The C64 game Curse of the Azure Bonds (adventure, rpg 3d) published by Strategic Simulations Inc. We bring you Curse of the Azure Bonds reviews, screenshots, music, and more! Curse of the Azure Bonds is the second in a four-part series of Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box adventure computer games, published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. The story is a continuation of the events after Pool of Radiance.

Area Note
Unlike the other optional areas in the game, Oxam's Tower has fixed battles, and you'll need to explore to find them. Some of the battles are very difficult, so you should wait a while before coming here.
The tower rooms and the dungeon are colored in light gray. The caverns are in a darker gray. This is just to make the divisions easier to see.
1 - Sitting Room
If you 'search' in here you'll find a random treasure.
2 - Minotaurs
You'll be attacked by several minotaurs here. On their bodies you can find plate mail +1 and battle axes +1.
3 - Treasure
If you 'search' in this room you'll find a random treasure.
4 - Stairs to the Top of the Tower
There are five more levels to the tower, but they are small and relatively uninteresting. The main attraction is at the top, where you'll face a high priest of Bane, plus some otyughs and a few Zhentil fighters. If you cast 'silence' on the priest, then this is a very easy battle. Once it is over, you'll find plate mail +2, plus some random treasures.
5 - Entrance to the Dungeon
6 - Medusas
You'll face three medusas here, along with several griffons. Obviously, concentrate on the medusas first since they are the nastier of the two. You'll receive a random treasure from the encounter.
7 - Arrow Trap
8 - One-way Teleporter
The teleporter will take you back to the entrance of the tower.
9 - Fighter Battle
You'll be attacked by about 15 Zhentil fighters here.
10 - Otyugh Battle
You'll have to fight a trio of otyughs here.
11 - Battle
You'll face a medusa and some ogres and griffons here.
12 - Gas Spore
The gas spore looks like a beholder, but if you 'attack' it, it will explode, damaging your party. If you 'leave' it instead, nothing will happen.
13 - Entrance to the Caverns
You'll meet a man here who will tell you, 'The Beholder Corps is.. Gaak!' Then a large round shape will disappear into the darkness. If you haven't saved for a while, now would a good time to do so.
14 - Beholder
The beholder will tell you that you're not invited to the conference going on, and he'll allow you to leave peaceably. But if you want to visit the rooms to the west, you'll have top fight him. Beholders can't be hit by spells, so you'll have to rush him with your melee fighters.
15 - Dark Elf Lord
On the lord's corpse, you'll find an invitation to the conference. You should also find some random treasures.
16 - Guards
The guards will 'cower back' at your approach, but if you 'attack' them they'll turn out to be rakshasas. If you instead 'leave,' then you'll appear back in the hallway, but the rakshasas will disappear.
Rakshasas can't be hit by spells, but they won't have any problems pegging you with 'lightning bolts' and spells of their own. The best way to deal with them (if you want to deal with them at all) is to buff up before the fight and then hope your melee fighters kill them quickly. You'll find an invitation to the conference on the corpses of the rakshasas.
17 - Beholders
You'll face thee beholders here. If you can kill them without having anybody disintegrated (which takes some luck), then you'll earn about 60,000 total experience, and you'll find a list indicating that rakshasas and dark elves are attending the conference, but that efreet, vampires, and liches all declined to come.
18 - Conference
You'll stumble into a conference discussing 'the fate of adventurers,' and you'll be given two options: 'flee in panic' or 'throw caution to the wind.' There is absolutely no way to win the battle unless you have the dust of disappearance from the Fire Knives Hideout. Among other things, there are 15 beholders involved. So if you don't have the dust, flee and just skip this battle.
If you have the dust, then if you use it before the battle starts, it will prevent enemies from casting spells on you, and it will only allow enemies to use melee attacks against you if you're adjacent to them. With that sort of advantage, you should be able to work your way through the enemies, and earn a whopping 76,508 experience for each character in your party. You'll find random treasures after the battle.
19 - Treasure Room
You'll find a good-sized treasure here, but it's all random. So save your game before going in, and load if you get the wrong sorts of objects.
Exits:

1. Front door of the tower.
2. Stairs between the first and second levels.
3. Exit to the Wilderness.

The foes were a notch above the ones I'd encountered through most of the game-which of course you'd expect in the final areas. The spiders were capable of poisoning and thus immediately 'killing' my characters in melee combat, so we needed to take them out quickly with 'Fireball' spells and have a couple of 'Neutralize Poison' spells memorized, just in case. The thri-kreen (an insectoid race whose presence in Myth Drannor was a bit of a mystery) were capable of causing paralysis in melee combat. Hell hounds could breath fire, though were curiously also vulnerable to 'Fireball' spells.

