Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 33: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (MS-DOS) - Part 4

You're reading Super Adventures and I'm playing Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon. Not for much longer though.

This is part 4 of this epic 4-part saga, but if you'd rather read PART 1, PART 2 or PART 3, then click the text.

This is also part 33 of my attempt to play the first 10 years of Dungeons & Dragons video games, spanning 1982 to 1991. Hang on, this is the last game of 1991. That means I've done it, I've played everything on the list! It's over!

It's a bit of an awkward place to end things though, seeing as there's still another Eye of the Beholder game left to play, along with a bunch of Gold Box RPGs. On the plus side, Eye of the Beholder III apparently sucks, so maybe it'll work out for the best if I quit while I'm ahead.

SPOILER WARNING: whatever happens, you're going to know about it.

Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 32: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (MS-DOS) - Part 3

This week on Super Adventures, it's been pretty much nothing but Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon. Version 1.1, apparently.

You're reading part 3 of 4, but if you'd prefer to be reading PART 1 or PART 2, then those links will get you where you want to be.

Here's a bit of insight into how bad I am at estimating how much I'll end up writing about a game: I was originally going to cover Eye of the Beholder in one article. I mean the Eye of the Beholder series, all three games, on the same page. I had the layout in place and I figured that 10 screenshots each would be enough. Turns out that 100 would've been a better guess.

Anyway, there's barely any story in the game, but I'll put a SPOILER warning here anyway just to be safe. Maybe I'll end up spoiling a puzzle for you or something.

Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 31: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (MS-DOS) - Part 2

Hi, this is still Super Adventures, and I'm still playing Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon.

This is part two of four, and you can jump back to PART ONE by clicking the bold text.

The game is a part two as well, as it has a "II" in the title. I'm bringing this up because I don't think I've come across a numbered sequel yet while playing these Dungeons & Dragons games. They like to say things like "A Legend Series Fantasy Role-Playing Saga, Vol. II", but this was the first to put a number in the actual name. And then Eye of the Beholder III was the last, until the Baldur's Gate games seven years later.

Here's some more trivia for you: the Steam launcher suddenly stopped launching for me! I tried installing the game to a different PC and it ran on that just fine, so after trying a bunch of troubleshooting I just reinstalled Steam to skip to the part where it works again. That's proper old school difficulty.

There may be SPOILERS below, though that depends if you think it has enough of a story to be spoiled.

Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 30: Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Developer:

Westwood

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

DOS, Amiga, FM Towns, PC-98

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the second Eye of Beholder game that Westwood released during 1991. And I thought SSI were rushing out their Gold Box sequels a bit fast.

Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon was released in December 1991, just 10 months after the first game, and it came out on many of the same systems. But not all of them. Sega CD and SNES owners were left out, probably because they didn't get a port of the first game until 1994. 

At least the Amiga still got a port! The gap between the PC and Amiga 500's hardware specs kept getting bigger, but they continued bringing Dungeons & Dragons games over for one last year. Hang on, the more powerful Amiga 1200 was released in 1992, they could've released a few games for that!

Anyway, this is going to be the first of four parts. It was going to be two, but I thought splitting them in half would be less of a gruelling test of endurance for you, and it's less editing work for me. Plus I really want to publish four articles a month and I've almost ran out of time! I wouldn't count on me finishing the game though, as... no time, too much to do. Sorry.

I'll throw a SPOILER warning here even though it's not exactly a plot heavy game, just so you're aware of what you're getting into by reading past this point.

Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Origin

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

DOS, Windows, FM Towns

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing PC space sim Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, which is somehow only the second one of these games I've played. I covered the original Wing Commander back in 2014, but my site's been utterly Wing Commanderless since then.

