It's easy to mistake "Ms. Pac-Man" for a simple sprite-change of 1980s "Pac-Man" by Namco, but in fact that's not exactly true. "Ms. Pac-Man" is different. It wasn't even made by Namco.
Ms. Pac-Man Arcade
The story of "Ms. Pac-Man" starts with General Computer Corporation (GCC), a company made up by MIT-dropouts, and the so-called "enhancement kits".
In the early games of arcade gaming, arcade owners found that as players became more skilled at the games they could play for longer and longer without paying any extra money. Then along came "enhancement kits", essentially just a third-party mod of an already existing game, but with improved game-play and increased difficulty.
GCC started developing such an enhancement kit for "Pac-Man", named "Crazy Otto".
"Crazy Otto" was essentially "Pac-Man" but the character had legs and the ghosts where given antennas. Unlike "Pac-Man", "Crazy Otto" had 4 different mazes (unlike "Pac-Mans" 1), and the fruits (that works as bonus items) moved around the stages, instead of being right below the ghosts "pen".
"Crazy Otto", Atari 7800 (Actually a gfx hack of "Ms. Pac-Man". as "Crazy Otto" was never released)
At the time of development of "Crazy Otto" GCC settled a lawsuit with Atari over "Super Missile Command", which was a "conversion kit" of "Missile Command" (1980. Atari). Part of the settlement terms barred GCC from selling future conversion kits without consent from the original game manufacturer.
This obviously made GCC hesitant about "Crazy Otto", so they approached Midway, which was the distributor of Namcos games in the U.S. Midway had become inpatient in waiting for the next "Pac-Man" game, which would be "Super Pac-Man" (1982), and bough the rights to "Crazy Otto", making changes to the sprites in order to reflect the "Pac-Man" series.
"Ms. Pac-Man" (1981), Arcade
The name of the new game was changed multiple times during development, from "Super Pac-Man", "Pac-Woman", and "Miss Pac-Man". But as the third intermission showed the couple getting a baby, there was a fear of protests to the fact of the couple having a baby without being married, and so the title "Mrs. Pac-Man" was decided, and in the end "Ms. Pac-Man" was chosen because it was easier to pronounce. The three last name-changes all occurred within 72 hours of production.
Shortly before release Stan Jarocki of Midway stated that "Ms. Pac-Man" was conceived in response to the fact that the original "Pac-Man" was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players, and it was their way of thanking all those lady arcaders who had played and enjoyed "Pac-Man".
Changes from the original "Pac-Man" includes the change of the appearance of the main character, having a bow, lipstick and a mole.
Four different mazes, with different colors, and two warp tunnels rather than one (except for one of the mazes).
Fruits enter trough warp tunnels and move around the stage.
New music and new intermissions.
The intermissions show how Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man meet and eventually have a Pac-Baby.
"Ms. Pac-Man" (1990), NES
Reaching stage 256 causes an overflow bug, that causes the game to go black. However buggy code makes the game unplayable at stage 142.
If you are looking to buy a "Ms. Pac-Man" arcade cabinet you should be ready to pay between €600-€1.500 depending on condition and type etc.
For a nes version you could get away with €23 for a used copy, but for a brand new be prepared for closer to €270. (Funny how brand new nes games always seem to fetch such high prices)
For an Atari 2600 version you would have to pay about €4, and for a brand new about €9.
Because of the limited capacity of early micro computers, games used to either have graphics, or a deep story-line. But as computers grew more capable during the 80s, so did the capacity of adventure games to incorporate more graphical elements and even sound.
Roberta Williams, pioneer and game designer.
Roberta Williams had played "Colossal Cave Adventure" (alternately called Cave Adventure, or just Adventure) and was looking for more similar games. But she couldn't find any. This gave her the idea to create such games herself. Together with her husband and then IBM programmer Ken Williams she founded Online Systems in 1979 (renamed Sierra On-line in 1982) and in 1980 their first adventure game: "Mystery House" (1980), was released. She designed the game and her husband coded it.
It was an Apple II game based on Agatha Christie's book "And Then There Where None" (1939), and it was revolutionary; it was the first adventure game to have graphics!
Although crude black and white vector stills, it became a hit.
Mystery House (1980), Apple II
With "Mystery House" the company started a series of games called "Hi Res Adventures", the second of which was called "Wizard and the Princess" (1980), also released for the Apple II, this time the graphics had color.
