Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pons.cis.ohio-state.edu!tj From: tj@pons.cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games Subject: Chaos Strikes Back: Initial Review Message-ID: <86793@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 16 Dec 90 07:43:43 GMT Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 102 I bought Chaos Strikes Back (CSB) today and have been playing it all evening. The package comes with two disks, a thin manual, a diagram, a coin, an FTL sticker, and a sample of the CSB Hint Book. The cover of CSB has "Expansion Set #1" printed across the top, and the mean it. Although you don't need the DM disk or characters to play CSB, the manual doesn't say anything about the CSB interface or spells. Instead, you are referred to the DM manual. The story in CSB is that Chaos is back and getting stronger. He has four chunks of Corbum that he is using to drain Mana from the world. Each chunk is hidden at the end of dungeon maze. To defeat Chaos you must find the chunks and destroy them by throwing them in a special pit. Of the two disks, one of the disks is a utility disk that has a nice animated intro to CSB (complete with music), a utility to transfer characters from a Dungeon Master saved game disk, and the hint oracle. The transfer utility will also let you change the picture and names of each of your characters. 24 new pictures are provided (one for each DM character) that reflect the more advanced stage of each character. The utility reads your old saved game file and rights a CSB saved game file to a new floppy. You must have a DM saved game disk to play CSB, but you can construct one using the second disk. The hint oracle is designed to read a CSB saved game disk and offer a list of hints on the area surrounding your characters. I haven't tried this yes, because I'm not ready for hints. To use the oracle you have to quit CSB and reboot with the utility disk, so there is some incentive to only consult the oracle when you are really stuck. I'm not sure if I'll use this, but it seems like a good idea. I play games to be entertained not to get frustrated. To many game designers seem to forget this. The second disk contains the actual game and a prison of characters. The prison is just a single level dungeon like the first level of DM in which there are pictures of heros (upgraded for CSB) on the walls. You can select 4 of these and then save the game, which will construct a DM saved game disk. You must then use the transfer utility to create a CSB saved game. [Note: This is from the manual. I didn't try selecting heros this way, but it seems strange that they wouldn't directly save a CSB game from the prison. Perhaps the saved game disk also has some extra data on it that the game needs.] Once you have your CSB saved game disk, you boot with the CSB game disk and resume the game just as in DM. Your characters start the game completely stripped of all belongings. The dungeon graphics are identical to DM, but most of the monsters look different and I've run into a few new monsters. The interface is completely unchanged from DM except for one small detail which greatly helps exploration. [If you want to know or just want a hint, mail me.] In terms of difficulty, the game picks right up where DM left off. The manual warns you to only transfer DM characters if they were good enough to have seen Chaos. The dungeon is filled with traps, teleportors, pits, and fake walls. You can easily get trapped so that you can't get back to certain parts of the dungeon. So far I haven't run into any explicit puzzles like those in DM. Instead, the whole dungeon appears to be one big puzzle in that you need to figure out how to get into certain areas. I've also run into switches that I can't connect to actions. The monsters (even those from DM) seem more difficult to kill. I have yet to kill a single knight, which is what I am stuck trying to do right now. Finally, mapping is a little bit tougher than in DM. CSB feels quite a bit different from DM. There is a lot less guidance, unlike DM which provided a lot of hints at the start of the game. Your characters are also at an immediate disadvantage because they don't have any posessions. Despite this, you can usually survive in CSB as long as you are smart. I ended up killing myself by fireballing walls because I wanted to explore a particular part of the dungeon that I kept falling out of, but I could have kept on going. My initial impressions after playing CSB for about 6 hours is that it is just as much fun as DM. Now for the technical details: CSB runs on my A2620. The game does not multi-task, and is not hard disk installable. I was able to run the utility and flip between it and the CLI, but there is no way to exit the utility without rebooting. I couldn't get the game to run from my HD. I copied all the files to HD, put the original in the floppy drive and tried to run the loader. The loader runs and starts to load the game from floppy, then dies with an error. If I don't put the disk in, I get a screen with "Master Disk Damaged" on it. My biggest gripe is that CSB doesn't support my hard disk for saved games. I can live without multi-tasking and hard-disk installation for CSB, but I would like to be able to save several named games to my HD (as in Leisure Suit Larry II). When you initially start the game, it takes a long time to start up. It's possible that it's reading all the data into memory, since I have 4 megs, but the manual doesn't say anything about this. Once you start (and even when you resume a game) the disk accesses are very infrequent and extremely short. I'm planning on writing FTL to tell them how much I like their DM and CSB and to request HD support in future products. There really is no excuse for not saving games to the HD. I also suspect that there is little reason to not multi-task, especially on an enhanced system. Overall, though, I'm satisfied with DM. I payed $30 for it, and it was definitely worth it. [Though I'm not sure why it took so long to get it out, since the interface hasn't really changed.] I wish I could say the same about Captive and Corporation. ---Todd -- Todd R. Johnson tj@cis.ohio-state.edu Laboratory for AI Research The Ohio State University