Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cloudy Mountain, 1982 APH TC/Tom Loughry (20 From Intellivision #2)
20Another game VERY closely identified with the Intellivision; this is a cool maze exploration game with tons of cool items/monsters to come across. Your party of 3 (basically, all your lives in the game) look for caves to enter on the overhead map. As you approach caves, some you will be able to enter and others you cannot. You will know which ones you can enter since they will change color. This color indicates the difficulty of the enemies within. To vanquish an enemy you use arrows. You start with only 3, but if you can find a quiver within the maze you can use the "pick up" button to collect it and get more arrows (the amount differs from one difficulty setting to the next-- easy, medium, hard and hardest). With the zero button on the keypad you can check how many arrows you have (a click sound for each)! As you move through the maze, you uncover more of it-- a very ingenious aspect to the gameplay-- and a monster may be just out of view. If this is the case, listen for sounds it may make; a dragon makes a "purr" sound, a rat makes an "eek eek" sound, and a snake makes a "hiss" or tongue flick sound. You may even be able to fire an arrow and hit it just offscreen (though it may get pissed and charge at you). Be careful with shooting arrows willy-nilly; you can actually hit yourself by accident with the ricochet! Damage from enemies will turn you different colors-- blue is the first, then red, then death. Other indications of upcoming enemies are tracks (the demon and the rat). Other items you can come across are a key (opens gates that can make your path to Cloudy Mountain less direct), a boat (lets you traverse the river), an axe (lets you traverse woods/forests), a ladder (to exit a cave and return to the overworld map), and two halves of a crown (in Cloudy Mountain, which you need to construct to beat the game). The purr of the dragon got me on edge when I initially played this! Fun game that deserves the #2 spot on this list; I will have an Honorable Mentions/Games To Avoid/etc. video before #1. Hope to see you soon for both! Stay safe and practice social distancing/hand hygiene RELIGIOUSLY and we will get through this pandemic sooner than later. Take care!