Akalabeth - Won!

Tragedy strikes

Dear reader: I failed, because I am a weak man. I told you I was trying to beat the game the long way, and killing a gremlin was next on the to-do list. Sadly, I did not see a single one, despite going all the way to floor 10 (when these asshats were supposed to spawn starting on level 5). I think it's probable that they just spawned in some remote corner of the levels that I somehow managed to avoid in my mapping journey; regardless, I overextended, and fell to a group of monsters on level 10.

Undeterred, I rolled a new character (picking a higher wisdom stat, so that I could start from the gremlin quest or close to it), and looked into a different dungeon; once again, no gremlin, despite delving all the way down to level 8. Trying to not overextend, I made my way back to the surface and tried a third different dungeon; believe me, o incredulous reader, that there were no gremlin in that dungeon either (at least in the first 6-7 levels). Since fourth time is the charm, at the fourth different dungeon I tried to explore, I finally found a gremlin on level seven. Or rather, IT found ME, and by the time I noticed that among the pack of monster was one such horrendous creature, 99% of my food my gone, and I was destined to die of starvation assaulted by a pack of monsters.

It is at this time that I turned to the dark powers of the magic amulet.

What is magic anyways?

The magic amulet is an attack option we did not discuss last time. That's partly because the fighter cannot control its power, and will trigger a random effect every time (though the randomness can somewhat be controlled, see below). On the other hand, if you activate the amulet as a mage, you'll see four possible options appear.

The magic amulet options for mages

"Ladder-up" and "ladder-dn" are two very practical spells, letting you teleport to the same square in the floor just below or just above. It's especially great for exit strategies, after you've killed the latest enemy in Lord British's long list. The "kill" option is a misnomer, and is more akin to a magic missile-style attack, which can hit or miss and only does a certain amount of damage; still, given that mages can only uses axes, it's a welcome ranged option. The real interesting stuff happens when you choose the "bad??" option,  in which case one of three random options will be chosen: either the spell backfires, you turn into a toad, or you turn into a lizard man. In the first case, it just means you lose half your health. It's annoying, especially if your health numbers in the thousands, but is manageable if it doesn't happen a bunch of times in a row. The worst outcome by far is the one where the amulet turns into a toad, as all your starts except HP get reset to the fixed value of 3. That makes it essentially impossible to successfully hit anyone, minimizes the damage you do, and maximizes the damage you take; you might as well reboot the system and try again with a new character at this point. 

But in the rare occasion that the amulet turns you into a lizard man, your character essentially hits the jackpot, and sees all of his stats (HP included) be multiplied by 2.5 (rounded down). Assuming you followed my advice and got a character with each stat in the teens or early tweens, you now have a powerhouse with 40-60 strength, dexterity, and stamina, that can kill enemies with one hit consistently and takes very little damage in return. The lizard man transformation is also the secret to breaking the game entirely: if you repeat the transformation successfully, the stat boost compounds, and with enough successes you can max out all your stats to 9999, at which point nothing in the game can really hurt you anymore.

The downside of using the amulet as a mage is that there is a chance an amulet will break when you use it (which does not happen to the dumb fighter), so you need to store up on a few of them if you're hoping to have a guaranteed path out of a dungeon.

How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the lizard

Since I was not relishing the prospect of building up yet another fighter to make him strong enough (and with enough food) to kill the gremlin I was missing, I said "screw it" and tried to brute force a lizard transformation. Since the fighter cannot control the amulet, there were a lot of trial and error runs where you enter a dungeon, spam the amulet as much as you can, and if you die from damage or turn into a toad reset and take an extra step in a different direction before spamming the amulet again. Within 15 minutes and a handful of restarts, my fighter had gone through the lizarding process, and could kill enemies in the first few levels with his bare hands. With his increased charisma, Lord British decided to immediately skip to the last level of the quest, and ask me to kill a Balrog. I had carefully mapped the first dungeon I explored up to level 9, which I knew contained a Balrog, so it was just a matter of getting some more food, going down, and finally claiming my lordly title.

