The Rambo homage will never get old.

Game: 

It seems like you can hardly venture anywhere on the internet without someone who has stronger opinions about video games than, say, abolishing racism without someone complaining about how the Nintendo Wii is a children’s toy drowning in a sea of creatively bankrupt and soulless mini-games.  I’m not necessarily here to debate that (Although video games are essentially children’s toys and we should all just own up to the fact that sometimes that is okay)  but rather to note that this phenomenon is not new or confined to the waggle generation.  But since I have for whatever reason devoted my writing “career” to staying universally positive in regards to everything I write about, I will rephrase this line of thought – Westwood’s Hillsfar is a game that is very much ahead of its time.

Please note that this does not by any stretch of the imagination mean that Hillsfar is a good game.  The game was released after Curse of the Azure Bonds and can ostensibly be played without owning that game, but to do so wouldn’t be missing the point so much as peeling out in your novelty rocket car in the opposite direction of the point, presumably off a cliff and to your death.  You see, Hillsfar is basically an elaborate trainer that allows you to port a character from Pool of Radiance or Curse and subject them to several tedious mini-games, ranging from knife throwing to riding a horse across the worst maintained roads in all of the Forgotten Realms.  Also, lots and lots of breaking and entering, all in the name of adventure.  Your choice of character class determines which guild you work for, which in turn determines what tedious set of mini-games you will play as you wander around Hillsfar and the surrounding area.  The main draw here is that the game gives out boatloads of experience that can be transported into (you guessed it) Curse of the Azure Bonds, making Hillsfar little more than a glorified trainer.  As you can imagine, the lack of both console-based storage and a port of Curse makes the NES port of Hillsfar especially baffling.

 So why did Westwood bother with all the mini-games?  Looking back, that seemed to be a trend in early-90’s computing – taking advantage of the incredible disc space and resolution the PC platform provided by throwing half a dozen or more mini-games at the player to create a more “cinematic” experience.  One doesn’t have to look much further than the handful of universally frustrating “arcade” sections of most Sierra adventure games or pretty much the whole of Cinemaware’s output to see where adding multiple perspectives and modes of gameplay made (at least from a designer’s perspective) a more varied and fully realized game experience.  Not to mention that Hillsfar looks really good.  Despite my distaste for the EGA palette, the game features multiple full-screen tableaus that are incredibly vibrant.

 Unfortunately, the mini-games themselves are a unique combination of dull and completely unintuitive, even with the aid of a manual.  The horse riding required to go anywhere controls well enough, although the bullet hell-levels of debris and arrows are just confusing. Throwing knives is pretty but incredibly dull.  Fighting in the arena is incredibly frustrating and superfluous even by this game’s standard, which is really saying something.  There are more, but the two that are most important are breaking and entering and lockpicking.

You can break into any of the several hundred buildings around Hillsfar anytime you want.  The rewards for doing so are pretty much the same as they are for anything else in this game (that is to say, non-existent and definitely not worth your while) but most missions require you to break into a specific area to find some items or information.  While doing so, guards will immediately find you out and you must bump against any number of random objects or chests to find the exit.  Wait too long and guards will eventually start after you, requiring you to out-maneuver them lest they rub up against you too much and send you straight to the arena mini-game.  Even the most humble thatch hut in the world of Hillsfar hides a labyrinth of teleportation traps and locked treasure chests.  Chances are, your character can just bash the locks on chests anyway, but should you need there is a lockpicking mini-game that can be described as a noble failure.  It seems most modern RPGs include some sort of simulation of the lockpicking process in an attempt to provide added verisimilitude to the virtual thieving experience, but Hillsfar is the first game I am aware of that made it a challenge to the player rather than an algebra problem handled in the background.  Like every other distraction in the game, it’s a tedious and frustrating affair, but it’s still indirectly responsible for the reason you subconsciously flinch when you think about the lockpick breaking sound in a Bethesda game twenty years later.

