Pokemon Blue Version: Review and Rating

 Not all games age the same. Pokemon Blue Version was the first original Game Boy game I have played, and it's certainly a product of its hardware. The fundamental limitations of the Game Boy are apparent. The lack of color, the limited control scheme, and the relative monotony of the environments stand out to someone playing it decades after its release. That said, it laid the foundation for one of gaming's largest franchises and its remarkable how well the game nailed some of the core tenants of what Pokemon still is known for today. Let's get on to the scales. Since this is my first time rating a JRPG on my scale, I'll explain a bit behind each metric as well.

World Building (Lore): JRPGs are generally pretty long. One of the advantages of this is that they are able to build more interesting and fleshed out worlds. My number one thing when playing a JRPG is to slowly unravel the customs and histories contained within these worlds. Pokemon Blue really tripped up on this. While shorter than most JRPGs, it still floundered on developing a cohesive world. NPCs, signs, and books were rarely more than just vessels to convey game mechanics. On the few occasions that something referenced something relating to the broader world, I loved it. The lore books on Mew in the Pokemon Mansion is an example that comes to mind. But cases like that were few and far between.

I really wanted some commentary on how Pokemon fitted into the world, or how our society would be impacted by the introduction of Pokemon. I wish that everyone wasn't so singularly focused on Pokemon. There was just so little "flavor" text within the game. No sense of community or history. In this regard, Pokemon Blue is the most bare-bones JRPG I have played. Rating: 2/10

Characters/Story: I decided to lump characters and story together for a few reasons. Plots (as opposed to world building) are nearly always told through character interactions. This is particularly true in JRPGs, as they tend to have a huge cast of characters. If a game were to have bad characters (or no characters at all), it would be hard to pull off a good story. Pokemon Blue has few important characters and essentially no plot. The goals of the game are to catch every Pokemon and to become the champion of the Elite Four. Within this though, there is no real story. There is no plot that adheres itself to your goal. The game is little more that a linear line of battles to overcome. The only NPCs with more than a single encounter were Professor Oak, your rival, Giovanni, and I suppose the gym guide. Even those NPCs were pretty vapid. I hope future Pokemon games do a better job with having actual characters. Rating: 1/10

Art Direction: Art direction is important to video games as a medium, and will likely be one of the criteria I look at for every genre. Pokemon Blue did better in this category than the others so far. It is held back by the hardware it was produced for, and for the sake of creating fair comparisons I will not be buffing its score due to that fact. Being in black and white sucks, though it is amusing that they tried to make up for this by describing each city with a different color. The environments have little variety to them, and the cities have nothing graphically to distinguish them from each other. What really shines is the combat encounters. I'm happy that all 150 Pokemon have their own unique portraits, and I believe every move in the game had a unique animation. There was a decent variety in trainer portraits too, especially with gym leaders. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of the more graphically impressive Game Boy games. Rating: 3/10

Music: Pokemon Blue has pretty good music. It was a bit repetitive at times, but overall there were a lot of catchy tunes considering its age. The gym battle music stands out, as well as Lavender Town/Pokemon Tower. Rating: 5/10

Sense of Progression: This one is a bit different and will likely only be used for JRPGs. More so than any other genre, JRPG combat is heavily focused on stats. For most games, there is no mechanical skill needed. Combat is turned based and the player has all the time they need to choose which command to pick. Since it is so stat focused, it is really easy to tell that you are getting better. Attacks do more damage, damage is reduced, health goes up, ect. Progression can also be outside of just combat. Many JRPGs lock of parts of the world at the beginning of the game, and only through progressing in the story do you unlock these new areas. I believe that a good JRPG will make it clear that your character is getting stronger and that they can better navigate the world around them. Pokemon is a mixed bag on this front. On one hand, Pokemon do obviously get stronger as they level up. They learn new moves, they evolve, and their stats go up. The game made good use of roadblocks that required items to get past. I've always like the HM system. It's meaningful to discover a new move that allows you to interact with your world in a new way. And some, like Surf and Fly, fundamentally change the way you navigate the world. 

On the other hand, there are a few thing related to combat that disrupt a sense of progression. The most egregious is the difficultly. Pokémon Blue is pathetically easy. Crafting a team is pointless when one Pokémon can carry you through the whole game. Within the first few hours, my starter was leaps and bounds ahead of any other Pokémon I had. Why is there no shared exp for the whole team? That would have prevented my starter from being overpowered and would have helped keep my whole team viable. I can’t think of any other JRPG where the entire party doesn’t get experience points. Some even give exp to team members not in your party! 

