The Legacy – Part 1

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Pix

The Legacy (aka The Legacy – Realm of Terror) is a highly unusual RPG developed by Magnetic Scrolls and published by Mindscape in 1993. Magnetic Scrolls were known for text adventure games and were regarded by many as the British Infocom throughout the 80’s. The Legacy was therefore something of a departure for them and despite a largely positive reaction from the press, it didn’t get the success it possibly deserved and would be their last creation.

This is a game I bought and played on first release but returning to it 20 years down the line, I can’t say I remember a whole lot of the detail. I do recall it being quite tricky and it was quite possible to get into unwinnable states but I’ll do my best to get through to the end once again.

The copy I have now isn’t my original as I sold/traded that one a long time back. I rectified that mistake eventually and bought another one. This is a game that comes in a particularly large and good looking box even if mine could do with gluing back together on one side.

I’m sure the contents here aren’t complete but I do have 7 floppies, a technical leaflet and the manual itself which goes into all sorts of detail considering how intuitive the game is to play. The manual contains a brief section allegedly written by Edgar Allen Poe about a particularly scary house he was unfortunate enough to visit. It’s hinted to be the same house as in the game but the influences once you start playing are much more Lovecraftian the way I remember it.

The game has an impressive intro for the time in which some hapless idiot draws up to the extremely sinister looking house, and only manages to make it up the steps before something emerges out of the floor dragging him to his doom.

It’s at this point that the game hung on me and I had to spend a while figuring out that it will always crash after the intro with SoundBlaster/Roland combo selected for audio. Either on their own worked fine but didn’t sound anything like as good. The readme file came to my rescue – basically select Soundblaster for sound and then start the game with “legacy -roland” and it works fine during the game. The snag here is that the intro and presumably outro if I make it that far still only have SoundBlaster music. I’ll worry about the ending if I make it that far.

The story of The Legacy is a nice simple one allowing anyone to jump straight in without reading the manual. You the player have inherited a house and at the start of the game arrive to take a look around. Before starting the game, you have a choice of 8 characters to play all with their own stats which will affect how you play the game. If you don’t like those stats, you can redesign the character as you please. Something I recall from playing this years ago is that all of these characters are stored in text files so if you want to make the game much easier you can simply edit the text file to beef them up. Tempting as that is, I stuck to playing it properly and chose the ex-military Robert Kowalski.

And with that it’s straight into the mansion. The setting is very different but the game is effectively a dungeon crawler in the style of Dungeon Master and Eye Of The Beholder. The interface is interesting in that it’s all point and click with context sensitive menus. All of the windows are resizable meaning that if you want to play full screen you can. You won’t be able to see your automap without clicking on it to bring it to the front but it’s entirely possible. This may seem unremarkable now but this was cutting edge stuff for a DOS game back in 93. The system was previously used in Magnetic Scrolls earlier game Wonderland back in 1990.

Using this sort of interface is second nature these days at any rate. The first task at hand is to get my bearings and the game wastes no time in setting the scene as the note immediately in front of me says that the house is possessed by an evil entity. Apparently there are strange goings on every 20 years and I happen to have arrived at just the wrong time. It’s too late to get out now as the door is being held shut by a magical force that laughs at me every time I step on that square.

I’ve no choice but to explore and it doesn’t take long before I come across my first zombie. All the creatures in the game are pre-rendered in 3D studio but move around quite smoothly despite this. The animation puts the likes of Doom to shame but there were only four possible camera angles here. There are loads of these zombies on this level and they tend to chase me around as soon as they spot me but won’t come through doors provided I don’t hold them open. It’s something of a theme throughout this game that whenever you run into a new monster, you aren’t equipped to deal with it so there is a lot of running away even with the character I’ve chosen to play. I do find a poker fairly quickly which becomes my weapon of choice for these early sections.

Further exploration reveals a spiky green floating thingy that doesn’t actually attack me but does terrify the player enough that they are rooted to the spot until it’s gone out of sight. This sort of fear reaction is used throughout the game and the willpower stat can be raised to overcome it.

