Today I will be posting three dos-based games, so dust off your copy of dosbox for these three classics. First we have The Guild of Thieves. The Guild of Thieves is a text-based adventure game with one of the better written stories in dos games. The next game is called Warlords. Warlords is a turn based strategy game that is comprised of several aspects of today's RTS's. The last game is called Star Wars Chess. Star Wars Chess is a far cry from a GOOD chess game, but the fact that it's Star Wars and is quite funny is enough to save the game.
The Guild of Thieves
The adventure begins in the Master Thief's boat. You jump confidently to the jetty and begin a survey of the expansive countryside. The numerous locations range from castle to cave and from scrub to snow-capped peak. The descriptions, even without the graphics much-praised on other formats, are extremely atmospheric; even the most commonplace objects have their own characteristics. Exploration has some very realistic qualities: as you wander through the castle you can run your fingers casually along the piano keys or try your skill at potting the billiard balls. While the graphics are only sliding screenshots, the text describes it all, the Magneitc Scrolls' team writers are just that good.
The treasures are often quite easy to locate but difficult to collect. A jewel hanging from the ceiling of a cave is about to drop into a bubbling pool of quicksand; a silver chalice is inconveniently placed in the cage of a savage bear. Reckless burglars quickly come to grief! Unlike most text-based adventure games, you will usually have a mental image of the whole scene, due to the parser's extreme description.
The puzzles are often tough but at least have the virtue of being logical. The adventure is certainly more accessible than The Pawn which was occasionally open to charges of excessive obscurity. In The Guild it's sometimes the very obviousness of the solution which makes a problem difficult. While they are hard, they seem perhaps too hard even for certain seasoned adventurers.
The parser is up to Magnetic Scrolls' usually high standards: as well as complex sentences it accepts FIND and SEARCH FOR commands to locate objects you may have forgotten or misplaced. The GO TO command lets you move from one location to another without typing in all the directions in between. In practice this can be quite dangerous as you can't stop the command once entered and the program marches you straight into whatever obstacles (for example a closed drawbridge) there may be in the way.
Overall, if you're into thieves, really, really hard puzzles and text, this is one of the best!
Download:
http://abandonia.com/en/games/973/Guild+of+Thieves,+The.html
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Warlords
At the beginning of the game, you are in control of a single city, where you can build troops and send them out to conquer further territory. While most of the cities can build standard units like light and heavy infantry only, some places can also recruit better troops, which make them extremely valuable. These fantasy units usually are stronger and faster than normal ones, or they have special abilities. However, the most important units in the game are the heroes. These cannot be built, but emerge from time to time at one of your cities. These special units can explore the ruins and temple sites, which are scattered all over the map. When they are victorious, they may gain strength or find some artefacts. As a reward, you may sometimes even receive mythical units like mighty dragons, which are able to fly and take other units with them. The heroes are crucial to your success, especially in the later stages of the game when they have gained some power, and should therefore always be protected by other units.
The combat model is quite simple: every unit has a certain strength value, which is added to a dice roll. In battles, the weakest units always attack first; heroes go last. There are several factors that modify the outcome of a battle, e.g; territory bonuses, modifications for heroes, and artefacts or special abilities. When a city is attacked, the defender receives a bonus based on the defensive strength of the city walls. Never-the-less there seems to be a large random factor in it, as sometimes even light infantry is able to beat a much stronger opponent garrisoned in a fortified place.
While expanding your borders is quite easy during the first few turns, as there are lots of neutral cities with weak defence, it becomes more and more difficult to conquer further lands with the commencing game. The computer players understand quite well how to defend their more important cities. Sadly, this also leads to the shady sides of the game, as the AI is not very clever overall. This miserable AI combined with the fact that there is only one map in the game create the dilemma: even on higher difficulty levels, the computer players always follow the same routes and strategies and become very predictable after some games. However, it will probably take a couple of hours until you reach this point.
The game is completely controlled by mouse (or keyboard, if you prefer), and controls are easy to understand. You can group units by moving them onto a stack and then double clicking it. Units can take orders such as improving city defences. These options are accessed via a drop down menu which appears on the upper side of the screen. There are also some very practical functionalities which make your life easier: you can relocate your production from one city to another, which saves a lot of time, as you can bring your reinforcements to the frontier without having to move them manually around the map. In addition, you can assign them a defender status, which means that these units are skipped until you manually reactivate them.
From a technical point of view, Warlords is basic, even for the time it was made. There is no music and only a few sound effects. The graphics are functional and could have been more detailed for my taste. However, they have a resolution of 640x400 pixels, which was above average in 1990. The game runs pretty good in DOSBox and with VDMSound. In DOSBox I had to set the cycles really low to avoid sound interrupts.
