Eye Of Beholder

1991 SyksySSI's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons has wormed its way into the territory of almost every possible type of game; only the straightforward shoot'em-up has been skipped. Now the AD&D tentacles have grabbed hold of perhaps the best game in the world, Dungeonmaster.

Dungeonmaster's idea is so simple that, oddly enough, only Captive among the earlier clones has made it to the same level. That's why rousing yippee-shouts echoed far into the small hours when Eye Of Beholder, from the new Legend series, turned out to be a quality-class clone.

Ankle-deep...

The sewer network of the city of Waterdeep is home to more than just rats, so the bigwigs of the fantasy world hire four heroes to find out what's going on, who's doing it and, if possible, to put an end to the rampaging of the forces of evil. But Evil has its ways: the band of heroes has barely got into the sewers when a cave-in cuts off the connection to the outside world.

And then the tramping of endless corridors begins, in a spirit of deja vu. There are pit traps, levers, buttons, twisters, teleport fields, secret walls and everything else exceedingly familiar. Kindly enough, the maps of the top three levels come with the game, and those levels are mainly for getting used to the user interface, without any very complicated problems nor dangerous monsters.

Then things really start happening and the challenge curve climbs. So does the size of the mazes, which isn't purely positive: tramping through huge cave complexes gets boring at times, and Westwood could well have taken a lesson from Dungeonmaster's compact and eventful mazes. Help, of course, is already to be found in this very Pelikirja.

The photocopier has been running

Implementation-wise, Eye Of Beholder's user interface has been cloned straight from Dungeonmaster, i.e. all handling of objects is done with the mouse. The most significant invention is that the equipment screen doesn't cover the view, which makes it considerably easier to, for example, collect daggers, rocks and arrows after a fight. The fixed compass is, owing to the size of the caves, extremely useful. The improved quiver also works well in practice.

EOB is evenly lit, meaning it lacks the darkness caused by torches burning out. Another harmless shortcut is replacing DM's abundance of food with two different kinds of rations and kenku eggs.

On the ideas side, Eye Of Beholder suffers from nothing except the grafting-in of AD&D's idiocies. The mage, you see, can do nothing but dress up in a bedsheet and wave a staff, because armour prevents spellcasting, and mages haven't taken the business college's swordsmanship course. Well, fancy that: if it's an elven mage/fighter, the armour suddenly doesn't get in the way any more.

Magic is based on spells learned at the campfire and on praying. Luckily the process has been largely automated, i.e. the chosen spells are learned whenever the party rests. While resting you can also switch the clerics to automatic healing. There's a perfectly tolerable number of spells: 23 mage and 23 cleric spells, up to level 5 spells.

The combat ergonomics could have used some fine-tuning. There's a lag, you see, in the bigger clashes. So if, say, you shoot your bow just as the monster(s) attack, the arrow won't fly until the animation ends. The right mouse button is used for fighting, Captive-style. When casting spells in a hot spot, for instance, instead of a fireball you may get the message "SPELLBOOK TAKEN".

Beholder for the eyes and ears

On the PC the 256-colour VGA graphics beat Dungeonmaster coming and going, as far as outward looks go. The monsters are animated more or less identically to the original, but the graphic presentation of combat leaves something to be desired. When a monster takes a hit it flashes white, and when it dies it simply vanishes without any further effects. Hits on your own party are also rather tame: a bloodstain with numerical details appears over the character's portrait.

In EGA the game still looks quite good. Playability doesn't suffer and the objects stand out. CGA is presumably included out of pity, and I don't recommend it, since objects, little buttons and other fun stuff have a nasty tendency to get lost in the background.

On the PC's beeper the sounds are serviceable. That's lucky, because you definitely want to keep the sound on so you know whether a door is opening somewhere, or something like that. With the AdLib the effects multiply, including among other things the padding of monsters' feet. There are no screams of pain at all, and only a few monster grunts. Pity.

Jukka Tapanimäki got stuck into the Amiga version: The graphics make do with sixteen colours, and nobody has bothered to coax any extra power out of the Amiga's chips for the sound either. So in short, the Amiga EOTB is a competent but routinely knocked-together conversion of the superb PC version. What grates most is the program stuttering during combat, a feature that has sadly survived the conversion unchanged.

Eye Of Beholder lacks the fine-tuning taken to the extreme, the testing and the piquant details that make Dungeonmaster the model for all dungeon-vault games. The ending is a miserable disappointment and in fact an outrageous swindle: a bigger reward than a text screen was called for.

In any case, no Dungeonmaster fanatic can afford to leave EOB unbought, least of all the PC men, whose Dungeonmaster still hasn't turned up. Naturally the hope of Legend games coming out at a brisker pace is exciting too. Despite its little rough edges, Eye Of Beholder gets the Nirvi Official Seal Of Quality and a great many Power gloves.

With the sequel in mind, the problems could be trickier and the monsters could go and fetch their big brothers to help: only the Beholder and the Mind Flayers - well, maybe the kenkus in a big pack - earn the grade of opponent; the rest are pitiful dregs.