The game was later considered a prequel to the game "King's Quest".
"Hi Res Adventures" was comprised of 7 games, the last of which was "The Dark Crystal" (1983) based on Jim Henson's movie with the same title.
"Wizard and the Princess" (1980), Apple II
"The Dark Crystal" (1983), Apple II
Meanwhile, in 1982, Adventure International began making graphical games, including re-releases of their earlier text-only games, such as "Adventureland" (1978) and "Pirate Adventure" (1978), starting off the new series of games dubbed "Scott Adam's Graphical Adventures" (not the same Scott Adams that created Dilbert, but they did occasionally get each others fan mail), which consisted of 6 games.
Box for "Adventureland" (1982), Atari
Another series of games designed by Scott Adams was "Questprobe", based on Marvel Comics, with a Comic tie-in.
The series was planned to consist of 12 games, but after the third Adventure International unfortunately went bankrupt.
The first game featured The Hulk (1984). The second Spiderman (1984), and the third Human Torch and the Thing (1985).
"One of the reasons I was writing games was that there's weren't any to play, and I wanted to play games." - Scott Adams
"Questprobe featuring the Hulk" (1984), Adventure International, C64
"I’ve had numerous people tell me that it literally changed the course of their lives." - Veronika Mengler, talking about "The Hobbit" (1982)
Meanwhile in Australia, Alfred Milgrom had started Melbourne House, a book publisher in 1977.
Milgrom was interested in computers and in 1981 he posted an advertisement at the University of Melbourne, looking for computer-science students interested in working part time on a game-development project. Veronika Megler was the first to reply. Milgrom gave her a very simple brief: “Make the best adventure game ever. Period.”
She had only ever played one adventure game before, typically enough "Adventure".
"The Hobbit" was released in 1982 developed by Beam Software and Published by Melbourne House. Not only was it a licensed game based on the world famous book of the same name, but each copy of the game actually included a copy of the book!
It became highly regarded for its innovative text-based physics system, and an improved parser, much more complex than the standard 2-word parser commonly used. It allowed the player to talk to and order other characters around. The physics system allowed such things as for the player to pick up a dead dwarf, and wield it as he would any heavy weapon.
It was also in real time, characters would do things, and things would happen when the player didn't type anything, as opposed to other similar games, when you had to actively type out "wait". Characters moved, interacted with the world and each other independently from the player, resulting in a lot occurrences the developer hadn't even imagined.
This made the game world a lot more dynamic than even many modern games manages.
Unfortunately the extreme complexity of the game unavoidably caused a lot of bugs. Ironically the first update to fix the bugs also caused new ones that made the game unbeatable. This was of course fixed with the following updates.
The Hobbit, 1982, Beam Software, ZX Spectrum
"A good story never dies" - Roberta Williams
In 1984 Roberta Williams revolutionized the industry ones more.
In 1983 IBM approached Sierra On-Line asking them to make a game capable of showcasing the multimedia capabilities of their upcoming computer the IBM PCjr.
The result was King's Quest (later renamed King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown).
It was the first adventure game to feature animations, the first to support 16 color EGA graphics, and the first to use third-person pseudo 3D, where the character was able to move in front, behind, and over objects.
And to quote an IBM advertisement, it featured "unusually smooth and realistic animation and an impressive variety of sound effects".
The character was moved with the joystick or the keyboard, and other interactions used a text-parser.
The development costed $850,000 and IBM paid for much of it.
IBM ended up discontinuing the PCjr in 1985 due to it's poor reception, and as a result King's Quest didn't sell very well, almost making the struggling Sierra On-Line go bankrupt.
But thanks to the game engine "Adventure Game Interpreter" (AGI) Sierra was able to port the game to Tandy 1000, standard PCs, and the Apple IIc, which made the game a success.
King's Quest, 1984, Sierra On-Line, IBM PCjr
Silicone Beach Software was founded in California in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie.
They released "Enchanted Scepters" the same year. It was the first Macintosh game to have digitized sound. It used a drop-down menu with clickable options for common actions as an alternative to the games text-input. Other than typing "get <item>", it was also possible to click on the image of the item you wanted to pick up.
Level 9 Computing was a British game developer founded by three brothers; Mike, Nick and Pete Austin.
They started programming for the British Nascom computer, their earliest software where arcade games and utility programs.
