honp9@menudo.uh.edu (Jason L. Tibbitts III) (01/29/91)
Pool of Radiance is a good game trapped within a terrible user
interface. PoR is essentially a software version AD&D in the same
vein as Bard's Tale and Dungeon Master. It is not as good as either.
[ed. note: Does anyone use this on an A3000? Does it function?]
Pool Of Radiance - A Review with commentary
-------------------------------------------
Title: Pool of Radiance - A Forgotten Realms Fantasy RPG Epic, Vol I
Publisher: Strategic Simulations, Inc.
675 Almanor Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086
Genre: Adventure game a la Bard's Tale
Requirements: 1MB of memory
Copy Protection: Code wheel, can be installed on hard-disk.
The game comes on two disks and can be installed on your hard-disk.
It uses a code-wheel copy protection scheme. Also included are two
booklets totalling 72 pages and a platform specific Referece Card.
One booklet concerns itself with the mechanisms for play and
the second, the "Adventurer's Journal", is full of supplemental
information essential to your game progress. The game refers to
entries in the journal, tavern tales, and proclamations.
You can save the game at any time under one of 10 labels (A-J).
To restore another game you must quit out and start again. The
game also multi-tasks (but see below) and the game screen supports
the Amiga-M and Amiga-N control keys.
In PoR, you create and control a party of adventurers that have travelled
to a city called Phlan. Phlan is an ancient city that fell many many
years ago. New Phlan is an attempt to reclaim the lost city from the
monsters which now inhabit it. There is a 'safe' reclaimed portion
and a number of sectors of unreclaimed city. These unreclaimed portions
include the slums, the Library of Mendor, Podal Plaza etc... Each
sector is 16x16 and typically has some conclusive encounter. For
comparison, Bard's Tale used 22x22 mazes which are nearly twice as
big (484 vs 256). 16x16 is a little small and somewhat lacking in
'atmosphere'. There is also some wilderness adventure but I have not
yet reached that state (and may never) so cannot comment on it.
Speaking of detail: the walls have very little detail and
perspective is not handled as well as in Bard's Tale. In BT, it is
possible to map a great distance ahead, 5 or 6 sectors, if your
light is good enough. In PoR, it is difficult to interpret the walls
more than one sector distant. You must resort to the over-head, 2D
'Area' perspective that the game offers you. This also allows you to
cheat somewhat although it doesn't show you where doors or arches
are.
Pool of Radiance has a fair amount of game detail, there is an overall
mystery involved, and the play balance is pretty good. The game
itself would be very good indeed if they fixed up a few problems:
o There is no type-ahead and the game uses polled i/o. This is
unforgivable! While I am grateful that the game can be installed on
my hard-drive and that it multitasks, the polling chews up so much
cpu as to seriously debilitate the Amiga's multi-tasking
capability. The other side effect is that there is no type-ahead. This
slows down game play interminably. In any game involving repetitive
maze navigation, the player becomes accustomed to the key strokes
necessary to move about. Consider movement in Bard's Tale where it is
possible to move the characters about very rapidly indeed. In PoR,
this is impossible.
o Every command and output message involves a very slow re-display
of the text. Every single key press results in a complete
re-display of all the text on the screen. This is bizarre
and also contributes to the gameplay slow-down. It's doubly
strange in light of the fact that the graphic display is updated
very quickly indeed.
There is a mechanism for controlling the text speed but it is a
kludge: Instead of controlling the duration of each message put in
the display areas (there are two), it controls the wait between
each word typed. This yields an effect not unlike a primary
reader.
o On the other hand, output messages all appear in the same space
and always overwrite each other. Frequently one misses the output
entirely. In fact, due to the continual refreshing it is possible
to be oblivious to the text and not even realize that you have
missed it. If these last two comments sound like text display is
paradoxically too fast and too slow simultaneously, that's about
how I feel about it. It took a mighty poor design team to come up
with this display mechanism.
How they managed to avoid learning about scroll-bars is beyond me.
o The command menus are illogically ordered. Some items are
accessible almost everywhere and others inaccessible except in
special situations. For example, it is possible to 'pool' the group's
funds when purchasing goods but not when purchasing training.
Instead, you have to 'trade' money from character to character.
This is only one of many examples. The designers made absolutely
no attempt to streamline the menus according to frequency of player
use. (Did they have play testers? Perhaps not - the credits don't
mention any.)
o In keeping with the poor quality of information display, it is
impossible to examine a player's attributes during combat until it
is his turn to act. Further, once a character is injured, there is
no way, AT ALL, to determine what his full hit-points are. Thus
when a cleric wants to distribute healing, it is impossible to
distinguish between a character merely scratched (down 1 hp), and
a more seriously injured character (say, down 10hp). Strategy is
thus difficult to apply during a combat. Which fighter do you go
help when you can't tell whether either of them are bleeding?
o Combat in general has its own host of problems but most of these
are of the same flavour as mentioned above. Suffice to say it is
slow, slow, slow!! In keeping with AD&D, (where if you aren't
following the Gygax Gospel EXACTLY, well then, you are a stupid
heathen who doesn't merit the name 'gamer'), realism is pursued by
pasting kludges upon kludges, typically at the expense of
playability. Disengaging from combat is a good example: Even if
the enemy you are adjacent to has his hands full with three
adversaries, if you back away he gets a free strike at your rear
with bonuses.
Another problem I have with the combat is that there are too many
40-kobold attacks and not enough fewer-but-more-challenging-enemy
attacks. This of course aggravates a combat system suffering from
continual text re-refreshes.
o The graphics are very poor. I understand the requirement for
portability but that doesn't require that they distribute the
lowest quality graphics across all platforms.
Why don't the graphic artists draw in a high resolution and then
use one of the innumerable format conversion programs (the best of
which are free such as fbm and pbm) to 'scale down' the graphics
to each appropriate platform? In fact, the dithering etc that is
done by these programs is incredible and would result in better
looking graphics even for the EGA outputs.
o The manual has problems, largely stemming from the countless
nested single-line menus. It is difficult to find particular
topics and there is neither index nor cross-reference.
o The game doesn't take advantage of all the memory available to do
caching. Each sector is loaded and unloaded every time you enter
and exit even if you have the memory to contain it. The same is
true of character and monster graphics. Pretty mickey mouse.
Hope this helps. Please pressure game producers and designers to work on
their user interfaces!
Regards,
Keith Hanlan keithh@bnr.ca Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada 613-765-4645
[Ed. note: I understand that this is a rather negative review of the
program. It is, however, well written and expresses the author's
opinions about Pool of Radiance in a clear and organized manner.
If you have any disagreement or corrections to make (I'm sure that
there will be some) then mail them to me at HONP9@menudo.uh.edu. I
will collect them and post them all together.]
--
Jason L. Tibbitts III | Moderator: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
"Blob Shop Programmers:| Send submissions to HONP9@menudo.uh.edu
Because We're Bored!" | Check comp.sys.amiga.reviews for submissions
Disclaimer: Opinions...| guide, disclaimers, etc. Fnord.