From: honp9@menudo.uh.edu Reply-To: Keith (K.P.) Hanlan Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: REVIEW: Pool Of Radiance Keywords: game, adventure, graphical, role playing 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.]