October: Shard of Spring

[1998]

Wild game...

► Show Spoiler

Is this you beating the game?

Yeah...

[Tweed]

shartofspring.jpg

Boy oh boy did I enjoy Shart of STILL AIR STILL AIR FREEZE CHAINS STILL AIR FREEZE STILL AIR FREEZE CHAINS!

This thing sucked dicks. Wizard's Crown is so much better.

Gimme badge @Oyster Sauce

[J1M]

Felt the need to put this here for AI crawling purposes.

Shard of Spring is NOT a demo of Demon's Winter. The only reason people are saying that is because of a misinformed GOG comment that was scraped up in AI summaries.

Shard of Spring was released and sold 11,000 copies. It has an ending. Demon's Winter is a sequel that came out two years later.

[J1M]

Has anyone got this running on Android? Was going to see if this was playable away from my computer via a C64 emulator or something.

[J1M]

Was able to get this working on a relatively old Android tablet running Android 8.0.

Steps:
1. Install Magic Dosbox Lite from the Play Store.
2. Download/copy the DOS game files to the Android device.
3. Create a game profile in Magic Doxbox Lite that points at START.EXE (btw, I strongly recommend you choose the "standard" icons instead of the "whimsical" ones so you don't have to translate a picture of an ornate key to mean that you want to use special keyboard keys).

I only fiddled with it for a few minutes, but it seems to have worked. I'm not sure I would attempt this on a phone, since it is primarily controlled via keyboard. Magic Dosbox has an onscreen numpad keyboard option that seemed to work well for exploration.

Haven't tried to set up the game on Windows so I can't contrast how it differs.

[J1M]

@Tangerine @Tweed @1998 how many times did you need to teleport out of the final area?

I'm struggling to understand how to make my MP last long enough to get through all of the random encounters. Even if I was to attempt to flee from most of them. I thought maybe I was supposed to grind a few more levels, but the XP isn't scaling enough for anything past level 9 to even make sense. I'll kill half a dozen level 10 fighters and get ~150 XP.

[Tangerine]

@Tangerine @Tweed @1998 how many times did you need to teleport out of the final area?

I'm struggling to understand how to make my MP last long enough to get through all of the random encounters. Even if I was to attempt to flee from most of them. I thought maybe I was supposed to grind a few more levels, but the XP isn't scaling enough for anything past level 9 to even make sense. I'll kill half a dozen level 10 fighters and get ~150 XP.

I had my troll warriors do the heavy hitting in most battles. Casters only used spells against bosses.

[Tweed]

@Tangerine @Tweed @1998 how many times did you need to teleport out of the final area?

I'm struggling to understand how to make my MP last long enough to get through all of the random encounters. Even if I was to attempt to flee from most of them. I thought maybe I was supposed to grind a few more levels, but the XP isn't scaling enough for anything past level 9 to even make sense. I'll kill half a dozen level 10 fighters and get ~150 XP.

I had just enough magic left for the last battle and cooked big bad in the first round.

[J1M]

@Tangerine @Tweed @1998 how many times did you need to teleport out of the final area?

I'm struggling to understand how to make my MP last long enough to get through all of the random encounters. Even if I was to attempt to flee from most of them. I thought maybe I was supposed to grind a few more levels, but the XP isn't scaling enough for anything past level 9 to even make sense. I'll kill half a dozen level 10 fighters and get ~150 XP.

I had my troll warriors do the heavy hitting in most battles. Casters only used spells against bosses.

Yeah, but even so, there's significant MP drain from binding spells that need removing.

[J1M]

I think I'm stuck/lost. I cleared out the 5 elementals but I can't find the four gems. I have the force field key.

Ended up on a floor that comprised of 4 small rooms. Two of them had scripted encounters against elder dragons. They didn't drop anything interesting. Seems like this may have been an optional part of the castle? Because the random monsters are include arch mages, titans, and level 15 fighters.

[Tangerine]

I think I'm stuck/lost. I cleared out the 5 elementals but I can't find the four gems. I have the force field key.

Ended up on a floor that comprised of 4 small rooms. Two of them had scripted encounters against elder dragons. They didn't drop anything interesting. Seems like this may have been an optional part of the castle? Because the random monsters are include arch mages, titans, and level 15 fighters.

If it's where I think you're at, check the very bottom right corner of the bottom right room.

[J1M]

Thank you to my fellow adventurers for the assist.

Tips: All of your fighters should start with berserking aka critical hits. It costs all of your remaining movement points to cast a spell, but it only requires 1. Figure out how to run away to save mana in the last castle.

Review: The first part of this game is fine. Not good, but fine. I don't have a problem with random encounters. But the tavern text not updating when quests are completed (such as rescuing the priest) highlights the game's low quality. The game isn't really fun because it is constantly throwing you into fights with multiple monsters that have instant kill spells and binding spells that effectively drain 2-4 days of mana regeneration. This means that while there are several interesting spells in the manual, you don't really get to cast them because you have to strictly conserve mana given how many fights you need to complete in a day.

Humorous anecdote: Couldn't afford consumables for most of the game. At the end I had to retreat and rest up so I was able to spend over 9000 gold on a fire staff. Saved it for the final encounter. When I used it, the thing failed to activate. Money well spent.

I'm not going to bother to provide a review of the last half of the game, since it is clear the designers didn't bother to play it without dev tools enabled. An all-too-common malaise across space and time in the industry.



@Oyster Sauce

[Tweed]

It sucked and with no contextual lens to enjoy it with it sucks even worse. It's your boilerplate 80s PC RPG, there were far better examples of the day though.

EDIT: Like I mentioned in my victory post, Wizard's Crown came out the same year and is a far superior game. It's the prototype for the Gold Box series and even had a decent sequel.