I know that my Pokémon were getting stronger, but what’s the point when no new challenges arise? I also don’t like that some of the stats are hidden during battles. You can’t see numerically how much damage a move does or how much HP an enemy has. This leads to a lot of guesswork on what moves are stronger, as even in the menus there’s no record of the stats for each move. By the end of the game, I just was throwing away every TM I found. I was tired of looking up move stats online, and my current attacks one-shot enemies most of the time anyway. Rating: 5/10

Final Thoughts and Score: Pokémon Blue is not a bad game, but I’d imagine that there’s little reason to play it today. If it’s not the worst Pokémon game, then that would be a surprise to me. As a historical piece, it’s worthwhile. It truly was fascinating to see just how much Pokémon has stayed the same over the years. And of course there are a ridiculous amount of classic Pokémon that were introduced in Gen I. Helped fill my mental Pokédex out nicely. Final Rating: 16/50 or 32%

Pokémon Blue Version: Nothing but Mazes and Teleports (Won!)

Heading west out of Fuchsia City proved to be a good decision. Behind another sleeping Snorlax lay a hidden path to the HM Fly. I can now fly between cities, which will be great for making backtracking more tolerable. The last new town I need to reach requires Surf. I had to look up where to find it, as I completely forgot about the Safari Zone (and I always thought it was an option area anyways).

The Safari Zone not what I expected. It seemed pretty linear and the mechanics of catching Pokémon changed. I couldn’t battle with them, but rather, I could only throw rocks, bait, or Pokeballs at them. It was rather tedious, as they could run away at anytime. You can only take 500 steps within the zone before having to start again at the beginning. Took me two rounds to get Surf. I also found the Warden’s teeth, and he gave me a Strength HM. 

I left the zone and went south to the ocean. This ended up leading to the Seafoam Islands. The caves on the island had rushing water that could be made traversable if boulders were pushed into it.  I found Articuno at the bottom, but I couldn’t catch it. Leaving the cave brought me to Cinnabar Island.

My favorite Pokemon as a kid

Cinnabar had a Pokémon Mansion filled with stat boosting items and a “secret key.” There were also some journals there that revealed some lore about Mew and Mewtwo. I wonder if I’ll get to see them by the end of my play through.

Next up was the Cinnabar gym. This was probably my favorite gym so far, as I’ve always been a fan of quizzes. The leader used fire-type Pokémon, so it was quite easy. 

Didn't get hit once

The last badge I need is in Saffron City. The guard in front of the Silph Co. building fell asleep at some point, so I was able to go inside. Wish I didn’t have to though, as this area sucked. Eleven floors of mazes and teleports, with a ton of trainers to boot. It took me forever to clear the building out and eventually rescue the Silph Co. president. Gio was to blame (again). Got a master ball though, which is pretty dope. With Team Rocket defeated, the gym was now able to be entered.

The psychic gym had another teleport maze, but always using the one right in front of you brought me to the leader quickly, so it was a lot less frustrating than the teleports in Silph. The leader was, as always, easy and with her defeat, I now can go to the Elite Four! Or so I thought... Turns out that I didn’t have the eighth badge yet from Viridian City. I forgot that it was closed the first time I went through there. The leader turned out to be none other than Gio, so I had to teach him a lesson for the third time. This time he was so soundly defeated that he vowed Team Rocket would be dissolved forever. Doubt it. Onward to the Elite Four!

Should she though?

The first of the four was tough, as they used iced type Pokémon that my Blastoise was weak against. The third actually surprised me, as she withdrew one of her Pokémon before I could defeat them. I didn’t know the AI in this game was capable of that. After beating the four I had to defeat the champion, which was Red. Definitely the single toughest fight in the game. I had to use most of my potions and revives to defeat him, but I did manage to beat him on my first try. After that Oak shows up and congratulates you, and then the credits roll. 

Suck it nerd

The last thing I did was go and catch Mewtwo. Figured I should use my Master Ball on something after all. With him caught, I’m officially finished with Pokémon Blue! I’ll write up a review and give it a formal score here soon.

My last new Pokemon

Final team

Final play time: 15:37

Pokémon Blue Version: I Beat Up Animals For Money (And Items)

It took no time at all to reach Cerulean City. I think that might have been the shortest route so far. The Pokemart there carried repels thankfully, so I stocked up on those and on Pokeballs. Bikes costs a ridiculous amount of money, so I assume I’ll get one as a reward for something. And the gym leader here is Misty! Maybe my Squirtle will have to fight one of its own kind soon.