Near enough the whole house is open to explore right from the start of The Legacy. This is not a game that holds your hand through each section one by one and it’s entirely up to the player to decide what to do next which does make starting out tricky. I venture down into the cellar when I come across a set of steps but don’t last more than a couple of seconds so decide to carry on exploring upstairs instead.

Most of the locations in the game are rendered as corridors. They aren’t entirely bare with sofas, chairs and the like but are largely generic on each floor. There are however, some specific locations such as the room above which have a pre-rendered screen and the player can search within that for things to do in the same manner as a point and click adventure game. I.e. here I can open the curtain to discover a hanging corpse, or more usefully open up the dumb waiter to find a severed head which I can carry around with me. I assume it will be useful at any rate.

The inventory space is extremely limited in this game. I have found a suitcase at this point which I can use to store about a dozen items but I’ve ended up using the entrance hall as a stash room to store all those things that I expect will come in handy much later in the game.

I decide to venture up to the second floor and have much the same experience I did in the basement only with a ghost this time around. All the fuses have now blown because of the storm so the house is quite dark and makes life trickier still. I do find a fusebox on the ground floor but it needs repairing and I haven’t found the appropriate equipment yet.

I eventually locate my first spell which is used for avoiding getting hit by enemies. The game’s magic system works by equipping a spell book in one hand and then selecting the spell and power level from a window of icons which pops up. Each spell has its own skill level which you can spend experience points on if you wish to improve your chances of casting successfully. The stat system in this game is quite complex with a lot of options on where to spend your experience. I’m tending to concentrate on combat skills and hope this won’t come back to hurt me late in the game.

The experience system is unusual in that it appears to be about exploring rather than combat and I’m unconvinced I gain any experience at all from combat. The Legacy definitely doesn’t have the usual RPG mechanics in this sense. There are no levels either and experience is just gained gradually and can be spent at any time.

I’ve run out of places to explore on the ground floor so decide to do my best a floor up and run away from anything dangerous. There are some imp-like creatures who throw spells at me but I do find out I can destroy these with holy water which I have a small supply of. I spot another human but she just walks back and forth across some trapped areas and ignores me if I try to talk to her so I leave her well alone.

I do come across my first NPC shortly after in the form of a friendly ghost who tells me how he is chained to the house by a particular painting which I must find and destroy.

That painting is practically around the corner. I drag my matches onto it and can now explore the level without being hassled by ghosts any more.

This leads me to a fusebox which I switch to get the lights back on for this floor. This doesn’t really appear to help in any way except the screenshots look much clearer.

Level 2 looks to be the guest quarters with loads of bedrooms and bathrooms all of which are more or less identical. Opening the toilets is not recommended as a blue worm will attack on suspicion.

I learned early on in this game that triangular symbols meant safety and I’ve been desperately looking for one so that I can rest up and regain health ever since. When I do finally find one, I’m not tired enough to rest so it was wasted effort. The only way I’ve got to regain health is the first aid kits I’ve run across which don’t last long and are in short supply. I’m definitely going to have to be more careful about not getting hurt from here on out. Presumably if I run out of first aid kits it will be game over as this game doesn’t strike me as being exactly forgiving in that sense.

I figure a baseball bat ought to help me out in fending off monsters than a poker so I grab this for my weapon of choice at this point. There are firearms in the game also but I can’t honestly say that I found them all that effective and ammo is in extremely short supply so I’m tending to stick to melee weapons. There isn’t anything to say it’s a +2 weapon or the like so I simply have to try it out and see how it goes.

Before I call it a day, I get to meet some of the family using a VHS I found earlier in the TV room. Not surprisingly since they owned this place this isn’t your run of the mill family video. The man is just saying how Ellen has escaped and how he doesn’t know what to do when she turns up and gives him the axe.

I can’t say I’m a whole lot wiser as to exactly what is going on in this house at the end of this first session but it definitely isn’t good. The Legacy is everything I remembered it to be though and is holding up extremely well. The graphics have barely aged as far as I’m concerned. I’ll admit the monsters are a little clunky when moving around and they do tend to face the wrong way at times (not that it dampens their ability to hit you any). It doesn’t do anything to reduce the air of dread that is hanging over me while playing these early sections. The constant threat of a quick death certainly adds to the tension as does the atmospheric music and sound throughout.

