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