Is it actually possible to buy this?

Cerulean feels like the first town that is actually a decent size. There were a decent few houses with random people chilling inside. It looks like I will need to learn Cut before moving on. The gym had some easy water-type trainers inside. My Squirtle is resistant against water attacks, but he knows Mega-Punch so he did alright.

I liked Misty's description

Mist was easy too. Didn’t have to use any other Pokémon even. Her badge apparently lets me use Cut anywhere, so it seems like there aren’t any HMs in this game? Fine with me. I didn’t want to make a slave anyway. 

But when I went to the plant blocking my path, I couldn’t do anything with it. I missed a path northward though, so I headed that way first. After a massive amount of trainers, I finally found Bill’s house. Unfortunately I was not able to see his Pokémon collection, but he did give me a cruse ship ticket. 

Team Rocket is a bit more evil in this game

Back in town, I noticed that a cop no longer was blocking off one of the houses. Team Rocket had robbed the owners. I always thought that Team Rocket was a joke, but they are actually committing some serious crimes! They’re dumb though, and the perpetrator was still in their backyard. I beat him up and took the TM he stole and kept it for myself. Am I as bad as Team Rocket? Caught myself a Meowth soon after and left them at the daycare nearby. The above ground path to the next city is closed, so I had to use the Underground Path. Bit sketched because at the end of it, a lady said that people often loose stuff down there.

Vermilion City was packed full of stuff. An old man gave me a fishing rod and the slightly creepy Pokémon Fan Club leader gave me a bike voucher.

Game changer

Getting the bike was a huge step up. I was starting to get fed up with how slow Blue is at walking. I explored the Diglette Cave and caught one of them (thanks Reddit for suggesting I catch one ASAP!). Time to check out the S.S. Anne.

The exterior is much prettier than the interior

The S.S. Anne was a fairly tedious area. I generally play RPGs as a completionist; I enjoy talking to every NPC and fully exploring areas before moving on. For the sake of my sanity, I cannot do this here. Fighting ~20 trainers in one area just takes too much time. I rubbed an old man’s back for the Cut HM and found a Great Ball in the trash. I was wrong about there not being HMs in this game. I’m not sure what the point of unlocking the skill in the last gym was, given that I don’t believe I could have progressed this far without having beaten Misty. Now that I have Cut I can get into Vermilion’s gym.

The leaders name is Lt. Surge, but people call him the “Lightning American.” Further proof that Pokémon takes place in our own world!

Is this what Game Freak thinks Americans look like?

After beating Surge I started making my way towards Lavender Town, but Snorlax blocked my way. Apparently I gotta go through the Rock Tunnel to get there, so it looks like it’s time to backtrack. Rock Cave was too dark to see anything, so time for more backtracking to find out where I can get Flash.

I looked up what area Flash was in, and it didn’t take long to find it once I got there. I only have one Pokémon that was able to learn it though (thanks Dorwzee). Along the way my Wartortle evolved into Blastoise!

The Pokemon that will carry me for the rest of the game

Rock Tunnel was quick and easy with repels in hand. I don’t like areas with little Pokémon diversity, and there only seemed to be Zubats there. Lavender Town was only a few steps away from the cave exit. I can see why this town had creepy pastas written about it; the music was very strange and the Pokémon Tower is a bit morbid.

I understand now why there are so many creepypastas about this place

The Pokémon Tower requires a scope to see Pokémon in it, so I’m gonna come back once I find that. There wasn’t much south of town, so I went west and ended up in Celadon City. What a big town! There are actually skyscrapers, which isn’t something I expected to find for some reason. The department store was filled with unique stuff. I bought a bunch of lemonade in hopes that I can use it to open up the closed roads all around the game. There were some meta characters in Celadon that seem to be aware that they are in a video game.

Unexpected meta

There was a secret Team Rocket base inside the casino. The base had a rudimentary puzzle throughout it, which is a first for the game. There are tiles that move you in a specified direction. While not hard whatsoever, it was still nice to see the game try something like this. Giovanni, presumably one of the leaders of Team Rocket, was at the bottom of the dungeon. He left a Silph Scope for me, which means it’s time to go back to Lavender Town after I’m done with Celadon. 

Potential antagonist?

Celadon’s gym was the hardest so far. Grass type Pokémon are the most annoying type to fight, as they have binding and sleep attacks. It really draws the battles out. My Squirtle was at a type disadvantage, but he was still able to single-handedly take the leader down.