The random encounters in the first two areas weren't so bad; once I'd cleared 10 or 12 of them, they stopped coming. What made these areas interesting was the wide variety of special encounters. The rakshashas, masters of trickery, kept luring my party members into ambushes. The first encounter we had upon entering the graveyard was with an 'elven spirit' who tricked us into walking into a spider's web, then revealed herself as a rakshasa (the web made it so we could only move 1 move per round, but it didn't stop us from killing the beast). More mysterious was a stranger called 'Nameless' who approached us in the ruins and claimed to have a hand in creating the first bonds. He warned us that with the other four masters dead, nothing was stopping Tyranthraxus from 'invoking the full power' of our bonds, and he suggested we try to catch him off-guard. I know from my post-game readings that 'Nameless' is actually Finder Wyvernspur, a major figure in the 'Finder's Stone' trilogy, of which Azure Bonds is the first novel.

(Also, Alias told us a little about him in her journal entry.) Seeking to make his music immortal, Wyvernspur created a magic clone of himself, but ended up abusing the clone and turning him evil. In punishment for his offenses, the Harpers exiled him to a plane and wiped all traces of his music and poems from history. Centuries later, a sorceress named Cassana found him and offered to help him continue his work, and the result was Alias, the heroine of Azure Bonds. Through the events of the books, Finder ends up redeeming himself, nobly sacrificing his chance at immortality to prevent the return of Moander, and freeing the Saurials (Dragonbait's race) from Moander's slavery. But in doing so, he somehow absorbs some of Moander's divinity and becomes a demi-god.

Anyway, all of that (I think) is in the future for Nameless. Right now, he's just an anonymous friend of the adventurers I've been encountering throughout the game: Alias, Dragonbait, Olive Ruskettle, Akabar, and so on. Tyranthraxus attacked with a couple dozen margoyles and about 10 high priests. Naturally, we had buffed with 'Haste,' 'Bless,' 'Prayer,' 'Enlarge,' 'Protection from Evil,' and other spells before entering the chamber.

The big things we had to watch out for were 1) T's lightning attacks, which were capable of 50-60 points of damage and could easily kill one of my characters if it bounced off a wall; and 2) the priests' 'Hold Person' spells. My basic strategy was to take out as many priests and margoyles as quickly as possible with 'Fireball'; both Cesario and Viola had it memorized, and I gave a wand to Octavianus.

I've pondered the endgame for a while, and I'm still not sure what Tyranthraxus was trying to accomplish. The Fire Knives wanted to use me to kill the King of Cormyr. The Cultists of Moander used my bonds to somehow open a portal to bring Moander back into the realms. Dracandros wanted to compel me to attack some dragons and trick them into killing Elminster and ravaging the Dalelands. The Zhentarim bond had something to do with a factional war among the priests of Bane. But Tyranthraxus never seemed to have a plan.

The best I could figure is that he was going to use my party members' bodies as backups in case his storm giant form was slain. (He said something in a speech about being able to possess me through the bonds.) But if that was the case, why invite me to his secret lair?

Why not just let me go on adventuring until he needs one of us? Overall, though, it was a fun, action-packed ending. The final battle felt a tad on the easy side (I think Tyranthraxus should have had a lot more hit points), but I liked the ruins of Myth Drannor, and.huh. Something just occurred to me. The reviled 2001 game I referenced previously is called Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor. I just assumed it was a tawdry attempt to capitalize on the name of the famous 1988 game. But did this title and subtitle come together because Myth Drannor is where the Pool of Radiance was last transported, thanks to Tyranthraxus?

I never got far enough in the game to find out. AnonymousYou're kidding I hope. EoB2 is a masterful game that challenges the player fiercely throughout. EoB3 is an abominable pile of feces that could be beaten by a blind person wandering randomly and mashing the 'All Attack' button since all the enemies up to and including the final boss are incredibly weak.The first EoB had the same problem with too-weak enemies as 3 (as well as the problem of too large maps), but at least that game had proper puzzles in it that could take some time and effort to solve. EoB3's idea of a puzzle is 'put the statue arm in the broken statue'.

I remember the story as 'He was using you as a tool to gather the artifacts so he could destroy them'.2001 POR is often called POR2. It's a different story which just happens to take place in the same location.IF. you do play it again. Patch it with the unofficial patches.

It fixes MANY bugs, without messing around with game balance (too much). Further it includes a speed tweak so the zombies don't shuffle along at 0.01km/h.The big reason (in my opinion) that POR2 failed is that it started as being D&D 2nd edition, but changed to 3rd ed half way through game development. Unfortunately, some of the hard coding for 2nd ed was already done, so you got a broken implentation of a 2nd/3rd 'Red-headed-stepchild' edition.

AnonymousWe can all agree that Big T's plans aren't well expounded.While it's true that your party (probably) wouldn't have known about the artifacts without his meddling, I think he just wanted them destroyed in case anyone (or perhaps even specific someones-Harpers?) who did know about the artifacts would never be able to use them on him.Building on the character transfer idea, Tyranthraxus has your typical villains' desire for a sort of 'poetic anti-justice.' Since you were (ostensibly) the party that ousted him at Phlan, he revels in the irony of using the very same adventurers to ensure his invincibility.

What a humorous and strange ending. It would seem that part of Tyranthraxus's plans was to destroy himself in the process.If I recall correctly, one of the Journal entries from Pool of Radiance talked about a single pool, but that it appeared in different places at different times.I played CotAB a year ago, and remember the rakshasa. I don't remember there being any way to tell whether someone was a disguised rakshasa - it would have been cool to have been able to glean their identity through clues or through foreknowledge.

Otherwise, it gets reduced to a pure gamble. Rick CTo answer xyzzysqrl and this at the same time, the books make clear there are several pools around; they're not all pools of radiance.

There was one called the Pool of Darkness (also the name of the fourth game in the series.) I don't remember if those are something that were invented for the book or not-they may have been something invented for the original Forgotten Realms campaign setting.Says Wikipedia, PoR: Myth Drannor is not related to the first four games except by name & location. AD&D breaks down a bit once you hit about level 10. The monsters aren't really a sufficient challenge.For instance, one of the big bads, 'Yeenoghu, Demon Lord of Gnolls' has AC -5 and 100 hp, with a worse THAC0 than your lead fighter's. But wait, he is always accompanied by 66 gnolls of the strongest sort! They have 14-16 hp each. That's what, a couple fireballs?Furthermore, as monsters give out a set amount of xp, getting characters to level at an interesting pace requires throwing extra experience at them.

This is almost entirely done in the form of gold. At this juncture any hope of a reasonable economy is thrown out the window. I never played tabletop D&D long enough to get a sense of how leveling works, but my impression is that getting to Level 8 or so might take hundreds of hours of game playing, while this can happen in only a few hours in CRPGs.The real problem, then, is the developers using a very literal interpretation of D&D rules. There probably wasn't any good reason that they HAD to do that. If I remember correctly, Baldur's Gate and its sequel, on the other hand, modified AD&D2 rules liberally to improve the quality of the game. I'll admit I am not an expert in AD&D rules, but I don't know of many places the AD&D rules were changed in Baldure's Gate, aside from a couple simplifications.

One thing is that BG is based on AD&D 2nd edition, while the Gold Box games used 1st Edition.Well, there is one in both games: In those editions you get most of your xp for collecting treasure, whereas most DMs ignored this, slowing levelling greatly. This could be part of the wonkey levelling. Also you normally wouldn't fight hundreds of identical monsters in a D&D game. There is a far larger diversity of monsters in D&D then they can fit in a game.For example: is a sample of the one from 2nd edition. In 3rd edition they had five or six 300+ page Monster Manuals, and a Find Folio, and adventures and rulebooks would often add another 10 or so. Each has its own abilities, weaknesses, etc, which makes them more challenging.A good DM also doesn't normally throw hordes of identical monsters at you like that. They'd normally use tactics and strategies not possible in a computer game: For example: in most table top campaigns it doesn't take.

I had forgotten about that. The dialogue makes references to the first edition, too:.Aerie: Mazzy?

Do you think you’ll ever become a true Paladin for Arvoreen?Mazzy: I am a true sword for my God, Aerie. That is as close as I can expect to come. To hope for otherwise would be foolish and naive of me.Aerie: Yes, but I was told of a time when halflings were rogues only. That you would never find one that was a cleric or even a warrior such as yourself anywhere.Mazzy: That’s true, if unfortunate. But that was a long time ago, Aerie. Things have changed since then.Aerie: But maybe things could change again? Maybe your people could become paladins and rangers and even mages one day, without limitation.

Wouldn’t that be exciting?Mazzy: Yes, yes, and maybe my people will become skinny, wear shoes, and have big, long skulls. Really, Aerie, you needn’t keep your head in the clouds ALL the time.Aerie: Well, it was just a thought.Mazzy: And it wasn’t a bad one. But it’s not likely that the gods are going to revamp the halflings and come out with a ‘third edition’, as it were, now is it?Aerie: Oh, you never know. The gods do strange things, sometimes. BGII came out in 2000, the same year as 3rd edition, thus how the reference was made.

The Halfling references a very different take on halflings in 3rd edition. See, they used to be Hobbits, right?

However, why on EARTH are Hobbit's adventuring? Bilbo, Frodo and Bullroarer Took were supposed to be the super, super rare exceptions to the rule that only happen once every hundred years or so. So why are they leaving the comforts of hearth and home to adventure? So they remade them to be more adventurous, including giving them elf-ears, elongated skulls and giving them boots. The 2001 Pools of Radiance was a mixed bag for me- I tracked down a trainer/hack that let you speed up gameplay to 10x normal speed. Without that I would have probably gone crazy fighting undead.But the setting was pretty large, and it included a lot of little side quests and treasure hunts to leave you many things to do.-As to your questions about canon vs.

Retconning- most of the early D&D novels were based off existing adventure modules; checking wikipedia claims the PC games started that way as well:is much more pronounced in the Dragonlance-based games and novels- Heroes of the Lance/Dragon's of Flame are roughly the first and second halves of the novel 'Dragons of Autumn Twilight'. The authors of that book (which was the core work for all later fiction in Dragonlance) have said in interviews that they started off of their own adventuring party for the main characters:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaistlinMajere#Characterprofile. Sorry that didn't come out as clear as I intended.Since they were based off of adventure modules, canon tends to be very vague. Every party that played through the module could have ended up with a slightly different experience.

Optional parts could be overlooked or skipped or even circumvented. Depending on the GM, groups could flee from combat rather than fighting to the death.For connected adventure modules, they would either tend to focus on big events to tie things back to previous modules (Tyranthraxus out for revenge) and skip the smaller bits of continuity between games. Its kind of interesting comparing this against the Mass Effect games- there they had the foresight to save off information about pretty much every single decision point to use later.It also gets to the flexibility of a good DM over a computer- if one guy from an introductory battle survives and escapes, he can be fleshed out into a nemesis out for revenge against the players. Or if a character is supposed to come up at a big final battle but was killed early, just replace them with a renamed duplicate.

It is a bit odd trying to achieve any kind of campaign-setting 'canon' in a realm in which thousands of adventuring parties are gaming and presumably amassing power and reputation, and making changes to the world. You can easily see an adventuring party killing someone like Fzoul or the king of Cormyr, and then experiencing a cognitive disconnect upon reading of that character's continued adventures in the novels.Games that allow multiple paths and endings have to make a choice about how to resolve them as part of the world's canon, and none of those choices are good. If there's only one potential outcome to the main quest, they can just say that happened, but the events of the game are lamely credited to 'the Avatar' or 'the Hero of Kvatch' rather than to a named hero.If there are multiple endings, then the game either has to do what Mass Effect does, or choose one of the potential paths as canon, or carefully side-step the issue. A good example of the latter is what The Elder Scrolls did with the events of Daggerfall (cf. 'The Warp in the West'). Such tortuous storytelling wasn't necessary for Oblivion since the main quest had only one ending and none of the sidequests were particularly monumental. I'm curious to see what the next TES game does with Skyrim's history, though, especially as concerns the emperor.

Actually, most of the problems in the Forgotten Realms come from authours each adding their own regions to it without regard to a constant feel or sanity. So you have Halruaa where everyone has magic, and there are flying ships and such. However, oddly, this NEVER escapes there boarders. You have the mercantile houses of Sembia (I like that setting a lot, there were some great books set there) then you have horror books like The Night Parade that don't match any of the realms again.

I'd love to see Ed Greenwood's original notes and find out how much things have diverged from them.Actually, in one of the boxed sets they laid aside a region that was to only be for player and DM use, not the setting of any novels, adventures, etc. They abandoned that, but it was an interesting idea.Basically, a DM is expected to adapt the adventures to his group ahead of time, if not writing his one. For example, my Dad ran the first Freeport adventure for his group, and they liked it enough to stay in the city. Then a married couple of gamers we know found out that my Dad was running those adventures and gave my Dad the entire Freeport product line (they were done with it, and had no further use for it) and as we talk my Dad flips through the next adventure, and comments it will need some rewriting as his players killed the big bad guy of the rest of the series. It wasn't hard, just change some names (I think the 2nd in command had gotten away or something) but it shows one of the advantages of a tabletop game over a computer one: You can do.anything., there aren't limits on what you can think up.Anyway, this is one of the advantages of newer settings such as Eberron; they tend to be more coherent at they were all planned out by a small group of people talking to one another, rather then a mishmash of writers over decades. A further note about Realms canon: In general, pretty much anything with the Forgotten Realms logo is supposed to be canonical. Supposed to be, as there's a couple horrible things explicitly struck out, and other things cause no end of problems.The computer and video games, sadly, are the most common problem children, often because developers very much go off and do their own thing (and the video games are very popular, so many people are familiar with them.)Kellandros above is pretty wrong, actually.

Not many novels come from adventures; adventures come from (or with) novels. Ruins of Adventure is actually specifically written as an adventure (or module, they mean the same thing in D&D terms) to allow you to play through Pools of Radiance with your friends at the table.So, everything with a Realms logo on it is.supposed.

to be canonical. The easiest way this works from a canon perspective is that the games themselves are frequently not canonical - the books and adventures that accompany them are. Curse of Azure Blades has the novel you've read, and a module that follows the computer game. That module is the canonical version of events.Pools of Radiance has a novel and Pools of Adventure; only the novel is canon (and its sequel is the canonical version of Pools of Darkness.)In general, this stuff is done on a case-by-case basis, because some games can fit right in, only some have supporting material, and some really, really don't fit the printed Realms at all.

They have been, badly. Basically, the clerics powerful enough to do that are supposed to be incredibly rare, and refuse to do it for money (it requires ground up diamonds) unless the person is on a quest for their god or something. This is of course ignored by Ed Greenwood and a number of other realms authours who have gotten addicted to a super-high magic feel.But yes, authours have wirtten some horrible books about the afterlife, particularly the ones involving Mystra and Cyric: Prince of Lies and Crucible: The Trial of Cyric The Mad. This is one of the reasons I vastly prefer Eberron to The Forgotten Realms. Gods there are still mysterious (the game world has several conflicting religions that all get spells and can summon angels that say the others are wrong) not just whiny children, and most people CAN'T come back from the dead. Only those with some special fate can, such as, conveniently, the player characters.

Here's an answer to one of your questions:Tyranthraxus' GoalsFrom: in the body of Srossar, Tyranthraxus' goal was to control the mind of every living creature on the Material Plane, a goal he believed he could achieve with the Pool of Radiance, six ioun stones and blood to fuel his own life energy. He had managed to collect four ioun stones when he encountered the adventurers that would kill his body.After he found himself in Myth Drannor, he felt vulnerable, being forced into the body of a human after so long in the mighty body of a dragon.

He put his plans of mass-control on hold and instead sought the destruction of the three magic items that could destroy his true form.Tyranthraxus intercepted some members of the Fire Knives guild along with a small group of Moander-worshipers fleeing north from Westgate who told the tale of a woman named Alias, branded by their masters and a few others with magical blue tattoos called Azure Bonds which forced her to do their will. Although Alias managed to break free, Tyranthraxus saw an opportunity to further his own goals by placing these brands on a group of adventurers similar to those that managed to defeat him in Phlan. He gathered the cultists, Fire Knives, a renegade Red Wizard of Thay and a group of Zhentarim mages then captured a party of sellswords to inscribe the Azure Bonds onto. Each faction gave the party a compulsion but none realised that it was possible for the group to resist them.' Ref leveling speed in tabletop D&D and AD&D - It pretty much depended on the group. Characters typically gain a level in 1-4 sessions.

The deadliness of the game also varied. In my first campaign, some of our characters might die every session. Later I joined a group where permanent death was practically non-existent. Obviously, you'll gain more levels in the latter campaign.:-)I'd been playing for about six months when I attended my first science fiction convention (I went because I'd heard they had gaming). While waiting in line, a kid asked me what was my highest level character - I proudly told him I had a 4th level priest. He said, 'Oh, MY highest is a 27th level Paladin.' I was suitably impressed, and only later learned how ridiculous that was - You could not hit 27th level in a lifetime of play the way most games were run.I'd say hitting 8th or 9th level in a year of playing every week was probably typical, but some 'power games' went faster.

