Darkmere
8 hour train ride! Ideal moment to play an Amiga classic: Darkmere: The Nightmare's Begun (by Core Design, 1993)
Title, Credits & Game-over screen
Darkmere is an isometric action-adventure. There's no scrolling, the game switches to a new room (or section of a hallway) on the map when the character touches an exit. Quite similar to Cadaver (Amiga) or Last Ninja (C64).
Besides fighting enemies, you spend a lot of time searching/examining each room for items...
...as well as talking to NPCs to progress the story. For example here at the Tolk Inn.. (Yup, there's plenty more pop culture references)
Fights are simple: You can block or swing your sword from two directions. As you'd expect from a game with an isometric view, sometimes you need to circle around an enemy for a while until you're able to actually land a hit. Lack of shadows means flying enemies requires guessing.
Still, for an Amiga game with only one action button, the controls are quite good.
There's mostly fetch quests (bring me 3 potions, then I tell you a clue how to progress). The NPCs love to send you back and forth across the map, which is very time consuming because of the loading after each room. Nothing seems to stay in memory.
Loading between whole maps even takes up to half a minute but comes with a high color HAM mode graphic and a scroller that tells a story.
The manual mentions this: "Should the title screen not appear within 45 seconds of turning on your machine, there may be a problem with your computer system."
4 hours into the game it started to slow down a lot. Opening the menu suddenly took 3 seconds, which is a very bad in game where you need to access the menu multiple times per room to search for items, read books or unlock chests.
But even without the slowdowns, the UI is quite a mess. Looting items in a room requires a huge amount of menu actions (inventory->use->key, exit, search->examine->book, back, take->book). Also, the windows don't clean up after themselves, unless you return to the game.
I played the original 4 disk release on an emulated Amiga 500 (OCS). I'll try to resume my session via WHDLoad (a fan patched version that runs on a hard disk) on my speedy Amiga 1200. Assuming this gets rid of the 3 second delay and reduces loading times.
I enjoyed the graphics and exploration. The game felt fine. However after 6 hours I was only at 5% completion. Yikes!
Update: The WHDLoad port of Darkmere comes with the same 3 seconds delay when accessing the menu. This means I won't resume my session. What a shame, I was just sent back across the town map once again. :)
Update: Well, I couldn't just let it got. I had a feeling that the number of items in your inventory is the cause for the slowdown. Sadly, you cannot drop any items, but you can drink and eat all the consumables. And that's what I did. One hell of a overburdened for-loop.
Also, the 5% progress was a lie (or another horrible for-loop). It took me about 10 minutes to finish the first map, resulting in 35% completion.
Time to explore the woods, populated by spiders, orcs, ogres, fireball-skeletons and all sorts of magical creatures.
My favorite kind of ogre: the sleeping kind.
The forest turned out to be quite large and had tons of dead ends. So I decided to draw an old school map, with grid paper and pencil. Fast travel and automap is for Millennials.
You shall not multipass! Even my elf credentials didn't help me. This guy (and his guard buddies on the other bridges) were quite stubborn. But nothing a 'load of dosh' can't fix. I had to trade 10 gold coins individually... Where's the for loop when you need it.
Found my dying grandfather after following his 15 diary pages spread all over the forest. He didn't even ask me to help him, but told me where the mage lives. k, bye!
I finally bumped into the mage I was looking for. He wanted me to get a mushroom from some forest lady. Seriously, THAT mushroom? That's literally all she's got. Ok, fine. I'll ask her.
Mushroom woman wanted me to rescue her two (hopefully clothed) sisters. So I killed the damsel distressers and returned for my reward. Haha, it was just a TEST. Right. Right. Well, now hand over that shroom, lady!
After obtaining the horn from a unicorn (he happily "parted" with it for revenge kills of a bunch of orcs) I returned to the mage who fixed me up a teleportation spell.
I'm at 72% completion now and off to level 3. Looks like Monkey Island is up next.
Update: At last! I finally had time to complete my Darkmere play-through. The 3rd and final map leads into a cavern, filled with even more orcs, ogres and spiders.
Had to draw yet another map to avoid getting lost.
I bumped into an Orc Shamen [sic] who tried to kill a woman on an altar. I killed the orc and freed her, revealing the most uninspired video game character name of all time ...
... Sacrifice Michelle.
She wanted me to help free a bunch of prisoners, which was rather easy. The last prisoner was "Uncle Bob" (unrelated) who was happy to share the secret lever setting to operate the exit elevator. He also told me that I'm about to meet the greatest evil of all: The dragon queen!
Turns out the dragon wasn't the greatest evil after all, but a game breaking bug. I was supposed to enrage the dragon queen by slaying all her hatchlings. However when I returned to her, her fireballs pushed me out the room and the game state got messed up.
The dragons kept re-spawning forever and the dragon queen did neither talk nor attack me. I tried many times to get past this situation, but I wasn't successful. The game has no cheat codes, so I had to resort to switch back to the disk version and use a trainer.
I did cast invisibility and infinite power, but the end-game event just wouldn't trigger. I simply couldn't attack or interact with the queen. Also, even with cheats, flying enemies are extremely hard to hit. And the stunlock doesn't help either. 'skip level' to the rescue!
FINALLY! DIE, BUGGY DRAGON QUEEN!
Plot twist: It was my mother all along! Ooops, should have tried dispell magic first.
The End.
(And we'll never know what hatched from that last remaining egg)
