Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
Game 282: MicroMud (1988) - Hallo Guyst Review Games Update, In the article you read this time with the title Game 282: MicroMud (1988), we have prepared this article well for you to read and take information in it. hopefully the post content what we write can you understand. alright, happy reading.
Title : Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
link : Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
You are now reading the articlel Game 282: MicroMud (1988) with link address https://reviewgameupdate.blogspot.com/2018/02/game-282-micromud-1988.html
Title : Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
link : Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
 |
| This sounds like an exfoliating body wash. |
MicroMud
United Kingdom
Independently developed; published by Virgin Games
Released in 1988 for Commodore 64
Date Started: 18 February 2018
Date Ended: 23 February 2018
Total hours: 12
Total hours: 12
Difficulty: Easy (2/5)
Final Rating: 19
Ranking at Time of Posting: 60/290 (21%)
One thing that has never interested me is making other people part of my gaming experience. Not strangers, anyway. I guess it could be fun with a small group of intelligent, trustworthy friends, but I barely have five people in my life who will meet in a bar, let alone create Cyber1 accounts and join me for a rousing game of Oubliette. I have no interest in playing with strangers, either cooperatively or competitively. I don't want my success dependent on other people, or theirs dependent on me. I don't want to compete against 14-year-olds with 16 hours a day to devote to developing their expertise. I have no interest in hearing slurs about my intelligence, sexuality, or family. I play video games to get away from that sort of thing.
There must be a lot of players like me, which makes me all the more surprised that some of the big MMORPGs don't offer a single-player option. I think it would be enormous fun to experience a persistent game world in which things were always changing and there was new stuff to explore every few months. I just want to do it alone.
For players like me, or for those without modems in 1988, came MicroMud, an offline version of the famous MUD ("multi-user dungeon") developed at the University of Essex in the late 1970s. The two-disk game simulates the MUD experience by drawing 10 AI characters from a pool of 100 to play along with the PC. They come and go from the various screens, offer insults and platitudes, and occasionally attack without provocation.
 |
| As the game begins, computer-controlled characters enter and speak. |
These interactions happen within the context of a typical Zork-like text adventure spanning 400 locations. The ostensible goal is to reach 102,400 points by slaying other characters (which gives you one-twelfth their accumulated points), slaying monsters, solving puzzles, and finding treasures and dropping them in, of all places, the swamp. I gather that this basic approach is drawn directly from the online MUD.
The puzzles are adequate, but I can't say that it's a pleasant experience trying to solve them while dozens of messages cycle by about people entering and leaving, along with voices shouting in the distance (replicating the original MUD's ability to message everyone currently in the system). In fact, the experience makes me more confused than ever about how MUDs actually operated. I get the PLATO adventures that mostly focus on combat, but why would it enhance an adventure game experience to have a bunch of other people buzzing around? How did you ever manage to solve puzzles that required inventory items if other people were constantly picking them up?
Making things even harder here, since you've got 11 players running around, finding treasure, and tossing it into the swamp, the number of items depletes fast. The game thus resets every 40-60 minutes, which translates to 20-30 minutes with the modern emulator, because leaving it set at 100% is infuriatingly sluggish. When the game resets, you have to re-enter, and you find yourself back in the starting square, all of your items gone. You do get to keep your points between resets.
For character options, you only have name and sex. MUD allowed you to choose between a warrior path and a wizard path, but in this game you just have a generic adventurer with skills from both classes who gets more powerful with experience. The game automatically assigns your strength, dexterity, and stamina scores, noting that intelligence and charisma are up to you. Characteristics go up and down based on events in the game. You can save the character at any time with LOGOFF, and then back up the data disk if you want to cover your bases.
(Incidentally, because of the dynamic nature by which the game is run, with constant referencing of the data and program disks, emulator save states don't really work. You have to play this one honestly.)
I spent several hours just mapping about 40 rooms, or about a tenth of the total number. The map, which I guess is based to some degree on MUD, is horribly convoluted. Every square can have up to 10 exits (including up and down) and almost all of them have at least six. Hardly ever is a path from one square to another reversible; you often leave one by going south and enter the next from the west, for instance. There are many one-way paths. There are many squares with the same name and a twisting maze of paths between them.