The Wing Commander series was Chris Roberts' first space saga, coming before the Starlancer games and Star Citizen. In fact it came before the X-Wing series, FreeSpace, Star Fox... even Sonic the Hedgehog (though that last one's not actually a space sim as far as I'm aware). This particular Wing Commander game was old enough to almost get ported to the SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis... but it wasn't. In fact it's the only one of the mainline games to never get a console or handheld port. It did get a release on the FM Towns computer at least, which was well suited to the game considering that it's basically a 386 PC.

I have played the game before, a long time ago, but I don't remember playing very far, probably because it kicked my ass. And this would've been back when I was actually getting some space sim practice! It'd be fair to say I'm a little rusty right now, but I'll give it a fair shot and see if I can at least earn the right to fly the second type of spacefighter.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll only be playing the first few missions and I won't spoil anything that comes after them.

James Pond 3: Operation Starfish (SNES)

Developer:

Vectordean & Millennium Interactive

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Mega Drive, SNES, Amiga, CD32, Game Gear

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Today's the 25th anniversary of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System! Except it isn't, because the Super Nintendo came out in North America on August 23rd 1991 and the Super Famicom was released in Japan a year earlier on November 21st 1990. But in the UK we got the system in April 1992, so I'm playing a SNES game to celebrate.

This week on Super Adventures I'm taking a quick look at James Pond³: Operation Starfish! Because what better game is there to celebrate the Super Nintendo than a port of a Mega Drive game that's a sequel to a series strongly associated with the Amiga? There is sense behind my selection though: it's one of the few PAL exclusive titles for the SNES.

James Pond 3 is the third of the James Pond games, obviously. Except it isn't, because The Aquatic Games came out before it, which had the aquatic agent competing in various sports. It is the third game developed by creator Chris Sorrell though, and the last, as crappy iPhone game James Pond in the Deathly Shallows was allegedly crafted by a finite number of evil monkeys.

Alright I'm going to play it for a few hours without reading the manual, quit when it gets difficult, and then write a review at the end like my brief experience with the game makes me an expert. Same deal as usual.

Disposable Hero (Amiga)

Developer:

Euphoria

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Release Date:

1993

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Systems:

Amiga, CD32

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This week on Super Adventures I'm finally getting around to playing classic Amiga shoot 'em up Disposable Hero! Not Disposable Heroes, that's a Metallica track from the album Master of Puppets (and a cartoony indie game on Steam).

This has been on my list of games to play since before I even had an actual list of games to play, so it's strange that it's taken me so long to get around to it. Oh right I remember now, I was trying to stick to playing games I haven't seen before, and I used to play the demo of this all the damn time back in the day. Well, probably more like three times, but that's still a lot for me.

You could probably call the game a Euroshmup, as it's by a developer from the Netherlands called 'Boys without Brains' (who were going by the name of 'Euphoria' at this point... I think), but I wouldn't because that's a horrible word. I mean it's ugly to look at and it's ridiculous when you say it out loud. Plus Shmups sound like something you'd find living down at Fraggle Rock.

The developers were also responsible for the platformer Hawkeye, which is one of the games that inspired me to make this site in the first place, way back in 2011. Well its title screen did anyway. All I remember about it now is that it wasn't great, but I'm sure this will hold up a lot better. For one thing it didn't start out as a Commodore 64 game.
  

Batman: Return of the Joker (NES)

Developer:

Sunsoft

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Release Date:

1991

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Systems:

NES, Genesis

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Today on Super Adventures I'm taking a look at Batman: Return of the Joker, the sort-of sequel to Sunsoft's Batman: The Video Game, which was released for the NES two years earlier.

Batman: The Video Game was a tie-in with Tim Burton's 1989 'Batman' movie (thoughtfully given a subtitle so that people wouldn't get them confused and end up shoving the cartridge into their VCR), and this also shares the movie's shiny golden 'BATMAN' text so I'm presuming they're part of the same continuity. But ~SPOILERS~ The Joker didn't just get locked away in Arkham or go into hiding at the end of the movie, he got dropped off a giant gothic church tower to his very definite pavement-assisted demise. In fact in the end of the NES game Batman punches him off the church roof, which is kind of hardcore for a man that never kills, but the end result is much the same. So if The Joker really has returned here, then he's come back from the dead.

