Westwood Studios‘ Eye of the Beholder is a bold attempt to replicate the thrills of Dungeon Master, with real time, first-person exploration and combat.
Tag Archives: Monsters
Gateway To Apshai, ColecoVision
Gateway To Apshai is sometimes described as a Roguelike RPG, but it doesn’t have randomly generated dungeons – they’re set, in number order, and there are a lot of them.
Factory Breakout, ZX Spectrum
Steve Crow‘s second game, Factory Breakout, was published by Poppy Soft in 1984.
Tower of Doom, Intellivision
Tower of Doom is a Roguelike RPG with mazes that must be explored and monsters that must be defeated in order to escape the dungeon.
There are seven different quests, of increasing difficulty, and the player can choose to play as any one of ten different classes (Novice, Warrior, Archer, Knight, Trader, Barbarian, Waif, Friar, Warlock, and Warlord). The ultimate aim is to reach the stairs on each level, and to keep going down until you reach the exit.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, Intellivision
An early, proto RPG based on the TSR AD&D universe, released for the Intellivision in 1983. It’s actually a sequel to the previous Intellivision AD&D game: Cloudy Mountain.
Treasure of Tarmin is one of my all-time favourite Intellivision games; it’s like an early prototype version of Dungeon Master, with crude graphics and minimal sound. That said: playing Treasure of Tarmin is a great experience if you learn how to play it properly. Reading the manual helps. As does configuring the controls correctly.
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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, Intellivision
This early, prototype RPG was initially released in 1982 under the title of “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” and was later re-named as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain to distinguish it from its sequel, Treasure of Tarmin.
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Quo Vadis, Commodore 64
Written by Steven T. Chapman and published by The Edge in 1984, Quo Vadis is a scrolling platform game with a large and varied cavern to explore.
Dungeon Hack, PC
SSI‘s Dungeon Hack is an RPG that generates random dungeons, or custom dungeons, and is one big real-time battle through a Forgotten Realms world, in the style of Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder. It’s a never-ending dungeon crawl that gets progressively harder, and even has its own high score table!
Lutter, Famicom Disk System
Lutter is an obscure-but-interesting combination of platform game and maze game, but with RPG elements – like levelling – also thrown into the mix.
You play the titular Lutter, a knight of the realm on a quest to rescue the princess from a maze-like castle of platforms, ladders, doors and monsters.
Ai Senshi Nicol, Famicom Disk System
Translating into English as “Love Warrior Nicol“, Ai Senshi Nicol is an obscure Konami shoot ’em up, released for the Famicom Disk System in 1987. It has, to date, never been released outside of Japan.
The King of Grabs 