I like that gym leaders have unique portraits

The guard east of Celadon was happy to take a Lemonade in exchange for allowing me to go through. Right past them was Saffron City, which evidentiary is controlled by Team Rocket. The gym was the first place I noticed, so I knocked it out real quick. Instead of getting a badge, I got a Hitmonchan. There’s another gym next to it though, so I imagine I’ll be going there eventually.

That was all I could do in Saffron at the moment, so next I went back to the Pokémon Tower. This place is pretty sad for a kids game. The tower was being haunted by Cubone’s mother, but I bashed her to death so no more hauntings I guess.

What the hell is this thing?

The old man at the top gave me a flute to wake Pokémon up with, so I finally was able to get the Snorlax out of my way. After a pretty long trip, I got to Fuchsia City, though I’ll admit it took me an embarrassingly long time to find where the gym was (it’s tucked away amid the huge Safari Zone!) Finding the gym took longer than beating it, though Koga did put up more of a fight than anyone else so far.

That’ll be all for this post. I’ve gotten five of the eight badges, so I think I’m getting decently close to finishing the game. I’m hoping that it’ll only take one more post on here until I’m finished with the game. Looking forward to move on!

Time played so far: 10:46

Game #2: Pokemon Blue Version

Game: Pokemon Blue Version

Year: 1998

Status: Available for purchase on eShop

Playing on: mGBA emulator on 3DS

 

Time for game number two! I have wanted to dive into the Pokemon franchise for awhile now. I played Sapphire and Red Rescue Team a lot as a kid, as well as collecting cards, but besides that, I have essentially ignored Pokemon for well over a decade. I mean, the last game I played even a bit of was Pearl. So I figured it was time to return and take a look at the beginnings of the franchise. I know nothing about the original game, so this will be a blind playthrough.

Pokemon Blue Version is part of the first generation of Pokemon games. It was released in 1998 in North America alongside it's counterpart: Pokemon Red Version. Though I am too young to remember, they caused quite a big stir. They are still the seventh best selling games of all time and are by far the best selling games in the Pokemon franchise. I will be playing Blue on the mGBA emulator that I have installed on my 3DS. I figure that this will give me the most authentic experience with the game that is possible for me. 

Iconic title screen

The game starts with an intro by Professor Oak. I opted to go with the default names of "BLUE" and "RED" for my character and my rival respectively, which actually works out well as Blue is typically the name I use in games anyway. After the intro, it is time to embark on your quest. I set out to find Professor Oak. I went next door first, but soon discovered that he was actually in his lab. I also found a map of the world, which indicated that I am in Pallet Town. The world appears to be a lot smaller than what I've seen in other Pokemon games, but that's to be expected considering the restrictions of the hardware this game was made for. 

South of the neighbor's house is a research lab of sorts. I met my rival, and he seems nice enough. I snooped through Oak's emails and found an advertisement to come challenge the Pokemon League, which I assume is the elite four. I'm not sure if that's the ultimate goal of the game, or if Team Rocket eventually shows up, so I'm excited to see where my quest eventually leads!

Pallet Town is tiny. I already explored everything it had, so I tried to leave town, but Oak emerged from my house to stop me. What exactly was he doing there... Anyways, he explained that it was dangerous to walk around in tall grass without a Pokemon to protect me. He then offered to let me take one of his Pokemon, and also allowed me first pick over his own grandson (my rival). Why would Oak give me preferential treatment over his grandson...

I've always had a special place in my heart for water Pokemon

 

 

I chose Squirtle as my starter. I think its the cutest of the bunch, and I've always had a soft spot for water types. Red wanted to fight me, so I got my first taste of the battle system. Honestly I'm not too impressed. He picked Balbasaur, and our battle consisted of just each using tackle on each other over and over again. I won and he gave me a bit of money for some reason. Time to head out of Pallet Town.

Looks a bit more like the Eternally Grey Paradise

It didn't take long to reach Viridian City, and it didn't take long for me to leave. The town's shopkeeper asked me to deliver a package to Oak. Once I did, Oak gave me a Pokedex and a mission to record all of the Pokemon in the world. Doubt I will, but I intend to catch as many as I happen to come across. With little more than the few vague goals in hand, it's time to get back to exploring new spots. I also caught a Spearow, so that's cool.

Back in Viridan City, there appeared to be two paths I could take. I went left first, but was told by Red that I wouldn't be let into town. He then processed to whoop me in battle and sent me back the Pokecenter in Viridan City. Time to try the north path, which ended up leading to the Viridian Forest. I encountered my first random trainers and caught a Metapod and a Kakuna.

