|
|
The following systems were attempts to expand and improve on the original Eamon system with rather minimal success.
Eamon II &
KnightQuest
Super Eamon
SwordThrust
A brief history - Eamon II
KnightQuest began as a vision of John Nelson to create a
"super-Eamon". The first step along the way was the creation of Eamon
II, written by John Nelson, John Heng, and Bob Davis. Eamon II shows
many of the features and commands of the later-to-come version 6 Eamon,
but lacks the commands PUT & FREE. It has 4 new
spells: CHARM, FEAR, BLINK, & SLEEP. It accommodates
5 personal weapons instead of the usual 4 of the Main Hall.
It has a total of 7 artifact types, including Shield, Healing, Light,
& Shovel. There are several new monster fields: Low
Room, High Room, #Attacks, Greed, Hate, and Wanderlust. It
allows the adventurer to find 'friends' and take them along on
adventures. There are 4 professions: Thief, Fighter, Cleric,
& Magician. Alignments run from Lawful Very Good to
Chaotic Evil. It has an Intelligence attribute. It
runs VERY slowly and is an incredible memory hog. This
situation got worse as it grew into 'KnightQuest', and the next thing
you know John got himself an IBM-PC with compiled Basic & 640K
of memory.
Four disk images are available for the Eamon II system and are
provided here for your amusement:
Eamon II Main Hall
KnightQuest
This is John Nelson's aborted "KnightQuest" gaming system. It
contains considerable enhancements over standard Eamon, and was an
attempt to approach true D&D-type gaming. However, the Apple II
did not have the resources for such an ambitious enhancement. Because
of an extreme shortage of free memory, KnightQuest ran VERY slowly and
was very difficult to work with. Then the IBM PC with its 640K of RAM
appeared, and John moved his efforts to that platform. Set your
emulator for at least 3.5 mhz to get KnightQuest up to a decent
performance level. Faster is probably better.
KnightQuest has gobs of new features, although I've never really tested them. There are 17 spells total: HEAL, CHARM, BLAST, FURY, SCARE, POWER, HARDHIT, LIGHT, TELEPORT, SLEEP, RESURRECT, INVISIBILITY, FORCEFIELD, DARKSEE, ATTALL, RAGE, & PURIFY.
Professions are slightly different then Eamon II with possibilities being fighter, thief, cleric, and mage. The character can be a either a Human, a Dwarf, or an Elf. The player can speak one of eight languages: Trollish, Orcish, Dwarfish, Elvish, Gerbish, Falconese, Latin, or Welch.
There are 26(?!) artifact types: Key, Weapon, Armour, Shield, Light, Medical, Tool, Read, Key, Fuel, Teleport, Sleep, Vitamin, Agility, Charm, Scary, Cont., Portal, Effect, Weapon, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Resurrect, and Trap.. Again, I don't really know what all of these artifacts do. Some artifacts appear to be pre-programmed into the system: Weapon, Armour, "General1", Readable, Key, Fuel, Container, Portal, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Trap.
Four Disk images are available:
The KnightQuest
Master is required to run the other games.
Amateur Alley
is KnightQuest's equivalent to the Beginners Cave.
Curse of the
Hellsblade was converted to "regular" Eamon #206. You can
read the review of that Eamon
here.
Quest for the
Firedragon was also written by John Nelson.
Two custom disks are also available.
Disk 1
gives options to resurrect an adventurer, modify an adventurer,
maintain stores file, change titles, change town marshal, reload store
inventory, maintain system parameters, create new formats file, change
character file length, change rooms file length, or print stock
listings, with a small help file describing what each function does.
Disk 2 is "L.U.R.C. Maintenance" although I have no idea what that means. It lets you change the attributes of the professions, languages, spells, artifact types, etc.
Description | Spell Ability | Weapon Ability |
V LOW | 0-50 | 0-10 |
LOW | 51-199 | 11-24 |
LOW-MED | 200 – 299 | 25 – 49 |
MEDIUM | 300 – 399 | 50 – 64 |
MED-HI | 400 – 499 | 65 – 84 |
HIGH | 500 – 599 | 85 – 99 |
V HIGH | 600 + | 100+ |
Aside from these items, I like Super Eamon. It has very responsive people standing behind it. And, to answer a question some of you undoubtedly have, it does have better graphics than the previously reviewed Eamon Graphics Master. It is rumored that version 2 of Super Eamon will include adjustment of the thriving pick-pockets, extra things to do in the bar and other items. It is not known when these revisions are planned. --Bob Davis
In 1985,
Two disks are available to download: The Super Eamon Main Hall and The Haunted House.
The italicized part of this review was written by David Rugge and was originally found at http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,31/gameId,9997/
SwordThrust is a commercialized and enhanced version of the Eamon RPG. Your hero begins in the land of Diurla at the Main Hall, where he (or she) must register, roll up stats, equip, and buy spells before going on one of many adventures.
Like in its predecessor, your main stats are Hardiness (the number of hits you can take before you die and your carrying capacity), Agility (affects your chance to hit monsters), and Charisma (affects prices at the Main Hall and the friendliness of monsters). SwordThrust also adds another ability called Left Hand, which affects your chance of hitting with weapons in your left hand. All the standard weapon categories (Axe, Bow, Club, Spear, Sword) are inherited from Eamon and work in similar ways. Your weapon score is a percentage chance for you to hit with that type of weapon, and it has a small chance of going up each time you hit.
SwordThrust adds many new spells to the standard Eamon spellbook of Blast, Power, Heal, and Speed. Some examples of the new spells are: Charm (makes monsters friendlier towards you), Fear (makes monsters run away), Thickskin (increases your armor), This greatly expands your options in the game as well as giving you something to spend your extra gold on since the most powerful spells can cost 30000 or more gold pieces.
Adventuring is very similar to Eamon. The dungeons are all text-based, similar to an adventure game. You move and fight through the dungeons with commands like NORTH, INVENTORY, ATTACK RAT, and so on. Some improvements over the Eamon interface are that the room description and character status are displayed in a window at the top of the screen so you don't have to constantly be LOOKing to figure out where you are. Another game play change is that your character can get fatigued. When your fatigue gets too high, you pass out which may end up killing you if monsters find you. Stopping and RESTing is necessary, but it is easy to get very fatigued in a difficult battle and pass out when you have to run away to rest.
Equipping items is also much different than in Eamon.
You can now equip weapons in your left hand if you don't use a shield,
potentially doubling your number of attacks. Armor is also now
equippable, so it is possible to find better armor during your
adventures instead of being stuck with what you bought at the Main
Hall. --David Rugge
---
The SwordThrust series by CE Software was a set of seven text adventures with role-playing elements, high on character interaction.
The first episode, The King's Testing Ground, contained the guide for interacting with the parser, as well as the game file interpreter required by subsequent adventures, which were data disks only. In a way they were early "expansion packs", in thin paperboard folders printed with minimal instructions. All episodes have the same cover art, only the number and title are different.
The whole collection of SwordThrust is available online.
This page last updated 04/03/2011 and 12/02/2012.