I’ll confess I didn’t actually complete any of the questlines in Hillsfar (I couldn’t find a cracked copy and using a fake codewheel was easily as frustrating as anything else in the game) but the game deserves some small credit for going out of its way to disguise what it is (a transparent money grab aimed at people who can’t get enough of the Gold Box series) with attempts at innovation.  I cannot fathom a single reason why anyone would want to play Hillsfar this many years after the fact (and can name precious few as to why anyone would want to play it in 1989) but the game at least puts effort into milking the license dry, something that I will come to miss as my time with SSI comes to a close.

Both projects are moving along smoothly, they have just hit some snags due to hitting crunch time in both work and school. Hillsfar should be up on Chronomancy within the next week, and episode 2 of the PSGCast (A Thanksgiving sized feast of banter and snide opinions about the games of 1988) is set to record over the holiday break.

Game: 

Pool of Radiance was a gem that completely redefined how computers could present a roleplaying experience and effectively gave anyone with a personal computer the ability to play Dungeons and Dragons without having to rely on inconveniences like graph paper, funny shaped dice, or friends.  But one of the few flaws it had was that it didn’t tell an especially compelling story.  Sure, the reclamation of New Phlan through systematic genocide was compelling enough, but the free form nature of the game and the limitations of fitting that much of a game onto the PCs of the time didn’t leave much room for nuance.  So it’s understandable that while people were waiting for Curse of the Azure Bonds (the direct Pool of Radiance sequel) that SSI might release a game based on one of the best-selling Dungeons and Dragons novels of all time.  Heroes of the Lance is based on Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first Dragonlance book and the product that arguably solidified TSR’s eighties boom and made the arcane and possibly secretly satanic world of D&D palatable for a wider audience of people that enjoy pleasantly brisk fantasy novels but aren’t necessarily interested in weird pointy dice and lots of tables.  It’s been well over a decade since I have actually read a Dragonlance novel, but Autumn Twilight is pretty much the essence of a D&D game put in literary form – a bunch of characters with last names that evoke their dominant personality trait meet at a tavern and are driven by a literal Plot Device to go an ancient ruin and change the world in a suitably epic manner (in this case, bring back the gods of the world).  Of course, this is just the start of their adventures together, and how all of these people know one another is explored in roughly a hundred or so other novels of wildly varying quality, of which I read half or so between the ages of 12 and 15.

It’s nothing that will change the literary canon, but the novel is pleasant enough and, since it was based on an actual D&D campaign, naturally lends itself to the episodic format of an action game.  Despite this, Heroes of the Lance usually pops up on X Worst Games EVER lists whenever a website needs to get its ad views up.  Unfortunately, that’s a reputation that isn’t entirely deserved.  While Heroes of the Lance isn’t a good game (far from it!) it is a wildly misunderstood one.  For one thing, the version most people are familiar with is the NES release by Pony Canyon in 1991, three years after the PC release.  Three years was positively an aeon for technology back then, and a straight port of a mediocre PC action game from 1988 naturally didn’t have any favors in the post Mario Bros. 3 landscape.

Heroes of the Lance is also a relic from an era where PC action games had very little interest in keeping up with their console and arcade counterparts in.  Games were usually developed across several different computers at once, and the standard was to assume the home consumer was working with a joystick that had barely changed from the standard of the Atari 2600.  But this is also the era where the delightfully inane rivalry between console and computer game crowds really came unto its own.  To the personal computing crowd, console games where simplistic, garish affairs where you were rewarded by pressing B with murder in an agreeably Pavlovian fashion, while the personal computer was where one went for a more cerebral and evocative experience (that usually meant hitting the joystick button and being rewarded by murder).  Heroes of the Lance comes from this era, and so while the NES crowd saw an incredibly ugly platformer with controls that almost openly defied the player, they were missing out on the fact that it was in fact a very complex game (that happened to be a platformer with incredibly ugly graphics and controls that almost openly defied the player).

