DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of T

RSS Bot · September 19, 2018

I have been debating whether or not to review this game for a while now, mainly due to how complicated is actually is, but I have steeled my nerves and clenched my buttocks and am now gonna review Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin on the Mattel Intellivision. This is technically a sequel to AD&D Cloudy Mountain, which despite being a very complex game in its own right, did not live up to the moniker of ‘Advanced’ Dungeons & Dragons, there were no classes no leveling up, it was not a Role Playing Game. Here’s the thing though, I think Treasure of Tarmin may be even less of a D&D game than Cloudy Mountain; it has some glaring flaws that WILL sour the game for many players, so without any further dawdling, let us commence the review.

This is an incredibly boring looking game. The first thing you see is a map screen which consists of a castle and a large multileveled dungeon that shows your location, and the location of the treasure you seek, sadly that’s where many of the positives end. The game is in a first-person view, which is impressive enough, but the problem arises immediately when you actually look at the game… Everything is GREEN! The floor, the ceiling, and even the walls are green; the only things that stand out are the doors which are a deep blue color, and the enemies of which there are many. If I can credit this game with one thing it’s the amount of objects and enemies on display, there are 13 unique monsters each with three colors representing difficulty, which are also sorted into three classes: Bad, Nasty, and Horrible. The bad category contains: Giant Ants, Dwarfs, Giant Scorpions, Dwarfs With Shields, Giant Snakes, Alligators, and Dragons. The Nasty class has only three monsters, Skeletons, Cloaked Skeletons, and Giants, and the Horrible class has only three monsters as well, Ghouls, Wraiths, and the big baddie himself The Minotaur. All of these monsters with their three different colors equal up to 52 ‘different’ monsters, that’s a lot of sprites, which is quite impressive for a game this old. The enemt designs are okay if not a little bland, all of the designs are incredibly chunky, but at least they’re distinguishable from each other. There are also boatloads of items to collect, there are over 30 unique item sprites, and many of them have different colored versions to denote higher and lower value, in total there are over 70 unique items, well that might explain why the rest of the game is so visually bland, all of the memory was taken up by the drove of items.

This game has almost no sound effects; all I was getting was the angry beep when you press the wrong button (we’ll get to that soon enough”, and some sort of high pitched beep that just sort of happens. Unlike Cloudy Mountain, that relied extensively on sound Treasure of Tarmin seems to throw that whole idea out the window in favor of ugly beeps and garbled messes from the noise generator. A serious drop in quality from the previous game, but then again, when dealing with early 80’s memory constrictions it seems some things just had to be left to the wayside.

This is without a doubt the most complicated Intellivision game I’ve ever played, while being a dungeon crawler maze exploration game, the game has depth unlike any seen before it; there is so much I’ll probably have to leave out since there is seriously a LOT of stuff to look at here. You can select your difficulty, which is nice, the easiest level can be completed in 5-30 minutes with a minimum of 2 levels, while the hard difficulty can take anywhere from 1.5 to 5 hours to complete with a minimum of 12 maze levels, no thank you. This game does not hold your hand, and if you don’t have an overlay you are absolutely screwed, without a manual it’s unlikely you’ll even get past the first few monsters. I am going to gloss over the war and spiritual energy system since I still don’t fully understand it, but I think it’s basically your physical attack and magical attack stats, but I seriously have no clue, all I really do is throw all my weapons at the enemies and sometimes they die. I will also skip all the different Items you can pick up since there are too many to talk about in depth, if you want to know what everything does please consult the manual since it can tell you far better than I. But how does the game play exactly? Well in a word, horrible, there is a good reason why consoles didn’t try to take on genres of this type, they didn’t have enough buttons, and despite the keypad controller, the Intellivision Still doesn’t have enough buttons. Unlike most RPG’s of the time this game has no menus with which to sort and use items, in Treasure of Tarmin you have your right hand, left hand, and pack which can hold 10 or so items. The method used to get items from the ground into your pack is absolute murder, first you must move the item your holding (weapon) from your right hand to your left hand so you press 2, then you press one to pick up the item, you must then press six to swap the item from your right hand to your pack, if you already have an item in your pack you have to press 3 to rotate the pack to get to an open slot and if you miss it you have to go all the way around the pack since there is no way to reverse(which is great when fighting enemies), so there is a possibility of pressing over 10 buttons just to put an item in your pack, that is bullshit. This game is just an absolute bore to play, since everything looks exactly the same, you get lost quite easily which leads to frustration and eventually just turning off the game to play something else.

The complexity of this game is its overall downfall, I enjoyed the first AD&D game because of its overall simplicity, the manual for Treasure of Tarmin is 29 pages long while Cloudy Mountains is 13. It just goes to show that bigger isn’t always better, and speaking of bigger, the prices for Treasure of Tarmin sure are compared to Cloudy Mountain, you can find a Cloudy Mountain CIB for 8-15 dollars while Treasure of Tarimin is anywhere from 15-30 dollars CIB, and in my opinion not worth the price. This game, for sure, goes to the Collector’s Zone, for being too clunky and primitive to play with any enjoyment, and also expensive.

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