One little quibble- in 1st edition D&D, levels did go up to 30 and progression was faster (each gold piece of treasure was worth 1XP). At 30th level a character could choose to try to ascend to demi-godhood.2nd edition(with the switch in name to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) capped at 20 normally, with a few special cases of going to 30 for epic level(near god-like abilities and spells to wipe out most of a continent).Level 1 characters have to be pretty lucky or helped in order to survive in earlier editions. The poor mage can cast magic missle once per day, then is stuck in no armor with a dagger.

A ordinary housecat has decent odds of killing a non-fighter in a few rounds.If you want fun tales of lethality, look up Tucker's Kobolds- stories of entire parties just running as fast as they can to the 2nd floor of the dungeon to get to the safer, higher level monsters. DaveThe best AD&D campaigns are run by GMs who do take some liberties with the rules in order to make the game better. Losing a character permanently in whom a player has invested a year is a big deal. But if you make dying too easily recoverable then it has no danger. My campaigns have evolved house rules over time which are designed to make it nearly impossible to die FOREVER. But losing a Constitution point should become increasingly likely the more times you've died.

And yet there should also be a way of getting that Con point restored if the party/player is willing to invest a massive amount of resources.Recovering a dead body is not always easy if the rest of the party was forced to leave a corpse behind. I had a party spend weeks on reconnoitering and then planning an infiltration mission that was a combined assassination and corpse recovery on a Drow city. That is the kind of shit that people remember forever. As nerdy as it is, that is some epic adventuring.and since it's unlikely that most of will ever be in a real-life Black Ops mission, this is a way of living it in a fantasy world. Oh, are there ancestors of the Khajiit? Also, Alias reminds of the construct Dolora in Planescape: Torment.It's quite fascinating to read about the D&D rules in such detail.

It has never been my world and I played through Neverwinter Nights without ever realizing that it was THE D&D system. Only since I realized that the weapons of Baldur's Gate obey the same rules as the ones in Planescape Torment, did I begin to understand the deeper game mechanics.Also, it seems as if the updates from Pool of Radiance that made it into this game, slightly upended the golden balance of that game. Belated answer, but:If you have the help of the Knights of Myth Drannor, when Tyranthraxus flees, leaving you to fight his minions, you're supposed to get a message that some of the minions are decoyed away (as Chet mentioned in this entry).If you have the help of the rakshasa, every time you would be brought to combat with a random group of minions in the temple, there's a percentage chance that instead, you'll get a message saying 'the monsters look confused and wander away.' If you're unlucky, you might never see that effect. I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting.

(For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters.3. Please don't comment anonymously. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread.

Choose the 'Name/URL' option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank.4. I appreciate if you use for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention 'ROT13' in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying 'what is that gibberish?'

Also, Blogger has a way of 'eating' comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on 'old' games continue to supplement our understanding of them.

As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as 'necro-posting' on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.As of January 2019, I will be deleting any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and 'word verification' on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving.

I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools. Read the explaining this blog and to understand the current playing order.1. I am following a list of CRPGs in chronological order derived from several sources, including Wikipedia, MobyGames, GameFAQs, and contributions from readers. I am going in chronological order on two sections of the list: a) all RPGs in the 1990s, and b) non-PC RPGs that I missed during my first four years of blogging when I played only games released for DOS.2. To appear on my play list, a game must be a a) single-player RPG released for a personal computer, and b) in a language that uses a Latin alphabet. Console games do not appear on my playlist unless they also had PC releases during their original release schedule (generally within 2 years of the console release). Exceptions made and ambiguity resolved at my discretion.3.

My definition of 'RPG' requires the game to have three core criteria: 1) character leveling and development, 2) combats based at least partly on attribute-derived statistics, 3) inventories consisting of something other than just puzzle items. If I reach a game on my playlist and it lacks one of these items, I may mark it as 'rejected' and skip it. (Increases in maximum health alone do not count as 'leveling and development.' Some other attribute, skill, characteristic, or ability must get better.)4.

I can reject independent and shareware RPGs if they are clearly amateur efforts with no innovations or accolades attached to them.5. I cannot use cheats. I cannot look at FAQs or walkthroughs until I have finished playing, or unless I'm so stuck I literally can't progress otherwise, in which point I can look up a hint for my current situation only.6. I don't have to win every game, but I must play for at least six hours. Pocket trains trailer.