For one thing, it is a game that expects you to have read the manual, if not the book it more-or-less faithfully adapts.  If you are just going into Heroes blind, you are going to be left wondering why the frizzy-haired lady is punched to death by an angry naked little person within five seconds of pressing start. However, armed with the power of literacy, you’ll learn that:
a) Her name is Goldmoon, and the goal is to keep her alive at all costs (she is required to beat the game, and is also the only person that can raise dead party members or cast the only healing spell actually worth a damn)
b) The angry naked little person is a “gully dwarf”, a race of covetous and filthy miscegenated dwarves that seem to embody any number of uncomfortable stereotypes from the early 20^th century, and
c) Unless you immediately move Goldmoon to the back of the first row, where she can actually cast the only healing spell worth a damn but only take a fraction of damage from the angry naked little people, you are probably going to make the game unwinnable.

While Heroes is a side-scrolling action game, the simulates full party combat by having the entire front row take damage in the middle of a fight, but also requiring any spell casters to be in the front to cast spells. Mercifully, Raistlin (the first of hundreds of characters to twist the melancholy hero trope of Conan the Barbarian into whiny, self-absorbed “anti-heroes”) and his arcane magic are basically useless, so he and everyone who isn’t just your three strongest fighters and Goldmoon can be mercifully shunted to the back row, where they can be safely forgotten while you blunder about the maze of Xak Tsaroth.

And blunder you will, because the controls of Heroes are a daring experiment in making the player’s actions feel like they have heft and gravity.  Every move you make is slow and deliberate, and as a hold-over from the dark joystick days, most actions require you to hold the NES d-pad at a very unpleasant diagonal angle to do things like “jump” or “stab the angry little person currently punching your crotch to death”.  To people used to the smooth, devil may care physics of Mario and Sonic, this must have felt like a platforming adventure starring a cement mixer and it’s seven cement mixer friends. But again, that is looking at the game from the perspective of a console owner in 1991. To a PC owner in 1988, the sparse graphics were standard fare for the time, and the deliberate pace really let the atmosphere sink in as you deliberately mapped your way through Xak Tsaroth. Does that make it a good game by those standards? Reviews from the time seem to think it was decent enough, which I can see.  There are nearly twenty different types of enemies, from the previously mentioned gully dwarves to newborn dragons (these little bits of infanticide are actually the hardest segments of the game, as the game is not screwing around when it comes to simulating having a seven foot tall creature vomit acid on you) and the maze is reasonably large, requiring some mapping or memorization to get through.   The fact that you have to hold up or down at what may or may not be a doorway for nearly a second before you go through makes a lot more sense on a platform where you had to hold up and left to make a running jump over one of Xak Tsaroth’s many bottomless pits. And even in 1991, the last fight against the rightfully peeved mother of all those infants you just stabbed to death is fairly impressive, even if the only real way to beat that fight is to select Goldmoon (hope she is alive!) and have her cast her only non-healing spell worth your time before tossing her staff through the dragon’s heart. Only then can you recover the Discs That Revive all the Gods, or however the book played out.  Provided you aren’t crushed by falling masonry on your slow jaunt over.

Truly, a game from a different era.

Also, a few house-keeping notes:

The first episode of PSGCast is currently in the editing bay. For being the first podcast experience for almost everyone involved, it’s almost listenable. I also completely failed to adhere to my own rule of keeping it under a half hour, so expect something a lot closer to feature length in the near future.

The gentleman behind the excellent indie adventure games site Gnome’s Lair was nice enough to randomly pick me to win a copy of A.I. War, a macro-level strategy game that is excellent and anxiety inducing all at once. That was nice of him, and it also reminded me that I need to update my blogroll.

I played the NES version to completion, but since I couldn’t take screen shots, I just used screencaps from this gentleman’s playthrough of the much more attractive Atari ST version.

