Pong and Beyond

150th played so far

Genre: Strategy
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 1997
Developer: Bullfrog
Publisher: Electronic Arts

As we’ve mentioned before, for these landmark numbers for games we like to find a game that’s somewhat meaningful for us – we care about or such. For the 50’s Jeroen gets a ‘joy game’ whilst I take the 100 marks.

Dungeon Keeper is one of these games. Made by the at the time brilliant developer Bullfrog, it’s a strategy game using the tagline “It’s Good To Be Evil“. I played through it a few times (by now knowing what’s coming) and even did quite a bit of research into how it worked to get past some trickier bits – the scripts are all plain text and fairly easy to understand.

Our Thoughts

Want a bit of proof this worked for us? At around 22:30, we stopped playing. I thought it was around 9. That’s certainly a sign of addiction – and yeah, I could’ve gone on longer if I wanted.

At the core, this is a normal real-time strategy game in the vein of Dune II and Warcraft. You build up your army and send it in against the enemies. There’s a larger simulation aspect added though, which is arguably for a large part the more interesting.

As the dungeon keeper, you’re responsible for building a dungeon. While these include such interesting staples as torture rooms and treasure rooms, just as important are certain rooms more important for developing your dungeon but that might not be impressive to visiting heroes, such as the workshop – you need to build your doors and traps somewhere!

This leads to most levels being a two step approach – first you build your dungeon, gather your armies and train them, then when you feel ready you go in to face the heroes or rival keepers and wipe them out.

While this sounds very formulaic, this isn’t as strict as it sounds. Your enemies seek you out, meaning that you don’t always have the time to build your dungeon. You need to find resources, both gold to build your dungeon and new rooms and creatures that are sometimes elsewhere in the area, for which you need to strike out, and at times exploration is half the fun. In yet other levels you’re more timed – such as the one level where your enemies attack you from all sides and you have to survive wave after wave, or another where you either spend a lot of blitz time training your creatures to defend against strong heroes, or rush in to defeat an enemy keeper who starts out incredibly strong. Still, in many cases you can determine how fast you go and where you go, and when you do what, giving you an amount of control that adds its own strategy. Even when it’s about defeating the four wizards who rule the land and hide in their fortresses instead of about you killing some keepers.

The great thing about the game is probably the amount of fun there is in this. While the core game is pretty straightforward – the game AI is usually fairly simple, but the game is balanced so that later levels become absolutely horrible, making the final enemy (the Avatar) absolutey horrible to fight. To be brutally honest the game’s AI is pretty stupid. I can not talk for later in the game (I was a bit young for this at the time) but after a conversation and some observation I can not speak much for their intelligence. I mean… when you keep a fleet of beetles and don’t even try to train some of your beasts then you deserve to have you minions tortured until they turn into ghosts (wow this blog entry got dark).

The writing – especially voicing – makes it more fun though. You’re the evil guy, so obviously this is about converting lovely villages – described as having many fluffy bunnies hop around the fields and kids not being punished for crimes they didn’t commit – into horrible places – or perhaps not if you’re a demon spawn looking for a nice place for your holidays. This is also shown in the worldmap slowly changing from a green and colourful landscape to a black and red volcano-filled horrible area as you defeat the different areas, but it’s the mentor who really drives it home.

In the game itself, this manifests itself in several humorous comments that happen at different times (I understand the game tells you to go to bed if you play at 4AM, but I never had a chance to do so) as well as the general design and writing. Your score is determined not just based on the usual parameters (speed, gold gathered etc), but also on more obscure mechanics, such as how many of your creatures you slapped (it makes them work faster) or how long you trained your mistresses. Those same mistresses, by the way, are probably a good example of the game’s humour becoming more visual… and I supposed purile. You see, these women, dressed in all leather, have a slight bondage theme going on – to the point where being slapped and tortured makes them happier, instead of angrier as normal. At least they did not moan with pleasure whenever you slapped them… I did worry for a while.

So as a mix of simulation and strategy – genres Bullfrog does well – this game works well. Tough, but not impossible, and with enough simulation that you can spend quite a bit of time and resources on it, but this doesn’t ever get overwhelming.

The graphics in the mean time are simple – we’re looking here at a mostly pre-3D era, and while the dungeon is partially 3D, quite a lot of things (including most objects and all creatures) are 2D sprites placed on top of it. The game has a high-res version built in (press Alt+R while playing), making for a better experience and badly needed to get past the pixel blur. It’s still quite dated and the colours are fairly drab, but it’s playable and, I suppose, functional up to a point. The high-resolution certainly helps but it really does have a level of graphic sophistication like Super Mario RPG. Considering how many frolicking minions you can have at any one time you can forgive the graphics. However, one thing that is really annoying is the isometric viewpoint. When building treasure rooms and the like this can be a real pain since you wil repeatedly miss out a row of building because you simply can not see all of the floor because of the dungeon walls getting in the way… some transparenting like was later used in The Sims would have worked perfectly.

And as said, it’s still very playable and quite an addictive game even now. Difficult to get to work on Windows 7 now (use Dosbox, trust me), but worth a try. It’s probably still in a few bargain bins somewhere and there is always the fantabulous world of eBay.

Final Thoughts

I will be honest here, I was never the biggest fan of this game. I was seven when I first played this and when you consider the complexity and the hinted sado-masochism I think it’s fair to understand why. Whilst this is not a game I really like to play myself it really one that I enjoy watch being played (a bit like Civilization really).

Still, what a great 50 we’ve had… time to write our round-ups.