There are a lot of indoor areas, including a cave, a hut, a cottage, a mine, and a mausoleum. Most of the good stuff is there, but you need a light source to progress, and for more than half of my playing time, I couldn't get anything to work. The opening hints tell you to make a torch out of a stick and some fire. I found plenty of sticks and a roaring fire, but no set of commands I could think of would ignite that stick. It doesn't help that the book only gives you about a dozen of the supposed 200 commands and tells you to figure out the rest on your own. (One of the commands it does provide is COMMANDS, which supposedly "gives you a short list of commands." But if you actually try to use it in game, it says: "Well, if we told you them, it would spoil the game!") It was only late in my experience, after a fan e-mailed me instructions for finding a "firestone" in the dark, that I could start to explore the indoor areas.
In some ways, whether you can progress through all the game's puzzles doesn't matter, because there's no way you would get it all done before the game resets. Even if you could, the movement of other players disrupts the locations of key puzzle items. Thus, after every reset, your goal is basically to get as much done as you can before the next reset. That might include winning combats or collecting treasures and taking them to the swamp. I managed to rise most of the way to 100,000 points just repeatedly collecting the treasures that don't require me to go into a dark area. These include a golden apple in a southern forest, an umbrella in the cottage foyer, and a crown sitting in the swamp itself. That latter one, at the end of a bit of a maze, is worth 2,000 experience points, so I could have "won" the game in 50 resets with that alone. In fact, I did use the SITE/RESITE spells (a "mark"/"recall" combination), which persist in between resets, to teleport myself to the crown at the beginning of each new game.
Combat is both simple and confusing. You can fight with fists but it takes forever and gives you the worst odds. Even a stick is about twice as effective. Deadly weapons like swords are only found in far-flung places that take most of a session to get to, and you have to defeat a dragon to get the deadliest weapon, a broadsword. A woodcutter's axe fairly close to the entry is probably the best option.
If you want to attack something, you type KILL RAT WITH STICK or whatever weapon you have. If you get attacked, you automatically retaliate, but I don't know with what since there's no "wield" command. Either way, the computer simply fights round after round without telling you specific attack rolls or how much damage you're doing to the enemy. Success seems extraordinarily variable. Sometimes I kill an enemy in one blow; other times it takes 10 rounds and leaves me with single-digit stamina.
Magic is also a bit confusing. The manual lists a bunch of spells, some of which are unique to this game, such as WHERE, which will tell you the location or person carrying one of the game's objects; SUMMON, which automatically brings another player to your position; SNOOP, which allows you to see what another player is doing; and offensive spells called CRIPPLE, BLIND, and DEAFEN. What the manual doesn't tell you is that some of these spells require you to be at a certain level and some require you to have a certain object. If you try to cast a spell for which you don't have the right level or object, the game acts like it doesn't understand your words rather than telling you something useful like, "You need to be an enchanter to cast that."
Levels go something like warrior, superhero, champion, enchanter, necromancer, legend, and wizard. I might have missed a couple. With every level-up, you get a bump in attributes, up to 100. Moreover, your point level itself acts like a "power" level and increases your effectiveness in combat and spellcasting. Some areas are only accessible to higher levels, with messages that only they can read showing them the way through dangerous areas.
MicroMud is underwhelming as an RPG, but it performs relatively well as a text adventure, and I almost wish I could have played it as a straight adventure, without the distractions of NPCs and the constant threat of resets. I didn't solve anywhere near all the puzzles, partly because I didn't figure some of them out, and partly because other NPCs kept wandering off with keys and other items I needed to progress. The text is well-written and the individual areas are well-designed and evocative--particularly the mines in the northeast that slowly open up into a huge underground dwarven empire. Other areas include a dark cave network full of goblins, the surprisingly spacious basement of a cottage, an enchanted forest, and an island across a stormy sea. There are quite a few areas that lead to instant death, but this just kicks you out of the current game. If you're killed by another character, on the other hand, you're gone for good.
Most of the puzzles involve the creative use of inventory items, such as using a torch to burn an evil dryad, opening an umbrella to slow one's descent after jumping off a cliff, or using an axe to chop down a Yew tree and finding a cave beneath it. There are numerous doors locked by keys. There are at least two gratings that you need two characters to open; NPCs were always wandering into my square asking for help opening the portcullis.
My favorite puzzles were a set of word puzzles inside a mausoleum. Each word opened a different door and led to a different treasure. I got them all, but I am obliged to note that Irene helped and I guessed on one. Two of the clues have typos that make them harder to solve, but I've written them below as they actually appear. See how many you can get.