We’ll see if I can’t shift the balance a little more in my favour next time anyway and speed up progress a little. Either way, the floors on this house are unrealistically enormous so I expect there will be a good number of posts before I make it to the end.

The Lawnmower Man

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Pix

I decided it was time to indulge my guilty pleasure for FMV games and picked The Lawnmower Man for my next game. This was one of those games that I can’t say I especially wanted to own but since it came with a bundle of others + I already had the sequel, it got added to the collection.

The box is a giant metallic silver monstrosity with a grinning Cyberjobe on the front. Mine is in a sorry state, no doubt due to having hung around bargain bins for several years before being snapped up by some poor fool at the £10.00 sticker price. When first released in 1993, the retail price was a whopping £54.99 (somewhere around US$100).

The inside of that sizable box isn’t exactly stuffed full of goodies with a single CD and a reasonably substantial manual. The manual has an introduction from the producer of the forthcoming Lawnmower Man 2 movie saying how the second film was going to be produced to take advantage of assets from the game whatever that means. I vaguely recall seeing that film many years back. It’s not an experience I intend to repeat but I do recall it picking up from the events of these games instead of straight after the first movie.

Speaking of which, I ought to briefly mention the first Lawnmower man movie which was allegedly based on a Stephen King story but didn’t bear much resemblance in reality. The film tells the tale of an intellectually challenged man called Jobe who makes his way in the world by mowing lawns. Through the powers of a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and his virtual reality lab, Jobe is made super intelligent before ultimately becoming evil and loading himself into cyberspace at the end of the film to become an all-powerful virtual being and set up the sequel. The film was the first I can think of to feature VR so heavily with impressive CGI graphics for the time. That was definitely it’s selling point, the rest of the film was nothing special.

The game picks up straight after the film ends. There is a lengthy FMV intro in which using his new-found powers Cyberjobe somehow zaps Dr Angelo (Brosnan) and colleagues into Cyberspace. Playing Dr. Angelo, you have to make your way through Cyberspace picking up as many spiky balls as possible to rescue both colleagues and then escape yourself. To make that more difficult, Cyberjobe also brings along several villainous characters from the movie morphing their characters so that they do his bidding trying to stop you. For some reason he takes the form of a lawnmower himself so that he can mow a message into his cyberlawn…

When you eventually get to the game, it’s mostly Dragon’s Lair inspired where you have to press the appropriate direction or fire at the right time. I do have to say that Dragon’s Lair looked a whole lot better than this even if it did come out a decade earlier. The underlying CGI isn’t bad by 1993 standards but the compression is terrible. The pixels are at least as large as in The Black Cauldron and it doesn’t have the greatest frame rate either. The thumbnail images here make it look far, far better than it does on a full screen. It’s bad enough to be difficult to see what is going on at times.

There are 12 subgames many of which have to be completed numerous times in progressively harder forms. I’ll look at a few of them here but not all as the game really doesn’t warrant a post that long. The first involves running along the information superhighway (it was a lot less busy in 1993) while Cyberjobe in lawnmower form chases along behind you. The player has to jump over the spiky balls and duck under the enemies who somehow float around above the road. In short press up or down at the right time. The correct key can just be held down with no timing required meaning these sections are nice and easy. This section has to be completed 5 times in all with later versions involving several trips along the highway and linking platform sections where the player has to carefully time jumps onto moving pads.

Another section you’ll be seeing 5 times is the Cyberboogie where the player has to navigate twisty passages, all alike, in their flying contraption. This is easily the most successful section but also the most difficult. It can be played as a straight arcade game without learning the route if you can react quickly enough but learning the route is recommended as it will be the same every playthrough. Later levels introduce balls to be shot by the player on the way through and barriers that shoot out of the walls at the last moment – you have to be extremely quick with these or know they are coming.

I particularly like the music in this section. All the music was composed by Steve Hillage who has a long history in the music industry going back to the 1970’s. The soundtrack is a mix of electronic and guitar and it’s easily the best part of the game fitting perfectly to the theme.

