Tag: Rogue Like

Publisher: Epyx

Designer: Jeff McCord

Type: RPG – Rogue Like

Platform: C64

Rating:

This is what is termed as a ‘rogue-like’ game, namely it is a rather simply constructed roleplaying game that involves you exploring a dungeon, killing monsters, and collecting treasure. This is one of those games that I played quite often back in the day, namely because it was quite simple, which compared to a lot of other rogue-like games, is certainly saying something. You basically start off on the first level of the dungeon, and make your way down as far as you can go before you happen to be killed off by one of the many monsters (or traps) that happen to populate the labyrinth.

It was fun, and as I mentioned, rather simple. The fact that you could play the game with a joystick (or controller) made it quite playable, and if you were lucky, you could certainly go quite far. Mind you, you only had a limited amount of space for gold, but you could also deposit gold into one of the temples, which happened to be on each of the levels, and it would be converted into experience. There were also magical items, such as potions and spells, that you could use, though there weren’t too many which meant that the keyboard interaction was limited.

The thing I don’t like about the game is that when you advance a level your hit points basically stay the same, and healing does take quite a while, unless of course you manage to find either a regeneration spell, or a healing potion. The other thing is that the game ends up being pretty repetitive, which meant that after a while I would end up losing interest in it.

One thing that I do remember though is that the game was written in BASIC, and my brother managed to not only discover that, but also hack into it so that the number of special squares that appeared per level increased by something like four. Mind you, these days, if I were to be able to break into the code, it might be possible to rewrite the code to make it even more beneficial, though once again, that sort of defeats the whole purpose.

If you are interesting in finding out more about this game, there is always Wikipedia, though you can also go to the C64-Wiki, or even Lemon 64. If worse comes to worse, well, you could simply type ‘Sword of Fargoal’ into your favourite search engine.