Missed Classic: Loremaster - Won! (And Final Rating)

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

Up until this point, I've been playing far ahead of the CRPGAddict. I started very early in May, and it took a little while before he started up. You know character creation? Yeah, he figured out how to get that working. create [charname] (case sensitive, so daniel is daniel but Teal'c is Teal'c) [password] [class]. Characters are visually distinguished by might and magic. (actually, everything, but I didn't care enough to check it that thoroughly)

LanHawk, who I don't think actually posts here but is probably reading, sent me a textfile from a pirate release of the game, which is undoubtedly the closest thing to a manual we'll ever get. It was mostly useless, except for the most important aspect of all. I can move with the keyboard now, it's the numpad, it's a numlock issue. Even better, I can go diagonally.

Missed Classic: Loremaster - No Prayer for the Dying

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

I need to get money. That's the clear thought I have starting up this game with a completely new world and save. Firstly and oddly, I'm buying the leather armor I have just a bit too little money for last time, it's a better choice as of yet. Since I should try to be a "proper" player, I guess I won't try to rob the church. Playing at being Henry VIII isn't my best choice anyway.

And someone may or may not smite you for it.

While trying to check my stats again, I realize that the command "help history" won't help me with my command history, but tells me what's going on. It's nothing we didn't already know. The King Yelraf (Farley backwards, guess there's someone with that name on this game's team) and Queen Tei live in the Kingdom of Peace and Tranquility, the kingdom to the north has been conquered by the evil Gaiasbane. We need your help LOREMASTER! (Player is not actually said to be Loremaster)

Missed Classic 132: Loremaster (1991) - Introduction

Written by Morpheus Kitami

Valhalla is another game like Twin Valley Kingdom in that it requires an absolute ton of mapping, which in its case, involves a lot of busywork. I'll explain when the next entry on that comes out, but for now, let's talk about the very mysterious Loremaster.

Actually, it's not just me that's going to be talking about this, because Loremaster is another one of those weird RPG/adventure hybrids. Which means of course, that the CRPGAddict has so graciously agreed to do another collaboration with us, so his first entry can be found here. I promise I'll finish this one within a year, I swear. (Note, finish, not win)

This seems to be overselling it considerably, judging by the following screenshots.

As you can see, that's a lot of money. I think this might have been shareware, but if it was that was a hell of a lot of money for a shareware game. Either way this explains why it was missing for a long time, nobody was going to spend that much money for what was effectively a random game. We've had screenshots for a while, but the game was only findable on the internet a few years ago. So, let's get into it.

Missed Classic 119: Refixion (1991)

 Written by Morpheus Kitami

Well, anything is going to be a bit of a downgrade after one of the greatest adventure games of all time, and going in I already knew this wasn't going to be any kind of challenge. It's something I wanted to cover for a while, and one of the very first (pre-rendered) 3D adventure games. Actual early 3D, not the Playstation era.

Let's be very accurate here. Adventure "game". This is something akin to an interactive music video. There were a fair number of these things back in the '90s. Queensryche, Prince, The Rolling Stones and Devo, among many others. Some of these have more legitimate claims to being games than others. Its something we've all sort of forgotten since most people are only vaguely interested in music and superfans don't have any money because they spend so much on concert tickets.

I'm going to continue to call it game, without quotation marks, simply because that's easier for me to keep track of.

Missed Classic: La Crypte des Maudits - Won! (With Final Rating)

By Ilmari

Where I left off last time

Missed Classic 109: La Crypte des Maudits (1991) - Introduction

By Ilmari

The crypt of cursed

The sequel to Lankhor’s Le Secte Noire doesn’t have a very original framing story. At the end of the first game I had found a protective spell book stolen by a fiendish cult. Apparently this had not been enough, since the cult still held its meetings somewhere within an abandoned castle. The task of this game is to get rid of the cult for good.

Missed Classic: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer – WON!-ish and Final Rating

Written by Will Moczarski

Thou shalt not pass.

First of all let me say: what a fantastic community we have here at The Adventure Gamer. I had five people respond to my request for assistance with great advice – alas, it was not to be: The Palace of Deceipt indeed appears to be a game of deceipt, it is unwinnable in its present state and I’ve boldly gone as far as I could have gone in playing through it. However, the good news is that the remaining text bits of the game are somewhat readable as parts of the main .exe file, so I will try my best to provide you with a second-hand account of what the other parts might have played like.

