"Tha funkee MC on yo' Apple IIe! *beatboxes incessantly 'til he gets his head bashed in by a lyre*"

I start with a confession: back in middle school, a friend, Aric, would encourage me to buy certain games. Despite making fun of Deathlord, perhaps my all-time favorite, most of the time he got things right. Magic Candle(MC,) one of his bulls-eyes, made me jealous after he showed me fifteen minutes of play. I didn't buy it right away, but in the meantime he was able to get pretty far ahead of me, which was okay by him. However, once the novelty of dispensing hints as a way of showing how advanced he was wore off, I stabbed him in the back when I called a 1-900 hint line in order to catch up with him, with the rationalization that we could maybe work together that much quicker, after he told me about spell books you had to find and a secret dwarven language he dropped hints about, which probably put me over the edge. But one day despite still being fractionally ahead(I wouldn't have overtaken him, I swear) Aric was dismayed by my progress and gave up. Which left a good deal of the rest of the game for me to play the right way.

Sadly, Aric never finished Magic Candle, but that's what he deserves for dissing Deathlord. I suppose he had the last laugh with a new IIgs and IBM PC where he got to play all kinds of games, and I suppose I got part of my own back when my sister hid the map on top of the fridge. I was just tall enough to see over it(her triumphant moment of revealing the truth but a final Pyrrhic victory in the lost I'm-taller-than-you sibling war) but wasn't used to doing so yet, and I spent two months slugging through the game without any aids. The game was too fun to give up until solved.

MC takes place in Deruvia, a land of pointy roofs and pointy elf-hats, with other cute drawings and hands-on combat that compensates for the world-map being far smaller than Ultima V. Your mission, should you choose to accept it(and the game ends quickly with a rebuke from the King if you don't) is to protect the land from the evil demon Dreax, who is due to burst the magic bubble that is guarding him in a hidden valley and restricting his powers, once the candle that sustains his prison wears down. The forty-four guardians of the bubble and the candle that helps keep him down have mysteriously disappeared, and you must find the words for the spells to maintain the bubble. An old scroll has left you a fragment of the full ritual you need to replenish the bubble in times of emergency, and it will be imperative to find the missing words and the reagents and chants they indicate. The flame is melting the candle, too, with no-one to take care of the protect spells. You've got just a thousand days on easy mode, which is more than enough even if you don't use the magic of turning your computer off after wasting a couple days. But it establishes tension for those who don't know the way yet: enough for melodrama, but never really pressing. Particularly klutzy or smart-alecky players may even burst Dreax's bubble for an alternate ending, also unusual for RPG's back in the eighties.

And there is a lot to do to get there. There are lots of islands you must travel to. Usually you'll have to find sailors who hang around pubs late as night as there is no boat you can guide, the rationale being that many of your characters already have professions, which can help you make money. And sea crossing is slow--at least a day each trip, with no sailing 'til morning--it's even possible to oversleep and miss the boat. Time is a factor in when people pop up in certain locations and go back into the ether and always leaves you a little paranoid you missed someone despite webs of information telling you of folks who hang around at odd hours. Along the way you'll have chances to split your party up, wake gods or track down magic beasts who may grant you favors, teleport to and from dungeons, find arcane landmarks(runes included, naturally) explore different climates, encounter exotic people, many of whom know a thing or two but won't answer when you knock unless you know their names, and you can even alter the landscape. Several people on the road sell items or grant critical information--making for a welcome step away from the overused 'Things are so bad, people just cower in their homes' crutch.

Yet when I found that I could only allot five letters for my character name, I suspected you couldn't do much at the micro level and indeed told Aric so. Then he showed me how your hero gets to sit at a table, call up, inspect, and take in five potential party members--no stupid dice rolling, and they even profiled themselves. In fact, you get to do it again when you escape to the Crystal Castle, several dangerous mountain passes away, where the more powerful characters are. In either place, the names are cool and no more than five letters: Kruga, Rexor, Eflun, Alhan and one of my all-time favorite fantasy names, ZIYX. Each one even has his own personal history detailed in the manual, and you can tag-team if you're not satisfied with a player. And although cool names do not an adventure game make, they are original(i.e. Phaleng, Shertuz, Merg, Vo, Knessos, and a rare long fantasy name that doesn't meander--Bedangidar) and the people's names in town are a similar cornucopia. The smatterings of dwarven language themselves that frequently add extra layers to puzzles may not be linguistically sound, but they roll off your tongue--I liked them so much I think I even saved the game after learning, a pithy honor-box donation where generally I'd take the information and hit reset.