Next on the docket is a quick look at Hillsfar, a game that technically comes after Curse of the Azure Bonds, but is really meant to be played before. I still plan on flitting between the SSI and non-SSI games as we go, but I have a big plan for Tower of Doom that has yet to fizzle out, so we’ll see how that goes.

As I had mentioned in the previous post, one of the greatest strengths of Pool of Radiance is that the game offers a huge world to explore while still tying the dozens of areas together with a rudimentary plot.  The problem I ran into with just taking on areas at the order in which the city council requested them is that the game wasn’t necessarily meant to be played this way, and I ended up brute forcing my way through the two most difficult areas in the game while just barely powerful enough to survive.  Had I followed the cluebook closer, I probably would have been able to take the hint about how the graveyard is located on the page before the final castle and saved it for later (or ignored it altogether, like I did a few other areas).  But instead I persevered, despite the fact that half of the monsters in the area can level drain.

Level draining is a bizarre and hateful little ability that may require some explanation. Wights, vampires, mummies, and the rest of the combined Universal/Hammer horror pantheon have attacks that go far beyond merely hurting a character.  Most of them have a chance to inflict diseases when they hit you (which in this game translates to making a character sluggish and unhealable until you have access to a Cure Disease spell) but almost all of them can drain a level of experience upon touching your character.  And in a game where your levels rarely exceed six, this can be a pretty big problem.   And just like the pen and paper game, levels stay drained until you cast a 7^th level Cleric spell, in a game where the maximum spell level is 3^rd.  The way the game gets around this is by plying your characters with Regeneration scrolls, which your Clerics can cast at any level.  But even after reading a fistful of scrolls you still have to spend the 1,000 gold pieces it takes to train back each level lost, one of the few serious uses for money in the game.

Once you clear out Sokal Keep, your party has the option to expand its racial cleansing services to the wilderness surrounding Phlan.  This is where the game starts to feel a lot more like a Dungeons and Dragons game proper, as the encounters become a lot more varied than goblin-variants by the dozens and the areas that you explore gain a lot more character.  Unfortunately, I made the assumption that the Kobold Caves would be the easiest of the areas outside of Phlan, and spent a while throwing myself against the final fight there.  While Kobolds are one of the easiest monsters to fight in Dungeons and Dragons, they often make up for it by being one of the best races at creating traps.  Not coincidentally, the Kobold Cave is one of the few areas in the game that actually utilizes traps, including siege weaponry hidden in the walls to shoot down your wounded characters between waves of combat.  It’s also one of the few wilderness areas that cannot be completed diplomatically, ending in a giant melee against hundreds of kobolds supported by annoyingly tough and regenerating enemies such as trolls and giant boars, both of which can get up after being slain.  Fortunately, at this point you most likely can cast Fireball, which quickly becomes the bread and butter of the party’s Magic-Users, as a well-placed fireball can cook twenty or more enemies.  Unfortunately, there are very few challenges between the Kobold Cave and the end-fight, beyond the genre-standard teleporter maze in one of the other wilderness areas.  By the time you have access to Fireball, the game is pretty much decided in your favor.

That isn’t to say that the other areas are any less interesting.  In fact, the option to diplomatically and/or cleverly solve most areas is honestly refreshing, especially since the alternatives are usually a somewhat arduous fight against hundreds of low level enemies with next to no chance of hitting your Fighters.  Granted, the diplomatic options usually involve fighting waves of Kobolds (again) or 1^st level Thieves, but they at least let the game tell a story at its own pace and build a world that is interesting enough to save.

As most of the auxillary characters will tell you, Phlan is currently conquered by a demon named Tyranthraxus, who is marshaling the various evil races and factions in the area using the titular plot device, the Pool of Radiance.  What exactly the Pool of Radiance does is never strictly defined, but it has let Tyranthraxus (inexplicably not the name of a metal band) succeed in summoning more and more powerful monsters in his service, causing friction amongst the orcs and other races you completely wiped out before you knew all this anyway.  Most of the quests in the wilderness area involve convincing other races to not join Tyranthraxus, which can be accomplished either through politeness or mass-murder.  Eventually, the one city councilman that was given a proper name (and therefore the evil city council member you were vaguely warned about in the beginning of the game) sends you on a diplomatic quest against the Zhentarim – the go-to evil secret society in the Forgotten Realms setting – which ends predictably in a failed assassination attempt against the party and the resultant go-ahead to the end-game.

