From: jepler@nyx.cs.du.edu (Jeff Epler)
Subject: AD&D spelljammer disappointment
Organization: Nyx, Public Access Unix @ U. of Denver Math/CS dept.
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 92 03:19:51 GMT

I got the Spelljammer game (Pirates of Realmspace) for christmas and have
been disappointed so far.

First, the install.  Two 3.5", hd disks.  The install runs in excess of half
an hour on my 386-40 with a 19ms, stacked hard drive.  (The compression they
use is ARJ.  I wonder if he's getting any money out of it?)

The game dissolves to something like 11 megabytes, but gets about 2.8:1
compression on the stacker drive.  It gets along fine with stacker (loaded
high) and my shadowram UMB provider.  (It should also work with emm386.exe) 
You need in excess of 600,000 bytes free memory.

Next, character creation.  You can only choose single-class characters, and
you are level 5.  The rest of the characters (10 others) are apparently
pregenerated, since in four starts they have had the same names and ability 
scores.  They consist of three mages, two clerics, a paladin, a ranger,
a thief, and two others (I don't recall what.).  Additionally, you start with
about thirty no-names, your crew.  

You start in orbit around Torril, the familiar home of Waterdeep, etc.
You can then spelljam to any of the eight planets in the crystal sphere.
However, about three of the planets have no ports. (One is home to beholders,
one has no stable landmasses, and one no land at all.). 

When you get there, you have to pay tax -- Sometimes excessive, and apparently
buggy.  See below.  Once you've landed, you can go to a pub to look for work,
or to a warehouse to get cargo to transport.  (The cargo is usually worth
1000 gold, often less than the taxes you have to pay.  The jobs you find
in the bars have so far involved either transporting an individual or destroying
a certain ship.  They usually pay 3000 or more gold.

About spelljamming:  Usually, the navigate function works correctly, but
sometimes it ends you up in the wrong place.  Several times I've set sail
for Torril, but ended up facing away from it and drifting when the computer
announced that we had arrived.  And once, going for Anadia, it left me
a whole 120 degrees (compared to the sun) away from the planet.

Also, travel times reported are often incorrect. (IE First reported as
"less than an hour away", time required may then start to fluctuate between
seven and eight days.  However, so far, travel time hasn't been an important
factor.

The navigation screen is lacking too -- It shows a graphic representation
of the system (Inner, outer, whole thing, or "points of interest" that you
must discover yourself.)  However, I cannot figure out how to use the mouse
to choose my destination, I instead have to use the "new destination" button.
Being able to click on a pixel (Each planet is different in color) would be
much handier.

Several times, my keyboard and mouse have become messed up.  The behaviour
was this:  For some reason, it had stopped paying attention to my clicks.
I kept clicking on whatever it was, and finally it got the message.  Then,
when I went to click somewhere else, it first registered about ten clicks
where the mouse had been before.  This persisted until I exited the game
and rebooted.  (I think this may be tied to a keyboard enhancer, fastbf,
which i use.  Since I have started deactivating it before using the game
this hasn't occured.  It should be noted, though, that the program
overrides the normal keyboard interrupts, becuse I cannot turn off the
fastbf program (with a hotkey) from inside.

The "real-time combat" that the box talks about is a disappointment.
Before you and a hostile ship grapple to slug it out, you have a bit
of a fly-about in space.  You can control turning left and right, and
speed.  It's basically turn to face the ship, then accelerate and
hit space (fire) as your big weapons reload.  Then, G to grapple.
Of course, there's a shear attack (To destroy their rigging) and a
ram (You know what that is) -- But when you click the button or type
the appropriate key, the computer takes over these manouvers for you.

Also, the ships are hard to see at long range.  They're scaled bitmaps,
and they're not that big.  So at long range, it's hard to tell even two
very different ships from one another.

Once in the melee, there are some disappointments, too.  Your crewmen
have cutlasses and bows, and are computer controlled.  They always hang
back and fire their bows first, while the "real" characters are forced
into the fray.  Using the quick toggle, you can make them controlled
by you, but I don't see how to change them between cutlass and bow.
(There are often 30-40 crew, and they're represented by one icon for
five.  The same is done when there are many of one kind of opponent.)

There are some really big bugs, too.  Well, about two that have really
marred my enjoyment of the game.

My mage had enough XPs to gain seventh level.  He would gain the level
as soon as I went into orbit around a planet.  However, we got into a
battle with a ship full of undead. One of them drained him to level three.
When I got to the next planet, it announced that he had reached level four.
A the temple, when he asked to get the lost levels restored, he was told that
he "could not afford it".  He had about 17,000 gold, and moments before
it had cost 3,000 gold to get a dead character raised.  I think that
the "insufficient money" message was possibly because he had gained
a level after he as drained, but whatever the cause, this bug enraged me.

And about half an hour ago, the biggest problem yet.  Docking at a planet,
it announced that a tax of approximately 220,000 was due for my cargo.
I had just gotten some loot from a an Illithid slaver ship, but when I
sold it, all my cargo turned out to be worth only about 70,000 gold total.
When I could not pay, the took all my gold, and would have taken the cargo
too except that I sold it.  I'll have to go back to an old savegame when
I finally decide to go back to the game.

Hopefully these problems will be fixed, (Does SSI release patches that might
find their way to somewhere FTPable?) because it looks like this one has its
fill of difficulty.

Also, the required computing power is excessive.  On a 386DX-40, it runs with
decent speed.  However, when my sister forced me to move it to the 386-25DX,
even simple things such as moving the sights in melee using the cursor keys
was quite sluggish.  Even though it is manipulating a 256-color screen,
it's only 320x200, and it's just moving a cursor.  Still, it took about
1/2 second for each move, and it wasn't my slow typing.

Also, while in the process of installing it on the other computer, I got
a cryptic error message (It reported a number, and told me that "errors are
often related to insufficient memory.").  After about four installs, I
discovered that I didn't put my files=20 line into config.sys (It's a nwe
system, and DOS still stupidly defaults to eight.)  But the error messag
was certainly no help with this.

One final complaint.  Whenever you die, it scrolls a message about how,
two years later, the Neogi conquer the entire crystal sphere, plunging it
"into a new age of darkness" (or some such)  However, besides this message
at my death, nothing that I've seen even remotely relates to a Neogi plot
to take over Realmspace.  I assume I'll find that out later, after some
gameplay, or maybe I've missed something in the book or introduction..  But
I don't think so..

(Besides for that message, judging just from what I do while living, I'd say
I was sure all there was to the game was what I've described above.  No hint
of a plot there, that's for sure.)

So far, Pirates of Realmspace is a real disappointment.

Jeff




--
Jeff Epler jepler@nyx.cs.du.edu or bx304@cleveland.freenet.edu (preferred)

Signature under construction
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games