After playing this game I was finally and unequivocally willing to admit that my first MRPG group's names(Bard's Tale II) were bogus. Yet there was consolation; the name ''Sasnu the High,'' useful fodder when Aric and I turned our guns on Boris and his Commodore, is worse than any of my efforts. I have tried to come close with my own efforts, but often it feels as though he's taken all the good ones. These days I just go for names like Biph and Spudd when playing RPG's; they sound like they're steppin' out, but I'd like to have some of what inspired Ali Atabek's wonderful naming(and with a neat name like that, he's got an unfair advantage, doesn't he?)

In that vein of innuendo, generally I don't like to foray into drug humor, which is a sure way for charlatans to seem like they're taking brave risks, but given the part mushrooms play in the game it seems irresistible. Your characters do need 'shroom fixes more than anything else to get by, and frequent users will find they speed up your quest. Mushrooms to restore energy--if anyone's exhausted, the party can't go on. You'll also restore stamina(hit points) with it or temporarily increase some abilities. Even the plants have cool names: nifts, gonshis and mirgets can actually appear and be picked in secluded patches. Some won't cop the right buzz for your party, but I guess it depends on your temperament. I tried every mushroom, maybe to recompense for not getting an NES and Super Mario Brothers, but of course there are other items like blankets, lenses and boots, which are a bit more innocent. You even have buried treasure in some dungeons--dwarven language generally guides you to it, and all sorts of treasures give you money.

There's also an odd but welcome social tilt on the generally accepted RPG conventions. In this game Wizards are their own separate race, and each race has a set maximum for any one statistic. Wizards are even worse than Dwarves in charisma, for example, although there are many wise Dwarves--usually fighters. One of your players needs strong charisma, which is a problem because he'll be the weak link. Some towns are even haughtier than others(high average charisma needed to talk to the inhabitants) and may extort a bribe so you can enter, and others will reduce your charisma needed to talk to everyone if you can defeat a tower of monsters laying siege to it. Things that generally aren't in towns turn up there. Dungeons are beneath a castle or in a village, and some even lead you under a sea to a small legendary island. Then many special locations directly punish greed by losing usefulness for the rest of the game. The gambling house and monks' rest stop are actually funny.

Other things are logical, too; characters need resting time to focus intently enough to learn spells, and they can only learn for the books they have(Ishban, Demaro, Sabano and the mysterious Zoxinn.) There are academies in towns that teach you weapon or magic skills, and the more important ones(learning, which benefits you more at the academies, or charisma) are tucked away in villages or across water. Characters' weapons acquire wear and tear and risk breaking(becoming useless,) requiring them to fix them while resting, and armor, which they have to wait for as it's made, only fits them. There are no official levels, either, although players gain certain attributes in leaps for putting certain pieces of knowledge together. Most realistically, the armor even softens blows instead of helping you avoid them outright, avoiding the common absurdity to many early PC role playing games.

The jabs at realism are, as in any good old school game, either entertainingly quirky or sensible without the usual dullness, and all without the generally tougher controls as you need to progress more. Valid commands are laid out nicely in a small box at the bottom of the screen; just access them by first letter. All the commands do scrunch the screen vertically a bit so you don't get to see too much of the towns at once, especially since your party takes up actual space--a 3x2 rectangle. This undoes the good work of your five-letter names compactly displayed on the right. The only tricky part is that you can reorder(i.e. to have your charismatic person talk to some old grump in a corner) your troops or actually break them up through the course of the game. Early on this is handy for a character to learn a skill(he has twelve of them, and although successful use battle can increase some, others such as charisma are affected most by training, at the cost of gold and time.) Some of the characters also have professions, and their abilities to draw income make up for diminished statistics. As it is necessary for magic users to go through the game's rest dialog to learn spells(fighters may hunt or fix their weapons,) you can make yourself a flexible schedule. There's even the ability to make several game-save bookmarks, so if you waste time in extended searches in one area, you can reclaim it later. This would almost be too nice if not for how the game asked for word X, paragraph Y, page Z as copy protection.