 

That's a more accurate description

I reached Pewter City. A man in the Pokecenter mentioned that Team Rocket is in Mt. Moon, so it does appear like they are in the game. Brock is the gym leader of Pewter. Cool to know where he came from! An NPC in the museum mentioned the moon landing, so is Pokemon suppose to take place here on Earth? 

Was Brock this extra in the show?

Brock was a complete joke. My Squirtle destroyed his rock type Pokemon. So I got my first badge and the Bide TM. I gave it to Squirtle. Onwards to Mt. Moon. The route there had a definite difficulty spike. There were a ton of trainers, and nearly all of them were more difficult than Brock. I went back and caught a Rattata and Pidgey to help out. With a bit of grinding, I got past them and found the entrance to Mt. Moon. 

Mt. Moon was the most frustrating area thus far. The encounter rate was one of the highest I've seen in a JRPG. It was a common occurrence to only be able to take two steps before having to fight another Pokemon. Stocking up on repels will be essential for future dungeons. Team Rocket was present in the cave, but disappointingly their main role was to act as more trainers to fight. I decided to take the Helix Fossil at the end of the cave. I emerged onto Route 4 and the next blog post will start with my journey to Cerulean City. I just hope that I can buy repels there.

Team Rocket uses whips apparently

Some final random thoughts: 

• There's more variety to battle screen transitions than I anticipated.
• I'm playing this with the original aspect ratio and screen size, and wow the GB's screen was tiny.
• The dialog has been subpar so far. There's very little exposition, and most NPCs only talk about game mechanics.
• I'm digging the soundtrack so far.
• A lot of sound effects were used as late as Pokemon Sapphire. This creates a weird situation where certain parts of this game are nostalgic, despite the fact that I've never played it before.

Time played so far: 3:40

 

Enchanted Scepters: Review and Rating

     Well, it's time for my first review and rating! As a general structure for these going forth, I plan on rating games based on a few different categories. What is different from other reviewers is that I'm going to tailor my categories to the genre of game I am playing.  For example, it is not fair to judge a text adventure on its graphics (as they generally don't have any). Enchanted Scepters is a point-and-click adventure game. The elements I would look for in a game from this genre are: story, art direction, audio, gameplay, and puzzles. All categories will be out of then points. Some genres may be evaluated on a different amount of criteria, so scores will be turned into a percent to make this fair.

    Story: Enchanted Scepters, like many games from its era, is weak in the story department. There is a bit of exposition at the beginning, which serves to justify the quest we are about to embark on, but everything that happens beyond that point feels very isolated from each other. Their are hardly any characters in the game. There's the king, a couple guards, the court wizard, the Queen of Atlantis, a bartender, and a robot. Fewer than half of them have more than two lines of dialogue. Rating: 1/10

    Art Direction: The games that I play on this blog are played from a contemporary perspective. That means I will not be adjusting scores to take into account the age of the games I play. ES has impressive graphics for its age, but ultimately come off as strange and eerie today. It strove for a more realistic look. As a result, it's human-like characters ranged from uncanny, to goofy, and even sometimes creepy. The environment design is decent and has lots of variety considering it's a black-and-white game. It might have worked well if it was a horror game, but as a point-and-click adventure game, it's a bit lacking. Rating: 3/10

     Audio: While the game is notable for its early use of digitized audio, most of the sound effects have aged poorly. The snippets we do get are generally sporadic, of low quality, and are distracting. When entire minutes can go by without a sound, the digitized shout of a troll can be quite surprising. There are a few areas of the game where the audio is not sporadic, and those areas are even worse. The sounds get mind numbingly repetitive. Audio is treated like a novelty here, but it unfortunately never justifies its own inclusion. Rating: 0/10

     Gameplay: This is a game that doesn't fully know what genre it wants to belong to. On one hand, 80% of my time with this game was spent as if this was a text adventure. I typed commands into a parser and (generally) read the results of my actions (as opposed to seeing those results). The problem with this is that the text parser was garbage. Its vocabulary was limited and it did not support any shortcuts. Zork, a game that was commercially released six years before this game, (and was developed nine years before) has a much better text parser than this game does. 

      But, of course, this is not a text adventure. This has a graphical element too, alongside mouse controls. The mouse controls were underutilized. Outside of a handful of puzzles, all the mouse was good for was shortcuts. It was faster to use the toolbar command to attack something rather than spam typing "swing sword." The best use of the mouse was for triggering traps or secret doors in the game's few temples. The game feels like a tech demo meant to show off the possibility of mice in gaming.