You can pleasantly complete almost the entirety of the final area (a massive and literal hedge maze) without getting into combat, which at this point is largely an annoyance, by visiting a laundry at the beginning and disguising the party as monsters.  If you play your cards right, you can even recruit Tyranthraxus’ second-in-command to help with the final boss fight, though the lightning bolt wand he wields is completely useless against the bronze dragon Tyranthraxus is possessing, and the AI is too inept to properly use it against the horde of 8^th level fighters you have to slay beforehand.  The last fight is actually pretty difficult, but like most of the encounters that aren’t solved by judicious applications of Sleep and Fireball, both the Fighters and Tryanthraxus are susceptible to the various forms of paralyzation available to your party.  If nothing else, the image of a giant dragon murdering my party one by one until a Stinking Cloud or Wand of Paralyzation stuck so a fighter could casually slit its massive throat is hilarious, but an anti-climactic ending to an otherwise fantastic game.

Of course, once you finish the last boss fight, the game isn’t entirely over.  Your characters are rewarded a ludicrous amount of gems and jewels and there are hints dropped that you may want to max out your levels so you can transfer your party to the next game in the series, which I won’t be doing due to the fact that the optimal party for Pool of Radiance (Cleric/Fighter/Magic-Users) actually hit their racial level cap at the end of the game, leaving them unable to advance much further and ultimately leaving you relatively under-leveled in the sequel.  So instead I liquidated the party’s magical items and jewelry stash, and just hope that Morrissey, Twinbee, Ziggy, Halliburton, Masonry, Eggshell, and the other various characters I had abandoned shortly after the slums can retire comfortably after splitting slightly less than ten tons of platinum coins between them and let a younger, more versatile band of adventurers save the world through a slightly enhanced engine that allows more versatility.

So would I recommend playing Pool of Radiance this far into the 21^st century? Yes, I absolutely would with the caveat of using the cluebook or Game Banshee’s absurdly detailed walkthrough on hand.  But even if you want to play the game without spoilers (which is unquestionably how it was meant to be experienced) there is still a lot of fun to be had in just setting out on an adventure, and figuring out where to go next through trial and often fatal error.  I’d also recommend the Commodore 64 version, which has slightly worse graphics that are only noticeable on the monster close-ups, but has a mercifully muted color palette that is marginally better on the eyes.  Like almost any D&D campaign of note, it has also seen a reinterpretation in the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine that apparently comes highly recommended, though I can’t personally attest to that. But despite the relatively limited tactical scope, Pool of Radiance is absolutely worth a glance as not just a historical curiosity, but as a remarkably solid and well-aged blueprint of what the next fifteen years of computer RPGs would look like.

Game: Pool of Radiance
Year: 1988
System: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons
Setting: Forgotten Realms
Developer: SSI
Publisher: SSI

It’s hard to believe that the PC version of Pool of Radiance came out in 1988.  Not in the negative sense (though most of the non-monster portrait graphics are incredibly ugly, even by the standards of late-80s EGA) but because it’s hard to believe a game so determinately streamlined came out so relatively early in the PC’s transition from a hobbyist machine to a staple of the American home.   The controls are a bit fussy and Strategic Simulations Inc.’s legacy as war-game developers shows at the seams of twenty-minute mid-game tactical battles against dozens of enemies that pose no threat to the party, but Pool of Radiance is very clearly a blockbuster – even this far into the 21^st century.  The game knew it too, and uses the full half a megabyte of RAM it required (a pretty hefty amount back then) to stretch out and offer massive battles and tons of party-building and equipping options while being a (relatively) accurate portrayal of Advance Dungeons and Dragons rules.

