Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

17*, if you want to get technical. Note that the screen in question predates 1998, guessing it was actually written and coded in 1997 some time. Blades of Exile came out in lateish 1997 and there was another Yendorian game though IIRC it was sort of an expansion, and directly followed up III. Book of Yendorian something something. Might be remembering wrong there. Sadly, Cleve lacked the street cred to include a Nahlakh reference on the "shareware rules" screen.

The Yendorian Tales games were M&M (3-5) like games. Not bad, though an extra helping of quirky.






*Blades of Exile, Nethergate, Avernum 1-6, Blades of Avenrum, Geneforge 1-5, Nethergate re-release in super updated AvernumGeneforge engine, Avadon, Avernum: Escape from the pit. The Avernums are rehashes of Exile but pretty different (the first 3 anyway; the second 3 are brand new). Avernum: Escape from the pit was really different from Avernum I, in fact. And quite good. I did a lets play. And obviously the Nethergate re-release is another rehash, but in what was practically 2 engines later.

I understood it, I think.

You know back when you were first learning to program, and you needed to clear the shit off the screen to draw a new screen, and so you just blanked the screen with a giant [background colour] box or something and then redrew the scene over it; causing eye searing flickering? I think that's what he was doing.

Next icon, Haunted Suit of Armour With Tiny Arms:



Yeah this is inventory. Or at least the wearable part of that. Paper doll go!



...Doesn't look much like a lizard.

You can click to pick up items from the slots or the paper doll, and then click to put them down again (dragging does not seem to be supported). I have no idea what "Adorn" means specifically (adornment? of what?), why there's a need for an inventory slot for "Quill" (is that so we can put footnotes on the maps? Or is that going to be a quiver, for arrows? Or... what?), and I have no idea why "Prime" and "Alter" ended up being the terms for the main and off-hands. Also puzzling is "TAC, IAC, NAC, BAC, CAC and MAC", which sounds like an unusually comprehensive hair removal procedure you'd get at a salon involving wax in painful places. Different types of armour class, I am presuming? Still doesn't explain the initial letters, though.



Look, we're in leather pants! Told you this guy was a pervert.

There's a few more clicky icons to the left, between the portrait and the omni-tool circle. We've got what appears to be unbalanced scales, "OK", and the letter L. What do these do?



The Libra scales prove to be resistances. This isn't a proper window, it just pops up this small box when you hold down left click. From it we learn: there's a bewildering number of resistance types, including both Mental and Mesmer (one alone would be insufficient!), "System" (is that the save to roll against the game crashing? If so I'd better buff that fast), what I'm assuming is "Caustic" (acids, I suppose?) and the mysteries of "Luma" and "Galvan" (I presume the last one is to do with electricity?). The bars I presume measure how much the resistance is? There's also some tiny little pixels to the right of the bars. I have a blue plus in Toxin. Is that good? Who knows?

Clicking and holding on OK produces a similar little box:



(I love that gradient fill on the header text, btw. It's the early nineties vision of shiny gold!)

So yeah, lots of nasty things that might happen to you? Both unconsciousness AND sleep, I notice. Do the bars represent the degree of it you have (so you can be 30% nauseated?) or does the whole thing light up, or what? Also, a metric for how irritated we are. I'm sure that will come in handy, even if it's currently implausibly at zero despite us being in the middle of nowhere with no money or memory of how we got here and we can't find our damn journal even though we just wrote in it.

Clicking the L, logically enough, leads to the Item Workshop!



So.. we're carrying a workbench around?

I decide against sharpening the edge of the owl figurine for the moment and exit this menu.

One last thing to try on Beowulf: what happens if we click the picture?



AW YISS. Now we're getting somewhere. This is proper RPG territory right here. Skill lists, stats, encumbrance limits which I'm sure will be a useful and fun mechanic and not a total pain in the ass...

BEOWULF (excitingly, clicking the question mark next to the name allows me to rename him, but we'll get to that) is a Saurian Berserker. He's 18, if I'm reading that right (so, legal! Shippers start your engines) and has specially Stinking Bile. His Patron (I'm guessing a deity or some such) is... Skulls. A dude named Skulls, or just some skulls?

Stats provide new mysteries. I presume INTelliugence, WISdom, WILlpower, STRength, CONstiution, SPEed, AGIlity. But FEL? DEV? MET? DES? I'm going to go with FELoniousness, DEVotion, METiculousness and DESirability until the game forces me to understand otherwise.

