12/21/2023 0 Comments Potion of true seeing angbandThe game lasted a defensible number of hours, had some good visuals, and was easy to master in terms of controls. Overall, aside from having to get help from walkthroughs when the puzzles were too obscure, I didn't find anything to be terribly upset about. I missed a few cluebooks hidden in walls, none of which would have helped me that much, and I ended the game two levels below the maximum. You can only hold four of them at a time, and I guess there's an NPC who gives you a bag that allows you to double that, but I didn't find him. I missed some items, including a useful weapon called a "sacred flame." There are a couple of places in the game where you can buy laurels, which temporarily render you invincible and are necessary to cross long stretches of deadly swamp. I won in about seven hours using walkthroughs to get me past a few difficult parts. A few of the mansions can't be explored until you find certain items, and there are parts of the game where you need to have a particular item to progress. The ultimate goal is to explore five mansions, recover Dracula's rib, eye, ring, heart, and nail, and toss those items into a pyre in Dracula's castle. Much of the world is theoretically "open" as you begin the game, but the value of that is dubious when there is such an obvious order imposed by enemy difficulty and plot. I printed it and made annotations on it and found myself wondering why I don't do that more often for computer RPGs. It wasn't a lot of help, particularly since it suggests a two-dimensional surface whereas the reality of the game is one-dimensional "on the ground." Nonetheless, it helped keep me a little oriented. Apparently, the English version of the game didn't have a map, but the Japanese version did, so I allowed myself to use it. There are a little over 40 areas in the game. Each area scrolls for about three or four screens horizontally and up to two or three screens vertically before making a hard transition to a new area. The game is divided into screens and areas. Otherwise, what's the point of reloading? I think most games that use a pre-generated set at least re-generate it when you reload from within the game. Only by fully quitting out of the game to the DOS prompt and re-starting it did I force the game to generate a new set of numbers. Moreover, the same exact things happened a third time when I quit to the main menu and then reloaded. But when the battle began, the same things happened for exactly the same damage. This time, I dithered around town a bit before entering the cell. I figured that was no way to start a battle, so I fled the scene and reloaded. Ginger suffered 3 damage to the neck, my warrior suffered 18 damage to the left hand, and my cleric suffered 22 damage to the waist, killing her. One of them immediately cast "Column of Fire" at my party. I "lost initiative," so the dark elves went first. For instance, on one occasion, I wandered into a dark elf's cell and combat began. More important, that list seems to be virtually unshakable. This is one of those games that pre-generates a list. Other games roll random numbers in the moment that they're needed. Some games generate a list of random numbers to call upon as necessary. I had to reload a couple of times with one of the dark elf parties, and in doing so I confirmed something I'd long suspected. As a core, the Virtual Dungeon wouldīe usable today as-is and I'm seriously hoping to find a copy and not Portable and used by any method (zapping, invoking, on impact, etc.) onĪny item and mostly by any monster (e.g., the fireball spell was used by the All the functionsįollowed a required template which allowed all the "spells" to be The spawner to create random monsters/items from data structures whichĪlso had included "must have" and "may have" flags. It also handled timer calls and dispatches. The VirtDun code cycles through them all choosingīehaviors/actions randomly (or by % in the structure) and calling thoseįunctions along with any data they need as specified in the dataĭescription. The monster/item behaviors were lists of functions in theĭata structure. We were doing object oriented programming before it The VirtualDungeon was a mini operating system that managed all the
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