Let’s resume our story, and go back to the armoury where I found a shield with my family crest on it. When I try to take the shield, I hear a deep rumbling from within the suit of armour next to it. The suit comes to life and proceeds to attack me with a sharp sword. If I try to kill the knight, the game informs me that I left the knife (you know, the cutz-o-matic one) with the carcass – however, there’s still a sleeping lion next door, right? I open the door and...the lion springs at the knight and knocks him over. He proceeds to tear him to pieces, and then turns to me. There appear to be multiple solutions for what happens next: holding up the shield either results in the lion shredding it to pieces of metal but then blacking out because there “must have been something in the meat”, or the lion’s head “clangs off the shield, and he drops to the ground, knocked out, several of his teeth scattered around the room. […] There are now 19 knights here, a knocked out lion, shreds of metal, lion's teeth, and a frustrated adventurer (you).” A frustrated adventurer? You can say that again. It’s strangely meta to read this parser output after THE CRASH.

Missed Classic: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer – Half-WON! with REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE

Written by Will Moczarski

This, my friends, is only a half-won, a won-ish, a sort-of won post which must be a first for the blog. What does this mean, you ask, and how did this come about? Have a little faith and a little patience and I shell tell you all how I succeeded at playing through The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer after a massive amount of parser-wrangling, cursing, keyboard-smashing and wailing – and yet I did not succeed. I will thus start my post with a request for (software) assistance, unusually, because maybe if not all is won at this point, maybe not all is lost either.

Request for (software) assistance

Basically I am looking for someone who can explain and (ideally) fix this error message:

Illegal function call in module PALOFDEC at address 01A2:1470

I assume that either the code is broken here OR this is as far as the shareware version takes us. However, I haven’t found any registered versions on the internet, so if the latter assumption turns out to be true, I will be unable to finish the game. Ironically, I have done what this situation would have required back in 1991, and tried to contact the author of the game, Cliff Bleszinski. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful as of yet.

If nobody is able to help me, I will post an as-if walkthrough of the remainder of the game because all of the text is right there in the open when you open the main executable file, and attach it to the PISSED rating. That would be somewhat unsatisfactory but I’d be out of other ideas, as it is.

Missed Classic 92: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer (1991)

Written by Will Moczarski

The beauty of the days gone by.

Missed Classic 91: Sanity Clause (1991)

Written by Joe Pranevich

Merry Christmas! I know I speak for many of us when I say that this has been a difficult year. While some of us found solace in the games that we played, others found themselves with little time or energy to relax as pandemic lockdowns and fear stretched over months. Our hearts reach out to those of you that have been affected by the virus in large or small ways. Christmas is a time for joy and reflection, plus to look forward to the year ahead. My Christmas started earlier this year as I have had the privilege to be playing Sanity Clause for you during what free time I could scrounge up these past several weeks. Playing this game, a little bundle of Christmas spirit from 1991, has been a relief to me and far less stressful than some other text adventures I could mention. I am glad that we have been able to continue our annual Christmas tradition this year and I hope that you enjoy reading about this game as much as I enjoyed playing it or, better still, playing Sanity Clause for yourself. Perhaps it will be a balm for your soul as well. 

Our longtime readers know that we made a deal with Satan Santa that this blog would continue running if and only if we played a Christmas classic each year. This is our seventh annual Christmas game (can you believe that?) and I know of at least one or two more English-language games for future years. Despite the hardships that the pandemic has brought, I am confident that we have many more great years of adventuring ahead of us!

While other Christmas games have been written as technical demos, adware, or “traditional” adventure games with a thin veneer of yuletide, Sanity Clause was written by a man who truly seems to love Christmas. Long after this game was a distant memory, Mike McCauley, the author, has even performed as the Jolly Old Elf himself. The game is well-researched, well-written, and you’ll just have to see what kind of nuttiness Santa was up to on this fateful Christmas in the early 1990s. 

The Year That Was… 1991

By The TAG Team

1991... the year of quality entertainment and quality games!

After a more quiet year, Sierra came back with a vengeance. Space Quest, Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Conquest -series all got new sequels, Space Quest 1 and Larry 1 were remade with better graphics, and completely new games, like Castle of Dr. Brain and EcoQuest were published. If you also count the games Dynamix made (Heart of China and Willy Beamish), the total rises to ten games, which is almost half of the adventure games that made it to our official gaming list. Of course, not all of these games were flawless, but even at their worst (Larry 5 and Police Quest 3) Sierra games had their moments and at their best (Space Quest 4 and Conquests of Longbow) they were unforgettable classics. Compared to Sierra, Lucasfilm again published only one game (Lechuck’s Revenge), but as could be expected, it was almost pure gold.

