Dungeon Master

The Good
My Dad wouldn't let me play on his Atari ST back in 1987, but to be honest I had my Commodore 64 so I didn't care... then he bought Dungeon Master!

In the evening, my sister and I would watch as he opened strange doors and battled with mysterious creatures. When it all got a bit much, for example his first encounter with a Screamer, we would take cover behind the chair. I have vivid memories of watching the whole story unfold (although not actually playing myself), from selecting characters in the Hall of Champions through to defeating Chaos himself. It was much more entertaining than being dumped in front of the TV every night, and quite frankly it scared the s*** out of me!

The silence in this game is deafening - long periods of nothing, then suddenly a roar or a scream which makes you jump out of your skin... Now THAT I do remember!

The Bad
Having nightmares about Screamers (I was only 9!)

The Bottom Line
You have to try and imagine what this was like back in 1987 - there was nothing to compare it to. The scariest thing I'd ever played was 'Atic Atac' on the Spectrum. It was a total gaming revolution that surpassed everything else in terms of sheer atmosphere and tension. Superb.

The Good
I was first exposed to Dungeon Master back in '87 when my best friend had it for is Atart ST. I can truly say that the best way to experience Dungeon Master is at night, with no lights on, the sound turned up a bit, and with NO background noise.

The gameplays much like Eye of the Beholder (1,2 and 3) and Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos. Dungeon Master was the first color 3-Dimensional Real Time dungeon game, and even today it is in a class of it own.

The Graphics are top-notch for it's day, and even now they are very good. The dungeon is very bright (at least the frist 3 levels are) and colorful...for a dungeon. The enemies are nicely animated also.

Gameplay is incredible. Traps and tricks and puzzles were all that this game was about. There is even one floor that has 8 puzzles that need to be solved (in non-linear order, which made it that much more cooler) in order to proceed to the next level. Timing puzzles, floor switch puzzles, teleporters, etc. etc. A lot goes on in this one.

The sound was incredible. The PC version used the Soundblaster for it's effects, and it used them well. The creaking of gates as they rose, the noises from the creatures, the crackle of a fireball. Oddly enough, there is no Background Music in this game. In retrospect I believe the reason that there is none are 2: 1) lack of memory to do so at the time; and 2) I didn't need it. Racing down a corridor and running headlong into a screaming mummy would scare the heebie-jeebies out of anyone.

The Bad
That depends on your perspective. If you don't like Dungeon Crawls then you'll have a hard time liking this game.

The Bottom Line
If you like Eye of the Beholder, Lands of Lore, or even Ultima Underworld, try the game that started it all... Dungeon Master

The Good
A well-balanced and engrossing CRPG. Dungeon walls with real texture, terrifying monsters appearing around a corner. Challenging environmental puzzles involving doors, switch plates, traps, and much more. Unique spell system that players learn by finding spell scrolls and experimenting.

The Bad
An amusing bug allowed resistance items (e.g. fire resistance) to stack to a point where spells did negative damage... Except that they used unsigned arithmetic, so a small negative number turned into a huge positive one. The better you're equipped, the faster you die. This is almost a positive - It's the most terrifying RPG I've played. Another bug could cause the game to freeze in the endgame if you used items in almost the correct way to win. However, these are rare exceptions in a mostly very solid program.

The Bottom Line
Any aspiring RPG designer needs to play and study Dungeon Master. Players who think that a CRPG can't approach the tabletop experience should play DM and be amazed. Dungeon Master is a truly great game, and I wouldn't mind playing it again today.

The Good
Back into 1990, i had a PC and an MSX and played only Action/Platform games on it. I didn't pay much attention to adventure games, and never even knew or considered playing an RPG game.

In fact, I liked action and didn't even think that games can be of other categories than action or reflexion/puzzle games. One day in 1990, my uncle who had a 286 at that time, gave me a copy of a game with the name 'Dungeon' handwritten on top of an old 3in1/2 diskette.

