PC Games: The Faery Tale Adventure

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Published on October 12, 2021 11:57:33 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5q8e6kMH5g

Game:

The Faery Tale Adventure (1987)

Duration: 23:59

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Originally released for Amiga computers, The Faery Tale Adventure is believed to have had the largest world of any video game at the time of its release... and for the next five years or so. According to the manual, Holm is 144 screens tall by 100 screens wide. Going by the raw game data, it's 128 by 128 supertiles (plus another 32 by 128 for indoor areas). That's a lot of world! Some background preloading trickery means there aren't even any noticeable load times as you explore.

The main thing preventing it from holding its own in terms of exploration against games like MMORPGs and Breath of the Wild is that, to get the world to fit into the limited storage space available, there's a lot of repetition. Its use of supertiles (reusable blocks of terrain, essentially) to cheat space limitations means that a lot of areas are largely indistinguishable from each other. Even many of the unique locations are mostly empty, with only a few being important to the quest, and only a handful of NPCs live in the game.

Battle, though conceptually interesting with a real-time combat system, is another weak point. Early on, you're in constant danger of dying to a few unlucky hits. Later on, you're still fighting the same monsters, and eventually most can't kill you anymore even if you just sit there and let them attack. It's gratifying when you first realize you no longer fear death, but there's no difficulty curve, no sense of increasing challenge as you explore new areas. Hunger and fatigue are more urgent concerns and more frustrating to deal with. Hasn't Holm ever heard of travel rations?

That said, the huge world is still huge, and (assuming you don't use a walkthrough) you could spend weeks just finding areas of interest, let alone figuring out what you're meant to do there. The game kind of drops you into the world almost no clues about how to achieve your eventual goal, or even where to start looking, and expects you to take it from there. That's very different from many modern games that have constant guidance and clear next steps spelled out along the way, but it reminds me of the original Zelda game. Here you are, you have a Quest but your end goal is pretty much all you know, now go figure out the details for yourself. If unguided open world exploration is your thing, The Faery Tale Adventure has that in spades.

As I mentioned, the game was originally designed for Amiga computers, which had some of the most advanced graphics and sound systems of their time, so this DOS port is unsurprisingly not quite up to the same standards of quality. The DOS port's music slows down when the screen is scrolling horizontally; the Amiga version plays it at the proper speed regardless. The Amiga version's main window uses 64 colors with variable palettes; the DOS port has only 16 colors (or 4, if playing the CGA version!) with a fixed palette. The Amiga version has digitized sound; the DOS port uses the PC speaker. The game is still quite playable, the music is still some of the best you'll ever hear a PC speaker produce, and I even prefer some of the cruder sound effects if only out of familiarity, but the hardware limitations do show themselves.

I've shared some game maps and a walkthrough here: http://kwhazit.infinityfreeapp.com/verge2/files.html

Anyway, this is a fairly long video, so here are some timestamps of possible interest.

00:00 Including a zero timestamp makes chapters!
00:58 The game begins
07:28 Julian's luck exhausted; brief stint as Phillip
08:25 Evening into nighttime
10:01 Bird totem demonstration
10:22 Getting the sunstone
10:55 Fighting the witch of Grimwood
11:37 Showing off flight and visiting mysterious Pixle Grove
13:48 Venturing into the dragon's cave
17:03 Visiting the hidden city of Azal
18:13 The endgame and ending
21:17 Bonus footage: The CGA version!

And is it just me, or does the water as viewed with a green jewel at night look like cheese pizza?

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