Consulting Detective - Alternate Versions

Written by Voltgloss & Joe Pranevich

Although we closed up Consulting Detective with a Final Rating last week, there is still a bit more to the story. In its publication life, the Consulting Detective games have been released in four distinct forms: the 1981-1995 pen-and-paper original game by Sleuth Publications, the 1991-1993 computer versions by ICOM, the 2012 remaster of that version by Zojoi, and a 2012/2015 (French/English) update of the classic game by Ystari Publications. We’ve now spent eight weeks covering the ICOM version of the game, but it’s worth a look at the others to see how they stack up. The Zojoi games may be played on this blog at some distant future date, but it will be a very long time before we get to contemporary adventure gaming history.

Joining me in this retrospective is Voltgloss who has been kind enough to take an in-depth look at the new Ystari Publications version of the game, as well as provide some details for the pen-and-paper game in general. The Ystari version features a number of plot changes from the cases that we played and he has patiently documented those in detail. If you intend to play any of these three Ystari cases, we will be dealing in spoilers for those games, but I will put up a spoiler warning when the time comes.

Consulting Detective - Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

It’s finally time for me to be the judge.

Last time, we closed the book on the third and final case in this volume of Consulting Detective. We’ve interacted with a ton of crazy characters, explored London, and placed three murderers behind bars. This is a game unlike any that we have played before and I’m glad that I was able to experience it firsthand.

As I prepare to write, I’m not sure how it will do in our PISSED scale. I know that I had a lot of fun, but the game does not have many of the standard trappings of adventures. Will that give it an advantage or a disadvantage in the rating? Let’s see!

Consulting Detective - Won!

Written by Joe Pranevich

A mysterious murderer and his mysterious envelope.

Last week, we started the case of the “Tin Soldier”. General Armstead has been killed in a duel with an unknown assailant. While we know he was killed by an elderly Frenchman with a cane and a carpetbag, he left behind plenty of people that had a motive to kill him: the thieves of the Polar Star diamond who he was close to exposing, five other members of a death lottery (a “tontine”), plus his brother-in-law who may have stood to gain control of a number of shared assets. None of those are elderly Frenchmen so we have to dig deeper to discover the connection.

We spent most of last time working to track down the Polar Star diamond. We discovered that Armstead’s contact had been murdered, potentially by the guy who the diamond was stolen from. We also know that Armstead’s publisher was making moves for the information almost immediately after his death. My leads are exhausted and I’ll need to start this week by going down a different path. Thus far, I don’t have any theories that are panning out, but I am having a ton of fun with this case.

Consulting Detective - A Duel to the Death

Written by Joe Pranevich

The “Moriarty” of French warfare

Last week, we “solved” the second of our three mysteries by unraveling a murder plot hatched by a crazy lazy with a superpower. Now that we’re on the third, I’m curious to see if this one references the previous cases or if all three chapters are completely stand-alone.

This story begins in Baker St. as Holmes and Watson are sought after by Inspector Smythe of Scotland Yard. As usual, the Yard has a case they cannot solve: a former soldier in the Napoleonic wars, General Farnsworth Armstead, has been murdered. He was a member of a curious lottery where the man who lived the longest would receive a significant cash sum. His death means that there are five remaining participants and five very good motives for murder. Mr. Armstead is also the author of a tell-all book about various “treasures” and may have been about to reveal the secretive owner of the Polar Star Diamond. Two lines of investigation but only one dead body. This should be fun!

EcoQuest - Final Rating

Written by Reiko

As it was targeted at a younger age group, EcoQuest was a very straightforward underwater romp, aside from a few minor issues. I generally had fun playing it (and gently poking fun at it) and was never really stuck on what to do next, although I did miss a few things and didn't get full points.

Consulting Detective - Victorian Supervillain

Written by Joe Pranevich

Is this the face of a murderer?

Last week, we were trying to solve the case of the “Mystified Murderess”, a woman who awoke from amnesia to find that she had apparently killed her fiance. We’ve been asked to prove her innocence. That’s not going to be easy! I think I have it figured out that her sister arranged the murder (at least indirectly) but not how she carried it out.

