"Dead ends? Maze games don't need no stinkin' dead ends to be tough!"

Gemstone Warrior was a bit of a departure for SSI, being part arcade game and part RPG. It's a maze that seems more than eighty rooms even though no one room is a dead end, as there are winding paths in many of the rooms, and monsters that attack you to hinder your quest to retrieve the five pieces of the broken life-giving Gemstone and return. If you do so in good time, you get a bonus based on the treasure accumulated. The maze has, except for ten randomized rooms, the same paths every time, but they are not easy to follow, even with multiple paths to some bottleneck rooms that you must pass through. No one room fits fully in the screen, and it's amusing that the designers stretched the limits of a single-side disk game to make more rooms while using the another limit of the Apple(280x200 screen) to make it hard to picture individual rooms.

It's a slick idea with minor imperfections. The tricks they use to make the game harder only get truly unfair in one point, at a very early room with a locked door. There's nothing in the manual about keys, and you don't seem to find any after initial searches. Although it plays a key part in injecting originality into the game, the door that won't open can seem discouraging at first. It makes the options to play Kamikaze or Normal modes, as opposed to Beginner, seem cruel to people starting out. Then for those lucky to get to the random rooms, sophisticated mapping techniques fail to hacking, slashing and looting. Still, Gemstone Warrior is comparable to Atari's Pitfall but without the popularity--each game creates a huge and mostly simple world that makes its variety count.

The monsters pose different problems; some spontaneously combust so they will damage you if they get too close. Spiders may disease you so that you slowly lose points over time instead of gaining it. There are also ghosts and skinny hard-to-hit skeletons, amoebae that duplicate quickly and annoyingly fast fireflies to go with monsters that burst into damaging flame on dying. The game, despite the disk loading you hear on leaving a room, even seems to remember where monsters are if you try to double back into a room. You can loot the dead bodies of enemies for treasure(bigger heaps mean more treasure) and special items, not all of which help you; there's a learning curve at the beginning when you need to determine which do which. There are dice, flowers, various colored potions, books, scrolls, crystal balls, and even a weird dagger, and you'll need to experiment at the start to discover which are helpful. Your weapons are a bow and fireball crossbow, and although reloads are easy to find by killing enemies, you need to determine which is appropriate for a situation; fireballs at enemies too close in will hurt you, and you won't be able to get any treasure from the corpses, which are incinerated. On the way back, things get even tougher, and you

The controls add to the game's odd feel; I've never heard of control-F(freeze?) as a pause, which you'll need when you want to do some mapping, as the more logical escape key is used for a nice save game feature. Why not control-s? That's the sound toggle. I'd switch save to control-q, because you quit when you save, and use escape to pause. You also change the direction you face with the Lode Runner-ish IJKL, and you can move slowly forward by hitting a key repeatedly, although you will want to toggle running with the space bar when enemies aren't around. The return key is used to look through piles of treasure, and although you can bash the return key to pick up everything, you can use arrows(which kill any one normal enemy quickly) to avoid taking certain items or select the item later and push P(Put on the ground) if you forget. Shooting is also odd as you toggle fireball and regular bows with R, shoot with S, and shoot diagonally with A/W or D/X. The first pair will fire in the direction you're facing, plus down/left, and the second takes the direction you're facing and adds down or right. It's a bit odd but you do have a choice of buttons to push, logically placed around S, and if you don't hit the right one it's easy enough to try the other--wasting arrows is no problem as they are a dime a dozen. So the keyboard controls, although you don't think they'll work at first, do. There are even joystick controls, with looting actions based on if the joystick is centered, but the keyboard allows inching better. The controls also realistically restrict you in some situation as you can't just fire arrows as you're fleeing. You have to plant your feet; magic is allowed here, but Dukes of Hazzard style action is over the line.

The graphics are entertaining and occasionally even teasing. You've got a nice opening scene that depicts your character running in a cavern surrounded by monsters, and each game starts with a minimally animated scene at a temple that you can skip over. When you begin the search proper, there are plenty of different jagged border icons that give many rooms a natural cavern feel, while the dungeons are perfectly linear. Most of the rooms don't have a whole lot of interior decoration other than standard room-edge borders. Sometimes there are broken pillars, lunch-pail treasure chests or coffins lying around, and you have several different portals between rooms--various arches along with gates and doors for which you must wait while they open and close. The only room that stands out is the entrance to the demon's temple, but it is impressive. The item interface at the bottom of the screen is nice, and there's also a bar to the right of the playfield that gauges your life force remaining; it turns different colors based on how much is left and turns blue if a spider bites you. It's a great example of the simple yet effective features this game has. The monsters are also well done. Although there are only so many ways to draw skeletons, ghosts and spiders at Apple resolutions, monsters' different sizes(and speeds) force you to use different combat strategies, and you can tell which way the ones that move quickly are facing. And I have to admit, the demons that appear after you get the gemstone are truly frightening. But the best innovation in the graphics is how the fill for the wall icons are random; it provides variety with cross-hatches and circles and gaudy stripes, and yet, you can't successfully remember rooms by their wall patterns across games.

Gemstone Warrior has some elegant coding as far as I can tell; many rooms are really huge, and the programmers used a nice algorithm to compress maps. Bytes between 80 and bf told how many wall icons to print in a row, and between c0 and ff printed out space icons, which meant several continuous rows of width 50 could be compacted in four bytes. Combined with the random room detail(treasures and monsters,) compelling mazes could be created with relatively little memory--the game fit on one disk, including the introductory and game start/finish scenes. The game also becomes much better when you realize how to pick off monsters at range. It can take a bit long to play without intensive mapping, however, and the monster variety is a bit low, so when you are given a chance to continue after solving the game(say yes and a monster swipes the gemstone when you aren't looking,) you don't really have a lot of immediate motivation to go through the same maze save one concentrated dose of illogic-inducing randomization, build on your score and knock the authors's scores down the high score list. But that's only if you've put in a lot of likely enjoyable time solving the game in the first place. If you don't mind not solving games this will be a neat one to putz around with for a bit, but your ego may be in for a denting. For those who survive that, get ready to play a fast-paced game with a huge maze conventional graph paper can't fully tackle.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/04/01, Updated 11/04/01