Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back
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Chaos Strikes Back from FTL by Bob Retelle (MACE)
Well, Dungeon Master fans, it's finally here ... the long awaited sequel to the most popular computer game for the Atari ST. Lord Chaos is back, and THIS time he's ANGRY!
Actually, the way the scenario for this "Expansion Set #1" goes, Lord Chaos foresaw his defeat at the hands of your group of Champions and prepared his revenge even as you were descending through the Dungeon to fuse him back together with his Good side. He created a secret dungeon below the one you were exploring and concealed four deposits of Corbum ore in well hidden locations. This ore is draining the mana from the world and weakening the bonds which hold him captive. When enough magic has been drained away, he will be free once more to wreak havoc upon the land. Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten that this much power, concentrated in such a small area, will also destroy the universe!
It's been a year since your party of four Champions defeated Lord Chaos, and your wounds have long since healed. But now, you've been summoned back to Mount Anaias to help the Grey Lord find and destroy the four Corbum ore deposits before they can release Chaos once again, and before the world is destroyed in the process. You'll need all the skills you learned in Dungeon Master to survive this challenge.
Released almost exactly two years after the original Dungeon Master, this game takes the same familiar dungeon world and expands it greatly. The game has the same excellent balance of easy playability and challenging situations. The screen looks the same, and all the intricate details which added so much to Dungeon Master are still here. Essentially this IS the same game, continued on to higher levels of difficulty.
The Chaos Strikes Back box indicates that it "Requires Dungeon Master," but this is not strictly true. The game is a complete standalone game and could (maybe, just possibly) be played without having first played Dungeon Master. But, it's highly doubtful anyone could survive long without the experience gained in the relatively "easy" Dungeon Master dungeon (yes, this game is THAT much more difficult ... it makes Dungeon Master look like a romp through a playground!).
You CAN use your Dungeon Master party if you have a Saved Game disk from DM or you can start a new party from the 24 new Champions provided on the new game disk. Unfortunately, while your Champions retain all their statistics, such as Health Points and Mana, they're stripped of everything else. They'll enter the secret dungeon of Chaos Strikes Back without armor or weapons, without food or water, and without any of the nifty gadgets they'd picked up along the way in DM. They start the game wearing literally nothing but their smiles and with nothing but their (your) experience to see them through. Eventually they'll find weapons and armor, and many magical items, but surviving long enough to find them will be your first challenge.
The game comes with a second disk, the Chaos Strikes Back Utility Disk. This disk has several nice enhancements to the Dungeon Master world and is used in the somewhat complicated process of starting a new game. When you boot up the game disk, you're presented with a familiar looking screen, allowing you to choose either to enter the "Prison" (this version's "Hall of Champions"), or to Resume a Saved game. If you want to start a new party using the new Champions, you'd enter the Prison and browse among the portraits of the Champions frozen in the magical mirrors. The first thing you'll notice is that the Champions are very different from the ones in Dungeon Master. For one thing, they're all much more advanced than the Champions at the beginning of DM were, as is necessary for this more difficult game. Another difference is that there are far fewer "human" Champions, and a great many more, er, unusual types. There are Pixies, Insects, Ghoulish-looking characters and even Incan warriors. After exploring for awhile, you'll notice there are only 22 Champions ... hmmm ... thought there were supposed to be 24. Yes folks, in this game, there are hidden areas in the "Prison," and just to get the game started with a "bang," there are monsters in there too!
Once you've made your selections from the new Champions, you need to Save the group to a disk (there is no exit to the Dungeon from the "Prison"). Then you have to boot up the Utility disk and select the "Champion Editor" to "Make a New Adventure." If you decided to keep your old Dungeon Master party, you can skip exploring the Prison, and just use your old Saved game disk at this point.
Did I say "Champion Editor" ... ?? Yes, one of the new enhancements added in this game is the ability to change the pictures of the Champions by using a little drawing utility on the disk, and saving the portraits back to the Saved game. You can draw a mustache on Halk, give Wuuf an afro, or, umm ... see what REALLY happens when you throw Sonya's golden bra across a pit to trigger the hidden switch on the other side!
Speaking of which, there are also 24 NEW portraits of the old Champions on the Utility disk, "enhanced" to reflect their experience in Dungeon Master. The Warriors look meaner, the women look more voluptuous (must be all the exercise swinging those heavy swords) and the non-human characters look, well, even more non-human! The portraits can be saved back to disk as individual files, which means you can trade them with your friends or upload them to BBSes to share with other CSB players.
There are already quite a few Champion portraits to choose from, including an entire set of familiar Bloom County faces (imagine battling Deth Knights with Opus the Warrior, Steve Dallas, Oliver and, of course, Bill the Cat!). Other Champion portraits I've seen include Calvin and Hobbes and a complete set from "Lord of the Rings." In fact, E&L Productions has recently introduced a disk with more than 50 new Champion portraits to be used with CSB. The disk includes Peanuts characters, the entire set of four Pac-Man ghosts, Madonna (truly awe-inspiring), Norman Bates and the scary bunch of "World Leaders" shown in the photo. This is a really fun addition to the game and allows everyone to have their own customized version!
Also on the Utility disk is the Chaos Strikes Back "Hint Oracle." If you get stuck at a particular puzzle, or stopped by a certain door, the Hint Oracle may be able to give you the help you need to get past that point. While I might be a little prejudiced in favor of a nice warm hintbook, the Hint Oracle can come in handy if you don't have a hintbook yet.
The procedure is a little awkward, much like the "Hintdisk" approach for Dungeon Master. When you need help, you have to first Save the game onto your save disk, then reboot your ST with the CSB Utility disk. The Hint Oracle on the Utility disk will ask you for your Saved game disk and will read in your current position in CSB from the Saved game. Then it will display a menu of hints available for that spot in the game. These hints will range from general information about the monsters in the vicinity to specific information about whatever puzzle or door is in that location.
The Oracle can ONLY give information about the ONE specific location where you Saved the game, and many times the hints it gives may not address the specific problem facing you. But, it's very handy until you get a good hintbook (grin). After you've read the Oracle's hints, you have to completely reboot the CSB game disk and Load in the Saved game disk again to resume playing. It's awkward, but usable.
Now back to the game itself ... be forewarned, Chaos Strikes Back starts out tough and gets even tougher! Do you remember the Purple Worms from Dungeon Master? (I'm sure you do.) Well, imagine starting out completely naked, no armor, no weapons, in total darkness and surrounded by worms. This time they're a yellow or golden color, but they're just as mean.
This first room serves to set the tone for the game, as you soon find out that the worms are among the easier monsters to kill! It also serves to introduce your party to quick death (almost embarrassingly quick death, as when I demonstrated CSB to a local user group, sight unseen ... the score was Worms:4, Me:0 and the game was over very quickly). Several people on CompuServe had complained the game was just TOO hard, but once they got into it and got their confidence back, they decided they liked it after all.
One of the things FTL has done to increase the difficulty of the game is to make the groups of monsters larger. Remember the Knights of Dungeon Master? In CSB, the Knights are wearing new designer armor, apparently modeled after Lord Chaos' attire, which gives them a much "meaner" appearance. They're a great deal harder to kill than those wimpy Knights in DM, and while they do occur one at a time, they also tend to pop up in groups of four. Until you hit upon a strategy for killing them that works for you, a good tactic is to "Run away! Run away!" (Actually, poison gas clouds and direct frontal attack seems to work pretty well. Fireballs don't seem to be all that effective against Knights.)