When you start the game, the first thing you see after struggling through the incredibly arcane codewheel anti-piracy screen (something you can easily bypass with a hex-editor and the knowledge that there are only a dozen or so actual answers) is the character creation.  You get the standard array of Dungeons and Dragons races to pick from (Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, and the rest of Tolkien’s creatures great and small), even though a bizarre quirk in the game design makes any option besides Elf or Half-Elf the Wrong One.  Pool of Radiance uses a level cap to keep the game within the realms of what a computer can easily simulate.  However, classes in AD&D have asymmetrical experience point requirements to level up, and as a result any character that stays in one class hits their upper limit relatively early in the game.  One of the draws of using a demi-human (any non-human race, for those of you who had better childhoods than me) is that they can multi-class and split their experience between two or three classes.  Typically, these races have upper limits to expansion (there’s a lot to be said about the weirdly casual racism and sexism of Dungeons and Dragons, but this is not and hopefully will never be the place for that) but in a game with a low level cap these are completely ignored.  So the objectively best party is six Fighter/Magic-User/Clerics , and the only race that can be that particular combination are half-elves for whatever reason, which makes the game feel limiting.  Later games would get around this by implementing an experience cap (the aforementioned Fighter/Magic-User/Cleric requires a TON of experience to get to the level cap of 8/6/6) but the fact that the game doesn’t take the limitations of combining classes into account means a party of pretty Elven Fighter/Whatevers is pretty much the way to go.

That being said, there’s more than one valid reason to build whatever party you want.  Thieves are incredibly useful in the first handful of areas, and the first area is pretty much unsurvivable without the assistance of one or more straight-up fighters. But more so than that is that the game is well designed enough that as long as you are smart and patient enough, almost any party can survive anything because of the depth the combat allows. Exploration is a particular delight, as almost the entire city of Phlan is there to die in almost immediately, and the game rarely (if ever) outright screws over the player – an outright novelty in 1989.

But Pool of Radiance’s relative mercy doesn’t mean that it is an easy game.  While you can go almost anywhere from the beginning,  you’ll most likely spend your first few hours being ran through repeatedly while trying to explore the slums of Phlan, the ruined city that your characters are recruited to literally clean up one block at a time.  The game builds its structure and plot from the idea that every single block of the city contains a mission to complete as you try to figure out who is behind the occupation of Phlan, ranging from the esoteric (witnessing an auction) to the standard (door-to-door goblin genocide).  As a result, the story is relatively bare-bones (the main antagonist is openly called The Boss through most of the game) but it still captures the spirit of kicking down a door and killing everything on the other side, which is how quite a lot of people play D&D proper.

The slums deserve special mention because they made me briefly reconsider this entire project.  Like the beginning of most ancient computer RPGs, it’s a brutal affair of throwing characters into a meat grinder and seeing who survives.  Unlike most ancient computer RPGs, the majority of your experience points don’t come from the combat, but from the treasure you find.  If you are playing without a cluebook or walkthrough it’s a long and lonely grind to the second level and the survivability that entails.  In fact, the time it took me to clear out the slums is nearly as much as it took me to clear out the rest of the city put together.  Once you clear out the slums and Sokal Keep (the area with the massive orc fight I made a video of in the previous post), the rest of Phlan is yours to tackle at your leisure.  This is also the point where you may want to start sloughing off your original party for as many multi-classes as you can stand, as single-classes are starting to outlive their usefulness and thieves are only outright required in one optional side-quest that nets you a useful item in exchange for a bit of money, which becomes a very heavy and superfluous resource almost immediately. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are no less than seven types of currency in the game, and each coin weighs 1/10^th of a pound, meaning almost any treasure trove is going to incapacitate you pretty quickly unless you ignore everything less valuable than gold. And even then, you’ll find yourself investing in extravagant jewelry every block like some sort of Kanye West simulator just to make your wealth portable for the very few occasions that you need access to it.