Many of the other sections are more puzzle than arcade. There are security doors full of IQ style tests. I.e. in the one above, 73 is the only number that isn’t a cube + the underlined picture is the only one that isn’t a rotated version of the others. Most of these are easy, some have several potential solutions and you just have to learn what is expected through trial and error. You have to get all four right to progress but get 3 chances before losing the game.

The puzzle above is Simon. It’s ridiculously simple and tedious which is confounded by the fact that having selected your sequence you have to watch slow animations play where your character presses each button at the rate of about one press every 10 seconds.

There is another section where you have to navigate around a series of pads taking turns with an invisible protagonist that starts at the opposite end. If you both end up on the same pad at once you lose. Since he can see me, my opponent could guarantee a win if he just moved back and forth from the starting pad. In practice the same route works every time so it’s just a case of figuring that route out.

I’m sure this puzzle was stolen from an old British TV series called The Adventure Game in which minor celebrities would be dumped in “outer space” and have to solve puzzles to get home again. If any of them made it to the end of the show, they had to outwit a talking pot plant to get across an identical board to the one in this puzzle.

After completing each level, the player is rewarded with snippets from the film in super grainy mono vision.

I will give the Lawnmower Man credit for presenting a challenge to the player. One of the reasons I chose this game was that I didn’t have much time and figured an FMV game on a single CD ought to be quick and easy to complete. You can’t fit that much video on the one disc after all. Finishing this was anything but easy involving many, many attempts where I would gradually learn the required moves. There is no saving and only 2 continues so there was a lot of starting from the beginning but I would get further each time.

Eventually, there is a final jumping section and I rescue my second colleague before the end cutscene springs into life.

Dr. Angelo is sucked through a vortex to meet up with Cyberjobe face to face. Despite spending the last hour trying to kill you, he has a change of heart, regains his humanity and sends the Doctor back to the real world. Mysterious tentacles then spring out of the ground surrounding Cyberjobe and before we can find out what they are or where they came from there is a to be continued. The sequel Cyberwar came out the following year and would answer neither of these questions. It will probably be getting a playthrough at some point but defeating this first entry was quite enough for the moment.

The Lawnmower Man is certainly a strange game and could only have come out in a very specific period of time. There is no plot to speak of – it’s more like a surrealistic repetitive nightmare in which the player is constantly under threat of death by lawnmower. I can’t say there wasn’t some fun to be had. It does have that arcade quality of always getting slightly further as you learn what to do. This did get frustrating nearer the end – completing the game must have taken at least 40 minutes even skipping cutscenes. That is a lot of replaying if you cock it up but since most of it was variants of earlier scenes I did more or less get through the last 15 minutes on the first attempt.

The point of these early FMV games, if they had one, was to show off your expensive system and the visuals/audio it could produce. The gameplay would be limited but with the compensation of all that glorious video coming out of your computer. On those terms, Lawnmower Man succeeds in the audio department with a soundtrack that could be a classic had it been attached to another game. The visuals however are a grainy mess and miss the point entirely. It’s also massively more repetitive than it needs to be sending you round and round the same levels with slightly different camera angles and obstacle placement. I would have been seriously put out if I’d paid £55 for this at the time. If I can look past the graphics, it’s not that bad a game for what it is I suppose. I’m certainly not going to recommend this to anyone though.

I’m extremely curious to see what the press thought of it at the time and will attempt to dig out a few reviews for the next post before I start another game.

Creepy Corridors

Posted on February 6, 2016 by Pix

I’m continuing to play through Chuckles’ early games and next on the list is Creepy Corridors. This was first released in 1982 by Sierra on the Apple II as part of a collection of 4 games called Laf Pak. All of the games were written by Bueche and came on a single disk. I don’t have a copy of this so the photo below is courtesy of vintage-sierra.net.

On loading the game, the player got a little menu with some beeping music to select one of the four games. I’ll stick with just Creepy Corridors for this post and look at the other games another time.

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Creepy Corridors is a simple maze crawl where the player has to work their way around the screen collecting diamonds and shooting at monsters. You can only fire one shot at a time so don’t want to miss on a long corridor. The monsters all spawn gradually from the same location. Once all the monsters are dead or all 4 diamonds collected, it’s off to the next level via the door that appears. Collecting all the diamonds gives an extra life.

