Yendorian Tales Book I
                  (RPG for PC on Disk 1004)

                 Reviewed by Julian Gregory

Richard Garriott has a lot to answer for. For those of you who have
been living on a desert island for the last few years he is the
person who started the Ultima series which has resulted in me
spending countless days on end sat glued to my computer.  I
understand that the series is still not finished. There are
rumoured to be Ultimas 9 to 12 in the pipeline.

Knowing my interests Sue has passed on to me a copy of Yendor Tales
Book I.  The copy she sent to me was a shareware copy and comes
with only a very short 'read-me' file and very little by the way of
instructions. This is no doubt in the hope that you will spend
either $22 to register or $29 which gets you a clue book as well.

I have not yet registered for the instructions and have really only
just begun the game, so this article is a first impression.

Installation is very easy as the file is self-extracting and take
up just over 5 Megs on the hard disk.

The storyline concerns the land of Thaine which is ruled by
individuals more interested in personal wealth than with the
welfare of their subjects. Each ruler wanted more land, but no one
dared to enter the mist beyond the Gorian sea, believing it to be
the edge of the world.  However a group endowed with magical
capabilities challenged this belief and sailed towards the mist.
Once there they realised the mist was a natural phenomenon
surrounding a large island, Yendor.

Over time large towns sprang up and commerce flourished.  The mines
produced Nuore which was needed in the practice of magic. But, as
usual, there have been increases in the attacks on the miners and
the governors need groups (told you) to venture into the mountains
to combat these evils.


The game itself is not as intuitive to play as Ultima on which it
is obviously based. The game is played from an overhead perspective
similar to the later Ultimas.

Without the proper instructions even setting up a party caused a
few problems. When a party (up to 6) has been created I could still
not begin to play. Apparently I had not assembled the party. This
is done by selecting a member and pressing the spacebar to include
that player in the group. This was not described anywhere in the
files. Even on a shareware version I would have expected not to be
just left to find such simple things out by trial and error.

However this is just a quibble as I soon managed to put a party
together and sallied forth.

It seems to me that the initial battles outside the town are not
easy enough to easily enable a strong party to be created.  The
maximum number in the group is 6. But having a smaller number does
not reduce the number of opponents (unlike in Ultima).

I also found that my mouse cursor had disappeared sometimes after
having been in a battle and I could not retrieve it. I should say
that it is quite possible to play just using the keyboard and that
may be how the game should be played, but I found the mouse to be a
bit quicker. Anyway nowadays all games with any pretensions to
quality should allow the use of a mouse.

My initial impressions are that any RPG fan would find this to be a
quite acceptable game. I think that to play any RPG you have to be
a certain type of computer games player. Therefore this game may
not appeal to the casual RPGer. It seems difficult to build up your
party to any serious strength as I said before. However things may
get easier later, although from past experience I doubt it.

If you think you could be interested in Yendor don't forget to
register your copy after you have had an opportunity to test the
game. That after all is what shareware is all about.


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