Once you escape the slums, however, the game really opens up. You spend the first half of the game fighting orcs, goblins, and kobolds with a smattering of annoying level-draining undead thrown in, but the layout of Phlan is logical and engaging, and the bare-bones story (supplemented by numbered entries in the Adventurer’s Journal that came with the game, as was the style of the time) is incredibly interesting.  And as I’ve hinted at before, the combat is an utter treat, even when it takes three or four key presses per turn to do even the most basic actions.  The AI is necessarily limited in its scope and tactical ability, but it makes up for that in numbers, leading to one of the first computer RPGs where formation and equipment mattered more than having bigger numbers than the opponent.  From the beginning you spend most combats outnumbered at least two to one against monsters that are at least as powerful as your characters, and the only way to even these fights out are to keep tight formations that keep the enemy from flanking your ranged attackers and to know when to use the very limited amount of spells your casters have between periods of rest.  As a result, combat continually hits that same sweet spot in the pleasure centers of the brain that a particularly skillful move in Advance Wars or a Total War game tickles almost every single turn.

I am currently done with everything one can do within the walls of Phlan and am now exploring the surrounding areas.  It’s a small game in terms of areas to explore, but every location actually makes sense and the quests handed out by the Phlan City Council (a simple but clever bit of fluff to give reason to your series of systematic orc genocide) fill them out agreeably enough.  By the time you reach the wilderness you’ve probably already maxed out the levels of your spell casters, so the game is unafraid to throw all sorts of weird monsters at you.

There will probably be one or two more updates about the game, depending on how big the wilderness and end dungeon are.  Most later games have a chapter structure that will make blocking off posts a lot easier.  I know better than to promise anything as to when these updates will happen, but I imagine I’ll be putting Pool of Radiance to bed pretty soon. From there, I’ve decided to switch between SSI and non-SSI games to prevent burn-out, so the next game on the list is the superlative Capcom brawler Tower of Doom, then back to the SSI side of things for the decidedly less superlative Heroes of the Lance

I like playing old games, but like having structure when playing them:
This is pretty self-explanatory.  I wrote myself into a corner with Pre-Sonic Genesis, because there were just too many similar games and my need to not be negative about any of them killed my enthusiasm for it. That’s why the PSGcast is happening – I have friends with opinions at least as interesting as my own, and I had been trying to find a way to transition the site to something beyond text for a while now.  But now that the PSGcast is set into motion (at the very least, I’ve invested too much money in it to not make it happen) I have that itch to write long-form essays about obscure old games again.  And this is a project with a definite end point. There are roughly sixty games to work through, discounting retired online games and mobile phone releases, and it’s something I can tackle at a leisurely pace

Dungeons and Dragons has always fascinated me:
To the surprise of absolutely no one reading this, I was a pretty good and sheltered child.  As such, Dungeons and Dragons ended up being my form of early teenage rebellion.  I had grown up hearing that it was basically a straight line from rolling up a wizard to plunging a sacrificial dagger into your heart to usher in the epochal reign of Asmodeus, so the fact that it just looked like a dorky good time where you pretend to be a dwarf with your equally dorky friends was somewhat confusing.  Especially since I read a lot as a pre-teen, and an awful lot of that reading came from a giant box of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance paperbacks my uncle gave me.

That being said, I actually have very little experience with playing the game.  I bought a Players Handbook and a supplement (I believe it was the Complete Thief handbook) for my 13^th birthday, but couldn’t find a regular game.  Around the time third edition came out, my friends were very into the game, but I had already discovered (in order) Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation and girls, and as such had very little time to pretend to be a dwarf with my equally dorky friends.   My actual table-top experience pretty much ends there, short of an abortive attempt to get into it with my drinking buddies that ended when we invited someone who actually knew what he was doing while also embodying every single negative stereotype about fans of role-playing games.  Again, my enthusiasm for pretending to be a dwarf was pretty much extinguished.