Resistances, Conditions and the armour paper doll we are all experts on at this point, but the skills list is new. Clicking the icons above it lets us filter them: All (the elastic band in a figure 8), Martial (the spiky ball on a chain), Physical (NEANDERTHAL FLEX!) and Mental (anachronistic mortarboard). Looking at Martial first:



BEOWULF is trained with Axe & Scimitar. Lash&Chain sounds kinky! I like it. I have no idea what the distinction between Bladesmanship and Swordsmanship is, or why Scimitars apparently aren't either.

Physical:


It takes skill to Berserk properly, you know. You can't just go into it without training. Since this is the Physical column rather than Mental, I guess skill in Inspection really is just looking really hard?

Mental University:


Well shit. We can both Incant AND Invoke? I must have died and gone to RPG heaven right there. Alchemistry, too, for when Alchemy doesn't sound impressive enough. I have no idea what on earth Mephistics could be. So much to learn!

Not for BEOWULF, I mean. For the other guys. Probably the eyeball.

I actually think that--or at least the concept--is kinda cool. Instead of assembling the X artifacts of Y before the big bad can use them, why not go wind a cosmic clock before the mainspring of the universe runs out of juice? And you'd have a good reason for needing to repeat it every X thousand years or so, for once!

All those incomprehensible three letter acronyms are giving me flashbacks to Cattle Bruiser 3000

What is Brunhilda wearing

I'm confused about how something like Climbing works in this game. First, because there are 8 people in the party, so when does it determine that all 8 of you can go up a level?

Second, because there is only one level of the playing field...?

Not only are they excellent games, they're now available on iOS, and great fun on an iPad. Probably some of the densest gaming experiences you can get on a mobile.

So this shit is what the old school fanatics have been wistfully pining for over the last decade?

I think I'll stay over here in consolitis babyville. We have tooltips.

Hatable toolbaby!

≈ ?

I think it and the entire game is retarded but whatever helps you justify throwing your money away, I guess

FEL should be FEELS

What, did you think I was going to buy this game? Aheheheheheh. Er. No.

I just think "run off and wind the giant cosmic clock before it runs down and the universe ends" is a fun concept for epic fantasy. Alas, it always comes down to execution; I know some great games with underwhelming log lines, and vice versa.

Hey, you just described the plot of Jay Lake's Mainspring. Which would be an awesome setting for an RPG, come to think of it.

Meserach how did you make it that far without just giving up and putting your head in the oven or something? I now know how there's 600 hours of gameplay, it takes you 45 minutes just to equip a sword.

Yeah, sure but did you see who made this game and how it turned ou-

...whew, OK. We are the same page after all!

strings BUNDLE-D.RSF | grep //

In 17 years has he written a manual for this game? WTF Mephistics?

This is sounding like the World of Synnibar of PC RPGs.

This thread is what happens when people bring C game snark to bear on a target with a fractional degree of difficulty. And not one of those powerful fractions, like 7/8.

It used to be my primary forum for a while too, sans the moderation. It wasn't so shitty in the early days.

what

You know, most game developers, when trying to determine how many interface buttons are required to allow players to click through a couple of pages of text, would settle on "zero." Cleve has instead gone with five: Top, Back, Next, Prev, and Exit. He plans to add Wait, Stop, Quit, and Purée, but only if he breaks $20K in his next crowdfunder.

no. when Saint Prov and VD and Exitium were running the show it ran OK. Huge bunch of opinionated assholes, yes, but it was mostly a bunch of dudes talking about old games and how much we loved them. There wasn't *that* much outright animosity until Oblivion came out, and the place became the forum where people banned from the elder scrolls boards came to whine. And it for damn sure wasn't the place it is now, where the accepted mode of discourse is "shitcockniggerfaggothurhurtranniesamirite?"

Yeah, that matches my recollection pretty much too.

Neanderthal mice can click on five buttons at one time. It's a Lemarchand's box of interface design that you can't understand because your frontal lobe has been poisoned by pink light.

You had already called it. Credit where it's due!

The demo not being the actual demo but a demo of the real demo which will be awesome and without a single fatal bug is just groundwork for a full release not really being the full release.

I like how he claims to overhead press 594 pounds for 11 reps. As an example of how ridiculous this is, here's one of the heaviest strict overhead presses ever at 228 kg from Lima Peru in 1971.


If he managed a single rep, that would be an all time world record. Even if he doesn't know the difference between kg and pounds, that's still a ridiculous claim.

