"Learning to love to loathe the listlessness"

We all dream of facing down bullies from high school, or perhaps that nasty teacher we were sure ripped us off intellectually and emotionally. Well, it looks like none of that is going to happen for me(hopefully some of the bullies are too down and out by now for me to ever meet them again,) so I guess I have to settle for various old computer games, which won't give me the disappointment of having reformed in the meantime, leaving nothing for me to be righteous about.

See, I've gunned down a lot of oldies with walkthroughs or straightforward cheats or hex editing, but Curse of the Azure Bonds(CAB) always eluded me. Strategic Simulations, Inc. started a series of computer games intertwined with Dungeons and Dragons novels. And what a tangle it was; another such novel was, I believe, Heroes of the Lance, which graced only the NES.

The first game, Pool of Radiance(POR,) was a respectable effort with plenty of monsters and quests and a neat little town of dungeons packed together. You could travel to other places that really felt more like dungeons than sixteen by sixteen grids, and the colorful walls(vegetation, archways, even various stages of crumbling) and--zowie, curly fonts you never thought would get on a computer--were refreshingly different from the sameness of Bard's Tale. There was even an adventurer's journal(with, as is proper, a fake story sideline for nosy cheaters--CAB's got one too) that saved disk space and added to the gadgetry, along with a code wheel for copy protection every time you rebooted the game. The cool runes you had to match up prevented it from getting boring much earlier.

PoR also tried to regulate you from just running away with superpower characters, which I confess was one thing I loved in RPG's. Each seemed to have a different way to do so, but in PoR there was a limit to the level you could achieve or special items you could find, and some of the nasty spells you used were available to the bad guys, too.

CAB continued in PoR's vein and didn't even force you to reboot and flip through the code wheel each time you got killed, but forgot to be terribly entertaining. The important fights are much harder, and regular fights to build up experience are much sparser. Despite the neat overland map that serves as a break between towns and grid-map dungeons, the tie-ins to the earlier game's geography feel like retreads, and most of your time is spent building up spells, or punching through the awkward menu interface to tell the computer what spells you want to build up. Oh, there are also useless new options for character class or switching character class(and while you now have five levels of spells and not three, druid spells you can acquire just stink,) and some of the old abilities are also useless(turn undead, yet there are none to be found--any proper RPG should have undead, especially one that brags about being cut from Dungeons and Dragon cloth.) There's also a good deal of NPC interaction, with many things you can do and relatively few results, but the basic idea probably still suckers some trusting teenagers with PS2s or whatever these days.

The game's object lends itself to the linearity of a book as well, one might say. You wake up in a town called Tilverton, far south of Phlan where PoR took place. Each party member has five sigils on one arm, which glow at inopportune times and make him act a certain way. This is convenient to push the plot around and in fact as you go through Tilverton there are various silly acts your sigils make you perform. You're forced into hiding, a separate map of the sewers, and eventually into a fight with the guildmaster of the Fire Knives. One tattoo down with relative ease, four to go.

In the overworld there's this shadowed man who gives you hints where to go next, but he can't help you build up. There are three other big fights, with plenty of minions desperate to defend or avenge their masters thrown in, and once you get through them the path to Myth Drannor and the story's conclusion opens. Tyranthraxus, the bad guy you thought was killed in PoR, has something to do with it all, and it's probably not the last you'll see of him, or of him seemingly getting killed. There are enough arbitrary annoying rules in the game, so what's one more to pass along as a legacy, especially with the rehashing(oops, interlinking) of the other games in the saga?

It's all very imposing, with one disk per major dungeon area(a few sixteen by sixteen setups.) That's largely due to the writing that seems to assail you every other square, and it takes up enough space to edge out cooler stuff like magic items to help your quest. Take Zhentil Keep, where some dude named Fzoul is waiting for you(all the big enemies are. They aren't team players though as when you start to fight them, your bond disappears.) People along the way find many different ways to say 'It's them, isn't it?' This adds little to the plot, but with my being a Math Person and not an English Person I gave them the benefit of the doubt. In retrospect I can picture people saying 'Well, we want to make an epic, I guess we'll have to throw in the boring parts sometimes, from what I've read all epics have them.' But all the while there was no necessity to cede to.