Then my late twenties came along, and I found myself pretty unenthusiastic about doing anything someone could accidentally misconstrue as exciting.  I also came across a pretty large stack of old sourcebooks and have since then had a pretty solid understanding of the game and setting from the many times that I want to read but don’t actually want to learn.

There’s a lot of variety in the franchise, and not all of it is good:
I like being positive about the things I write about. It’s both a challenge and much more satisfying than snarking on something old and broken.  Unfortunately, there’s really no getting around the fact that at least half the games I’m covering are going to be awful.  I’m going to be doing my best to complete games as they come along, but I can’t make any promises as to a schedule (I am halfway through Pool of Radiance as I write this, which is  the arbitrary starting point)

Arbitrary starting point? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of going in chronological order?
That’s a question, not a reason, but I’ll roll with it. There are some Dungeons and Dragons games that came out before Pool of Radiance. In fact, there were four official games and roughly half a dozen or so unofficial mainframe games in the seventies, though those are largely lost to time. Two of the official releases are electronic handheld games that I am largely uninterested in hunting down (one is a clone of Hunt the Wumpus, a game fondly remembered for the sheer novelty of being an electronic game, and the other is a two player maze deal), and two are Intellivision releases.  Unfortunately, I cannot get an Intellivision emulator to play nice with my computer, and I imagine that when I see the same uncle indirectly responsible for this whole fiasco over the holidays he still has access to his old Intellivision and these two games.  Those two games deserve a closer look, but I’d like for them to have some context.

So how am I going to handle this? That’s a pretty good question, honestly.  I am probably going to talk about each game in one to a dozen posts, talking about the narrative and relative strengths of the game.  Pool of Radiance is going to be in two or three posts, depending on how involved the end of the game is. I know myself and my very hectic real life too well to commit to any one format or schedule, and I’ll be experimenting with the prompt as I go along.  Expect the Pool of Radiance post in a few days, and here is one of those self-same experiments to get an idea of what we are getting into (be sure to turn annotations on, as those explain what the hell is going on there)

Strategic Simulations Inc:
1988:

Pool of Radiance: Part One Part Two
Heroes of the Lance

1989:

Curse of the Azure Bonds
Dragons of Flame
Hillsfar
War of the Lance

1990:

 Secret of the Silver Blades
DragonStrike
Champions of Krynn

1991:

Eye of the Beholder
 Shadow Sorcerer
Pools of Darkness
Death Knights of Krynn
Gateway to the Savage Frontier
Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon 

1992:

 Order of the Griffon
Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun
The Dark Queen of Krynn
Treasures of the Savage Frontier
Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace

1993:

Eye of the Beholder III: Assault on Myth Drannor
Fantasy Empires
Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures
Dark Sun: Shattered Lands
Stronghold
Dungeon Hack

1994:

Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager
Slayer
Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession
Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse
Menzoberranzan

1995:

Ravenloft: Stone Prophet

1996:

DeathKeep

Everyone Else:
1993:

Tower of Doom
1996:

Blood and Magic
Shadow over Mystara
Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft

1997:

Descent to Undermountain

Birthright: The Gorgon’s Alliance

1998:

Baldur’s Gate

1999:

Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Planescape: Torment

2000:

Icewind Dale
Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter
Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal
Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance

2002:

Neverwinter Nights
Icewind Dale II
Eye of the Beholder (GBA)

2003:

Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide
Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes
The Temple of Elemental Evil

2004:

Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II
Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (Game Boy Advance)
Neverwinter Nights: Kingmaker

2005:

Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard

2006:

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
Neverwinter Nights 2

2007:

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer

2008:

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir

2009:

Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate

2011:

Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale

Note: This list doesn’t include the various premium modules of Neverwinter Nights, but as best as I can tell there is no way to purchase those. If anyone has any hints either way to that regard, please feel free to let me know in the comments