Crystal Caves

Engine

Crystal Caves uses the same game engine as another one of Apogee's games, Secret Agent.

Patch

October 24th, 2005, Apogee released patched v1.0a shareware versions (and patches for registered versions) of old play-alike games Crystal Caves and Secret Agent after discovering that quitting these games under some installs of Windows XP (an operating environment that wasn't a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye at the time of these games' release) in some cases set the system clock back a century!

Credit for the fix goes to Peter "DOSBox" Veenstra and Crystal Caves' original programmer Frank Maddin; as the press release likes to point out, patching these titles up to 14 years after their initial release "has to be some kind of record."

The patched shareware version of Crystal Cave can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/share/1cc10a.zip ; the patch for registered versions can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/patches/cc10apt.zip

References

• The title of Part One of Crystal Caves, 'The Troubles with Twibbles is very much alike to an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, which had an episode titled The Troubles with Tribbles. Scott Miller - the game designer - is said to be a fan of Star Trek.
• There are numerous references to another Apogee platformer - Commander Keen, hidden in the game. Keen is listed on the default high score list, his famous helmet can be found many times throughout the game, and there is a mention about Yorp herding.

Shareware

Like most Apogee platformers Crystal Caves is actually a trilogy. The first part of the trilogy is shareware, the other two parts are not. The names of the three episodes are: 1. Vol 1:Troubles with Twibbles 2. Vol 2: Slugging it out 3. Vol 3: Milo versus the Supernova

Information also contributed by DreamWeaver, Roedie, Pseudo_Intellecual and SpikeNexus

Version Differences

In the original DOS version, the game's border will change color from red to green when all crystals have been collected and the level can be exited. This feature is not emulated in the DOSBox emulator (which the official releases for Windows, Mac and Linux use), thus the player has to rely on only a sound cue to mark this.