Finally frustrated at getting deep into the dwarven mines only to be yanked back by a reset, or unable to explore the western half of the map because someone stole the umbrella before I could get to it, I "won" by settling into a pattern of grabbing the crown, going to the mausoleum, yelling each of the answers, looting all the tombs, taking the resulting load to the swamp, and dropping it. Then I'd walk one square away and kill NPCs who came along with their own loot. It took around 20 resets, but I ultimately made it to "wizard."
When you reach the highest rank, you become a kind of moderator, with some administrative privileges that make the game a breeze. You can kill anyone instantly with "Finger of Death" (FOD), cast a GO spell to take you to any room in the game (if you know its number), and visit a special moderator's room east of the starting square.
Based on my limited experience, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed MUD. I don't get the value of making an adventure game a multi-user game, even though I understand the tradition goes back to some of the first text adventures, like Colossal Cave Adventure and the Dungeon game that became Zork. I understand the multiplayer rationale in a game like Moria, where you need a party to stay alive, or any game that prizes tactical PvP combat. But to run around the same map iteration after iteration, trying to solve the same puzzles only to find that someone got there first, strikes me as boring and frustrating. Put another way, Moria and Oubliette feel empty without other players, but without other players, MicroMud would feel like a perfectly adequate and less-annoying text adventure. Perhaps I'm missing some aspects that original MUD players can clarify.
The best I can do on a GIMLET is 19. It does worst (0s) in story and setting and economy for having neither. I came close to giving a 0 in graphics, sound, and interface. Entering commands is maddeningly sluggish, and it alternately fails to recognize half your keystrokes while reading others as doubles or triples. It does best in overall gameplay (4) for being nonlinear and replayable, and in encounters (4) for its reasonably-challenging puzzles.
I found one favorable review in Advanced Computer Entertainment, which praised the NPC AI, noted the problems with the sluggishness of the interface, and concluded that it was "definitely worth checking out by anyone not totally addicted to pretty pixels." I get the impression that it sold poorly, though, as most all-text games would have by the late 1980s.
MicroMud was written by Jon Stuart and Paul McCraken. They would later establish Manic Media Productions, based in Oxfordshire, and enjoy success with a series of racing games titled SuperKarts (1995), Manic Karts (1995), and Formula Karts (1997). I lose track of them after that, but it doesn't appear that they worked on any other adventure games or RPGs.
The puzzles are adequate, but I can't say that it's a pleasant experience trying to solve them while dozens of messages cycle by about people entering and leaving, along with voices shouting in the distance (replicating the original MUD's ability to message everyone currently in the system). In fact, the experience makes me more confused than ever about how MUDs actually operated. I get the PLATO adventures that mostly focus on combat, but why would it enhance an adventure game experience to have a bunch of other people buzzing around? How did you ever manage to solve puzzles that required inventory items if other people were constantly picking them up?
Making things even harder here, since you've got 11 players running around, finding treasure, and tossing it into the swamp, the number of items depletes fast. The game thus resets every 40-60 minutes, which translates to 20-30 minutes with the modern emulator, because leaving it set at 100% is infuriatingly sluggish. When the game resets, you have to re-enter, and you find yourself back in the starting square, all of your items gone. You do get to keep your points between resets.
 |
| Character creation. |
For character options, you only have name and sex. MUD allowed you to choose between a warrior path and a wizard path, but in this game you just have a generic adventurer with skills from both classes who gets more powerful with experience. The game automatically assigns your strength, dexterity, and stamina scores, noting that intelligence and charisma are up to you. Characteristics go up and down based on events in the game. You can save the character at any time with LOGOFF, and then back up the data disk if you want to cover your bases.
 |
| My character demonstrates a lack of both intelligence and charisma. |
(Incidentally, because of the dynamic nature by which the game is run, with constant referencing of the data and program disks, emulator save states don't really work. You have to play this one honestly.)
 |
| The game world offered in the manual. |
I spent several hours just mapping about 40 rooms, or about a tenth of the total number. The map, which I guess is based to some degree on MUD, is horribly convoluted. Every square can have up to 10 exits (including up and down) and almost all of them have at least six. Hardly ever is a path from one square to another reversible; you often leave one by going south and enter the next from the west, for instance. There are many one-way paths. There are many squares with the same name and a twisting maze of paths between them.
