menu->Input (this machine) to access this.

After the title screen, Maze Game lets you adjust some game parameters. The most important one being the maze size, which can be anywhere from 3x3 to 18x18, but also lets you enable or disable some difficulty-affecting options.

Regardless of what options you pick, the maze is then generated for you on the screen. A big maze can take a few minutes.

Then you’re dropped into the maze and given a 3D view.

Footsteps indicate a path already traveled.

I imagine that the 3D perspective here must have been influenced by the wireframe view we’ve seen before in PLATO games. Here, however, not only do we get solidly colored walls, but we actually get smooth forward movement that simulates walking forward one step at a time, or at least we get movement about as smooth as we can expect 40x40 graphics to look. Reportedly, Richard Garriott was influenced by this game to give Akalabeth a 3D perspective, but it’s interesting that his approach wound up more closely resembling the wireframe grid-movement PLATO games that he likely never saw.

The paddle controls are stupid, but they work. By default, MAME binds these to the mouse, which won’t work all that well, so I’d suggest you rebind to an analog joystick (or use actual paddles). In the maze, you automatically move forward. If the paddle is turned left, then you will take any left-turn passages. If turned right, then you will take any right-turn passages. And if it’s in a neutral position, then you won’t take any turns. Therefore, when you see an upcoming turn that you want to take, you have to turn the paddle in that direction before reaching the intersection. And you can turn 180 degrees by pressing the button on the paddle. This is probably the best control scheme possible for this game with paddles, but keyboard controls would have been more logical.

There’s really not that much more I can say about the game. Having the map visible at the start makes it kind of easy, though, and I’m surprised Warner didn’t have an option to hide it from you. Once I mastered the controls, I restarted and set everything to be as difficult as possible, while recording it. Actual gameplay starts at 5:40, and it took me about five minutes to solve the maze.

Game 97: Escape!

This game has some nice cassette cover art with instructions on its reverse.

Scan by brutaldeluxe.fr

Scan by brutaldeluxe.fr

I couldn't get saving and loading to work as intended via the cassette drive, and save states just made MAME crash. Not a huge deal; one can reasonably finish this game in a sitting.

Unlike Maze Game, Escape! gives you no options. Instead, an unseen abettor gives you some tips.

Then once the maze is built, we’re dumped into the 3D view.

Controls are now keyboard-based, and better for it. Enter moves you forward one grid-square’s distance, but the transition is still the smooth, step-by-step animation seen in Maze Game.

I started exploring the maze, mapping out my surroundings.

At random moments, creepy looking people will show up.

Our abettor warned us that he might be a truther (is there a better word for one who never lies?), a liar, or a sometimes-liar.

Each question may only be asked once. Question 3 may provoke the following responses:

• I always tell the truth.
• Sometimes I tell the truth.
• I always lie.
• I’m not allowed to answer that.

While these answers can, with simple Boolean logic, rule out the possibility that the stranger is a truther or a liar, you can never rule out the possibility of being a sometimes-liar, which means you can never trust any answers to the other two questions.

I asked question 3 first, and he said “sometimes,” which rules out the possibility of him being a truther. You can't ask the same question twice. He said I’m heading east, and I had no idea if this was true or not. Lastly, he offered me a pass, claiming it was good, which I declined, not trusting him.

Another, who claimed he always lied, offered me a map, which I accepted. It could either be correct, or it could be reversed top-to-bottom, and either way, it would be useful.

From this map, I concluded that I was in the bottom-right corner, that the map I was given was inverted, and that the very top row of cells was omitted from the map. I plotted my escape route.

Soon, I encountered a guard who took my pass.

Another encounter said “I always tell the truth” and “You are facing north” (I was). He offered me a new pass, claiming guards would accept it, which I decided to take. I couldn’t rule out the possibility that he he sometimes lied, but odds were he was telling the truth, and besides, having a bad pass was no worse than having no pass at all.

At an intersection ahead, another guard took my pass. The next few encounters all either offered me bad compasses or nothing, and eventually I encountered another guard, who spared me, and even gave me a free pass.

I kept moving toward the exit, ignoring the random people who had nothing I wanted. The next guard I encountered confiscated my pass, and just as I was near the exit, a final guard wasn’t so kind.

A prequel to Castle Wolfenstein, perhaps?

Then the game crashed.

No big deal. Typing “RUN” will restart the game, and at this point I had a pretty good idea how the game worked.

I tried again, and once again, was able to pinpoint my position on the first map I received, which was correct this time. I had once again started in the lower-right corner, facing north, and executed my escape route.

The only challenge was determining whether to accept passes from random people or not. It was really just a question of probability – my starting pass was guaranteed legit, so it would be stupid to replace it, but it didn’t last very long. And once it was taken away, even a dodgy pass would be better than none, so it made sense to accept even when it seemed fishy. The only difficult question would be when to replace a pass, and then it was just a question of determining which person seemed more trustworthy. If a guy said “I always tell the truth” and also correctly told me which direction he was facing, then I figured (making several assumptions about how the game works) an 80% chance he was a truther, and a 10% chance that he was a sometimes-liar but would tell the truth about the pass anyway.

Alas, a few steps from the end, I was caught passless again.

A third attempt in, I explored for a fairly long time, never receiving any gifts except for a bad compass, and eventually got arrested without a pass.

On my fourth attempt, I once again got a map before too long had passed, and once again located my position, again in the lower-right of it, but got arrested shortly after without a pass.

The fifth attempt was successful. As before, I was offered a map and determined I was on the lower-right. The path to the exit wasn’t terribly long. I encountered many people, but ignored them all – I needed nothing. About 75% of the way toward the exit, a guard took my pass, and a few steps later, another one showed up but spared me (and gave me a new pass).

I made it out without any further hassle.

These are, frankly, rather poor games. Maze Game is fine for what it is, but it isn’t much. The smoothly-moving 3D perspective and surprisingly good controls on the ill-suiting paddles are the only things even slightly interesting about it.

Escape! tries to add some much-needed depth, but the concepts are kind of half-baked. As far as I can tell, you always start in the southeast of the map and always start facing north, making it rather easy to find your way out once you get a map, inverted or not. The knights-and-knaves logic puzzle element is deeper than what meets the eye – it’s really a Monty Hall probability problem in disguise – but most of the time the random people are just interruptions who aren’t offering anything you’d want to take.

And ultimately, success or failure is too dependent on a luck factor that you have no way to influence or respond to. Luck isn’t always a bad thing – games like Tetris would be pretty boring without randomness - but if Escape! throws two guards at you in a row without giving you a chance to get a pass in between them, and the second guard isn’t feeling merciful, then you lose, and there’s nothing you can do to affect these odds except to finish the maze as quickly as possible. Even with perfect play, your speed is still going to depend heavily on the maze layout and on how soon you are offered a map, which are both purely random occurrences.