Incidentally this has nothing to do with the 'Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker' animated movie, as that came out about a decade later and has its own set of games. Though it's still about The Joker coming back from the dead.

The guy is like... weeds or something.

Wolfenstein 3D (MS-DOS)

Developer:

id

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Release Date:

1992

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Systems:

DOS, SNES, Mac, Jaguar, 3DO, GBA, Apple IIGS, PC-98, Archimedes, etc.

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Today on Super Adventures I have another requested game for you: Wolfenstein 3D, or (Wolfenstein 3-D according to the title screen). And it's got the Nazi Party's theme tune playing right now as its title song, that's just... great.

This of course is the earliest first person shooter ever made, except for all those other ones that came before it. Even if you don't want to count things like 1974's Maze War, 1980's Battlezone, or even 1987's MIDI Maze, you've got id Software's own Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3D released a year earlier. Granted they don't have assault rifles, but they're so similar in style and gameplay to Wolfenstein 3D that it's hard for me to look at them and say they're not the same genre.

Either way this is definitely the first of the Wolfenstein series; except it kinda isn’t as it was inspired by a 1981 stealthy action-adventure called Castle Wolfenstein and its sequel Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. When id Software realised the trademark had lapsed and was up for the taking, they took it and made their own series out of it. And I don't blame them, as it's a cool title.

Is it the first World War II themed first person shooter at least? I've no idea, but let's say yes. Medal of Honor, Call of Duty... they're all this game's fault. Anyway, I have played Wolfenstein 3D before, but not recently and not for long. In fact I've never even finished a single episode, so that's what I'm planning to do now.

Vice: Project Doom (NES)

Today on Super Adventures, I'll be playing this NES game for an hour or so. The Japanese call it Gun-Dec, but in America it's known as Vice: Project Doom. It doesn't seem like it ever reached Europe, but here I shall call it Vice Project: Doom, because that just flows better to me somehow.

This had better be about a vice cop who ends up being the one man who can stop a supervillain's scheme to doom America by dumping cocaine into the water supply or... starting a chain of casinos in... high schools or something. I dunno, I just want to see a proper b-grade 80s action movie plot here.

Undercover Cops (Arcade)

I see a lot of shiny logos due to playing and writing about all these games, but that's the shiniest, most metallic logo I've seen since... well, Unreal a couple of days ago. But still, it's pretty damn metal. It's like two 80s action movie title logos were fused together, and both of them were from RoboCop.

Today on Super Adventures I'm playing an hour or so of Undercover Cops, a 1992 arcade game developed by Irem. You should probably just ignore the title though, as it's likely going to feature about as much actual police work as a Streets of Rage game. It's really about people in jeans and shoulder pads punching other people in jeans and shoulder pads, while walking over to the right for several stages in a row in order to eventually save the city from a mad doctor. At least that's what Wikipedia says.

Wikipedia also says that many of the folks who worked on this later split off from Irem to form the Nazca Corporation and create the legendary Metal Slug franchise, so I won't be entirely shocked if this turns out to look kind of amazing for its time. In fact I've gone and got my hopes up now.

Unreal (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I've finally ran out of excuses to put off replaying Epic and Digital Extremes's 1998 megagame Unreal. Not that I don't want to play it again, I was just trying to save it until I could give it some proper attention. I actually love this game, or at least I loved it back when I first finished it (I admit it's been a while since then).

I usually try to avoid user mods, bug fixes, source ports etc. because I'm after the most authentic experience I can get short of plugging a CRT screen in and digging out my old rubber ball mouse, but I'm going to be running this with the unofficial OldUnreal 227 patch, found on this site. I had to make an exception this time to get rid of the evil mouse smoothing/acceleration/whatever, because I can't find any better way of disabling it. I can live with dated controls, tiny resolutions and game bugs, but that's where I draw the line, I ain't putting up with that shit.

