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 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of Obsessing Over Which Games to Play

     Over the course of my life, I have gone through several distinct periods of how I approached video games. As a kid I played what was available to me. By my teenage years, I had amassed quite the collection of games, but I played them with little intent and often abandoned games as quickly as I had found them. Around the time I graduated from high school, I decided that enough was enough. Playing games at random was no longer gratifying for me. I created a list of games which I considered to be "top priority" and set out to finish them.

    Years went by, and while there were a few distractions along the way, the list by and large was completed. Simultaneously I was completing my BA in History. As I became immersed in the study and practice of history, I realized that gaming history was something that I was intensely passionate about. So with the top priority list finished, I decided that it was time to create a new list. This time around, I wanted to play every video game that could be considered important to the history of the medium. 

    And that has been my life for roughly the past year. I started with some classic Infocom games like Zork and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and more recently started delving into more JRPGs like Dragon Quest VIII and the Etrian Odyssey series. But simply playing the games still does not feel like it is enough. Much like how Infocom packaged "feelies" in with their games, I too want something beyond just what I experience in game. I'm hoping that I blog will fulfill that desire.

    This blog will be a way for me to catalogue and review the games I play. Additionally, I hope to use it as a place to write about the history of the games I am playing (gotta use my degree for something) and to put them into a broader context within the medium as a whole. This idea was directly inspired by the CRPG Addict. I believe that we will have relatively little crossover, as his goal is to play every CRPG ever, where as mine is to play every "important" game irregardless of genre. (Edit: I'm a few posts in now, and am formatting them similarly to CRPG Addict's posts. It feels like the most natural way to write. Just wanted to be upfront and give him credit.)

    For the time being, I will be focusing on DS, 3DS, and old computer games. The DS and 3DS games I play are picked just by my inherent desire to play them. As for old computer games, I have chosen to play most of them in a specific order. I recently bought a book titled "The Art of Point and Click Adventure Games". It catalogues a wide selection of adventure games from 1984 through 2020. I thought it would be fun to play them as I'm reading along in the book, so it'll serve as my guide for that particular genre at least. 

The book that motivated me to start this

 

    If you've read this far, then congrats you're probably the only one. I'm writing this more for myself at this point, but of course it'd be awesome if even just a few people cared enough to read any of the future posts on here. Thank you to any who do!