[net.micro.cbm] Review: Temple of Apshai

doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (02/12/85)

Game review:
Temple of Apshai (Epyx) C-64 cassette  list:$40  discount:??
    One player

Overall grade: C

A role-playing game.  You are an adventurer, exploring an abandoned
below-ground temple which had been built to worship insect gods.
Your goal: explore the temple, kill monster insects and collect loot.

As a computerized, single-player FRP I suppose this one is OK.  I
wasn't as impressed as I thought that I would be, given the amount
of publicity that the Apshai series has received over the years.

A somewhat disappointing aspect is that it doesn't recognize joysticks.
You have to use the keyboard, using L (left) R (right) V (turn around)
and the number keys (number of steps in direction you're facing).
When fighting a monster, you also have to use appropriate letters
T (thrust with sword), P (parry with sword) etc.

Temple of Apshai is written in BASIC, and the graphics suffers a
bit.  Not as badly as it might, but there's no getting around the
5-second delay as it draws the room you just entered.  And the
graphics are character-type graphics, rather than bit-mapped.  The
use of sprites for your adventurer and for the monsters is enough
to save it, though.

The authors apparently didn't get the word about not using single-
pixel wide vertical lines.  The sprite which represents your little
adventurer has an upraised sword which changes color as it goes
across the screen, sometimes disappearing.

Apshai changes the character font to one which is in keeping with the
sword-and-chainmail era.  Unfortunately, that character font is very
difficult to read on a TV.  A monitor would be quite desirable, but
not absolutely necessary.

Sound effects are very good.  There is a little machine-language
routine which makes haunting music as you explore, and also provides
some pretty good sound effects during encounters with monsters.
My only complaint here is that sometimes it gets out of sync...
if you leave a room just as a monster enters it, the music still
plays as if the monster was in the room you're now in.  That
straightens out when you change rooms again.

The documentation is voluminous.  Huge.  Unnecessarily so.  There is
more useless information in the instruction booklet than anyone could
ever need.  For instance, there are descriptions of every chamber on
each of the four levels -- over 260 in all.  But these descriptions
are of no value to you.  They are strictly for the Fantasy Role-Playing
part of you, not for the computer game-playing part.

I originally bought the cassette version.  Big mistake.  It takes
about 20 minutes just to load the program.  Then another 15 to load
the data for the current level.  Gadzooks!!  After I bought a disk
drive, I spent a weekend figuring out how to transfer it all to disk.

And now a sob story to explain why Epyx is now on my black list -- you
may skip to the next article whenever you get tired of this...

When I was playing my first game, I tried (of course) to use the
"save game" command.  The program crapped out with an undef'd line
number.  Being a wizard at software (a legend in my own mind), I
undertook the task of investigating.  Sure enough, although the BASIC
program was numbered with line numbers increasing by 1, there was a
gap of about 10 lines where the "save game" command should have been.

Well, it didn't take too long for a genius like me to figure out that
the cassette version had been adapted from the disk version, and
someone had taken out the "save game to disk" routine and forgotten
to replace it with a "save game to tape" routine.

So I sent a letter in to Epyx along with my warranty registration card
(this *was* my first day).  Well, three weeks went by with no response.
I got impatient, so I called Epyx.  The reason they hadn't answered my
letter:  they only open the mail once a month or so.

Then they sent my call round and round.  I talked to over a half-dozen
different people at Epyx.  Nobody knew anything about any cassette
version for the C-64.  Eventually one fellow said in exasperation,
"Just send in the original tape and we'll send you the current version.
The problem *must* have been fixed by now."  Yeah, right.  I'm expected
to send in the only copy of a tape that I paid 40 bucks for, to a
company that opens their mail once a month, to have whoever it is
that deals with the C-64 cassette version (nobody knows who that is)
replace it with the current release, which "must" have been fixed by
now.

As you might guess, I did *not* send in the tape, but gave up all hope
of using the "save game" feature.  About two weeks later, I received
a response to my letter (you remember my letter?).  Now, I had
complained that it looked like the "save game to tape" feature wasn't
included in the cassette version.  Their response was a form letter,
advising me that I had to save the game on the *original* disk.  DISK?!?
Furthermore, a handwritten note in the margin said that there wasn't
room on the original disk, that I had to use a different disk.

Okay, so I have to use the original disk but not the original disk when
I want to save to tape.  Makes no sense to me.

When I finally got around to the process of converting from tape to
disk, I found the truth.  You can't do a "save game" either on disk
or tape because the description of each level, including
treasures/monsters/etc info, is a machine-language program and the
BASIC program hasn't the vaguest idea of how to re-write it!
-- 
Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug