Commodore User


The Standing Stones
By Electronic Arts
Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Commodore User #35

The Standing Stones

"Createth a new knight, or Getteth an old knight?" starts the menu for this dungeon-type game, after a spectacular ending to a musical, animated title sequence.

Playeth the Dungeon Master looked an attractive option, but it turned out to be merely a set of housekeeping tasks, to clean up a file of old knights, initialise a dungeon, and to generally purge the system. I entered my choice to go back to the main menu, and decided to createth my knight.

Virility, intellect, holiness, agility, and an attribute described as 'initial hits' were listed, and each had been assigned a value. I could selecteth the knight, or re-rolleth the die, until I came upon a combination that suiteth. High all round, seemed the obvious choice!

The Standing Stones

Having become a virile if somewhat sinful knight, with a great deal of agility, a promising combination, I thought, I entered the dungeon. With no experience, and no gold, I found myself carrying one magic spell, and one cleric spell.

My objective was to recover the treasure and retrieve the grail, slaying monsters as necessary, from the dungeon. This consisted of a typical maze, rather after the style of the Asylum maze with movement through it achieved in a similar way. The dungeon/maze is shown on the left of the screen, whilst status and attributes appeared on the right, and messages at the bottom. Action is in real-time, however, and events can overtake you if you dawdle between moves.

Moving forward by pressiing the I key, I twisted and turned along the dimly lit passages of the maze. Soon I was challenged to a fight by a snarling elf and gaining experience of 283 points, I ventured further to find a chest full of 12,042 gold pieces.

The Standing Stones

When a chest or a book appears, the player is given the option of opening it, opening it carefully, or leaving it. The choices seemed rather redundant, really. Of course a chest must be opened, and one would be foolish to do so without care. So imagine my annoyance when I was suddenly knocked out of the game with the message: "You have been killed by an exploding chest!"

This is mainly what this game seems to consist of: the constant and repeated assuranec of treasure, and monsters who look alike, but have an impressive range of evil-sounding names, as you control your passage through the corridors. With equal suddenness to death, gold will appear, only to disappear and be credited to my account so quickly that I had barely a chance to see what was happening.

Becoming a little bored, I left the computer alone for a while. A snarling elf appeared, and soon started to multiply. Eventually a startling total of sixteen had built up. Wearily I returned to the keyboard, convinced I was about to be slaughtered, and greeted them. "Nice to meet you Supremo. Here's a Pink Potion for you," they said, and vanished! For all the good my virility had done me, I suppose little harm can come from taking the Pink Potion. See you in the next dungeon, duckie!

Neither pure adventure, true maze, nor real D&D, this is a rather disappointing game, especially bearing in mind its price.

Keith Campbell

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