There are places where you'll run into entire rooms filled with groups of monsters, and your only hope is to try to retreat into an area where you can take them on one at a time. Luckily, none of the monsters have learned how to climb stairs yet, so you can still dash up (or down) a stairway to rest and recuperate (assuming there's nothing waiting for you at the top of the stairs!). Also, doors can still be used to attack monsters, although there are a lot of doors that have to be chopped (or otherwise permanently opened), making them useless for defense.
Many of the doors in CSB are locked, of course, and finding the right key for the right lock can be quite a challenge. The Hint Oracle will tell you what kind of key is necessary for a certain door if you get completely stumped, or you can just start a key collection and keep trying them all. Tiggy, in my party, has so many keys she jingles when she walks (and I STILL can't get through that Black Metal Door!) Something new in CSB is the ability to use lockpicks on some of the locked doors, assuming you can find the lockpicks in the first place. I haven't found them yet, so I'm still looking for keys.
Another thing FTL has done to change the game a bit is to add some randomness to which items are found in some locations. Every time you restart the game, you'll find different things in different locations. This also means that the game is slightly different for other people who are playing the game at the same time. I found something different where others had reported finding the lockpicks, for example. There had been some talk about the Dungeon itself being random too (headaches for mapmakers!), but it now appears that while it's very convoluted, the layout of the Dungeon doesn't actually change.
This time, the Dungeon isn't so neatly laid out as it was in Dungeon Master. There isn't the "Level by Level" progression that we had before. Instead, there are four "Ways" radiating out from a central point, each one corresponding to one of the four Skills (Ku, Ros, Neta, and Dain for Fighter, Ninja, Priest and Wizard skills). Each one has more than one way in, and each also has different paths, chosen at random when you enter. This gives the appearance of the Dungeon changing from time to time, and also makes mapping a lot more difficult. There are a lot of stairs and a lot of small areas on levels connected by more stairs, so you end up doing a lot of up and down travel, in addition to exploring on an individual "level." This also makes it a lot more difficult to describe just where you are in the Dungeon. In DM, it was fairly easy to say you were "just outside the entrance to the 'Wizard's Workshop' on the Firestaff Level" and know that everyone else would know what you meant. I've been up and down so many staircases, I don't have the slightest idea WHERE I am!
Eventually, you'll find the path through each of the four Ways, and find the Corbum ore in each. Then you need to find the "Fulya Pit" to destroy the ore (and the "level" the Fulya Pit is on DOES change each time you enter it). The bonds holding Lord Chaos have been so weakened that you'll even run into him again on this Level, but this time you don't have your trusty Firestaff, so all you can do is avoid him. Find and destroy all four of the Corbum ore deposits and you'll win the game (and of course, save the world).
Lord Chaos is nicely enhanced for the new game, and there are quite a few new monsters among all your old familiar friends like Screamers and Spiders (some of which have been "enhanced" too ... for instance, the Spiders have mustaches this time). You remember the Dragon in Dungeon Master and how hard he was to kill? Well, let me tell you about the Dragon Den ... or, on the other hand, I'll let you find out for yourself (heh heh). I'll just say that when you finish fighting FIVE dragons in a row, you KNOW you've been in a fight! There are dragons EVERYWHERE in this game.
After a little while trying to remember my magical spells from Dungeon Master, it was easy to get into Chaos Strikes Back. The spells are all the same (no new ones!), and everything works the same as in DM. As far as I've seen for myself, and heard from others, there are also no new sounds in the game, at least in the Atari version. The game box comes with a parchment-like map, which is more of a stylistic representation of the game than a real aid to playing, and an actual "Gor" coin with mystical inscriptions on it that I hope will enter into the game at some point (although I haven't heard of anyone finding any such use for it so far).
My impressions of the game? It feels good to be back in the Dungeon again, exploring new territory and meeting new challenges. The enhancements FTL has made have added a lot to the game. I only hope that the NEXT "Expansion Set" doesn't take two more years!
If you liked Dungeon Master, you'll like Chaos Strikes Back. It takes a classic computer adventure game and adds entire new dimensions to it!