 |
| A very small part of the game world. |
There are a lot of indoor areas, including a cave, a hut, a cottage, a mine, and a mausoleum. Most of the good stuff is there, but you need a light source to progress, and for more than half of my playing time, I couldn't get anything to work. The opening hints tell you to make a torch out of a stick and some fire. I found plenty of sticks and a roaring fire, but no set of commands I could think of would ignite that stick. It doesn't help that the book only gives you about a dozen of the supposed 200 commands and tells you to figure out the rest on your own. (One of the commands it does provide is COMMANDS, which supposedly "gives you a short list of commands." But if you actually try to use it in game, it says: "Well, if we told you them, it would spoil the game!") It was only late in my experience, after a fan e-mailed me instructions for finding a "firestone" in the dark, that I could start to explore the indoor areas.
 |
| Trying to light a stick on fire. |
In some ways, whether you can progress through all the game's puzzles doesn't matter, because there's no way you would get it all done before the game resets. Even if you could, the movement of other players disrupts the locations of key puzzle items. Thus, after every reset, your goal is basically to get as much done as you can before the next reset. That might include winning combats or collecting treasures and taking them to the swamp. I managed to rise most of the way to 100,000 points just repeatedly collecting the treasures that don't require me to go into a dark area. These include a golden apple in a southern forest, an umbrella in the cottage foyer, and a crown sitting in the swamp itself. That latter one, at the end of a bit of a maze, is worth 2,000 experience points, so I could have "won" the game in 50 resets with that alone. In fact, I did use the SITE/RESITE spells (a "mark"/"recall" combination), which persist in between resets, to teleport myself to the crown at the beginning of each new game.
 |
| Almost 3% of the way there! |
Combat is both simple and confusing. You can fight with fists but it takes forever and gives you the worst odds. Even a stick is about twice as effective. Deadly weapons like swords are only found in far-flung places that take most of a session to get to, and you have to defeat a dragon to get the deadliest weapon, a broadsword. A woodcutter's axe fairly close to the entry is probably the best option.
If you want to attack something, you type KILL RAT WITH STICK or whatever weapon you have. If you get attacked, you automatically retaliate, but I don't know with what since there's no "wield" command. Either way, the computer simply fights round after round without telling you specific attack rolls or how much damage you're doing to the enemy. Success seems extraordinarily variable. Sometimes I kill an enemy in one blow; other times it takes 10 rounds and leaves me with single-digit stamina.
 |
| Killing a snake in one round. |
 |
| This zombie took a bit longer. |
Magic is also a bit confusing. The manual lists a bunch of spells, some of which are unique to this game, such as WHERE, which will tell you the location or person carrying one of the game's objects; SUMMON, which automatically brings another player to your position; SNOOP, which allows you to see what another player is doing; and offensive spells called CRIPPLE, BLIND, and DEAFEN. What the manual doesn't tell you is that some of these spells require you to be at a certain level and some require you to have a certain object. If you try to cast a spell for which you don't have the right level or object, the game acts like it doesn't understand your words rather than telling you something useful like, "You need to be an enchanter to cast that."
Levels go something like warrior, superhero, champion, enchanter, necromancer, legend, and wizard. I might have missed a couple. With every level-up, you get a bump in attributes, up to 100. Moreover, your point level itself acts like a "power" level and increases your effectiveness in combat and spellcasting. Some areas are only accessible to higher levels, with messages that only they can read showing them the way through dangerous areas.
MicroMud is underwhelming as an RPG, but it performs relatively well as a text adventure, and I almost wish I could have played it as a straight adventure, without the distractions of NPCs and the constant threat of resets. I didn't solve anywhere near all the puzzles, partly because I didn't figure some of them out, and partly because other NPCs kept wandering off with keys and other items I needed to progress. The text is well-written and the individual areas are well-designed and evocative--particularly the mines in the northeast that slowly open up into a huge underground dwarven empire. Other areas include a dark cave network full of goblins, the surprisingly spacious basement of a cottage, an enchanted forest, and an island across a stormy sea. There are quite a few areas that lead to instant death, but this just kicks you out of the current game. If you're killed by another character, on the other hand, you're gone for good.
 |
| One of many instant and amusing deaths. |
Most of the puzzles involve the creative use of inventory items, such as using a torch to burn an evil dryad, opening an umbrella to slow one's descent after jumping off a cliff, or using an axe to chop down a Yew tree and finding a cave beneath it. There are numerous doors locked by keys. There are at least two gratings that you need two characters to open; NPCs were always wandering into my square asking for help opening the portcullis.
 |
| Don't try this in real life. |
My favorite puzzles were a set of word puzzles inside a mausoleum. Each word opened a different door and led to a different treasure. I got them all, but I am obliged to note that Irene helped and I guessed on one. Two of the clues have typos that make them harder to solve, but I've written them below as they actually appear. See how many you can get.
