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| Oh no! It's a crudely drawn Balrog! |
| Quick Info | |
|---|---|
| Reviewed by: | Mark Goninon |
| Developer: | Richard Garriott |
| Publisher: | California Pacific Computer Company |
| Release Date: | 1979 (Apple II Release), 1998 (MS-DOS Release) |
| Time played: | 2 hours |
I Played Ultima Before It was Cool
As I continue to delve into the classic games sitting on my Pile of Shame, I have come across another historically important game (although to be fair, many pioneers of the industry were active during the 70s and 80s): Akalabeth: World of Doom. This game happens to be the first game published by game designer Richard Garriott, who often goes by his pseudonym, Lord British, and is the creator of the legendary Ultima RPG series. Garriott developed the game in BASIC on the Apple II and claims it was first released in 1979. California Pacific published the game in 1980 and it sold thousands of copies, making it a commercial success.
Akalabeth is an early example of a first-person RPG or dungeon crawler. You start off rolling your character stats, as you would when playing "Dungeons & Dragons" and then you pick from two classes: a fighter or mage (this will determine what weapons you can use). After that you're taken to a shop screen where you can buy food and equipment before venturing onto the overworld map. Here you'll be able to visit dungeons and Lord British's castle but each time you move, you'll consume one piece of food. If you visit Lord British's castle, he will request you to kill a number of monsters in the dungeons and if you successfully kill all of them, he will agree to knight you.
Entering dungeons converts the game into a first-person wireframe 3D view. You can travel around a floor and attack various enemies using weapons available such as an axe, rapier, bow or even your bare fists. You can even use a magic amulet which has the possibility to turn you into a Lizard Man with boosts to your stats (although it can also turn you into a toad). The amulet can also be used for teleporting you to the exits. As you descend the dungeon you'll fight tougher enemies with the ultimate baddie being the balrog!
I originally played the default version that GOG supplied with the game which seems to be a more authentic conversion of the Apple II version as there is no ability to save the game and it has monochrome graphics. Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of time with this version since, as mentioned, it has no ability to save the game meaning when you have favourable outcomes, you cannot save your progress. Also, the version appears to be bugged since Lord British will sometimes not actually provide you a target to kill in the dungeons, meaning you could never become a knight.
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| You'll be searching for this on the map in order to start your quest |
Differing Versions, Differing Difficulty
So, this is why I played the other version GOG provides, which is the original MS-DOS port of the game released in 1998 and developed by Ultima fan, Corey Roth. This version added colour graphics and MIDI music as well as the ability to save your progress. Regardless of which version I played with though, I respect this game for what it is, which is a simple, no-nonsense dungeon crawler and for a game released over four decades ago, it does a good enough job of it. In fact, I would've been content to keep playing with the version that was closer to the original Apple II version despite the added difficulty of no save games, if it weren't for the showstopper bug I encountered. Sure, the graphics are dated, there's no music in the original but the gameplay is essentially a cut-down "Dungeons & Dragons" or a prehistoric, turn-based, first person version of Diablo. It's primitive by today's standards but it still has an addictive gameplay loop.
Compared to dungeon crawlers of later years, Akalabeth is lacking in terms of available weapons and classes: there are only five "weapons" available (axe, rapier, shield, bow and arrow, and magic amulet) and two classes to pick from (fighter and mage). The only difference between playing a fighter and mage is the fighter can use rapiers and bows while the mage can use the magic amulet. However, it's probably worth mentioning that the magic amulet is really overpowered and before I get into why, you ought to know I only discovered this fact after already playing the game for half an hour, giving up and then resorting to a walkthrough. While following a walkthrough isn't necessary to this game when you compare it to Zork, it does mean the difference between spending a long time grinding for experience and loot and not much at all.
I spent maybe an hour trying three different walkthroughs with little success. Often a walkthrough relies on you entering a "lucky number" at the beginning of the game as a kind of seed. This seed would then generate the same world for you to play each time, which is probably the closest Apple II players got to a save game. However, these never worked on the default GOG version of the game so either this is a bug or they differ from the original Apple II maps. This meant I couldn't rely on the walkthroughs verbatim but maybe I could follow some general advice that was provided.
