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.