- Reetirr stalanio xebor luntaw
- Ruyers seexe nollwarc arolfid
- Zn+xt=tz zv+zr=zjr z+z = ?
- What has no wings but often flies; has legs but cannot walk; is two of something that can never exist alone?
- Czech for MUD
- Republican = onehundredandeight democrat = ?
Finally frustrated at getting deep into the dwarven mines only to be yanked back by a reset, or unable to explore the western half of the map because someone stole the umbrella before I could get to it, I "won" by settling into a pattern of grabbing the crown, going to the mausoleum, yelling each of the answers, looting all the tombs, taking the resulting load to the swamp, and dropping it. Then I'd walk one square away and kill NPCs who came along with their own loot. It took around 20 resets, but I ultimately made it to "wizard."
 |
| Crossing the threshold. |
When you reach the highest rank, you become a kind of moderator, with some administrative privileges that make the game a breeze. You can kill anyone instantly with "Finger of Death" (FOD), cast a GO spell to take you to any room in the game (if you know its number), and visit a special moderator's room east of the starting square.
 |
| A GO command instantly takes me to the most lucrative treasure chamber in the game. |
Based on my limited experience, I'm not sure I would have enjoyed MUD. I don't get the value of making an adventure game a multi-user game, even though I understand the tradition goes back to some of the first text adventures, like Colossal Cave Adventure and the Dungeon game that became Zork. I understand the multiplayer rationale in a game like Moria, where you need a party to stay alive, or any game that prizes tactical PvP combat. But to run around the same map iteration after iteration, trying to solve the same puzzles only to find that someone got there first, strikes me as boring and frustrating. Put another way, Moria and Oubliette feel empty without other players, but without other players, MicroMud would feel like a perfectly adequate and less-annoying text adventure. Perhaps I'm missing some aspects that original MUD players can clarify.
 |
| The game resets just as I'm starting to make some progress. |
The best I can do on a GIMLET is 19. It does worst (0s) in story and setting and economy for having neither. I came close to giving a 0 in graphics, sound, and interface. Entering commands is maddeningly sluggish, and it alternately fails to recognize half your keystrokes while reading others as doubles or triples. It does best in overall gameplay (4) for being nonlinear and replayable, and in encounters (4) for its reasonably-challenging puzzles.
I found one favorable review in Advanced Computer Entertainment, which praised the NPC AI, noted the problems with the sluggishness of the interface, and concluded that it was "definitely worth checking out by anyone not totally addicted to pretty pixels." I get the impression that it sold poorly, though, as most all-text games would have by the late 1980s.
MicroMud was written by Jon Stuart and Paul McCraken. They would later establish Manic Media Productions, based in Oxfordshire, and enjoy success with a series of racing games titled SuperKarts (1995), Manic Karts (1995), and Formula Karts (1997). I lose track of them after that, but it doesn't appear that they worked on any other adventure games or RPGs.
MUD was written by University of Essex students Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle between 1978 and 1980. In 1980, Essex hooked up with ARPANet and MUD went global. It was enjoyed by avid players until 1987, when Bartle licensed it to CompuServe, who insisted on shutting down the free version. (Though apparently a variant called MIST remained up and running until 1991.) By the mid-1980s, MUD had become a generic term for the many available games that we would later call MMORPGs. If I ever get caught up on the backlog, maybe you'll get to hear about my experience with a MMORPG as a special topic.
****
I want to play the German Nippon (1988), which seems like an authentic RPG, but I'm having trouble with the controls. I really need a manual. If any of my German readers knows where to obtain one, I'd appreciate it.
****
I want to play the German Nippon (1988), which seems like an authentic RPG, but I'm having trouble with the controls. I really need a manual. If any of my German readers knows where to obtain one, I'd appreciate it.
At All Articles Game 282: MicroMud (1988)
Thanks For Reading Game 282: MicroMud (1988) this time, hopefully it can benefit you all. alright, see you in another article post.
You are now reading the articlel Game 282: MicroMud (1988) with link address https://reviewgameupdate.blogspot.com/2018/02/game-282-micromud-1988.html
0 Response to "Game 282: MicroMud (1988)"
Posting Komentar