The brothers had played "Adventure" and finding themselves wanting a version for British micro computers. It was no easy feat to squeeze the 200K mainframe program into 32K, but that's exactly what they did. Not only that, but they found they actually had enough space left to expand on the game with 70 extra locations. And so, in 1983 "Colossal Adventure" was released. In 1986 it was re-released with graphics.
It became the first part in a trilogy inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, dubbed "The Middle Earth Trilogy". But due to licencing issues it was later renamed "Jewels of Darkness", and any references to Tolkien's work was removed, when the games where enhanced with graphics.
In 1986 they followed up their fantasy trilogy with a science-fiction trilogy called "Silicon Dreams".
The trilogy is set in a not too-distant future when humans have started colonizing space. For the first two installments the player has the role of Kim Kimberly, an undercover agent, whose goal in "Snowball" (1983) is to save the colonist's spacecraft from crashing into a star, and in "Return to Eden" (1984) to stop the defense system at the destination planet of Eden from destroying the craft. In "The Worm in Paradise" (1986), the player, with the role of an unnamed citizen of Eden, must travel around the city of Enoch, learn its secrets, earn money and save the planet.
"Snowball" was initially released only for the BBC Micro, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Nascom, but was later followed by versions for the Commodore 64, Camputers Lynx, Oric-1, Atari 8-bit, as well as for the Memotech MTX, Amstrad CPC, Enterprise and MSX.
"I'm aware of the female audience. I always try to write nonsexist prose." - Pete Austin
"Return To Eden" (1983), BBC Micro Model B, Level 9 Computing
London based Magnetic scrolls' "The Pawn" (1985), originally for the British Sinclair QL computer, is notable for being the first game to really utilize the Amiga's sophisticated sound chip, and the option to have speech-synthesis reading the entirety of the games text as you played.
The Amiga version of the game was released in 1986, and unlike the Sinclair version had graphics.
"We got fed up of adventures that constantly said 'YOU CAN'T EXAMINE THAT' meaning that no-one had bothered to write any text for it so we tried to describe everything that was referenced in the room descriptions and elsewhere. This is why you end up with a description of a pocket as a 'Loose bag inserted into your trousers...' and the carrot described as 'A conical orange vegetable, don't you know anything?'" - Robert Steggles, talking about the production of "The Pawn" (1985)
Intro Music to "The Pawn" (1986), Amiga, Magnetic Scrolls
"The Pawn" (1986), Amiga, Magnetic Scrolls
Sierra On-Line continued their "King's Quest" series with "King's Quest II: Romancing The Throne" in 1985. Followed with "King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human" in 1986. This was the first game in the series that didn't star Graham, and didn't take place in the kingdom of Daventry.
The protagonist this time around is a 17 year old boy named Gwydion who is held captive by the wizard Mannanan in the land of Llewendor.
"King's Quest III - To Heir is Human" (1987), Atari ST, Sierra On-Line
"I loved parsed adventure games. They made me use my little grey cells and not just my thumb joint cartilage" - Scott Murphy
Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, who had already worked together on the Sierra game "The Black Cauldron" (1986), wanted to create a humorous science fiction adventure game.
So, in 1986 Sierra's second "Quest" series started off with "Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter". It was a Science Fiction comedy, starring janitor Roger Wilco.
It quickly became a hit, and was followed up in 1987 with "Space Quest II: Vohauls revenge"
"It was the anti-King’s Quest. We knew there had to be a different audience out there for what we were thinking and liked." - Scott Murphy on Space Quest
"Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter" (1986), DOS, Sierra On-Line
"We wanted to give the player the opportunity to see what it’s like to be a police officer. And judging from the fan mail that would soon come, we were successful in doing that. Some of the mail was from active police officers." - Jim Walls, about "Police Quest" (1987)
1987 was also the year that started off the third "Quest" series, with "Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel". It was produced by former police officer Jim Walls, and star traffic officer Sonny Bonds in fictional town Lytton, California.
The game was relatively realistic, and the player had to follow police procedure in order to progress in the game. As a result the games manual is full of listings of proper police procedures from the time.
Allegedly it was even used in some capacity to train actual police officers.
"Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel" (1987), DOS, Sierra On-Line
"King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella" (1988) was the first game in the series to have a female protagonist, in an attempt to attract more female players. It was also the first game to use the enhanced engine "Sierra's Creative Interpreter" (SCI), replacing the old AGI engine that was first used in the original "King's Quest".