The concept of the game is simple enough, and an obvious Pacman variant, but I found this strangely good fun to play on the Apple II. The levels start out extremely easy and the player can simply find a safe spot to shoot every monster if they wish. Later levels introduce white skulls which are invulnerable and these levels get extremely frantic. The monsters chase the player around the map once they have a line of sight and when one of these has locked onto you they are very difficult to shake.

There are hordes of monsters on later levels and everything (including the player) speeds up on each successive screen. The code handling the speed of the game could have stood some improvement. The speed is all over the place while monsters spawn at the start of a level. Think of the speed of that last space invader when there is just one left and you won’t be far off. Things slow down when there are a few monsters on the screen but it’s lethal at first. I’m surprised just how fast the Apple II can push these sprites around.

The main claim to fame of Creepy Corridors is that it was allegedly the third ever Apple II game to include sampled speech with Chuckles himself providing the dying scream should you blunder into one of the monsters. The rest of the sound is more mundane but functional.

I’ve got a theory that there are only 10 levels in the game but I only managed to get that far once and was far too busy to get a photo or finish the level. Level 10 was extremely open with very little maze allowing access to me for the monsters from all directions. If that is the last level, I’m sure I could beat this game with a little more practice and a lot of luck. It does run so fast at this point, I’d need a stack of lives left to make suicide runs to the diamonds.

I can’t say that Creepy Corridors is anything particularly special but I still liked it and for one game on a four pack it’s not too bad at all. It grabbed my attention enough to make me have numerous attempts to complete level 10 at any rate. On its own it would have been a definite improvement on Brainteaser Boulevard and this came with 3 other games thrown in.

The story isn’t quite finished there as Creepy Corridors saw a 1983 release on the VIC-20 as an individual game. The port was done by Don McGlauflin and I thought I should give this a quick go. There was a slight hitch in playing it however. NTSC VIC-20 games will run on PAL machines but end up in the top left corner of the screen. Plenty of games allowed the player to simply move the screen to the middle with cursor keys at the main menu but if this option was present here I couldn’t find it so the left edge is slightly clipped. Other than that it all ran fine.

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The VIC-20 version is immediately familiar and plays largely identically. There is a title screen this time around but no screaming Chuckles when the player gets caught and the screen is monochrome. What really lets this version down is the horrible collision detection. As I understand it, the VIC-20 can’t do sprites in the conventional sense and instead uses character based graphics where the screen is effectively made up of a load of tiles that are swapped to create the illusion of bitmaps.

This is all well and good and the “sprites” in the game move smoothly meaning you wouldn’t know the difference. The snag here is that the collision detection appears to work purely on the basis of intersecting characters meaning you can be nowhere near and get hit. It absolutely ruins what would have been a decent port when you can get killed by monsters that aren’t even in the same corridor. If you really want to play Creepy Corridors, avoid this version and stick with the original.

Brainteaser Boulevard

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Pix

I’ve looked at the early games of several famous Origin employees but have never got around to any of Chuck Bueche (aka Chuckles) early titles of which there are several. Bueche was one of the four co-founders of Origin in 1983 and the only non Garriott in that group. Prior to that he put out several titles on Atari and Apple platforms and I’ll be giving each of them a play over coming weeks.

One of those early games was Brainteaser Boulevard which was published by California Pacific in 1982. I gather that Beuche never saw any money for the game with California Pacific going bust shortly afterwards. I don’t own a copy myself so the pictures below come off a fairly recent Ebay auction where this sealed copy went for the not all that unreasonable sum of $30.

It’s an Apple II game but didn’t want to run on my IIGS so I’ll be resorting to an emulator. The title doesn’t suggest it but Brainteaser Boulevard is a Frogger clone pure and simple. Instead of a frog, the player takes the role of a scout helping old ladies dash across a lethal 4 lane highway.

The gameplay is considerably simpler than Frogger since there are no logs to jump onto or lily pads to aim for. It’s merely a case of getting to the top of the screen and returning to the bottom without hitting anything. The trip back is made harder with the old lady walking by your side making the player character twice the size in effect. If just the lady gets hit by a car you can go back and pick up another one without losing a life. If the player gets hit then they’ve both had it. Run out of old ladies one way or another and the next level starts, all exactly the same except the cars move more quickly and you score more per trip.

