CRPG Addict - Review Roundup (Part Seventeen)

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This week's standouts in our recap of CRPG Addict's history lessons include ORIGIN's Space Rogue and Sword of Aragon by Bret Berry / SSI, a Strategy-CRPG hybrid that the 'Addict found surprisingly good.

We also get a GotY of 1989 as the year comes to a close: The Adventure-CRPG Hero's Quest.

1989
Space Rogue (1989)

6 points for NPCs. The game is clearly an ORIGIN game in this respect. It's one of the earliest games that offers dialogue options and not just keywords when speaking with NPCs, although some of them have keywords, too. These options allow for some significant role-playing opportunities. (..)

That gives us a final score of 46, quite respectable. I think it's easily the best of the "in-between-Ultimas" offered by ORIGIN and I'm sure elements went into their Wing Commander series a few years later. For a reasonably good game, it doesn't seem to have made much of a splash at the time, although almost everyone who reviewed it gave it a good rating.​

1. Game 105: Space Rogue (1989)
2. Won! (With Final Rating)

Rance: The Quest for Hikari (1989)

As you've seen, the RPG elements are scant. The only things it has going for it are a theoretically good dialogue system (the mechanics are good; it's just that everything out of Rance's mouth is contemptible) and a reasonably quick pace. I gave the largest negative bonus I've ever given (-5) for the content, bringing the final score down to 17, one of my lowest ever for a post-Bronze Era game. But I suppose if the content doesn't offend you, you'll like the game about as much as a natural 22. (..)​

1. Game 104: Rance: The Quest for Hikari (1989)

Sword of Aragon (1989)

Gameplay. Generally excellent. The game is brisk and lively, challenging without rising to the level of exasperating. I think the curve turned a little too steeply for the final battle, but other than that one fight, I felt the level of difficulty was just right. (..) Even more notably, the game has a high degree of replayability--though to fully enjoy this, you have to forget about the points and just go with your role-playing whims. (..)

The final score of 48 doesn't seem very high if you don't understand my GIMLET, but it puts the game in the 85th percentile of games I've played, ranking 18th from the top out of 104 rated games.​

1. Game 107: Sword of Aragon (1989)
2. The Empire Grows
3. A Chronicle of Deeds
4. A Conqueror's Mentality
5. Won!
6. Final Rating

Windwalker (1989)

Like its predecessor [Moebius], Windwalker is a game with interesting ideas that doesn't take enough time to develop them. It's a simple action RPG masquerading as some kind of epic experience, and its uses of eastern themes are shallow and ultimately unnecessary to the gameplay. (..)

I can't help but subtract one point for those stupid storms, giving us a final score of 33, considerably higher than Moebius's 24, but still lower than the threshold I'd use to suggest a game is "worth playing."​

1. Game 108: Windwalker (1989)
2. The Wayward Windwalker
3. Won (with Final Rating)

The Third Courier (1989)

The Third Courier turned out to be almost exactly like B.A.T.: a nearly pure adventure game masquerading as an adventure-RPG hybrid, in which all but a couple of combats were unnecessary and avoidable, attributes and traits didn't matter at all, the plot was extremely limited, and the developers bulked up the game with inexcusably large and tedious mazes. Just like B.A.T. (and, frankly, a lot of games I played in 1989), it had some intriguing elements that simply didn't come together in any kind of coherent fashion. (..) The final score of 29 is exactly the same rating I gave B.A.T., which doesn't surprise me. There's an admirable effort here, with some nice innovations, but it simply isn't enough of an RPG to deserve a high rating on my scale.​

1. Game 109: The Third Courier (1989)
2. Won! (with Final Rating)

Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick (1989)

The subtotal comes to 38, a respectable score for the era, suggesting I liked it about as much as The Mines of Titan or Prophecy: The Fall of Trinadon. But as I said at the outset, it irks me how little faith the developers had in the integrity of the game as a serious fantasy story, and from the box art to the endgame text, they filled it with the most senseless drivel. (..) What particularly annoys me is that this is fundamentally not a comedy game. It tells a serious plot, and all it would have taken was some changes to the text to offer the player a more interesting, immersive experience.​

1. Game 110: Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick (1989)
2. A Bit Less Grief
3. Won! (with Final Rating)

1981-1982
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981)

Many of the players who fondly remember this game also fondly remember the cooperative multi-player aspect which I, as a solo player, didn't get to experience. (..) This kind of option is rare in an RPG and worth an extra point. I'm also going to give a second bonus point for the navigation puzzles, which are a big feature of the game and don't really fall into any other category. (..) That leaves us with a final score of 27, very good for its era.​

1. Game 103: Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981)

Crown of Arthain (1981)

Arthain distills RPGs to their most basic elements: fight, collect treasure, improve your stats, become king. An amusing distraction (..)​

1. Game 106: Crown of Arthain (1981)

Dragon Fire (1981)

I'm giving Dragon Fire 18 points on my GIMLET scale, with the highest values in the "game world" category, for the care put into the descriptions, and the "gameplay" category, for its brisk and challenging pace and its constant replayability. It's not a great game by modern standards, but among the myriad of early-1980s Apple II offerings, it stands out of the pack.​

1. Game 111: Dragon Fire (1981)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cartridge (1982)

Despite (..) the game's lack of CRPG elements, I wanted to play it because it's really the first officially-licensed Dungeons & Dragons game for anything resembling a computer. On my GIMLET scale, the Cartridge ties with Braminar as the lowest-rated game ever, at 9. It was hurt by 0s in the key "Character Creation and Development," "NPCs," "Equipment," and "Economy" categories.​

1. Game 113: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cartridge (1982)

The Dragon's Eye (1981)

On my GIMLET scale, I give the game a 20, which is a reasonably high score for the era. It suffers from a lack of NPCs, no economy, and no real character development, but it gains from making an attempt to give the world a back story, a decent action combat and magic system, and robust, non-linear, replayable gameplay.​

1. Game 114: The Dragon's Eye (1981)

1989/1990, Game of the Year
Game of the Year 1989: Hero's Quest

I know the choice is a bit unorthodox. It's small, short, and a hybrid besides. It lacks the tactical combat, dungeon-crawling, and world-exploration of great RPGs. But to my mind, these factors are outweighed by the things it does right, starting with an unparallelled skill- and attribute-development system. We've seen games where skills develop based on use before, all the way back to Wizard's Crown and notably in Dungeon Master and The Magic Candle. But Hero's Quest beats them all with the variety of ways that the skills can develop and the synergistic leveling of both attributes and skills.​

1. 1989/1990

Explanation of the final score: The GIMLET.