The game was however released with both engines, enabling those with older hardware to play the game as well.
"King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella" (1988), DOS, Sierra On-Line.
Left: SCI engine. Right: AGI engine
"King's Quest IV was a much bigger hit than I, II, or III. I do feel that King's Quest IV was a pivotal game in bringing in more female players" - Roberta Williams
Also in 1988 the sequel to "Police Quest" was released using the SCI engine.
"Police Quest II: The Vengeance" again features Sonny Bonds, now promoted to the Homicide division.
This was actually one of the first adventure games I played, and considering I barely knew any English at the time, the parser driven interface was quite a challenge, not to mention words like "warrant", it wasn't exactly in the vocabulary of beginners English lessons. However I'm sure games like this did help a lot in my learning process.
"Police Quest II: The Vengeance" (1988), DOS, Sierra On-Line
In 1989 a new "Quest" series was started: "Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero". It was a adventure game/role-playing game hybrid, and has been credited as being a genre-defining game.
The game advertised itself as "three games in one" since it was the first Sierra game that allowed the selection of a character out of three classes: Fighter, Magic User, and Thief. This in turn affected how the player could solve puzzles and what quests the player would encounter.
"Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero" (1989), Amiga, Sierra On-Line
1989 was also the year for the third "Space Quest" game: "Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon".
Sierra also started up a new series, written by Roberta Williams, with a female protagonist: Larua Bow.
The first game in the series was titled "The Colonel's Bequest", and was an adventure mystery, heavily inspired by "Mystery House" (1980).
"The Colonel's Bequest" (1989), DOS, Sierra On-Line
Infocom on the other hand, religiously stuck to their interactive fiction, seeing it as a virtue and being convinced those kind of games would last forever.
Activision acquired the company in 1986, and in 1989 their last three interactive fiction games was released. The only three that had graphics, but still images next to the text-section, similar to Sierra's "Hi Res Adventures" started almost a decade earlier.
To be fair they weren't really wrong. There is still an underground movement for interactive fiction, it just doesn't seem to be commercially viable any longer.
"James Clavell's Shōgun" (1989), DOS, Infocom
"The nice thing about the all text format is that text is moderately timeless. If you have a graphics game, a game from five or ten or fifteen years ago seems like caveman scratches on a wall compared to the latest graphics. That, in a perverse kind of way, has helped keep our games alive." - Dave Lebling
"In the beginning the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a game by Infocom released in 1984, it is based on the novel with the same name by Douglas Adams written in 1979.
Well, actually it was originally written as a radio theater by Douglas Adams in 1978 for BBC Radio 4.
Of course there is also a movie adaptation from 2005, which is rather sub par to the novel and game in my opinion.
The game was co-written by Infocom employee Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams.
Just as the novel it is a science fiction comedy.
Familiarity with the novel does help in the beginning of the game, but events as the game progresses differs from the novel.
As all of Infocoms games it was an Interactive Fiction, meaning it had no graphics, but rather text that described events, as well as a text input for the player to interact with the game.
And just as most other Infocom games it came with a number of "feelies", merchandise to increase the player immersion into the game.
The feelies include a big red button inviting the player not to panic. That seem to be good advice, since the game is insanely difficult despite having a difficulty rating of Standard according to Infocom themselves.
I don't refer to the common problem of such game as to how to phrase what you as a player want to do to make the game understand you, or the fact that if you miss something earlier in the game, it may be unbeatable (such things where common in adventure games), but rather that the game is straight up sadistic and tends to troll the player (which admittedly is part of the humor of the game).
I will now give an example for the two first turns in the game so *minor spoilers* coming up (skip this paragraph if you want no spoilers).
When I first played the game it probably took like 10 minutes just to get the first turn right. Everything is black. I tried to navigate the game anyhow, but it didn't work. After I while I got desperate trying to figure out why it was black and tried "open eyes", which didn't work. The correct action was "turn the lights on". The second turn was equally frustrating trying to figure out why I couldn't do anything. Turns out the protagonist was lying in bed and you had to write something like "get out of bed". Of course if I was actually the protagonist I would know that.
This is often a problem, or rather the basis for the puzzles in the game; figuring out what is going on based on the information the game Doesn't give you. Like for instance Who you are!
Later in the game the player gets to control different characters, but luckily there is a "Who am I" command.
"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Another problem I quickly found when playing was that sometimes the right thing to do is nothing.
