@~It's double review time with reviews from James (floppy disk) @~and Alex (CD-ROM) for ... Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession - US Gold/SSI/TSR RRP œ45.99 (RPG for PC on floppy disk or CD-ROM) 1. Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx Do you like sitting at night with the curtains drawn, lights dimmed with just you, a scary movie and nothing else (apart from your imagination) to keep you company? If so this game will have instantly drawn your attention in the shops as the huge box leads you to believe this is THE trip into horrordom, with a very good picture of a vampire on the front and the words 'TERROR AWAITS' emblazoned across the back with warnings to be afraid, be VERY afraid. So, with great expectations (no, not the book) I installed the seven disks (took 15-20 mins and 21 megs of HDD space) and read the rather naff manual - the cover felt as if it had become wet and then dried, the spine was just a little too small for the pages, leading to a feeling of the book being bent. Other than that the content was fine, it just didn't feel very good, that's all! After an 'animated' opening sequence (a series of stills displayed as a slideshow) with some OK music playing through it you are treated to the option screen where you can see the animation again (yes please!), start a new game or continue an old one. Starting a new game is the obvious choice and for choosing this option you are treated to the normally boring task (for most people) of creating your own character. Here, the process is simple where you just click on a number of cards for the selections you want to make and the most in depth part is where you have to roll your character, but the computer can do that for you if you want. You get a choice from 6 professions (from fighter, paladin, cleric, mage and thief) and a choice of 6 races (human, half elf, elf, gnome, halfling and dwarf), where the race choice effects what profession you can be (ie only humans can be Paladins). You also get to choose your sex and character portrait from a choice of 17 piccies for each sex. After designing two characters you are thrown into the game quite gently but a slow stroll through a wood and then a fight to the death with a criminal who has attacked your lord, stolen his pendant and made off like a thief in the night. This is how the main part of the game starts with you running through the woods after this guy and then after a fight (in which, hopefully, you come out on top) you pick up everything that he left. Then the light dims, a fog appears and you see a hand reach out and grab you. When you awaken you find yourself in a small clearing facing an abandoned hut. Everything that you took from the thief has gone except for a note explaining his actions - how he thought that your lord's pendant was the artifact that could kill the evil overlord of Barovia (the place you have entered). Now you are in the main part of the game where you find the village of Barovia, Castle Ravenloft and the old Svalich road. To some tabletop RPGers these names will be familiar as the whole game is based upon the AD&D scenario of the same name, invented well over ten years ago. As you progress through the game the story will continually unfold (in a not too subtle way) and you will meet many interesting characters - some who will join your party of two to make a party of four. The ultimate aim of the game is to retrieve the pendant, kill the evil overlord and escape from this evil place. Simple really . The thing that first hits you about any game is the graphics and sound and in this game both range from the above average to the truly brilliant (well, maybe not on the music side). Dreamforge (the programming team) have come up with a non-standard video display that uses just the bog standard VGA card. Instead of being 320*200 pixels, the screen is now 320*400 allowing for twice the number of pixels vertically, leading to far clearer pictures. True, it isn't up to the standard of SVGA graphics but they are by far some of the best graphics I have seen on an RPG. While the 3D graphics (texture mapped, of course) are good, the still pictures are brilliant, drawn with confidence and a distinctive style. Light is used to great effects and although I would have liked to have seen more animation in the 'animated' sequences they still took my breath away. The sound is quite good too. Well, the sound effects are good and the music is so-so. Music first. When I read a review of this game they said that, in parts, the music was exactly the same as the music found in Arena. I disbelieved them at first but sure enough, in certain places, the two musical scores are very, very similar, just a note or two out here and there. Luckily, while the Arena music grated after a while there is enough variation in the music (a different style from area to area and in some areas there seems to be more than one piece) to keep most people happy. Still, I prefer to turn it off and put on my own style of music. Another good aspect with the music is that when you fight the music suddenly changes to a fast tempo piece that helps to add to the excitement of the battle and when the original piece is restored you feel like going 'phew!'