#apshai

Eventually I’ll get around to watching Extreme Ghostbusters. Maybe I’d write for Cohila, Dream Ghost, Ghostly Trio, the Scoleris, Tenebraug, and Taxi Driver.

Achira: Better not. You could get sick from her.

Apshai: Why is his mural cooler looking than he is? Catfishing was a thing in ancient Egypt too, I see. 

Beauty Queen Ghost: Imagine the head game. 

Cohila: Oh, this guy was recommended to me before. I’d give him better looking spawn. ._.

Corpuscule: I’d be too busy figuring out how to kiss him.

Crainiac: Oh, so these guys were inspired by Hellraiser??

Dream Ghost: Oh yeah! The one who gave Ray a blowie.

Dry Spell Ghost: Just show him to the nearest public water fountain and you’re okay? He’s pretty big. I don’t think I could discharge enough for him.

Evil Clown: See Cohila.

Ghost Bride: She’s already ready for the wedding night.

Ghostly Trio: Don’t really do much for me. Unless there was possession, maybe.

Gristle: Not sure how to kiss him, either. :(

Gu Mo: ...Bone dragon.

Jersey Devil: One of my folklore books has a story about the Jersey Devil attempting to seduce a farmer with a courtship dance.

Mrs. Myrnick: Is a married woman. So... cucking?

Scoleri Brothers: Hm. I should rewatch the sequel.

Tempus: I want to do his nails so bad.

Tenebraug: Whoever keeps making these monsters unkissable, knock it off. I actually kind of dig this guy’s whole eye thing.

Vigo: Nah. Gimme the pink slime instead.

Wishgiver: My wish would be to make him and the others more kissable.

Hellfire Warrior (1980) is the direct sequel to Temple of Apshai and explores the regions below the temple. As you can tell from that amazing cover art, it considerably ups the ante. The four dungeons are the Lower Reaches of Apshai, the Labyrinth, the Vault of the Dead and the Plains of Hell. Scary stuff!

There is some added complexity with new items, shops and an addiction mechanic. Two of the levels — Labyrinth and Hell — don’t have room descriptions, which is a bit of a bummer (though understandable). The essential gameplay is the same though — explore, kill monsters, get stuff. The final level has a princess to rescue (she’s a heavy inventory item, which, jeeze guys) but no formal story or end state for the game.

All the illustration work for the game is by Lela Dowling, who I believe eventually went into comics. Its all absolutely perfect here, I think. That minotaur! That cover! Her signature is real familiar, and I wanna say she’s done work for some tabletop RPGs, but I can’t bring it to mind. Fantasy Trip, maybe? GURPS?

I enjoyed doing the vintage videogame posts last year, so I am back with some more this week. First up, Gateway to Apshai (1983). I believe this is the last of the original DunjonQuest games (not counting the Temple of Apshai Trilogy remake) from Epyx. It is a sort of remix of the formula that aims to keep up with the new advances in console technology — this is on a floppy, but it was also available on a cartridge for home consoles. That means it is a more streamlined experience, since the game was going to played using a joystick of some sort (can you call the weird telephone that was the ColecoVision controller a joystick?). So the RPG elements are streamlined quite a bit to focus on the action and the game plays FAST.

Like, almost ridiculously so. There are eight levels. There are something like 7000 rooms in the game. But you’re timed, so if you last on any given level for five or so minutes, you automatically progress to the next level, until you get to level 8, which is endless. Its fine! But it lacks a lot of the stodgy charm of the previous games. I particularly miss the room descriptions. There isn’t a lot in this booklet.

The Keys of Acheron (1981) is the first expansion for Epyx’s Hellfire Warrior (which I posted about back in December).

It’s kind of interesting, because up to this point, all the DunjonQuest games were sort of the story of one character (I say sort of because you only get that info in the manual, not in the actual game). Keys switches it up — this time you are tasked to find four gems (one for each level) so you can defeat the evil demon Kronus (the illustration of whom, I believe, was done by the game’s designer, Paul Reiche III). The twist here is that Kronus is actually pursuing you through the levels (similar to the demon in the last level of Hellfire Warrior), which adds a new sense of urgency to the proceedings.

This is the Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985), which remakes the original Temple of Apshai and its expansions, Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra. From the year 2021, you have to squint hard to see the improvements, but they were there and probably felt miraculous at the time, judging from my experience with other games of the period. The play is the same, though. And because technology is amazing sometimes, you can play it in your browser over at the Internet Archive, or grab it for  like 3 bucks on Steam!

I’ve posted generally about the game and specifically about the booklet before, so you can look that up in the feed. All this week’s posts were the byproduct of my hopes to fine more art work by Mike Mott, who illustrated the booklet. Today, though, let us celebrate the box. My original copy of the box and the disks is long gone — I just have a tattered copy of the booklet, one of my most treasured gaming-related possession, honestly. But I recently acquired a new copy of the box and, my goodness. Just look at it! So burned in my heart and brain is this box that it feels like it has always been in the house here, despite it being absent for, I dunno, thirty years? What a strange sort of ghost.

Here’s another bit of dusty videogame history: Datestones of Ryn (1979). It was a follow-up to Temple of Apshai, but was chronologically a prequel. Temple of Apshai is kinda sorta the story of Brian Hammerhand’s days as a veteran adventurer (though any narrative in that game is paper thin and fleshed out more by the booklet than anything on the screen), where in Datestones he is a young soldier sent into a cave to retrieve the stolen stones. The cave is small and full of bandits and critters, heads of which can be brought out for additional rewards. But that takes time, which you don’t have a lot of — just twenty minutes to snag your objective.

That time limit, the speed of play and the complexity of the combat system all come together to form a very different experience than the methodical dungeon crawl of Temple of Apshai — this is probably the first example of what we now call an “action RPG,” a genre that would grow into games like the Witcher or the Souls games. It’s a pretty hard game, made harder by the strict weight limit that sees you tramping back to the entrance pretty regularly at the expense of precious minutes. Two sequels/expansions used the same template: Morloc’s Tower (1980) and Sorcerer of Siva (1981), but I never played them (and don’t own them, alas!).