Download:
http://abandonia.com/en/games/24976/Warlords.html
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Star Wars Chess
At first, I thought this would just be “Battle Chess enters the Star Wars universe”. I wasn’t far off the mark. But this game is a LOT funnier than I first thought it was going to be. Surprisingly so, in fact.
The battleground has been moved from the vacuum of space, the forests of Endor and the frozen wastes of Hoth to the somewhat smaller, but by no means lesser, arena of the Chessboard.
Not only content with being Emperor, Palpatine also takes the title of King, appointing Darth Vader the title of Queen (really, who else could he play?) and makes his gambit for Galactic Domination. Though this not the Vader I grew up to know and love - none of the malicious and sadistic quirks and foibles that are his trademark here, I’m afraid.
Boba Fett, playing the part of the Empire’s Blaster-Wielding, Jet-Packing Bishop, is perhaps the closest to George Lucas’ “Dark Side” characters to act out their part in this game. The Rebel army is more as you would imagine it to be.
The Dark side of the Force is a shade lighter than it could be. But then, the appeal of Star Wars spans all age gaps. This game is definitely a 3+ age rating, so don’t expect any captures to as graphic as they are in other animated Chess games.
t first, I wondered where Han Solo came into it all, but then I spotted him – still encased in Carbonite in the corner. Relegated to a mere few pixels. Woe is He.
The captures for different pieces are great little comic book animations. Some of them are very unexpected. I don’t really want to say too much about them because watching them the first few times is really what makes this game great. The novelty does wear off but the capture animations can be switched off, not only saving time but also removing, to some extent, the repetition factor that is any animated chess game’s downfall.
The area will be cleared of pieces and the stage set for a short battle between the two characters.
C3P0, as a rather fittingly camp Bishop, asks Boba Fett, “Don’t you know how dangerous these things can be?” before swiping his blaster from his hands, throwing it to the floor and resulting in an accidental discharge decapitating the hero of my youth.A rather disturbing Yoda, grinning and giving a thumbs up (well, that’s what it looks like to me…), as a Rook, is by far the most humorous character in this game. Watching him tell a Stormtrooper that “Backwards their gun is, yes” then using the force to get them blasting their own heads off made me laugh out loud.
I spent several games figuring out which moves to make just so I could watch every single capture animation! Sad as I am...
Then I turned them off, because they slowed the game, made me forget what it was that I was planning and became irritatingly repetitive. I even turned the sound off after a while as the movement music started to grate…
Watching Yoda shuffle his way across the board, taking his sweet time to do so can lower the pace somewhat, too.
The major disappointment, apart from the AI being a little easy for my liking, is that when Check-Mate is made, there is no finishing animation. I was looking forward to seeing Luke Skywalker get mullered seven ways from Sunday by each piece in turn but, alas alack, it is not to happen. “The game is over” you are told, and that’s it.
For those not so learned in the wiles and ways of the 2nd best board game in the world, the Mentor Menu will give you a hint on what move may be best next and allow you to gloat over all the pieces you have captured.
For experienced players, the AI is also set in this menu. Though, the difficulty is set by allowing the AI more time to compute it’s next move rather than accessing an higher complexity database set.
This can be a touch frustrating, as the computer will take nearly the entire time allotted to it for each move. You can choose to Force a Move (that’s force Palpatine Kasparov to make the move it is currently deciding on, not use the Force, young Padawan…) from the Actions Menu, but this rather defeats the purpose of the AI.
From the Actions Menu you can also Switch Sides, for those who always wanted to drop kick Yoda, give a Wookie a Wedgie or perform Unspeakable Acts upon Princess Leia.
From the Play Menu, you can choose to play against another human opponent instead of the AI, or simply spectate and watch the battle unfold between the two sides. You’ll also find the “Look and Feel” option in here, which is basically whether White is at the top or bottom – these can all be changed mid-play so there’s always the opportunity to change your mind should you get tired of watching Leia wiggle up the board or staring at a row of Stormtrooper’s armoured arses.
In the Actions Menu there are the standard Chess game options of recanting a move, setting the board up as you want (utilising a simple interface that is easy to use) and offering a draw as well as the options, found in the Settings Menu, to turn the animations and sounds on and off. Settings, Save, Load and New Game are all available through the Game Menu.
For a Chess game, with another human opponent, this game is great fun. Until the novelty wears off and you go back to using a regular board – an option that is not available as it is in Interplay’s BattleChess – or to play the game from a different viewpoint.
This is most certainly worth a play through, if only for the capture animations. Though if you are looking for a Serious Chess Challenge, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for…
(By the way, TIE stands for “Twin Ion Engine”)
Overall, this game is what a game should be – Fun. But for a Chess game, it’s not the best. Its redeeming qualities are the fact that it’s Chess, it’s Star Wars and it’s Funny. ‘Nuff said.
Download:
http://abandonia.com/en/games/5205/Star+Wars+Chess.html