Brainteaser Boulevard doesn’t play badly but it’s clearly a step down from Frogger. There is little reason for the player ever to move left or right and it gets near impossible quickly no matter how good the player. I had an issue with the keyboard controls where the character stops moving when a key is held down until the character repeat kicks in. This may have been an emulation issue but it certainly didn’t make playing this any easier when my character would take one step into oncoming traffic and then hang around for a second.

Other than that it’s not a badly made game but is just one of many in a sea of uninspiring Frogger clones so I can’t say it’s worth anyone’s time these days.

The Black Cauldron

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Pix

I first started playing Sierra adventure games almost as soon as I got a PC back around 89/90. The Sinclair PC200 I was using at the time was behind the times in most ways but ahead of the game in the sense that it only had a 3 1/2 inch disk drive at a time when most games still came on 5 1/4 inch floppies. Sierra were one of the very few companies to include both disk types in their boxes as well as supporting CGA graphics and I played my way through most of the AGI engine games back then.

One game I never did get around to was one of the earliest AGI titles, The Black Cauldron, an adaptation of the Disney movie headed up by Al Lowe but also worked on by plenty of familiar Sierra names. The game is now about 30 years old so lets put that right.

This is the original PC booter version and the box is a good deal smaller than the later Sierra releases than I’m more familiar with.

What it lacks in size it makes up for with a folding flap on the cover with an illustrated booklet on the inside introducing the game. It’s distinctly similar to the Infocom boxes in this respect.

There is no neat little tray at the back of the booklet though and instead the contents have to be pulled out of the box conventionally. Note the sticker at the back to cut up and stick on your keyboard so you don’t forget the keys. It’s not strictly necessary as the interface isn’t much more complicated than any other AGI game.

I’m using scummVM to play this + the version I’m playing is a later release than the one I’ve got on floppies. The game is actually free to download from www.allowe.com for anyone who wants to give it a go. I can’t compare this to the movie as I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it. I just about remember it coming out as a kid but it doesn’t seem to have been anything like as popular as some other Disney movies.

First things first, this does use Sierra’s famous AGI engine but it’s not quite how most of us will remember it. You still move your character around the world with the cursors but instead of typing commands the game uses F4 to use an item, F6 to interact with whatever you are stood next to and F8 to look with no typing required. The keys chosen are unnecessarily awkward when you have a whole keyboard of non function keys that could have been used instead but ignoring that it works well. Not having to guess the verb does make the game a good deal easier and I’m sure this was aimed at a younger audience that many other AGI games.

As the game begins, Taran is an assistant pigkeeper and not too enamoured with this state of affairs. Nevertheless life continues as normal and the first task in the game is feeding what would appear to be the farms only pig Hen Wen.

After eating, Hen Wen immediately trots off to your master and I soon learn she has the power to see far away things. She has a vision about the Horned King searching for Hen Wen in order to make her find the black cauldron and hence rule the world.

In the space of a couple of paragraphs of text, Taran’s life is uprooted and he has to take Hen Wen off to the fair folk and save her. Of course the moment I step outside the Horned King’s goons start swooping down trying to capture us both.

Anyone who has played King’s Quest will be very familiar with the mechanics in this game with the semi-random monsters. Step off the screen and they vanish again so it’s just a case of sticking near the edge of the screen for a quick escape.

My master wasn’t helpful enough to tell me where to find the fair folk but they are only a handful of screens away from the house. I do have to go behind a particular bramble bush to get to the right exit.

With Hen Wen safe, I can explore the rest of the map in peace. The world map is largish and rolls over at the top and bottom just like in Kings Quest. Playing this game is very much a trial and error approach at first with plenty of deaths and restarts along the way. Sierra got a lot of criticism for this sort of approach but since you can complete these older games in no time at all once you know what you are doing I never saw a problem in it. When the games got larger and the dead ends longer then it became more of an issue.

With my newly discovered magic word, I eventually figure out how to open up a secret passage by the water fall to find the King of the Fair Folk who wants me to destroy the black cauldron. He doesn’t offer to help as such but does give me a magic mirror + 5 portions of magic flying dust, one of which I need to use to get back out of the cave I just fell into.