    Moving through the world worked well enough, even though continually having to re-open doors was annoying. Interaction with the world was generally limited. It was rare that I found any "flavor" text in this game. Many set-pieces in the world ultimately were non-interactable (as far as I could tell). This made the world feel flat and boring. I believe something like 75% of rooms in this game serve no purpose, which is simply a shame. The world should have been half its size and filled with twice as much content. Combat was much too frequent, the mechanics behind it obscure, and never served a purpose. I got EXP for killing thing, but it did nothing. I got tons of different weapons, but I could never tell if they did different damages. Rating: 2/10

    Puzzles: Puzzles are the heart and soul of point-and-click adventure games. This is the category ES does the best on. After playing a few Infocom games, I have gotten used to vague and frustrating puzzles (and not to mention dead-ends). This game generally avoided that. I only encountered one dead-end, and it only set me back a few minutes. The puzzles were generally logical, or at least were obvious and/or had direct hints through the gameplay. I used a walkthrough three times, which is low compared to previous games I have played. The game world itself was also easy to map, as it had a consistent internal logical. Games like Zork were much more frustrating to map than this was. My biggest complaint is the simplicity of the puzzles. Most of them are simple "find the right item for the lock" puzzles. So even though I rarely used a walkthrough, I don't feel particularly accomplished in that achievement.  Puzzles are also relatively sparse considering how many screens this game has. Rating: 5/10

 

Page one of my completed map

 

Page two and three. For fun, here's a link to a much better map.

     Final Thoughts and Score: Enchanted Scepters is a glorified tech demo. It is a showcase of what was possible with Silicon Beach's new game engine (and perhaps a marketing tool for it). It straddles the line between text adventure and point-and-click adventure without fully committing to one or the other. The rich worlds of text adventures are replace with drab and primitive drawings, but without the ease of use that mouse controls would eventually give us. Other than for its historical value, there is little reason for a modern gamer to play this. Final Rating: 11/50 or 22%

Enchanted Scepters: All for the Spectacle (Won!)

     As of the last time I wrote, I had acquired the first of four elemental scepters needed to beat the game. The next three turned out to be a bit tougher, and more tedious, to find. Overall though, the game continued more or less as before. 

    There are four major areas in the game, each housing one of the scepters. Last session I explored the underground caves and found the Earth Scepter. This session I toured around a jungle, ocean, and desert. For as small as floppy disks were back then (roughly 1MB according to the emulator), there sure are a lot of scenes in this game.

    The jungle was home to the Air Scepter. It was located inside a Mayan inspired temple. (Inspired is a loose term here, as this temple was built with stereotypes and preconceptions rather than any real facts.) There were traps galore inside the temple, but nearly all of them were nearly impossible to trigger. For example, one room has a giant stone ball rolling towards you (thanks Indian Jones). This game is not played in real time, so the threat of being crushed is near non-existent. The only way to get hurt by this trap is to essentially just command your character to wait. There's a spiked floor trap that functions in the exact same way. It's as if the developers wanted their players to conceptually imagine encountering a ball trap, but didn't have the means of implementing it in a meaningful way. 

Why is he raising his eyebrows at me?

 

    I found the Air Scepter at the end of the temple. There was a secret trap door in the same room which let me escape back outside, though it led to any entirely different area than the jungle. Weird. Not that I complained though, as it brought me closer to my next goal: the ocean.

    The third scepter was rumored to be somewhere inside the lost city of Atlantis. Thankfully, there was a diving suite I conveniently could steal right from a bar on the beach. I marched right into the ocean, apparently with pockets big enough to house the entirety of my inventory without anything getting wet. I came across a trench that had an oyster blocking off an important seeming tunnel. Offering it a pearl made it float away, though what use does an oyster have for a pearl? Inside the tunnel was the city of Atlantis, or at least what was left of it. Most of it was in ruins, and the only place I could explore was the throne room (which was just a chair out in the open ocean). A trident lay flat across the ocean floor, which seemed like a worthy prize for such a discovery.

    Just south of the throne was a hatch sticking out of the ground. Inside there was a sophisticated seeming airlock. To my surprise, on the other side of the sealed door, there was a robot. They claimed that I was the first visitor in 1000 years and offered to bring me to the queen. The queen was listened to my quest and offered an exchange: if I were to kill the dreaming beast, then I could have the scepter. I accepted.