The underwhelming victory screen

...Except Lord British is being a twat and telling me that yeah, I'm a knight now, and I can keep playing, but there is no point. I should try playing at difficulty level 2 though. Thus shamefully concludes my attempt at beating the game; it is doable, yes, but all it takes is a small wrench in your wheel (a gremlin or thief you missed, or going just a little too deep for your current hit rate) and you're dead and your run is done.

Ultimately, playing as a fighter without using the amulet is a masochistic pursuit. If your stats (especially dexterity or stamina) are too low, you will not be able to hit (potentially at all!) enemies in the lower levels, and since that's where daemons and balrogs lie you could literally start a game that is a lost cause from the beginning. If extra hard runs are your thing, Akalabeth will give you something to chew on; otherwise you're much better off playing as a mage.

You're a Wizard, Nic

The first success was not gonna be the last time I played the game. The retroachievements set (see below) had some more challenges, so I decided to beat the game as a Mage at difficulty level 10, but I would allow myself the option to use the Lizard Man trick to guarantee success. It's a good thing I did too! Raising the level from 1 to 10 meant that the enemies hit equally as hard, but had A LOT OF HEALTH, so much so that even on the first level of a dungeon you'd have to hit a thief or a rat multiple times, and they were more prone to run away. I quickly realized that there would be no way to win the game without embracing our inner lizard selves; trouble was one single lizard transformation would not be enough to make it down the deepest pits where the Balrogs lie. At the same time, trying to tempt fate with the amulet multiple times can lead to a backfire after the first successful transformation; or worse, a toadification which would mess up our lizard plan.

That's where we used the not-so-random RNG to our advantage. As I said in the previous post, the random features of the game are entirely determined by the "lucky number" you pick at the beginning. That's not just the location of the castle and dungeons, or which monsters spawn where, but even which random effect the "Bad??" option on the amulet will give you. Or rather, the cycle of outcomes you will run into after a certain number of actions (steps/attacks) in the dungeon. So if you luck into a lizard man transformation after a couple of steps into a dungeon, you can head out, head back in, take the same steps and use the amulet again, and PRESTO! infinite lizard men transformations and max stats are available to you. At that point (and hoping you went to talk to Lord British before utterly breaking the game) the only thing that can mess up your knighthood is not paying attention to a nearby gremlin.

With an infallible plan, I went in, mercilessly slaughtered a bunch of monsters, and reported to Lord British the death of a Balrog. I was a little disappointed to see that there is no special "you won at level 10" screen, rather His Britishness suggests you try the game at the (non-existent) level 11.

Level 11? Sure! Just tell me how to actually access it though...

Having triumphed over all obstacles, and having mastered all retroachievements for the game. it was time to hang our sword on the mantle, get some time to reflect, and figure out just how good of a game this actually was.

Retroachievements watch

The set for the game is pretty straightforward: clear every step of the main questline, beat the game as both a mage and a fighter, beat the game at level 10, and trigger the lizard transformation. You are likely to run into most of these in the course of natural gameplay, with the exception of the level 10 run, and potentially some of the early monsters if you start with a high wisdom score. As long as you're planning to use the lizard trick for the fighter too (trickier because of its lack of control of the amulet), the set is pretty easy to master.

Mastery achieved

Time for the RELATIVE

Now that I've described my experience with the game, it's time to discuss its RELATIVE rating of the game. Go see the original post about Chrono reviewes for a reminder of how the RELATIVE works.

