Dungeon Master v Ultima Underworld

                 An article by Bill Commons

A couple of articles in Syntax recently got me thinking and I felt
that I could add my experience as to why DM is so high in the
charts.  I count Chaos Strikes Back as an extension of the same
game as I used the same team to play both.

Back in the late eighties I used to visit a friend and someone was
usually playing the game and each member of the family, five in
all, had their own saved game disk, so it became a test to see who
could find yet another secret wall or solve a problem.

Also I remember Sue's letter pages on the adventure page of
Micronet being dominated by people writing in to boast how far
they had progressed or how they had killed a certain monster.
Some of the other readers were not very pleased about this and
asked if there were any other games apart from Dungeon Master.

Then came the graphics program that enabled you to design your own
faces for your heroes followed by extra dungeons and various other
add on programs.  I have played most of the clones and spin off
games that followed but none of them created the same following.

When someone made the comment that UW:The Stygian Abyss was the
game to topple DM I went out and bought the CD ROM version.

I started playing the adventure with my back up, sneering at the
way you can get so close to the walls and objects that they break
down into pixels and become unrecognisable. I played it for a
couple of days like this and found that I was getting addicted to
it. After all, in real life you don't look so close to people that
you study the pores on their face, do you?

When I got used to keeping the view in perspective I was hooked.
When I went to bed at night, the after vision of staring down a
corridor and zooming through the same for hours would invade my
head and each time I closed my eyes I would be rushing along the
dungeon.

Again when I had killed a really hard monster I found that I was
punching the air and shouting "yes", something that I have picked
up by watching my grandchildren playing Kick Off and scoring a
goal!

I can't seem to find all the secret doors that are mentioned in
the walk through by Hazel Bradshaw but I might have found some
that she missed so I will definitely will play it again.

I loaded DM after finishing Underworld and it shows its age now
and cannot compete with the modern games.

@~Yes, I remember all the letters in MicroNet about Chaos too.
@~I think people will always have a soft spot for DM and other
@~games like Monkey Island that really pushed computers to their
@~limits, at that time, or did something different ... Sue


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