(Click the images to view them in resolutions unheard of in 1998.)

Call of Duty 2 (PC)

Today on Super Adventures I'm playing a Call of Duty game, in an effort to make every other game on the site look more unusual and obscure by comparison.

I remember liking this one when it first came out, but it's been a long while now since I last saw it and the military shooter genre wasn't quite as played out back then. The single player campaigns in COD games get a bad rap these days and I'm curious to see whether my fond memories of this one will evaporate in the harsh cynical light of the modern day.

(Click the pics to expand them into exciting new resolutions, usually around 1280x720.)

Apidya (Amiga)

Today's game is 1992's Amiga exclusive Apidya, requested less than a month ago which is way better than I usually manage.

Man, look at that title screen, you can tell with a glance what country this game came from. A glimpse at the Kaiko logo anyway. Kaiko were actually a German company who tried to bring the Japanese console game experience to western computers, even down to including katakana on the logo and anime art on the box cover. Though the fact that アビヂャ actually says 'abidya' would be a bit of a giveaway to anyone who can read the language. They even threw a II on there for the hell of it, even though this is the first and only game in the series.

Speaking of the title, Apidya is based on the word 'Apidae' which is the family that the honey bee belongs to; just in case you were curious.

I've thought about showing off Apidya on the site before as it's got some interesting art, but then I'd remember that I'm terrible at the game and all I'd be able to show was the first half of stage one. But it's been requested now, so I figure that I should probably get it over with.

Abuse (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

At last, some more words by someone who isn't me! This time I've brought alien bug killing expert Jihaus in to talk about about killing alien bugs in frantic DOS shooter Abuse.

Let's do this.

The game doesn't really have a proper splash screen so I'm using the box art.

This awesome run and gun platformer made by Crack Dot Com came out in '96 and gave us an early vision of what you'd get if you combined a platformer with the mechanics of an FPS (such as multiple weapons and mouse aiming). The game sports a control scheme that at the time was crazy different, resulting in a fast paced and unique alien/mutant blasting experience that you didn't really see in platformers at the time (or at least I didn't, I was poor).

I played and finished this game long ago but it's been so long that I am pretty much playing this as a newbie again.

BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge (SNES)

Today as requested, I'm taking a quick look at BlaZeon: The Bio-Cyborg Challenge, a SNES arcade port with a shiny chrome logo and absolutely zero title screen music. Looks like it should be called Blaze-On, but isn't.

BRAHMA Force: The Assault on Beltlogger 9 (PSX) - Guest Post

What a title! It's got a bit of everything!

What could it possibly be about?

ActRaiser (SNES)

By request, today I'm going to find out what ActRaiser is.

It seems that the US, Japanese, and European versions of this are all slightly different, though I'm not really sure what was changed. I do know that the European version I'm playing has an extra 'Action mode' available, which I'm not going to pick. Plus they've given the game a difficulty select screen, though like usual I'm just going to leave it on the the medium setting.

Brain Lord (SNES)

This time I'm taking a look at Brain Lord, which was requested a while back.

Judging by the name I'd say there's no way this isn't going to be a horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up. Or maybe one of those top view run and gun alien killing games. But then again it's got Enix on the title screen, who are famous for two things: RPGs, and more RPGs, so I'm not sure anymore.

Duke Nukem Advance (GBA)

Today I'm taking a quick look at Duke Nukem.... Advance. I didn't even know there was a Duke Nukem game on the Game Boy Advance until recently, which isn't usually a good sign. Not that I could even name more than like 20 GBA games (and that's using this site's game list to cheat).

I imagine it's either going to be a platformer like the first two games, or an isometric shooter like Max Payne Advance. Anything but a straight port of Duke Nukem 3D works for me, because I've written enough on the game already. Though I'd be impressed if they managed to get that running on a GBA.