• Game setting: 2
• It’s generic fantasy, and only the manual includes some information about the world. Not one of the game’s strengths. 
• Avatar: 3
• Besides name and class, there is little for you to sink your teeth in. Stats are random but can be rerolled ad libitum, so there is no reason not to keep hitting the button until you get the stats you want. 
• Interaction: 2
• Lord British is the only NPC and the only interaction is a very basic flag, checking whether you killed the monster or not. Hidden areas are not hidden, they are just annoying. 
• Quest: 2
• There is a barebones main quest line. No significant payoff from the ending, no real plot at all. 
• Combat and difficulty: 3
• There is some variation in combat (different weapons, axes can be thrown) but it is very dull, and boils down to using your strongest weapon. Shields are literally pointless, and the difficulty is too steep to play the game the long way, and completely busted if you use the lizard man trick. 
• Inventory and interface: 1
• You can check your inventory, but there is no way of interacting with it. Some info missing from the interface. Basically just gets the point for having such a thing. 
• Economy: 2
• Once you get into the first dungeon and kill a couple of enemies, money stops being an issue. After a couple of trips, you have enough copies of every item (including ones you can’t use) that you just spend 30 seconds hitting the F button to dump the rest in food. This kingdom must be extremely rich; shame that everyone is dead. 
• Graphics: 3 
• Passable for the time. Lack of sound is a bit of a bummer. My biggest issue is that most dungeon tiles look identical and it’s way too easy to get lost. Monster drawings are unique enough you can easily tell them apart. 
• Playing and replaying: 4
• Install is pretty easy, in either version. The loop is surprisingly addictive, and is good enough to entertain you for a few hours. The retroachievements add something to it, and they are all reasonably obtainable. But after this posting I don’t expect I’ll ever go back to the game.
• X-factor: 8
• Despite the game being very basic and nothing special by today’s standards, it does get a big boost in this category for being so innovative in the space and for kickstarting the career of Garriott, with everything that Origin created weighing in. This is a one-time bonus though; future Ultima games will need to stand on their own legs to get points here.
• Total: 30/100. 
• A game worth checking out if you're interested, but by no means a masterpiece or required playing. There is just not enough "game" in this game to keep you invested 

That's a wrap on the first Chrono Review! Let me know your thoughts on the format and Akalabeth in the comments below. Following our guidelines, we need to switch genre and/or advance in the timeline; for next time, I've decided to cover Mystery House, the first listed Graphic Adventure in our master list. I've never touched the game before, and I'm pretty excited to see what it's like! Until then, as usual, Let's keep Retro-playing together.

Chrono Review #1 - Akalabeth: World of Doom

The facts

The opening screen of Akalabeth on Apple ][

• Game title: Akalabeth: World of Doom
• Master List entry: RPG #19, in the 1980 timeline
• Original release date and info: sometime in 1980, see this blog post from the Digital Antiquarian for more info
• Platforms: Apple II (1980), Windows (1998, part of the Ultima collection)
• Available for purchase: FREE on GOG
• How long to beat: 2h main, 3h main+sides, 5h completionist

Akalabeth is a game of dichotomies. There are two platforms to play it on, the original Apple ][ or the DOS port from 1998. There are two “classes” you can play as, a warrior or a wizard. And there are two ways to play the game, either the long and patient way, or the speedrun way. As a result, you can have a wonderful time playing a little throwaway game that tickles your lizard brain receptors, or deal with a frustrating slog of identical hallways, invisible traps, and an exponential difficulty curve. Regardless, the most surprising thing is that this 45-year old game, built as a fun project by a teenager named Richard Garriott, is still able to get its hooks in you after all this time.

The story

Let’s take a step back and discuss the Origin of the game. Richard Garriott was a Texas teenager who was deeply entrenched in the nerd hobbies of the time: Advanced Dungeons&Dragons and computer programming. I will not relate the whole biography of the future Lord British up to this point; instead, I suggest you check out this wonderful video by Majulaar. In his senior year of high school (or freshman year of college, the chronology is muddy) Garriott programmed a small game using the BASIC language on his Apple ][, the ubiquitous (though expense) personal computer platform of the time. This was a time before the internet, when homebrew games were not readily available, and computer games in general were few and hard to come by. Garriott was working at a computer store during the summer, and decided one day to fire the latest version of his pet project on one of the store's computers. His boss was walking by, and being very impressed with what he saw he suggested the store should sell copies of the game Garriott had titled Akalabeth (a fortuitous mispelling of a term from Tolkien's Silmarillion).