From here it’s off to the scarier West edge of the world map where things get spooky and dangerous. I have to scale a cliff in a screen that would be nearly replicated in Kings Quest 3 before finding the Horned King’s castle. On the way to that, I carefully walk through the adventure game equivalent of one of those games where you have to move a metal hoop around a wire without touching it. I’d forgotten how many of these sorts of things were in these early AGI games.

The arcade like nature of the game continues on the next screens where I have to swim across an alligator infested moat (without meeting the alligators) and then climb up the castle into the window without falling off or getting rocks dropped on me.

Once in the castle, I get to spy on the Horned King before being captured by a henchman and thrown in a cell.

Escaping from the cell is simply a case of rattling the cup on the door. A trap door opens up in the floor and I’m rescued by a princess and her pet bauble.

She expects to be rescued in return. After walking through several dungeon screens, I find a suspicious looking wall which leads to a tomb and a magic sword. The princess takes the opportunity to sneak through a gap that is too small for me.

Now that I’m armed, I can escape the dungeon. The magic sword is less effective than I might have hoped but does stun the henchman for a couple of seconds. I take the chance to free one of the prisoners in return for a special harp that it occurs to me now I never actually used for anything.

I escape the castle, climb back down the cliff and head for the one area of the map I’ve not managed to achieve anything yet. This is across a swamp. You may notice that there are loads of little rocks across it. It is possible to jump across these which is how I tried it on my first attempt through the game but now I have the flying dust I take the easier option and bypass this particular subgame. This leads to a witches cottage and a chest full of frogs.

At first the witches try to add me to the frogs but after waving my sword around they agree to swap it for the black cauldron. Before I can destroy the cauldron and beat the game, one of the Horned Kings minions swoops down and grabs the thing meaning I have to traipse back to the castle once again.

The Horned King is busy raising a skeletal army with his new cauldron. I flash my magic mirror at him, showing him his true self which is apparently horrifying enough that he jumps in the cauldron committing suicide. As the castle starts to fall down in true end of the film/game fashion, I float off on a log and escape.

There is one final puzzle as the witches offer me various exchanges in return for their cauldron back. After turning down their first offers, the last of these is the return of my magic sword which I now find grants me immortality and a happy ending.

I really enjoyed playing Black Cauldron. I can’t say how much of that was pure nostalgia but I expect a large part. I may not have played this particular title but it was quite the novelty to play a new AGI game that I was entirely unfamiliar with. The colourful graphics really suited the subject matter and within the low res constraints of the AGI engine have never looked a whole lot better than this despite it being one of the earlier games.

As a game it’s a little hard to categorise. It’s certainly not an adventure game in the normal sense of the word. There was a large portion of arcade-like elements at times with walking along narrow pathways and bashing henchmen with swords. Sierra did this sort of thing a lot with their games, including things like driving through the city of Lytton in Police Quest, or the infamous arcade sequences in Space Quest.

There was a smaller quotient of puzzles than other AGI titles and the largest aspect of beating Black Cauldron was simply exploration and coming up with a plan of attack once you knew where everything was. There is a time limit of sorts with the game requiring the player to eat and drink throughout but it’s certainly simpler to play than any other AGI game that leaps to mind (short of Mixed Up Mother Goose). There is still a reasonable if brief challenge coming to this fresh. There are supposedly extra points available for taking different routes from the movie but I never found any alternative solutions other than the option to allow a minor character to sacrifice themselves at the end of the game instead of using the mirror.

I can’t say I’m entirely clear on many elements of the story actually. No doubt it would all make more sense if I’d read the books or watched the film. It didn’t get in the way though and it made just about enough sense to keep me playing. On the whole this would be a nice gentle introduction to the world of Sierra adventure games and definitely one I recommend. I wish I had some more AGI games to catch up on but this is the final one as far as I know, outside of fan games. There are several SCI titles that I still haven’t gotten around to and will no doubt be having a go at in due course.

Pix's Origin Adventures

Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Legacy – Part 1

The Lawnmower Man

Creepy Corridors

Brainteaser Boulevard

The Black Cauldron

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