Dragon Fire

The Good
The instruction manual is very good & the best thing about the game, containing a background story & details about playing. The rooms all have descriptions in them that add to the atmosphere, though don't seem relevant to your play.

Choice of five characters, with differing characteristics in part. Buy items in the store in the beginning to help character in his quest, though have little bearing except to add points to your characters stats. 170 monster types which live in the dungeons.

The interface does its job with single key commands.

The Bad
Sound is quite average mainly consisting of beeps, whilst the graphics are at most adequate. Direction keys are not good choice, & would have been improved with cursor keys or the original ones from its predecessor.

Dungeon is quite basic, with just corridors & doors, which are usually jammed & pot luck if you lose energy or not. Energy or life points, are with constitution your main concern, & the most annoying part of the game is you constantly lose life points for standing around in the corridors every few seconds, which makes you having to pause all the time to decide what to do. Bad design as you couldn't do this originally, & must be there to stop you defeating game.

The Bottom Line
Dragon Fire is actually an updated version of the authors original game Super Dungeon, & surprisingly is inferior to the older RPG. Although fairly similar, there are key differences with the two. The earlier game had 20 levels rather than 10, but had more choice in that there were three types of door, open, locked, & secret, which were dependant on which character you were, rather than the one type here. The game also didn't have the ridiculous way you lost life points for not moving, & the balance of how you obtained more life points & constitution was better. You could also save to disk, whilst here you need another disk, though the original contained the whole instructions on it. The characters were similar, though The Huntress replaced the Hobbit, although very similar to the Warrior.

As a RPG it would have been dated by 1981, with the likes of Ultima showing the way, I wouldn't recommend it at all, & if you are interested in earlier RPG play the original version which although not great is playable, & would have been quite impressive for 1979.