With some trepidation, I boot the game up again and load my save. This actually works! In all fairness, everything's been stable thus far. Of course, I've yet to do anything meaningful, but still.



I can't resist renaming BEOWULF to LIZARD KING (all caps seem to be the only option, and underscores verboten). Let's check out the rest of the party:



BRUNHILDA TITS MCGEE is also a Berserker, only female and a giant.

Incidentally, that "Suggest" button randomly cycles you through some alternate suggested names. Here are all of them:



Then back to BRUNHILDA. Four names! You can totally feel the fifteen years of work that's gone into this.

Anyway, TITS MCGEE:


Notice something alarming? WHERE ARE HER PANTS?



Literally, no pants. Some of the rest of the party are also pants-free, although I can't seem to work out the particular responsible variable - shouldn;t both Bezerkers start with the same starting gear? Never mind, the masculine hairless human paper doll seems to have nothing to conceal in any case.



On her "upper", TITS MCGEE claims to be wearing leather armor, her picture aside.



Interface redundancy fans: the menu features both "Resume Game" AND "Cancel". They do exactly the same thing as far as I can tell.

Needs a "save and cancel" button, too.

Also, a "resume w/o save" button.

Also Abort, Proceed, Proceed w/o Aborting, Sleep, Hide, Sleep-Hide, Flambe, and Help.

Well, maybe not the last one.

Psh, only savebabies need help.

I walked around in-game briefly last night, got into a fight with three bandit guys, and ALT-F4'ed after several minutes of mind-numbingly tedious combat.

Pro tip: if you click one of the action buttons and get stuck with a "which item?" pointer that you can't make go away no matter what you click thus rendering the entire interface unresponsive, hit Esc.

The second lizard person is actually a dragon person, or at least a "Drake". Paperdoll remains stubbornly human, though, so I'll assume this is a humanoid type thing just with a dragony head and scales. ATALANTA, GEORGIA is a female Warrior and has the Patron "Valor". Patrons appear to be concepts rather than named figures of worship? Although that still doesn't make the patronage of "Skulls" any clearer. The Berserkers just really love skulls?

Everyone's Vitality appears to be declining. I don't know why.


FLINT is manly bearded manly man, a Ranger, and patronises Nature. Actually, this much concentrated man can only have one name:



Much better.



HARMONIA has the patron Harmony, and is some sort of probably-nigh-useless Bard.

If you're observant you'll notice that the actual lists of skills available is different for each character. HARMONIA for example has Lockpicking and Robbery as possibilities, and CLEVE has Backstabbing and Accuracy skills that were denied to the Berserkers up front. This means that the skill list can get yet more obscure.

Humans and Feyfolk get no Special, it would seem.



Blinky here is called NICODEMUS. The eyeball race is the Aeorbs, apparently. Patronises "Light", Special in "MindFlay" (looking forward to that) and excellently, a skill in "Litany" to add to "Invocation" and "Incantation". And no pants.



Also pantsless is RA-RA-RASPUTIN, LOVER OF THE RUSSIAN QUEEN. A Drow (although it doesn't really look it, assuming that means "Dark Elf" as it does in every fantasy milieu ever), a Wizard (although seemingly, possessing no spells whatsoever) and... that's it. The Patron is just "Magic" which seems to capture the precise moment we ran out of any imagination whatsoever.



Finally, AESOP (OF THE FABLES) is a "Barrower" "Sage" and a Patron of TRUTH. What does being a Sage let you do?



Skills in Ancient History! I really really hope there's a separate skill for Recent History too. Not to mention this "Mythology" skill that nearly everyone has: is that going to be the study of stuff that isn't real in this fantasy universe, or the study of stuff that is real in this fantasy universe but would be considered myth in our own? My brain hurts.

All I can remember is that owls are important somehow, so I had better secure that Owl Figurine.



Now, where's the inventory? I try clicking the owl on the portraits, which just brings up these same character screens. I try selecting what I think is the inventory button to get me the paper dolls with the boxes for "Adorn" and so on, but all I am told with clicking is:



In the end I just leave it where it was. Screw you, probably-not-at-all-plot-critical-owl. Stay on the floor.

We should start a pool about the skills. Figure how many there actually are...and how many actually do anything...

Nothing more old school than a game with a lot of skills that do absolutely nothing. Like the CRPG version of Twilight 2000 (hi Pilot skill!)