【Telengard - Commodore 64】 Squiggy's Abandonware Adventures (Commodore 64/DOS Games)

Channel:

Squiggs 【Glitches - ROM Hacks - Speedruns】

Subscribers:

1,510

Published on January 9, 2017 3:07:27 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpFcmT9hst0

Game:

Telengard (1982)

Duration: 27:56

1,816 views

18

Today's Abandonware Adventure takes us to Telengard, the mystical land of slow-loading Level 28 Skeletons that are totally fair and balanced to be fighting at level 1.

This game is fun, even a bit wacky at times, but is overall disappointing. I love a lot of things about it, mostly the early RPG/roguelike elements, which are put together quite nicely. The experience is kind of tainted by the overwhelming difficulty of the random mobs, at least in my experience, and the long load times between each movement. It's really the last part about the load times that kills it for me, because I have no problem grinding out difficult games, but I don't want to do it at a snail's pace.

For an early dungeon crawler RPG on Commodore 64, I'm pretty impressed. This was the beginning of the genre really, and it has a lot of neat elements. You got your classic treasure hunting loot system with +2 Elven Boots and the like, you've got your inns to rest in and gold to spend, you got teleporting traps and randomized corridors and scaling mobs and line of sight and, for the first time in RPG history, scrolls.

Yeah that's right, Telengard created scrolls. It's already legendary for that fact alone. It's just a shame I couldn't fix the load time issues, maybe we could have tried to get to the end of this one.

❤ Squiigs


---[ Wikipedia Description ]---------------

Gameplay:

In Telengard, the player travels alone through a dungeon fraught with monsters, traps, and treasures in a manner similar to the original Dungeons & Dragons. The game has 50 levels with two million rooms, 20 monster types, and 36 spells. It has no missions or quests, and its only goal is to survive and improve the player character. The game is set in real time and cannot be paused, so the player must visit an "inn" to save their game progress. In the early releases (e.g., Apple II), the game world has no sound and is represented by ASCII characters, such as slashes for stairs and dollar signs for treasure. Unless the player enters a special cheat, they cannot resume progress upon dying.

The single-player adventure begins by personalizing a player character. Each character has randomly generated values for their statistical character attributes: charisma, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, strength, and wisdom. While the algorithm stays the same, the player can randomize repeatedly for new character attribute distributions until satisfied. The player begins with a sword, armor, shield, and no money, and can only see his immediate surroundings, rather than the whole level. Monsters spawn randomly, and players have three options in battle: fight, use magic, or evade. Magic includes combative missiles, fireballs, lightning bolts, and turning the undead, as well as health regeneration and trap navigation. The effects of the game's most complex spells are not outlined in the instruction manual and must be learned by trial and error. Like the game, the battle events are carried out in real time instead of in turns. Enemies increase in difficulty as the player progresses through the dungeon. They include both living and undead monsters such as elves, dragons, mummies, and wraiths. Defeating enemies awards experience points, which accrete to raise the player's experience level and increase player stats. The player is rewarded with treasures that include magical weapons, armor items, and potions. Players can code their own features into the game.

Reception and Legacy:

RPG historian Shannon Appelcline identifies Telengard as one of the first professionally produced computer role-playing games. Gamasutra's Barton described the game as a "pure dungeon crawler" for its lack of diversions, and noted its expansive dungeons as a "key selling point". AllGame's Earl Green remarked that the game's mechanics were very similar in practice to Dungeons & Dragons, Computer Gaming World's Dick McGrath also thought the game "borrowed heavily" from the original such that he expected its creators to be thanked in the end credits, and Scorpia cited four specific similarities with Dungeons & Dragons.


---[ Series Information ]---------------

Squiggy's Abandonware Adventures is a series where I play through Abandonware games. Abandonware games are games so old that their copyright is no longer being enforced, usually because the original company distributing the game no longer exists. As such, they are in a legal gray area where they aren't quite legal to pirate, but no one is around to protect the original IP. For the most part they are old DOS games, but they may be from other older systems such as the Commodore 64.

Other Statistics