Last Week's Games: Dungeon Master and Cluckles' Adventure

This week has been extremely busy for me for all sorts of different reasons and I haven’t had anywhere near as much time as I usually have to play games. But I found time to have a quick go on one or two games; a new game for me that’s actually an old classic, and a relatively new game that looks like an old classic…

My new game for this week is Dungeon Master. This is an early roleplaying game in which you play a Wizard’s apprentice trying to guide four heroes around a dungeon in order to win the Firestaff (I think) and save your master. This style of game is quite common for such franchises as Might and Magic, and the nearest I’ve ever played to this before is Legend of Grimrock. I quite like the style of it, but my word, it is hard…

Strewth, I'm going to have to fight this at some point...

This game was originally released in 1987 (presumably I’m playing the 1989 DOS release but from what I understand, they’re virtually identical) and harks back to a time where you were expected to make your own maps, write down the combinations of buttons that successfully cast spells, and know the strengths and weaknesses of all of the 24 available heroes. I’m not saying it can’t and shouldn’t be done, but don’t forget that back in the day, games could have their difficulty increased by arbitrarily forcing you to take responsibility for your progress outside of the main mechanics. Most games managed with a password, but if you come back to a save file after three or four months and you can’t remember how to do the spells, you’re pretty stuffed. Thankfully I can run the game in a window and have an online-available map in front of me, as well as the part of the instruction book that at least purports to tell me what all the spell syllables supposedly mean. As games went on, we developed ways of storing that information in the structure of the game itself, and it makes for a far more streamlined experience – but it’s interesting to see where the structure for these ideas came from.

Dungeon Master is a difficult game to get my head around but I’d be willing to give it a few more goes. The combat is fiddly and unintuitive, but it’s meant to be and I think it creates one of the core facets of the experience. I need to remember to save it every now and then, as this game was released well before autosave was a thing, and I’ve lost nearly an hour of play by blundering into a room full of Mummies and not having the wit or resources to deal with them. We’ll see what happens with it.

Just in case we need reminding:
It's a chicken with a sword. A sword.

My other game for this week is Cluckles’ Adventure. This was a gem I discovered last year where you play as a chicken with a sword. There’s not much I can say about this game that I haven’t already, but I will re-iterate a point I think this game makes very well: You can have all the graphics, presentation, celebrity endorsements, well-written plots and budget you want, but nothing’s going to quite replace a consistent art style, good level design and a solid core gameplay loop. If you want a platforming game that will remind you why you got in to video games in the first place, please give this one a go.

After I’d finished whatever nonsense I was up to on any given day last week, I found myself with very little motivation to get my paints out. I built the remaining Chaos Space Marines in the box I started a few weeks ago and sprayed them black, but that’s as far as I got with any hobby games this week.

As it happens, I’m not expecting to have much more time this week, as I’m expecting to be out all day for the next several days. I’ll carry on with some of the long-form campaigns if I possibly can, but more likely I’ll be filling a few spare minutes with games that can be beaten quite quickly. Nothing wrong with that – it’s just a case of time management.

Last Week's Games: Heroquest, Dark Souls, Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes and Open TDD

Near to the start of this week I found myself wondering about the video games that have been put out under a Games Workshop license. I’ve owned, borrowed and played some of them in the past and for the most part I enjoyed them, but there are more out now than I’ve played. I downloaded some of the earlier games now classed as “Abandonware;” games that are no longer supported by their publishers and, provided no one else has the rights to it, are available to legally download for free. I toyed with the idea of trying to obtain them all, and do a whole series of blogs on Games Workshop-licensed video games, but one thing at a time!

Those slightly-differently textured floor tiles
are rock falls. Who knew?

So the first game that I tried was the DOS version of HeroQuest. Games Workshop are known these days for their flagship franchises, Warhammer and Warhammer 40000, but back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were producing all sorts of games and this was one of them. I never played it since it had been and gone long before I started showing any interest in the hobby, but I had a look at the video game to see if it was any good. First impressions are of dungeon-bashing with a dice mechanic. You’re on a grid of squares featuring rooms and corridors, and you roll a twelve-sided dice to see how far you can move on a turn. You’re allowed one action per turn, during which you can attack an enemy if one is there, which uses a six-sided dice system, or search the room for treasures and secret areas. The latter is necessary to get through certain sections of the game. You can play as a Barbarian, Dwarf, Elf or Mage, the idea being that you can have up to four players playing at the same time as per the board game. I’m unlikely ever to touch the multiplayer functionality; because even if I could find three other people willing to play a DOS game released in 1992, for some reason DOSBox will only run in a window about an eighth of the size of the screen – and I’m playing on a laptop.

I’ve enjoyed games like this in the past, and I feel I should be enjoying Heroquest a lot more than I am. There’s nothing wrong with it, and to be fair I shouldn’t necessarily expect all that much from a 1992 Dos game. But for games with random number generation mechanics to work, they really have to make sure the stakes are high when it happens, and offer meaningful consequences for success and failure. I’m not saying Heroquest doesn’t do that – but I haven’t seen it yet.

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing Dark Souls again. I’d got a way in to it as a Deprived, but I’d spread the skill points I’d acquired far too thinly, and I was stuck on the Bell Gargoyle without the mobility to deal with it. So I started the game again as a thief, and I’m actually doing a lot better, putting most of my points into Dexterity and playing with low damage, but high mobility and critical hits.

I’m continuing to enjoy Puzzle Quest: Marvel Super Heroes; there’s a lot of fun in finding out how each of the character’s powers work so that you know what you have to do to build up an attack. This is almost essential if you’re not relying on micro-transactions, because you need to know which characters can affect the enemies or the board as well as do the damage. Sometimes it can be frustrating but it’s more fun than simply throwing money at a game in order to get through it!

Great to have a cityscape like this...

Also on Sunday after I got snowed in I had a marathon session on Open TTD, an open-source game based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I don’t play this game very often but when I do, I get into the ‘just one more turn’ mentaility that often comes with playing games like Civilisation – and it’s not even a turn-based game. Seeing your transport network influencing the development of the world around it is a pleasure I find it very difficult to describe!