What a cute, non-threatening fella

    The beast proved easy to kill. The trident I found slew the creature before it could even wake up. I made my way back to the queen. She seemed surprised that I had survived, and she then ordered her robot to kill me. She fled the throne room as I did battle with the machine. 'Twas no match, and I rushed off in search of the queen. Though she had dropped her scepter in the next room, the queen herself was nowhere to be found. Her palace was larger than I anticipated, with an entire submarine dock hidden away in it. Thankfully my time as a wizard's apprentice included a module in submersible piloting. I beached the submarine and went on my merry way to the last scepter.

     I saved the desert for last, as it seemed the most intimidating. It was the staging ground upon which our enemies were preparing for war. A lone command post was all that stood between our king's bountiful land and the sand-whipped wastes down south. Mere seconds after I left the post, I was met with a burst of machine gun fire. Despite having modern combat armor, my sword made quick work of the soldier. Resembling Rambo, I proceeded to sabotage the enemy's siege equipment and then walked out into the open desert in search of the scepter. 

    The shifting sands of the desert made it difficult to navigate, but soon enough I found myself facing a Sphinx. One quick puzzle later and I was inside. The interior was pretty straightforward. The last room contained a sarcophagus with a mummy inside. Spooky as it was, it provided no more difficulty than anything previously. A hidden tunnel lead outside to the top of a volcano. I repelled into hellishly hot hole and stood face-to-face with a fire demon. A few swings of my sword later it was gone, and a Fire Scepter lay in its place. 

    With all four in hand, it was time to return to my master, the court wizard. He took the scepters and cast four devastating spells, one for each of the cardinal directions. From the description of the spells, I'm not sure how much kingdom there is left to be ruled after all this. He called in tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, and earthquakes, so I might have just helped create the apocalypse. Regardless, you are congratulated for saving the kingdom and are told to look out for the next Silicon Beach game. 

Savior or psycho?

 

    Next post will be my final review and scoring of Enchanted Scepters.

Game #1: Enchanted Scepters (1986)

Game: Enchanted Scepters

Year: 1986

Status: Abandonware

Playing on: PCE/MacPlus emulator   

 

The game to kick off this blog is Enchanted Scepters by Silicon Beach Software and released exclusively on early Macintosh computers. This game was the inspiration for the creation of this blog. It is the first game listed in the "Art of Point and Click Adventure Games" book I am slowly working through. The book claims that Enchanted Scepters is the first point-and-click adventure game of all time, so I was surprised to see so little of it on the internet. YouTube appears to have a grand total of three videos on it, and there isn't much more to be found on the other corners of the internet. I figured that this game deserved a bit more, and thus the motivation to start this blog was born. 

Let's dive into the little history that appears to be known about this game. Despite what my book says, Wikipedia claims Enchanted Scepters is not the first P&C game. According to them, although the copyright date on the game's box is listed as 1984, it was not actually released until 1986, which would give the title of "first P&C adventure game" to another title. But does release date really matter in this kind of debate? I'm inclined to think that whichever game was created first deserves the claim to fame, but unfortunately there is no way of figuring that particular detail out. Regardless, Enchanted Scepters is one of the earliest games in the genre, one of the first Macintosh games that utilized digitized sound, and is certainly is a fun starting point for my trek. 

There are few sources online that reference ES. The May 1986 edition of MacUser magazine had a brief review of the game. The author was positive towards most aspects of the game. Most interestingly, she dedicated a lot of praise towards the mouse controls. It's easy to take for granted nowadays, but computer mice were still a new periphery for most people in 1986, and playing a game with one (I imagine) was still a novelty. Much of the marketing around this game centered around novelties. The box exclaims that ES is a "text-graphic-sound adventure game," which is every buzzword avaliable to the gaming industry in 1986. MacUser mentioned that the MSRP price for the game was $39.95, which is roughly $100 dollars in today's money (not to mention that you also had to own a ~$7000 computer to run it). A MacWorld review mentioned that the game would "probably take about a week’s worth of casual play to complete." Novelty has a price apparently, both financially and in opportunity cost.

Box art. Credit to Ye Olde Infocomme Shoppe

ES was developed in part to serve as a tech-demo of Silicon Beach's "World Builder" game engine. The engine itself seemed to receive more attention than the game itself, as it got a multi-page feature in MacWorld. The fact that their engine was able to digitize real-life audio recordings and output it through the Macintosh's internal speakers was a big deal. Designed by Bill Appleton, it was originally intended to be a simple-to-use tool for the creation of adventure games, but the MacWorld feature goes even further and suggests that it may be useful in both business and therapeutic settings. While there is no evidence to suggest World Builder was used in that way, it enjoyed some small amount of success. Released in 1986, and eventually made into freeware in 1995, there was a small community dedicated to the engine throughout the 80s and 90s. A number of shareware titles were produced using it, with care being taken to preserve them up until as recently as 2020. However, Silicon Beach were never to release another game on the World Builder engine, so ES remains the sole commercialized game built upon it. 