I put it on the disk-drive and run the game by typing Dm.bat. It took some time to load from the floppy disk, i don't remember playing the game directly from the hard-disk. After a few seconds there comes a sound like the passing of an F16 with the FTL logo showing in yellow on the screen. Then comes a door, a black door with a button nearby. The colour of the door, and the fact that it was located on a mountain, drew my imagination that something malefic and fearsome has to be lying behind it. I just wanted to open it and face the mystery behind it.

Once opened, a long corridor was lying in front me, i couldn't exploring the area. I found the keyboards controls easy, i used the keys for directions and the mouse for action. The first thing colorful i found was some kind of portraits on the walls, so i clicked on them, to find that there is a room for a party of 4. In all the games I played, I was always playing as one player, now in this one i found myself playing (managing)four!, i noticed that they get hungry with time, that was new to me, I had to find food for them (I recall that food was a stressing problem, I had some members die of hunger!). There were many things to take care of, this was entirely new to me, among the many quests was the stressing quest for food!. After forming my party I took stairs to go one level down, every time i saw a down stair it was with mixed with fear and anxiety that i did get down. Shit! a mummy!, the death sound it had terrified me. I took a dagger and throw on him three times like a mad man to kill him and save my beautiful party. I couldn't resist going down and deep the dungeon, the mix of exploration, fighting, magic, monsters, treasures, puzzles, party experience increase, management of players (food, sleeping, light) and the dark atmosphere hooked me unto the game like no other before. There were wall inscriptions that i still remember even now more that 15 years after playing the game.

I played it day and night, non stop for about 4 months, only to be stuck in front of the end game Monster (I didn't knew at that time that it was the end game monster). I didn't knew how to defeat it. I desperately tried to find some solution, but at that time, there was no Internet, and in my country there was no magazine with a hint or solution on how to finish game. Stuck in despair, I abandoned the game, lost my "dungeon" disk, and played other games, in hope that one day I could find the solution to my 'Dungeon' game. I remember that every time I got into a library, I tried to find computer/games books, in hope to find one talking about this 'Dungeon' game, in vain.

One day in 1992, I came across a small book with the title "Best 100 games", looking if there was my 'Dungeon' game in it, i was surprised to find it, it was the first time i read about 'Dungeon'. I was very happy to know that the author considered it to be a great game!, that was also my opinion, I was happy to know that I played a great game!. Reading the page about 'Dungeon', I found that probably the monster I found was the last one, and that to defeat it I had to use the Firestaff and a magic cage.

I drop the book to its place and run to see my uncle, hoping that hes still had the 'dungeon' disk. Finding me exited about getting the game, he asked me proudly if i liked his disk, very much i responded. He searched for it in midst of thousand of disks, and Thanks heaven he found it!. I took it again to my PC and began from scratch, with a new party, ready to rock through the game.

Then after 4 months of playing non stop, I found myself in front of the evil final boss with the Firestaff in hand. This time I knew how to use it, setting a cage around the Lord of Chaos (his bad name) i caught him in it badly. Being stuck in the magic cage I used the Firestaff spell to get the hell out of him. At last, I finished 'Dungeon'!, It was a great moment for me, I showed the ending to two of my brothers that were following my adventure through the game.

I regret one thing, i didn't show the ending to one of my brothers, because of something i don't remember, we were young and played the silly game: show me your game endings, i'll show mine or similar kind of things.

One day, after finishing the game my uncle told me if 'Dungeon' was a good game, even tough he'll never play it, he liked to hear that his games are good, I replied "sure! but the game name is not 'Dungeon' but 'DUNGEON MASTER'!".

Even now, i think that Dungeon Master comes to my mind every day or so!, and as one of my brothers calls it this game 'DDDDDUNGEON MASTER' is a GREAT game.

The Bad
Nothing at the time. Now, it is a little bit outdated. It's sad to recognize that a game can be outdated, unlike books. I think that 'Dungeon Master' needs only graphics/animations enhancements to be up to the modern games standards.

The Bottom Line
Try to play, even if the graphics may rebuke you, at least go past the second stair. If you can't stand the graphics then play 'Lands of lore' or 'Gothic II', those may compensate not playing 'Dungeon Master'.