Just a reminder, here are our dramatis personae:

• Frances Nolan - Our “murderess”. She seems like a nice lady, was in love with Guy Clarendon (the victim), and is currently locked up in the Old Bailey awaiting trial. She’s an heiress to the Caverdine fortune.
• Loretta Nolan - Frances’s sister. As a young girl, she witnessed the murder of her parents and has been wrong in the head ever since. She thinks that she is a princess and her doctor believes that she is “incapable of love”. She seems to be our best suspect, but I have no idea how should could have accomplished it. She is also an heir of the Caverdine fortune but may have squandered much of her wealth.
• Guy Clarendon - The victim. He was a well-known athlete for a London cricket team but had gambling and drinking problems. He was dispossessed by his father recently and may have run up gambling debts. At the time of his death, he was engaged to Frances, but we found evidence that he was secretly with Loretta instead.
• Gerald Locke - A suitor for Frances’s hand and the one that brought the case to Holmes. He has plenty of motive to kill Guy, but then why take the case to the world’s greatest detective?
• Dr. Trevelyan - Loretta’s doctor, first at the Mesmer-Braid Institute and now in private practice. He’s known the Nolans for years and is good friends with Frances. He was also the last person to see her before she apparently went off to kill Guy. He could be working with Loretta, but he doesn’t seem like the murdering type. 

We still also have a “Society Burglar” at large but have found no connections from him to the current case. Got all that? Let’s continue!

EcoQuest - Manta and Whale - Won!

Written by Reiko

Adam Greene Journal #6: "I found a huge stash of chemicals leaking into the water! No wonder there’s so much dead stuff near this cave, and the Elurians are getting sick. Good thing I brought a transmitter with me. With that out of the way, it doesn’t take long to trace a harpoon line to Cetus. He’s in bad shape, and it’s up to me to help him, free Delphineus, and turn the tide of battle against the crazy manta!"

Last time I gathered all the items from the Oracle's prophecy, including a hazmat suit to protect me against the poison that's been leaking out and devastating the underwater city. Now I can swim through the wall and investigate it. Indeed, I find that there are barrels of chemical poison stashed in the cave, and several of the barrels are leaking (Ecological message +1).

Somehow Adam has everything he needs to mark a chemical spill for immediate cleanup.

Consulting Detective - Amnesia, She Wrote

Written by Joe Pranevich

Dr. Watson has taken to finding cases in the paper.

Last time, we wrapped up Holmes’s first case of the game and now it’s time to start in on the second. This one begins like the first with Watson reading about an interesting case in the London Times. A “Society Burglar” has managed to rob seven different high-society households, each time taking only a single valuable piece of jewelry and leaving the rest untouched. There were no signs of a search; it was as if the burglar knew exactly where to look each time. The most recent burglary was a Cleopatra tiara at the home of Sir Sanford Leeds on July 2. Holmes seems interested, but then he and Watson are interrupted by another case.

A gentleman named Gerald Locke arrives at Baker Street and tells us about the murder of Guy Clarendon. That case seems straight-forward: three days ago, Guy was shot dead in his hotel room with a woman, Frances Nolan, found standing over his body with a gun in her hand. Despite the evidence against her, Gerald is certain that she did not do it and his request is for us to prove her innocent. This sounds pretty fun!

Are these two cases connected? Or is the “Society Burglar” just foreshadowing the third case in the game? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

EcoQuest - Anemone and Octopus

Written by Reiko

Adam Greene Journal #5: "Time to explore farther! I've done all I can in the city for now. It's too bad everywhere else is so full of trash too. And something nearby is wayyy worse than just trash! All the plants near one cave are dead. It must be that poison that's threatening the city. I've got to get in there and find out what it is without killing myself."

We're on the next stage of the quest to find Cetus, which seems to involve actually leaving the city to start searching. I swim down out of the city and find myself back on the overlook screen where I first saw the city after emerging from the kelp maze. This time I have full control, though, and plenty of time to look around.

Statue pieces don't count as trash, fortunately.

I notice a giant statue head off to one side that looks intriguing. As I approach it, the view shifts over to the next screen and I can look at it more closely. Apparently there's a "flashlight fish" stuck in the statue's ear.

I also find some trash to dispose of [10] (a doll, a plastic flamingo, an old teddy bear, and a pair of polka-dot shorts), plus a little mirror, which I pocket [2]. I need to catch that fish in the statue, though. I thought initially the mirror might lure it out if I reflected some of its light, but no. I think I need to catch the fish in the glass jar I have, but the problem is that the lid is stuck tightly on the jar. I tried to get it open earlier by using it on the fisherman, but nothing happened. There must be another way, but I don't see it yet, so I keep exploring.