Now onto the actual game! Well almost, as before being able to play this I had to setup a Macintosh emulator (not something I'd have ever thought I'd do). PCE/MacPlus worked well for me. You just run the .bat file once it's downloaded, and you are good to go! I downloaded ES from the Internet Archive as a .img file (which is the .ISO of the floppy disk world) and used that file to replace the generic .img file the emulator used by default. The MacUser review mentioned that the game took upwards of two and a half minutes to load on a 512k system. That's how long it took for me to install the game, and it loads instantaneously. Thanks emulation. 

Upon opening the game, there is no title or splash screen. You are thrust immediately into the first scene of the game: your bedroom. The premise of the game is that your homeland is under attack. As the apprentice to the court wizard, your duty is to find him the four scepters he needs to repel the invading forces. After getting your quest from the king, the game lets you loose. There is very little direction and is fairly open world.

Opening scene

I don't intend for these posts to be a play-by-play of my time in a game. That would take forever. I instead want them to serve as a place for specific anecdotes I found enjoyable and to as an in-progress review. 

I've played ES for a bit over an hour so far and am a bit over 25% of the way through the game. Compared to the Infocom text games I've played, the parser in this is terrible. Common shortcuts aren't recognized (like using "n" to go north) and the vocabulary it uses is limited. This is sorta made up for with its inclusion of mouse controls, as it is quicker to click on the attack command rather than type "cast lightning spell". Unfortunately the mouse movement has some sort of weird acceleration and is awkward to use. I am not sure if this is an issue with the emulator or if old Macintosh computers were just like that. 

I swear that early adventure games all had jokes written by the same person

So far, this game essentially is Zork but with graphics. It's a collection-a-thon, it uses very similar humor, and has fairly similar combat. ES has thus far emphasized its combat Zork did though. There are combat encounters generally every few scenes, which honestly just means that I have to reload a lot more often than in Zork. You can aim for specific body parts, but there is no clear documentation as for why one would do this. My guess is that you look at their character and try to aim for where they don't have armor, but without more information it's hard to be sure. So far I've mostly attacked without aiming for a specific body part. 

The characters you come across in this game are unsettling

This dude is a thing of nightmares

    

The early Machintosh computers that this was released on had a monochromatic screen but boasted a high resolution than many other popular computers at the time. This leads to some interesting looking graphics. On one hand, the lack of color makes it look dated, but the image is sharper than what I tend to expect from the mid-1980s. This serves the environmental design great. The character design though is unintentionally creepy and off-putting. Characters oftentimes take up huge chunks of the screen, which makes the fact that they are flat and still all the more apparent. The disjointed audio does not help. The game has been silent for 95% of my playtime, but on certain screens and during combat, there are occasional bursts of crackling digitized audio. While the quality was considered groundbreaking upon release, nowadays it only adds to the uncanny feeling this game exudes. I can tell that their audio snippets were recorded in real life, but the way they interject into an otherwise silent scene comes off as disjointed. 

The setting has been the best part of the game so far. For the first 45 minutes of gameplay, I was exploring what felt like a normal fantasy world. I dealt with crazy alchemists and priests, charmed a snake, and prayed to god for a magic wand. And then out of nowhere, while I was heading into the southern desert for the first time, I was jumped by a man with a machine gun. The juxtaposition of exploring a fantasy world with then hearing the spray of machine gun fire was surprising to say the least. Thankfully my medieval era equipment was able to defeat him, so while bringing a knife to a gunfight might be a bad idea, evidently a sword will work out perfectly fine.

    

A sword is mightier than a machine gun, apparently

 If anyone else who has played this (especially if you played it back in the 1980s) comes across this, please leave a comment! There are only two contemporary reviews of this game that have survived till the present day, so getting more firsthand accounts of Enchanted Scepters would be great. I'll hopefully continue my playthrough over the next week. We'll see how many more posts it warrants, but at the moment I'm leaning towards just one. 

Additional Links and Sources:

MacUser Magazine Review

MacWorld Feature (p. 116)

MacWorld Review 

World Builder Game Repository

PCE/MacPlus