As it turns out I embarked on a saga that was much better than whatever SSI served up. Mine did more in less time. And it was immensely cathartic. It involved continual save state hacking. Emulators. Several windows opened at once. And some unexpected turns beyond the usual people turning traitor or revealing disguises or telling you to refer to journal entry X when you just want to get on with the game.

Seeing all the painful stuff zip by quickly made me feel very fast paced and expedient and it wasn't so bad the second time through but I am obliged to indulge in a bit of description before getting on with my story.

The first horrible part of the game is memorizing spells. While it's quite easy to figure out how to hack all that, my old Apple was a real black box environment. So I had to put up with the weird toggles and having to use arrows instead of typing in keys to get right to certain places. For spells the game insists on pausing to show you that, yes indeed, you chose the spell you thought you did, and if you get one wrong you have to select everything all over again. Then you need to have your party rest to learn spells, and it's annoying to keep track of it all even if monsters don't interrupt your sleep.

However the combat is much worse. It's detailed, and you have a grid to run around, but there's no effective way to speed it up. It's very tactical and skewed forty-five degrees for some reason as it tries to recreate the corridor you're in. You can settle for the quick combat option if you like but then the game sometimes decides to have your mage equip an important wand you'll need for a big fight, try to use it, and abort. But quick was a relative term on the Apple, and the computer seems less stupid controlling its own guys.

If you do it yourself(as all tougher combats require) you even need two steps to attack someone right next to you. And the worst part is that in later stages monsters are tough because they can critically hit you, and dying is extremely nasty--the whole realism thing, you know. In general you have a very poor balance between the fights with many weak bad guys which take a while and those with a few very strong enemies that make you feel dumb and don't really take much time compared to the reloading times. (The PC keeps up this spirit by forcing you to restart the game on getting killed.) Which crushes some of the good ideas that turn up, such as dragons looking imposing taking up four man-squares or having to stand on where trolls died to prevent their regeneration, or how Shambling Mounds engulf someone in your party, rooting them to the spot and forcing you to kill them in several moves, or your comrade gets sucked into the ground.

Still I did it myself, and then some. Armed with graphical maps and a walkthrough that employed a surprising amount of snide cussing despite saying CAB was even better than PoR, and with an ability to judge which bytes in a save state file could help with hit points, I went at it. For a while I forgot the times I had forgotten to save after a fight(in the places where it was needed, I had two moves before the next combat.) I got forced to attack the King, banishing me to the Tilverton thieves' guild and later the sewers.

Perhaps some of this would not have been so tough to beat honestly as the game apparently adjusts for inflated stats(i.e. you start everyone off with 18 hit points.) But it made me feel more accomplished. I spent so much time cranking the emulator at warp speed to watch combats whiz by, like some sporting event highlight film. I found I'd forgotten about the fight with the Otyughs(cool eyeballs on tentacles) that was supposed to be impossible and picked up how to re-crank my players' hit points in the middle of the fight(for my own magic I thought BIG. It wound up taking less time than the in-game stuff by the end.)

'The monsters seem pleased with the trade.'

Through the sewers I managed to take out the Fire Knives' leader. He was even more of a punk than I remembered, and then I traveled overland, tackling whoever decided to attack me. One of the big themes in the game was a war between the cities of Yulash and Zhentil Keep, yet when I fought patrols they were all 'fighters.' A commentary on how war depersonalizes? I think not.

Fortunately I didn't have to go hunting for nasty monsters in the forest, memorizing spells, and rooting around to build levels. I did however suffer my first setback as I went in for advancement. I could only cheat up one level at a time as the game automatically pruned my experience, and once I did, my 255 hit points got bumped to 35. Some customer service! I would get it back, but it was a blow to my pride. The game was alive and kicking. Persistence would win out, though, I hoped. It was either that or pull myself away from the computer and take care of some real-world work I'd delayed for a month, which was nothing compared to how long I'd waited to solve CAB.

The Dark Elves, also called Drows, fell next but proved to be a bit more of a task. Some town called Hap, in the corner, and the elves wore some cool armor that would melt in sunlight. There was some political and family feud involved in all of it, but I just remembered the first fight where I actually got clocked. See, there are equalizer spells that knock you unconscious with the next hit taking you out, and elves are always somewhat magical. I realized my guys were turning into that cool skull and crossbones that outs a fighter from combat. So I had to do away with my guys zipping across the screen, which really felt high tech and certainly conveyed the excitement of combat. There were cool spells that took out a radius, and that included your allies. No problem, just crank the hit points back up and reload the save-state. Strategy? I had high-tech.