Little is left nowadays of the original release, and I couldn't find a playable version of it anywhere; but the Museum of Computer Adventure Games History has a page dedicated to the release, and you can see a pdf of the original art and manual the game came with. The game was by no means a smash hit, due to the very limited distribution network of ONE store; but one of the few copies it sold made its way to the California Pacific Computer Company, a computer software and game publisher based in Davis, CA. How the game made its way from Texas to California I do not know, but Garriott had included his address and phone number at the end of the original release, and a phone call and a handshake later, CPCC agreed to publish the game in a wider distribution, and the story of Lord British was off to the races.

For this review, I’ve both played through the GOG version, and set up an Apple ][ emulator to play the CPCC-published original version (though I strongly recommend setting the render speed to max to avoid wasting time during screen refresh). The Apple ][ version lets you earn retroachievements, while the GOG version is easier to set up and a little snappier, but has some unexpected behavior.

First clicks

The introduction to the game itself is barebones, and only the manual gives you some backstory, though it is essentially just flavor text to color your adventure. The version of the game I found on the internet archive did not contain instructions, but had some charming rudimentary graphics (potentially hiding some loading behind the scenes). 

The first illustration shown after starting the game

The second image, showcasing a dungeon entrance

Gotta be honest, you won't see anything THIS exciting while playing

The game starts by asking you a “lucky number”, representing a seed for the randomization of the game, and a "level of play", representing the difficulty of the game. Then you roll random starting values for all your attributes: hit points, strength (tied to damage), wisdom (tied to hit chance), stamina (tied to defense), wisdom (determining your starting quest), and money. You can reroll these until you get stats to your liking, and then get to pick whether to be a fighter or a mage, the latter only able to use a single weapon (the axe), the former not being able to control the result of the magic amulet. Finally, we get a shop menu, where we can buy food and weapons, before hitting the Q button to start the game. 

You are now dropped in the world without any idea of what to do, unless you have read the manual. This was the early age of home computers, where (to my understanding and research; I was not born yet) Arcade games and ports dominated the videogame market; while instruction manuals existed, the games were simple enough that you could pick up and play them without many issues. Part of the reason E.T. for Atari 2600 is considered such a bad game (it’s not) is that it is utterly inscrutable without the manual, something that was still very unusual in 1983, three years after our game got published. 

Reading the manual carefully we learn how to parse the overworld map, and recognize mountains, dungeons, and towns; and most importantly learn that we need to look for the castle: “To win the game it is necessary to visit the castle. From this point one may embark on a quest by which the game is won”. So we do just that, and start moving about the 20x20 map looking for the castle; I hope you bought enough food to start, because each step in the overworld will consume one whole ration, and if you’re out it’s an automatic game over. I’m not sure if the fault lies in AD&D 1st edition’s food rules, or Garriott’s liking of survival aspects in his real life D&D campaigns; but the need to buy a ton of food because you consume it while moving is an annoyance that will last a few more Ultima games before becoming somewhat manageable.

Not enough food? Sorry, you'll starve to death.

Let’s assume you survive long enough to find the castle. You’ll be greeted by this screen:

Oh, NOW I deserve a name since I'm in the presence of the mighty LORD *smh*

You finally get to name your character and get assigned a quest, to kill a certain kind of monster, depending on your wisdom stat. 

Seems easy enough: kill one skeleton and become a knight, 20 minutes in and out.

Lord British kindly increases your attributes by 1, and sets you on your merry way. Funnily enough, you can refuse Lord British's call for adventure, in which case he tells you to BEGONE! Nothing bad happens, and you can talk to him again, but the main quest chain goes through him, so there really isn't any point in saying no. 

The game loop

You enter the first dungeon you see, and the game truly begins. Inside the dungeon, you switch to a first-person perspective, with wireframe drawings of walls, chests, ladders, and enemies. The dungeons all have a randomly generated layout, though the “lucky number” you picked at the beginning determines the parameters that generate the dungeons, so picking the same lucky number and dungeon again guarantees the same layout. You move around the area, looking for the enemy Lord British tasked you to kill, going through doors and secret walls, and up and down ladders. Food is consumed for every action, though thankfully only 0.1 units of food are spent with every movement/attack, I should spend a few words on one of the most irritating feature of the game: a lot of walls you see are actually fake, and can be walked through, but there is nothing denoting such walls in-game, and because of the low refresh rate of the Apple ][ (and the lack of sound cues) it can be very hard to tell if you've gone through an invisible wall or are just pushing against a cul-de-sac.  

