Darklands Review
Developed by MPS Labs of MicroProse and released in 1992 on IBM PC MS-DOS, Darklands is a computer role-playing game most notable for its 15th cent. Mythic-medieval German setting and open-ended gameworld.
Darklands was conceived and designed by Arnold Hendrick; it was programmed by Bryan Stout, Jim Synoski and Douglas Whatley.
In Darklands, the player controls a band of up to four heroes (a party of adventurers) in search of fame and fortune. To this end, the heroes explore the overworld to battle the mundane and the mythical in dungeons, the wilderness and urban environments.
The main problems with Darklands are its menu-driven exploration, pause for orders combat system (RTwP) and primitive graphics, control systems and interface presentation.
Like most MS-DOS cRPGs of the 90s, Darklands runs like my Aunt May after she's had too much sherry to drink. Commodore 64 games from the 80s run better. And look better. And play better.
And while Darklands is rich in stats, build potentiality and itemization, there isn't much in the gameworld that is reactive to such.
Coding in stat-bloat is easy. Making the stats do something meaningful, not so easy.
As regards Darklands chargen, abbreviated stats are barely readable or interpretable without reference to the game manual (which was written for arm-chair historians):
A nice aspect of Darklands chargen is that we can see in realtime how our stats are being impacted on the right as we mouse-over backgrounds and occupations on the left.
Darklands' in-town exploration is menu-driven; that is, the player selects where to go and what to do from a list of options presented as text. Note how you can barely read the font even when the screencaps have been doubled in size. Note also how the blue highlight is harder to read than non-highlighted text.
Menu-driven systems were old-hat for exploration in computer games by the mid 80s. For crying out loud, Ultimate Play the Game employed contiguous flip-screen exploration of over 100 isometric screens on the ZX Spectrum in 1984.
With verticality.
And then they employed screen-scrolling and seamlessly-transitioning exploration in 1985.
On a 48 kbyte Zilog Z80 clocked at 3½ MHz.
The Darklands UI is laggy, non-tactile, it flickers when modes are changed, and the inventories are list-based. Some may argue that decent UIs and clarity in early 90s stat presentation were not possible due to low screen resolutions, but Master of Magic would prove them wrong. Master of Magic also featured in-game stat explanations through its Expanding Help system. Pre-MoM games did as well.
Couple the overall clunkiness of Darklands with its kludgy pause for orders combat system on barely-scrolling battlescapes (which should have been turn-based) -- how can it be recommended in 2024?
Darklands was distributed on 11x 5.25" 1.2MB HD floppy disks or 10x 3.5" 1.44 MB HD diskettes. Darklands extracts and installs via Brian Reynolds' MicroProse Hard Disk Installation Utility v.1.09 / Lib 3.22 by MicroProse Software, 1992 (MPSCopy).
Darklands installation size is 17,500,000 bytes of HDD space (17.5 megs), which includes 16 megs of data assets and 1.5 megs of temporary storage.
Darklands requires an i80286 "AT" CPU clocked at 12 MHz, 640K of RAM (581K or 595,000 bytes of conventional RAM) and 64K of LIM 3.2 or LIM 4.0 EMS RAM, but an i80386 CPU clocked at 20 MHz and 176K of EMS is recommended. It is not recommended to run QEMM or SMARTDRV. Darklands is capable of running faster via LIM 4.0 EMS or XMS that exceeds the 64K EMS requirement. Darklands runs faster on DXes than it does SXes.
In comparison, Ultima Underworld of 1992 requires 640K of conventional RAM, 480K of EMS RAM and 256 kbytes of vRAM; it requires 8 megs of hard disk space.
Darklands audio supports No Sound, PC Speaker, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro, COVOX Sound Master, Pro Audio Spectrum (Plus/16) and Roland MT-32/LAPC-1.
- Darklands manual written by Arnold Hendrick: 107 pages
- Darklands Clue Book: 124 pages
- Darklands Map: Map of Greater Germany
- Darklands skip intro: darklands /q (or tap space bar quickly)
- Darklands remake: There is no Darklands remake
cf.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.