There were more dragons and dark elves and such on the way down and occasionally I lost when I forgot to re-boost. But some fellow named Dracandros removed a sigil for no particularly good reason.

The next part was Yulash where I for once had to find the right options in a dialogue scene. Once again a cool concept got botched as I found myself fighting weird vegetable monsters. And I kept and kept fighting. Some NPC's had joined up, providing context for the next game in the series(groan) but they just added to the journal entries I had to look through. It was cool pointing a Wand of Defoliation at the Shambling Mounds so they didn't suck me down but the climactic fight, with 'Bits O Moander' that flee for even less reason than they were given such a flippant name in a relatively maudlin realistic game, is irksome. The run towards the end is punctuated by some cool monsters called Vegepygmies which I saw very little of after--a pity since overall CAB doesn't present any other new concepts and cuts down on the menagerie of PoR. This part was also very linear; once you start into a dungeon, it's impossible to retreat, and if you don't have enough firepower you'd better have a backup disk. Not that the game is terribly clear on this, or that

Then it got nutty. Zhentil Keep was next. It was easy just to walk in. I even put up with the constant textual reminders of eerie silence. Then the game sprung a nasty trap on me after a series of teleports and one-way crevices to sneak through.

Monsters every step and not enough spells. I couldn't rest to learn them. I have to say that figuring out the bytes to malign to give myself enough Magic Missiles and Ice Storms was more of an abstract puzzle than searching around a maze. Even then the game decided to start one of my players berserking and no spell in the world could prevent me from, after winning a fight, having to kill the party member off after which I had a big gap in my party.

That one took a while to figure out. And even after I did I forgot to resurrect the names, so three of my characters were but an armor class and a pile of hit points and stats. It allowed a priceless irony though as some fellow named Nameless was mixed up in the whole bonds business but I trumped him. I had three players who really WERE nameless.

Despite a wrong turn it all worked out, though. The last part mercifully degenerated into a few desolate areas without much forced activity, and the story of the sigils began to come together. It was time for the final melodrama with Tyranthraxus.

But it wasn't just any old painfully hard fight for me. I was spurred on to one last puzzle solving challenge. Watching my characters and opponents zip by it was apparent there were too many spell casters well endowed with hit points. I had tinkered with my characters enough. Only now would I take the step of tinkering with low-lives who deserved it.

Final bad guys who embody ultimate evil or whatever need to be put in their place but I especially relished running down a column of bytes and realizing I just scotched Tyranthraxus down to one hit point. Him and those stupid line-drawing margoyles. It was worth the dragged out conclusion, the explanation of those weird items that pop up in your average game but not in my inventory. Amulets and eggs and gauntlets and brooches. But it was over. The game I couldn't crank up and make my characters invincible for had finally fallen, and in a blaze of warp speed emulation, Internet research, and pseudo-scientific critical byte-location probing. The discovery sure beat the summoned thunder and hysterical yelling of the long payoff dialogs before and after big fights.

And oh how I would have basked in my joy even if I'd had the energy to do more after ten hours straight of CAB. A game which probably helped ruin many things for me for a while. It convinced me I wasn't very good at the new wave of role-playing games(Bard's Tale seemed too sissy,) that I didn't like epic novels or poetry(after all, games are more fun than books, loading times and all) and that I just didn't like realism(the detail was in entirely the wrong places to be fun.) It also dented my notion of progress, with its fewer monsters and less lively city than PoR, where you had so many quests and options as opposed to the Three Places You Need to Build Experience For.

I'm sure there were other players who enjoyed it but I've played other challenging games and come away with a sense of adventure in almost every one. CAB had some cool names, and some of the concepts and quick-deaths in combat are impressively creepy for the detail of presentation afforded, but I just came away with a sense of restarting and futzing with a code wheel and endless battles won--but not emphatically enough, or re-won because I was too exhausted to remember to save--until I took matters into my own hands. And now that I did I'm left happy about my conquest, but I hope I don't remember any other games I forgot to solve as a teen(I certainly put this off.) The greater repressed they are, the more impossible they must be. And as things stand I wouldn't replay this game unless someone knocked me unconscious and slapped a few mind altering tattoos on me.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/00, Updated 09/17/03