This means actively writing "wait". But be careful not to wait for too long, or not long enough for that matter.
Without the games manual, that gives a lot of hints of what is possible to do and how to play Infocom games in general, it is of course even harder to play. Luckily, in the gold release of the game there is an in-game hint system (remember, this is back when the web wasn't readily available) for when when you get Really stuck, which was far more often than I would like to admit.
The DOS version of the game has the option to play with color. This only means that the otherwise black background is now instead blue.
DOS version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
In 2014 the game was made freely available on BBC Radio 4's homepage to celebrate the games 30th anniversary. This version has an updated interface with graphics and an inventory bar, which helps a lot considering this is not based on the gold edition with built in hints. (But nowadays you can of course easily find hints online)
To quote the page: "The game will kill you frequently. It's a bit mean like that."
30th anniversary edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
This certainly is a game mainly for fans of Douglas Adams' strain of humor and not for the easily frustrated. You Will die, A Lot, but hopefully, each time you do you get a tiny bit further in the game.
I liked the game, but then, I've been a fan of Douglas Adams a long time, and I am rather stubborn. And honestly to Really enjoy this game, I think you need some masochistic tendencies.
"The ships hung in the sky the same way bricks don't" - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
For those unfamiliar with the story this is what it is about *spoilers ahead*:
Arthur Dent wakes up one morning finding out that his house is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. While protesting the demolition of his home Arthur encounter his friend Ford Prefect, who turns out to be an alien and researcher for the intergalactic dictionary "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". He explains that the earth is about to be demolished by the Vogons to make room for an intergalactic bypass.
In the last second the two friends manages to hitchhike on one of the Vogon spaceships, before the earth is demolished.
In the early days of computer gaming computers didn't have the capacity for advanced graphics, therefore a story-driven game, like an adventure game had to be in text format.
The very first text adventure game is considered to be Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) for the PDP-10 mainframe created by Will Crowther when he was part of the development of the ARPANET.
PDP-10
Being an enthusiastic spelunker he loosely based the games cave on Mammoth Cave in Kentucky (The worlds largest cave).
The game was expanded in 1977 with the help of Don Woods who added new magical items and creatures, and thus changed the game into a loose fantasy world with elements of role playing games.
In the following years other programmers made other versions and ported the game for other platforms often changing the title somewhat. For instance Microsoft released Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 as a launch title for the IBM PC.
Mammoth Cave
The game is still available in the BSD Games package that is included in some versions BSD and also available in the repositories of most Linux distributions with the title Adventure.
As impressive the game was for its time it did have quite some limitations. You where only able to write one or two word sentences, often following the structure verb + noun, and the game only read the first 5 letters of any typed word. Although you could navigate by typing directions such as north, east, south, west, etc, I found it really difficult to have an overview of where you where and what possible exits each location had. I suppose you really have to draw a map while playing to have any chance of beating it (but this was even long before finding the titular cave).
"What if there where some kind of technology which could enable you to talk straight to the imagination? Well there is and its called Text, and it's been around for several thousand years." - Richard Bartle
Meanwhile in Cambridge Massachusetts 1977 Marc Blank and Dave Lebling started coding their own game inspired by Colossal Cave Adventure at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science on the schools mainframe.
After founding Infocom in 1979 together with other staff and students at MIT, led by Lebling, Blank, Albert Vezala and Joel Berez, they started porting their game to microcomputers.
The game had to be split into three parts and was released as a trilogy.
Zork I: The Great Underground Empire was released in 1980 followed by Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz in 1981 and Zork III: The Dungeon Master in 1982.
They chose the name Infocom to be generic, since at the time of founding the company they actually didn't know what the company would do. Two years later the companies first release was Zork I, and it was clear the company would deal with text adventures, or Interactive Fiction, which was the preferred definition at Infocom.
"This was for literate people, this was for people who Like to read" - Brian Moriarty
Zork being played on a Kaypro computer
Infocom wasn't the first company to develop adventure games for microcomputers.
Similarly inspired by Cave Adventure, in 1977, then an employee of Strömber & Carlson, Scott Adams began working on his own adventure game, written in BASIC for the TSR-80.
In 1978 he released his game Adventureland from the company Adveture International, which he founded together with his wife Alexis Adams in 1978.
This made Adventure International the first company to primarily sell computer games.
In Europe the Adventure International games where released by the company Adventure Soft established by Mike Woodroffe.