Dungeons may look boring but aren't totally a hack and slash affair. Splitting your party is the best way to get through the basic part, but sadly the main variety consists of different levels having randomly different dimensions, while dungeon rooms, each indicated by a huge pair of doors, are depressingly similar except for the occasional fountain or treasure chest. Given the different residences in towns, this is a disappointment; I suppose dungeons generally aren't fashionable,, and there's plenty of time for strategy in differently shaped surroundings in ambushes, but they are no fun, and in each room you're just boxed in the same place. You can actually break your party up to go around ambushes or time traps--often one member will have to split to wiggle down into a corner to read a sign or get treasure. It's mixed up well enough, and there's the occasional special room, but I had more fun hearing about the Giants' castle on the Isle of Ice and what to do there or working my way around a story to find which dungeon to attack next than I did getting through it.

MC is not combat-heavy, although frequently it will put critical combats in a mountain pass or dungeon room you need to get through, and they can block you, as having a player die in combat wipes them off the roster unless you've got a resurrect handy. You can usually beat monsters with a deluge of spells or, less honorably, retrying a combat until the minimum of a random number appear, but building your party up beforehand takes time, and it's just as important to remember your shield spells before you take your backpacks off adventuring in case you run into any nasty magic users. Although the monsters do not have great variety(trolls, for instance, have varied armor and hit points as you go east) the combat allows you to set up, prepare spells and weapons before launching an assault. Barring nasty dungeon ambushes. And you can even flee to run from roving bad guys. The most fun part of the strategy is based on how combatants duck physical attacks by moving to an adjacent grid square, and if there is none, they're hit. With bow attacks it's even more deadly as they can't move back or forth.

Sounds and graphics from the eighties always pale in volume and detail compared to modern stuff, so generally you have to rely on something that looks clever or is believable--I try to think of relative ratios of meaningful detail to perceived effort, and MC scores quite high here. Generally the ease of play and the character interactions do the talking, but the skull and crossbones that flash to show an advancing enemy and the blinking with the trilled scale when a special location arises feel right. My favorite is the magic spell--the ball lurches diagonally between icon squares, reminding one of one of those driver games with a lot of crashes or perhaps even a pitcher throwing a curve ball. But seeing the name of the current sub-country you're in and your X/Y coordinates while outdoors is nice to have in the status box.

The original Magic Candle was so enjoyable that I want to play the next version but am worried it might not live up to standards--I was in fact tricked into playing the predecessor, Rings of Zilfin, where I got to see the promise I'd taken for granted in MC. However, on replay, the game can lose so much challenge on replay largely because many puzzles are based on knowing certain words or people's names, and perhaps one day I'll want to regain that magic and find what happened to the Four and Forty. Foreknowledge(especially of the puzzles you liked so much you wanted to remember) ruining replay happens to some extent in earlier games, but it's such a big part here--entire dungeons and towns are cut out this way. Although there are three difficulties, I've found that the easy version is pretty well-balanced for first-timers, and the tougher ones just throw nasty random monsters at you and give fewer days. That means more time in combat, when combat and exploring were so well balanced on easy--but what could be expected? Even today raising difficulty is still a matter of raising volume and not complexity; few games today actually manage to integrate more personal interactions or puzzles tied to further legends into their harder modes.

Yet most of what is off-kilter in Deruvia makes for great entertainment. I even feel fairly confident I would have solved this game within its time limit if I had not given up after every blind alley I'd turned to; on replay I noticed some easy ways to prepare your party early for various expeditions, but despite relegating the great journey of exploration and wonder to a more scientific exercise, I enjoyed the names, the items, the images, and the puzzles. And the nostalgia.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 02/13/03