In a normal "Dungeons & Dragons" game, you would roll dice to determine the stats for your character, hopefully resulting in high numbers especially for stats your class depends on; walkthroughs for Akalabeth however reckon none of that matters except how much gold you start with! Alarm bells are already ringing at this point. Is there something in this game that you really need to buy that makes playing the game "properly" almost useless?
Yes, and this is where the magic amulet enters the story.
In order to use the magic amulet, you need to choose the mage as your class and when you're at the store purchasing equipment, all you need is the magic amulet and a lot of food. You need a lot of food in this game since each time you take one step, you will consume some. If you ever run out of food in the game, you'll starve and it's game over. This makes the first part of the game, finding Lord British's castle, your first big challenge since there's a good chance you'll never find the castle before you run out of food. It took me several tries before I actually found the castle but it's also not enough that you find the castle: you also need a dungeon and town nearby because you need to pay for more food and the only way you're going to do that is looting dungeons. As you can see, even before you decide to start the game proper, you've got to find the perfect area to start your adventures or else you'll perish before you even get a chance to fight.
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| Lord British will offer you quests to kill certain monsters in the dungeons |
Do You Come From a Land Down Under?
Once you finally enter the dungeons this is when you switch from the overworld map view to the aforementioned first person, wireframe, dungeon crawl view. You'll see various lines representing things like ladders, chests, corridors and doorways (some which are hidden). You'll also encounter the occasional crudely drawn enemy, especially thieves, skeletons and giant rats on the first level down. Attacking is done by simply selecting the command to attack and having a go at it. You then take turns trying to whittle each of your health bars down to zero. Sometimes the attacks miss, sometimes they connect. Like any good RPG, your stats will determine how accurate you are and how much damage you inflict. You also get the opportunity to choose which weapon to use which will provide a modifier to your damage. Once you defeat the enemy, you can loot its corpse for gold and if you ever leave the dungeon, you'll receive a boost to your hitpoints.
So the main gameplay loop seems to be entering a dungeon, defeating some monsters until you start running low on hitpoints or food, exit the dungeon to become stronger, return to town to resupply and then repeat. Descending to lower levels of the dungeon means you'll encounter stronger monsters including ones on Lord British's hitlist.
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| The manual provides a very short background story which loosely connects Akalabeth to the Ultima series |
Magic Amulet Needs a Nerf
Oh right, you're probably still wondering what the magic amulet is all about. Well, there are a couple of useful things the amulet can do. Firstly, you can use it to teleport you to ladders on a level: this makes it much easier for you to find a ladder up or down, especially when they happen to be hidden in secret passages. It saves a lot of time and the need to map each of the dungeon levels (which you would have to do if you played as a fighter). The second is the strangely named "Bad???" spell. Now this spell can backfire and turn you into a toad which permanently reduces all your stats or it could also halve your hitpoints: neither of these are ideal scenarios. However, the so-called "Bad???" spell can also do something pretty overpowered: it can turn you into a Lizard Man which results in all your stats being permanently multiplied by 2.5! Not only that but if you're lucky enough to keep casting the Lizard Man spell, you can keep multiplying your stats by 2.5 ad infinitum! Now, when I played I only did this spell once but even that was enough to give me a good head start. Sure, it took a few attacks before the Balrog went down but I had a decent number of hit points by then and my stats were increasing naturally each time I cleared a dungeon level.
It's a very overpowered and broken way to play the game but I daresay not many people initially knew about this back in the day and it's only thanks to the Internet that it's now more widely known. Originally, most players probably grinded their way through the game, which is just fine, provided nothing bad befell you and you had to restart! Playing games back in the 80s seemed to involve a lot of gambling!
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5
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Although very primitive by today's standards, Akalabeth still works as a dungeon crawler and is especially accessible to younger players if you play the 1998 DOS version. Yes the graphics are basic, the audio is basic and the game is played using the keyboard only but by playing this game, you can see the groundwork that paved the way for later dungeon crawlers, even Diablo. You'll also get your first introduction to the character of Lord British of Ultima fame. Oh and if you want to ramp the difficulty up, make sure you don't play a mage with a magic amulet: it's an overpowered combination! |
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