Gord
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2011
- Messages
- 7,049
A few days ago I failed my nostalgia-roll and installed a C64 emulator (Vice) to check out some of the old games again.
I remembered one series of text-based german RPGs, which I used to play back in the days and managed to track them down (biggest problem was actually that I had forgotten their name).
So anyway, the series is "Schwert und Magie" (Sword and Magic), developed by a studio called GDG (abbreviation for german design group) in the years 1989-1992 (so pretty late in the C64 era).
There are 4 issues, each containing 2 independent adventures. All of them can be found online easily enough.
The games are completely text-based (edit: almost completely, sometimes there are simple diagrams and maps).
The system is rather barebones - you roll an character, who gets randomly assigned values (from 40-70 as far as I can tell) for the typical attributes (Str, Int, Dex, Cha, + Att and Def) and your hitpoints (around 30).
If you like it, you keep it, otherwise you roll another one. If you have an old char, you can load this one instead.
During the adventures you will of course fight monsters and at times have to pass checks on your attributes.
The adventures themselves are pretty short, about 1 hour probably, depending on how fast you read through the text, how many combat encounters you face or whether you get lost in the obligatory (but small) labyrinths.
Each one comes with a self-contained story (e.g. the first one has you find a magic plant, in the second one you explore an old temple in the desert). The writing is nothing special, but serviceable and reminiscent of old PnP adventure books, so it gets an extra point for nostalgia from me.
They also aren't afraid from trolling the player a bit - e.g. you can have made it through the entire adventure and completed the main objective, only to fail the last die roll and be denied a proper reward.
Speaking of rewards - if you solve the adventure in the "right" way, you get the opportunity to raise your attributes so you can play the next adventure with the same, but stronger char. Equipment however is not saved in between adventures, so except for "leveling up", there's no way to improve your char in between adventures (you can find better stuff for the duration of an adventure, though).
The games also seems to be ironman - you have one savefile, which gets erased upon the start of your adventure and there's no save or load within an adventure (although you can use your emulator to create a save, but more to that later).
There aretwo three quirks I found a bit annoying.
1st, they seem to do some scaling - I'm almost sure that a weak char is facing significantly weaker/fewer enemies than a stronger one, so having a "good" char doesn't really make the game easier.
2nd, Breaking of the 4th wall. They like doing that in form of short advertisement for other games made by them, or by placing "real" objects in their game (e.g. a Coke tin-can).
3rd, all rolls are pre-rolled at the beginning of the adventure. Every enemy you are going to meet, how the fight will play out or whether you pass an attribute check is decided once you start (with the exemption that the player can decide which enemy to attack or sometimes which attribute will be checked, so you have some limited influence there) - this also makes save states via emulator only useful to continue another time, save-scumming is out of question.
On the other hand it can be an annoyance if a otherwise easy section becomes almost impossible due to thr RNG screwing you over and placing too mny encounters there.
So anyway, anyone knows these games?
I remembered one series of text-based german RPGs, which I used to play back in the days and managed to track them down (biggest problem was actually that I had forgotten their name).
So anyway, the series is "Schwert und Magie" (Sword and Magic), developed by a studio called GDG (abbreviation for german design group) in the years 1989-1992 (so pretty late in the C64 era).
There are 4 issues, each containing 2 independent adventures. All of them can be found online easily enough.
The games are completely text-based (edit: almost completely, sometimes there are simple diagrams and maps).
The system is rather barebones - you roll an character, who gets randomly assigned values (from 40-70 as far as I can tell) for the typical attributes (Str, Int, Dex, Cha, + Att and Def) and your hitpoints (around 30).
If you like it, you keep it, otherwise you roll another one. If you have an old char, you can load this one instead.
During the adventures you will of course fight monsters and at times have to pass checks on your attributes.
The adventures themselves are pretty short, about 1 hour probably, depending on how fast you read through the text, how many combat encounters you face or whether you get lost in the obligatory (but small) labyrinths.
Each one comes with a self-contained story (e.g. the first one has you find a magic plant, in the second one you explore an old temple in the desert). The writing is nothing special, but serviceable and reminiscent of old PnP adventure books, so it gets an extra point for nostalgia from me.
They also aren't afraid from trolling the player a bit - e.g. you can have made it through the entire adventure and completed the main objective, only to fail the last die roll and be denied a proper reward.
Speaking of rewards - if you solve the adventure in the "right" way, you get the opportunity to raise your attributes so you can play the next adventure with the same, but stronger char. Equipment however is not saved in between adventures, so except for "leveling up", there's no way to improve your char in between adventures (you can find better stuff for the duration of an adventure, though).
The games also seems to be ironman - you have one savefile, which gets erased upon the start of your adventure and there's no save or load within an adventure (although you can use your emulator to create a save, but more to that later).
There are
1st, they seem to do some scaling - I'm almost sure that a weak char is facing significantly weaker/fewer enemies than a stronger one, so having a "good" char doesn't really make the game easier.
2nd, Breaking of the 4th wall. They like doing that in form of short advertisement for other games made by them, or by placing "real" objects in their game (e.g. a Coke tin-can).
3rd, all rolls are pre-rolled at the beginning of the adventure. Every enemy you are going to meet, how the fight will play out or whether you pass an attribute check is decided once you start (with the exemption that the player can decide which enemy to attack or sometimes which attribute will be checked, so you have some limited influence there) - this also makes save states via emulator only useful to continue another time, save-scumming is out of question.
On the other hand it can be an annoyance if a otherwise easy section becomes almost impossible due to thr RNG screwing you over and placing too mny encounters there.
So anyway, anyone knows these games?
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