Adventureland on the TSR-80
Zork I was a popular game for the PC, thanks to the superior quality of its writing and packaging, in comparison to Adventure.
Many contemporary adventure games had a very limited vocabulary and often only allowed for one or two word sentences. Infocoms games where generally capable of much more complex sentences and puzzles where often possible to be solved in a number of ways, of course adding to replayability as well as minimizing the frustration so prevalent in other similar games. Try for instance Derelict (1982) for C64, and count the number of times your commands yield the answer WHAT? when the parser can't realize what it is you are trying to do.
Derelict (1982) Commodore 64
Text Adventure games are still popular today, although not commercially, with a lot of enthusiasts making their own, but now it is generally known as Interactive Fiction (IF).
There are a lot of editors for making your own IF without the need to be able to program.
Here are a handful of contemporary toolkits:
Destiny of an Emperor is a strategic jrpg by Capcom for the nes that was released in 1989 in Japan, and 1990 in the U.S. Sadly it didn't get a European release which was commonly the case with jrpg of the time.
The size of the game is huge with over 20 cities, not to even mention fortresses.
The game contains 180 historical generals of which about 150 can become controllable by the player!
To compare it with Final Fantasy, another jrpg that was released in the U.S. the same year, you where only able to control 4 characters and there where about 10 cities.
Despite the intro of the game proclaiming:
This is the true story
of the wars fought by
ambitious men over the
vast Chinese Continent
about 18 centuries ago.
It is in fact based on a Manga named 天地を喰らう Tenchi wo Kurau (lit. The Devouring of Heaven and Earth) by Hiroshi Motomiya, which is loosely based on the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, which in turn is loosely based on the historical events of the fall of the Han Dynasty (169-280 AD).
The original Japanese title of the game is also 天地を喰らう Tenchi wo Kurau.
Since there are so many unique characters, there are really only 4 types of generic enemies:
Bandit Force, Brigand Force, Rebel Force, and Pirate Force. These get gradually stronger as you progress through the game, although they look the same. In doing so Capcom manages to avoid the common jrpg trope that enemies that look the same, but with a new color palette becomes newer and stronger enemies.
Of course a lot of the named generals roam the over-world as well, and by fulfilling certain conditions and defeating they may give you the option to recruit them for your own army, often by bribing them with a steed or money.
In fact the steeds available at merchants are only used as bribes.
You can also sometimes find officers willing to join you in cities, or joining you as a part of the story.
You can have 7 officers in your traveling party, of which 5 participate in battles.
One of these officers can be assigned as Tactician, which allow the other officers to use tactics (special abilities) by spending Tactical Points (T.P.). Each officer also have a number of soldiers, when an officers soldiers reaches 0 he dies. It is possible to resurrect dead officers with an item aptly named Resurrect.
As you can see soldiers work much like "Health Points", and Tactics like "Magic" in other jrpg.
By sleeping at an inn the officers T.P. and soldiers replenish.
Tactics are named in Chinese, so you really need the manual to understand what they do.
Although you can only have 7 officers in your party, you can have a total of 70 officers in your reserves at your headquarters, where you can exchange your party members. Since more than 100 officers are recruitable, you also have the option to fire officers from your army, to make room for new recruits. Doing so makes the fired officer again a random encounter on the over-world.
You must also keep enough provisions (also called Food) to keep your soldiers fed. When traveling the over-world Food is automatically depleted. When you run out of Food soldiers die for each step you take on the over-world.
During battles, other than the usual options of attack, defend, retreat, tactics and item, you also have the option of an All-Out battle which means the battle will be fought automatically, only using the attack option and distributing attacks rather evenly over the enemy. This of course makes the battles a lot faster and is a great way to get through grinding generic enemies.
The story begins with Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei becoming sworn brothers and setting out to conquer all of China to restore peace to the land.
After the first scenario Liu Bei becomes king and is no longer available as a playable character, instead being replaced by his son Liu Feng. From this moment on you can ask the local historian in any city with a castle to send for him, making it the new capital of your forces. The historian is also the place to save your game.
Being the story of how Liu Bei conquer China events is of course ordered in his favour, despite the fact that, historically, neither Liu Bei or Liu Feng was able to conquer the land.
I feel it is a true shame that this amazing and for the time, Huge game, has been so overlooked, and I can really not understand why.
The game cost about €30-60 for a used copy. If you want a sealed unused copy you are looking more in the vicinity of €650