The Good
This game was, at the time of it´s release, absolutely incredible. Awesome. Unbelievable. You haven´t seen something like that before! I saw the game at a friend, and i knew: I wanted to play this game at home, too. So I upgraded my Amiga with another 512KB memory (which was quite expensive at that time, at least for a 16 year old) - just to be able to play it. DM was one of the first Amiga games that required 1MB to run. When inserting the memory expansion, I ruined the 68000 CPU, so I had to open my Amiga the first time. Finally I replaced the CPU and was able to play DM. I played through it in about a month - and didn´t regret a second. I just LOVED the game. BTW, the PC version of it was done by Psygnosis and released as late as 1992. Still a good game, but at this time not the sensation it was back in 1989. Or, to be more exact, in 1988, when the first version was released for the Atari ST. For ST and Amiga followed with "Chaos Strikes Back", which was very hard - and therefore never solved by me. Dungeon Master 2: Legend of Skullkeep was released many years later in 1995 - but it was just an average rpg, only worth of notice cause there weren´t that many new rps in this year.

The Bad
Hm. The Amiga version had a very tough copy protection and didn´t support harddisks. This was not important in 1989, but it bothers me now. The PC version works fine from hd.

The Bottom Line
The game was the first 3D real-time role playing game, later followed by Eye of the Beholder or games like Captive, Knightmare, Xenomorph, Abandoned Places or Black Crypt. DM is, IMHO, better than all the games mentioned above! It was not only the game that created the genre, it was, and still is, one of the best games ever.

The Good
- One of the first truly free form experience gaining systems; You practiced attack spells to gain wizard experience, wielded weapons for fighter experience, and throwing stuff (anything) for ninja experience. I remember having fun throwing all my extra items in front of me, as I progressed down the dungeon halls, gaining ninja experience.

• Free form spell casting. You had to choose spell components (syllables) to build your spells. Now, you didn't have to blindly figure spells out (although for one you sort of have to), as you find scrolls that do provide instructions for casting new spells. However, you could have figured them out yourself and cast it before you found the spell scroll.

• Creepy atmosphere; I hated(liked I suppose) the fact that you'd be carefully inching your way around the dungeon, and then spot in the distance some very very bad monsters. Oh @#$@! If you weren't prepared for them, you had to escape back to the stairs up to the upper floor. Also, the silence (which I suppose isn't really a feature but it works) while traversing the dungeon halls was fairly off-putting.

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  The Bad
  - strict saving: If I remember right, you didn't have multiple saves as you do now. Like Sundog (another great FTL game), once you entered the game, you basically eased your save point. You could only save your progress by exiting the game. If you died, that was it; you would reappear at the entrance.
  
  The Bottom Line
  First off, I believe that this was the first great RPG I had played. I recall playing some early version of Ultima on the Apple II, but I didn't really get into it. (Eamon games were fun, but mainly for the hacking/programming/design side.) Anyways, Dungeon Master is a 1st person perspective game, where you are a guiding spirit, controlling up to 4 champions that you would choose for your quest down into the dungeon. You have to progress down the levels, solving puzzles and defeating monsters until you reach the end and defeat the dark lord.
  This game was one of the first 1st person RPGs, and so the immersivity of the game was good for its time. It was also a real time game; your stamina would drop if you threw too much; your food and water meters would drop over time as well. You couldn't take a look at your inventory unless you were sure you were safe, otherwise, you'd hear the groans of your party members suddenly being attacked.
  All in all it was a great game for it's time. I would tell you to run out and get it, but it isn't 1987 anymore.

The Good
This game took time and patience to complete and could be incredibly frustrating but you always knew you were going to play it to the end. When I played this when I was younger some of the enemies were genuinely frightening. There are many emulated versions of this game now (some in java/flash) - try it out!

The Bad
Sometimes finding endless keys to open doors became a little repetitive. The final level was incredibly tough, people who have played it will understand.

The Bottom Line
A terrific early RPG type game that still plays well today, just make sure you have a few spare days to play it.