. Originality is something that RPGers don't really look forward to - there is only a certain number of reasons why a myriad of tunnels and rooms has been carved out of the ground and so the most important aspect of the game is the way you interact with the game. If this part of the game falls down, then you are in trouble as playing the game becomes a chore, not a joy. As is the rage these days, gone are the flick screens so popular only a year ago and in comes the smooth 3D scrolling found in UU2/Arena/Doom etc. In some games this falls down because there are few points you can rotate through (ie instead of turning smoothly 90' to the right, you jerk through a number of points set at, say, 5' intervals) but Ravenloft doesn't suffer from this. If you use the keyboard to move you will suffer slight jerkiness when the screen gets really cluttered, but whenever you use the mouse for movement the screen scrolls as smooth as can be. In a stroke of genius Dreamforge have seen fit to include not one, not two, but THREE control methods. The first is the standard UU2 bit - if you hold the left mouse button down and move the pointer to the top of the screen you'll move forward, move it to the left and you start scrolling left and so on. The next method is something that doesn't work very well (for me) at all. By pressing the space bar the cursor freezes where it is. You then move the mouse in the direction you want to go - forward for forward, left for left, back for backstepping and so on. You can also hold the right button down to go forward so you are not continually picking the mouse up and bringing it back on the mousepad. Unfortunately this is cumbersome and doesn't work very well at all. The final control method is activated by clicking on the compass. This then returns you back to the day of Dungeon Master with the old flick-screen method. This method is OK in moderation, but as the game turns very quickly on my machine I tend to loose control when dashing down a corridor or trying to turn and run away from the Bone Golem. It is useful for moving over twisters and other such traps which require precision positioning. In another stroke of genius the designers have been able to do away with having an inventory screen for each character. Instead they have come up with one screen that displays all four inventories with bronze figures (suitably filled in the correct places for the correct sexes, if you get my meaning and suitably heighted for the certain races) for placing clothes and weapons on your character. A left click will turn the selected character's inventory into a slot full of stats and a right click on the same icon will turn all four slots to the stats screen and a right click returns. Very good and saves the need for continuous swapping of screens that was a nuisance in games such as Captive and DM. One thing that could have been touched up was the way you use an item. You can only use potions and books in the action screen and that means going to the inventory, placing the item in the character's hand, going back to the main screen and then using it. I would have liked to see a double-right click replacing that method. Fighting can be done in two ways. You can either take the pointer to the main screen and click on the enemy you want to attack (as long as you are close enough) and this results in a complete group attack. Or the other way is to left click on each of the character's weapons when you are in range - useful if you just want to throw a dagger at a monster stuck in a tree. There are two camps of spell - priest and mage. In all there are about 60 spells which you can gather throughout your journeys and each being useful in some way or another (to certain degrees, of course). To cast spells you must first memorize (for mages) or pray for (for clerics and paladins) the desired spells and then you must rest. The number and complexity of spells you have selected determines how long you rest (rest is also a way to regain lost hit points). To cast the spells you click on the character's spells icon (a book for a mage and a holy symbol for clerics and paladins) and then select the spell from the resulting list. You then select the character/target for the spell and away you go! Interaction with NPCs is just a matter of selecting responses (A) (B) or (C) and that's about it (apart from making notes on what they tell you). Puzzles come in various forms from get the key puzzles to push the lever, step on the pad and press the button or the more involved release the poor man from the lycanthrope disease. In all this is a very good games with few bugs - the biggest one I have come across resulted in me having to start from scratch (luckily it was early on...) but that was no bother. SO far I have thoroughly enjoyed this, rating it far above the likes of Arena which really does show how crass it is when put side by side to this. The only things missing from this game is the weather which played a very good part in Arena, but the sun still dips below the horizon at night and rises in the morning. I you like a good blast at an RPG and have 21 megs of free HDD, VGA graphics card a 386 or better (there are loads of options to tone down the graphical detail, so nearly everyone should get it to run to satisfaction) and, preferably, a soundcard you can't go wrong with this game. If, on the other hand, you have a CD-ROM why don't you invest in the CD version that has got more animations, a couple more monsters (on the disk version all but one monster is included but similar monsters will look the same instead of having separate graphics) and, of course, speech. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Ravenloft, CD-ROM version 2. Reviewed on a 486 DX2 66Mhz by Alex van Kaam Although the magazines I have seen weren't too keen on Ravenloft, I always liked Advanced Dungeon & Dragons games made by SSI, they aren't as advanced as games by Origin or others but they most of the time have a great atmosphere. So after calling Premier on Sunday I had the game by Thursday, and that's fast from the UK to here. Anyway installing is very easy, you can choose between a 13 MB or a 25 MB version on your hard disk, since I had the space I choose 25 MB since this would speed up the game a lot. As soon as you run the game you get a kind of cinematic sequence in which your party (2) enter the chambers of Lord Dhelt, you find him and his Mage wounded on the ground, Lord Dhelt sends you after the assassin which stole his Holy Symbol, your party leaves the castle and they follow the assassin into the woods....... This is where the adventure starts, you can create your own party or start with one from the creators of the game. Making a new party, two persons only (you can let two other persons join you when you meet them and you meet so many you can hardly choose), is easy and nice, you enter a Gypsy tent and she deals you cards with all the options, there are a lot of portraits to choose from so you always find the one you need. After this easy and painless part of the game the real game starts, you are transported to the woods and in the distance you see the assassin. The first thing you notice is that the game uses an almost Underworld kind of movement, you can set the game to step movement like in DM but this means that you can't enter certain locations??!! Unlike Underworld everything looks good, a tree from close by looks just as good as seen from far away. You move by using 1) the mouse as arrows in the screen, 2) the old Dungeon Master arrow buttons, 3) using the numeric key pad or 4) mouse control like in a flight simulator. Moving is the tricky part, especially in combat, before you know it you turn too much and the enemy attacks you from behind or the side. This is the only thing you need to get used to, all the other stuff like spells and spell casting works the same as in the Eye of the Beholder series, it is just that the mouse system works differently but as with all control systems you soon get used to it. On the very up side there is all the detail that has been put in to it, say you have a bag in your back pack, here it looks round just as you would imagine a bag, if you then put it in one of your players' hands it turns into the shape of a bag that you hold into your hand (a bit the shape of a water drop) If you walk through the city of Barovia near some crates mice will run away, you hear babies crying, cats screaming and lots more. In the Pray and Memorize menus there is a picture on the background, moving the mouse off screen removes all text so you can see the full picture, this just shows how much detail and thought has been put into the game. Every person you encounter has a nice picture and a good voice with it, in the cinematic sequences a dark deep Gypsy voice leads you through. And clicking on an item in the inventory menu gives a full description as to what it is, how much damage it does and how much it weighs. In the inventory menu you can also see what your characters are wearing, and this really looks great. Then there is the great music in the background, sometimes rising in volume and some times dropping in volume and always at the right situation. In the caves beneath Barovia it seems the music comes straight out of an old Dracula movie. Then of course your characters talk to you and give comments, you enter an abandoned house at the start of the game and one of them tells you that there is a door in the floor and there should be a way to open it. This really help you to get into the game and you know what to look for in later stages. In the city of Barovia they tell you things, like what they smell or what they think about the city. All this together really makes a great atmosphere to play in, even the automap feature is good, it doesn't reveal hidden doors or buttons, it does however show where you dropped items, and you have the option of writing your own text on the maps and you can save the maps in text format so you can use them in your text editor. So if you like SSI AD&D games you will probably like this one even though you do need to get used to the new control system, but you soon forget this thanks to the cinematic sequences, the music, great graphics and of course the atmosphere that is slowly created. One note though, with a Sound Galaxy card (16 bit) the voices of the people you meet sometimes disappears, to solve this you need a copy of SimCity 2000. First install the Ravenloft sound then look into the file: Sound.cfg and write down the two filenames you find in it: ********.DLL & ********.DLL, then go to the Simcity 2000 sound directory and you will probably find two files with the same name, copy these into the Ravenloft directory erasing the ones that came with Ravenloft, that's it. - o -