The first-person view inside a dungeon

Enemy encounters are pretty simple: you see the enemies attack you, and you can attack with a weapon from your inventory, or with your bare hands. If you're a fighter, you mainly want to use your rapier, and a bow and arrow if the enemy is away from you; as a mage, you have a choice between the axe and the kill spell on the magic amulet (which doesn't actually kill, so it should be called the "damage" spell instead...). If you manage to kill the monster, you earn some gold and, secretly, some extra HP are added to an invisible bonus pool, that you can claim when leaving the dungeon. If you run out of HP or food, you start over from scratch, as the game (at least until the 1998 port) has no save feature. There is a pleasant variety in the design of monsters, but all of them behave essentially the same: they approach you and keep attacking you until they die, or (if some conditions are satisfied) escape from you in a straight line to regen hp, in which case you wish to pursue them and trap them in front of a dead end to butcher them. 

Two notable exceptions to this (and both of them can bugger off for this) are the thief and the gremlin. The thief has a chance of stealing one of your items at random, including the one you're using to attack (there's not equipment screen in the game); if it’s one unit of food it’s not a big deal, but these jerks appear in early levels, and few things are more frustrating than having them steal your only axe, forcing you to hit with your bare hands. 

Thieves are so annoying, especially early on when your inventory is scarce...

One such thing though are the flaming gremlins, who have a chance to steal 50% of your food. Food stops being an annoyance after a couple of trips, except if you stumble upon one of these nuisances and cannot manage to kill it quickly. Facing one of them most likely will entail another trip to the surface to spend all your money on the food they stole.

... but gremlins are so flippin worse. [Screenshot taken from a source code repo, since I can't seem to encounter a single one of these jerks when I need it...]

After we kill our skeleton, we go back to Lord British to get our well-deserved knighthood. Except a lordly title is not so easily gained, and we are then tasked to kill a thief, and then a rat, and so on and so forth, each enemy being more dangerous and located deeper within a dungeon than the previous one.

He's altered the deal, pray he does not alter it further (he will)

The loop from that point on is pretty straightforward: enter dungeon, explore it to try and kill a specific monster without running out of food, climb out to restock and get an updated quest from Lord British, repeat until the last monster (the trademarked Balrog, re-christened "Balron" in the DOS re-release) has been defeated. Once you report the slaying of the Balrog the game doesn’t end, but there isn’t anything else for you to achieve besides personal objectives, like challenging yourself to go as deep as you can. 

My progress so far...

At this time I’ve beaten the game once in the DOS version (by using the speedrun/cheeky method) and I’m trying to beat it once the long way with the fighter. I’ve picked a fixed seed and a dungeon near the castle, and have been working hard to map the first few floors, so despite dying multiple times I keep a bit of knowledge with each run, and get to go a little deeper. I have now to find and kill a gremlin, and by my count (and the retroachievements list) there should be three more monsters after that.

So the game seems pretty straightforward, and it sounds like only bad luck can prevent you from a successful run, right? Unfortunately not; the issue (and the reason the game is very frustrating without using the cheeky trick) is that the quests are not repeatable and are limited, so your stats are hard capped at +10 from their starting values. And that’s only if you start with the lowest wisdom, so you get the quest to kill a skeleton first! Most characters start with higher wisdom and deeper in the quest chain, so they are more likely limited to half a dozen or so level ups. This is not quite enough to comfortably get to the lower levels with any starting character, so you really need to be patient until you roll a character with high stats but low wisdom if you wish to beat the game “the honest way”. 

I will put in a few more attempts at that (and at getting all the retroachievements) before posting the final verdict. We also still need to talk about the cheesy way to win the game. Hope you’re ready to shed your humanity for some lizard skin...