Some ideas for gaming grow old, and tend to be forgotten for a REALLY LONG time. Some genres became obsolete when greater capabilities came to people who create video games. One such genre is the "dungeon crawler". Anyone heard about "The Bard's Tale" (the old one, from 1985) ? Cold... "Wizardy" ? Warm... "Might And Magic" ? Warmer...
Have you noticed I haven't named any newer games? It's because this genre was pretty much dead since the 1980s. There were a few released games of this type in the 90s, but not as much, as ten years before. So, the whole idea here, is to see how these games changed over the course of time. And I am going to compare two games from this genre:
Eye Of Beholder and Legend of Grimrock
Why these two? The reasons are quite simple: I have both the games, I like, them, and they are 14 years apart. Enough to see how time has changed both the genre, and us, the gamers. I will sort this comparison in parts, each with a short video/set of screenshots to show you what I mean in the text.
But for starters, what is an dungeon crawler? To be short: it's a genre of game, where you/your party spend most of their time in a dungeon, trying to go lower/higher, fight monsters, beat puzzles, and defeat the "Evil One" (whenever it's an beholder/dragon/demon/evil archmage/etc. ). The focus of these games are exploration, puzzle solving and turn-like based combat.
But for starters, what is an dungeon crawler? To be short: it's a genre of game, where you/your party spend most of their time in a dungeon, trying to go lower/higher, fight monsters, beat puzzles, and defeat the "Evil One" (whenever it's an beholder/dragon/demon/evil archmage/etc. ). The focus of these games are exploration, puzzle solving and turn-like based combat.
Eye Of Beholder required from me to install DosBox on my PC. No chance running it natively on Windows XP/7/8
Here you can see the minimal requirements to play this games. They are here mostly to show you how LARGE is the time gap between these games. Years mean nothing when you talk about PC's, the hardware, however tells you everything.
| Game Name | Eye Of Beholder | Legend of Grimrock |
| Processor | 20 MHz | Dual Core 2GHz Intel or 2.8GHz AMD |
| Ram | < 1mb | 2 GB |
| Graphics Card | Any VGA | ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 or better |
| Sound card | Any | DirectX 9.0c compatible |
| Other | None | A mouse |
| Release Date | 1990 | April 11, 2012 |
Character creation and customization
The character creation process in both games are similar,yet they differ from each other. To be more precise: Eye Of Beholder uses the AD&D 2ed. rule set that is simplified during the character creation. You can't even select the spells your character know at the beginning of the game, which is... meh :/ Also, you can change your characters stats in ANY way you want. Yes, you can create a PC which has all stats maxed at the start of the game.
Legend of Grimrock uses his entirely new mechanics, and you have much more place for customization. Each character gets 10 points to give to statistics, up to 4 points to give to skills and can pick up to two traits. Oww, and I would forget. They are four races to pick, each of them change the available options to your PC.
Gameplay
Let's face it: old games had to have something else then beautiful graphics to captive the players. In case of Eye Of Beholder it's the difficulty which attacks us from time to time. There is also an added handicap, that may not sound terrifying, but it is: NO MINI-MAP. Other than that, another difficulty builder are the environmental puzzles, that are the main cause of frustration in this game. You can sometimes spend half an hour clicking walls in search for an hidden switch. Below a short gameplay of the old timer. A little rushed one, but you can get the main idea :)
In Legend Of Grimrock we can see... the same? o.O The gameplay is almost the same as in Eye Of Beholder. The most innovative thing is the way spellcasting is solved: you find a scroll with a magic spell. It says what kind of skills you need to cast the spell, and what runes you have to pick when casting the spell. You can see how it works at the end of the gameplay below, somewhere around the 11 minute mark. Also, THERE IS A MINIMAP. The game gets much simpler because of that, no more getting lost. There has been enough writing, you can see more at the video below :)
About food
Suprised food has got a paragraph of it's own? It's vital in these games, LITERALLY. If your characters will go starved for a prolonged period of time, that will effect your characters capability to fight. And that is a REALLY bad thing. For you as a player. Just a small remainder of this fact :)
The conclusion
Old ideas do not die, they just go to sleep. And after someone wakes an idea up, he needs to take it to a plastic surgeon, and teach him how the world works now. In case of Legend Of Grimrock we have a good example of that: an idea from the previous century changed, so that it will be playable in the modern times.
Similar Games:
In case you think you will like these kinds of games, you can also check out other titles where exploration, monster slaying, and thinking how to open the door standing before you are the main fun. Such games include (but it's not all of them):
- The Might and Magic series
- Wizardy 1-8
- The Bard's Tale (the ones from the 1980s)
