The Stack

So, I’ve finally done something about the Gameboy cable problem. It turns out that GBA cables are wired slightly differently than the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color: where the older model just has two of the wires cross over, the GBA does something tricky to accomodate plugging in another cable in the middle. Furthermore, the type of connection that a game expects depends on the hardware the game was created for, not the hardware it’s actually running on — so in order to trade original Pokemon on a GBA, you need an old-style cable. This is the sort of fact that’s easy to find documented on the web, provided you’re looking for it in the first place.

I’ve seen it suggested that an official GBC cable will fit in a GBA socket (although not vice-versa), which would solve the problem if I had an official GBC cable. But I don’t, and I’m not really willing to spend any more money on this problem (buying second GBA was about my limit for this project), so I took apart the GBA cable I had formerly called “defective” and rewired it. And it works great! I’ve pulled off my first successful pokémon trades trades in something approaching ten years, and stand ready to do more.

Of course, given my track record, I couldn’t justify asking someone to trade with me until I knew it worked. Which presents a bootstrapping problem. Fortunately, I had someone else’s Pokémon Red cartridge on hand — he wasn’t using it, so he let me borrow it. (With the stipulation that, once I got trades working, I had to take in his raichu. It’s the one pokémon that he wants to still have available if he starts over.) In short, I had to engage in some behavior I had spoken of derisively before: solo trading.

Still, this was a fairly satisfying conclusion to the whole problem, because I got to play with a soldering iron. I’ve played games where I had to read the data files in order to figure out how to win. I’ve played games where I had to read the source code, or even reverse-engineer the executable — it wouldn’t be exaggerating much to say that this is how I learned how to program. But how often does the pursuit of completion descend to the hardware level like this? Actually, pretty frequently, if you count the games that you can’t even start playing until your system meets the right specs. But this is different somehow.

It’s now been well over two weeks since my last post. I didn’t plan to take a break from the Stack, but it happened anyway, so I think I should take a moment to talk about how I’ve been spending my gaming hours lately. I’ve been playing Kingdom of Loathing, the humorous free browser-based RPG with stick-figure art and surprisingly deep gameplay, for… ye gods, the in-game stats say it’s been four years. I haven’t been playing it steadily over that time — I’ve taken substantial breaks — but lately I’ve been giving it a lot of attention.

The main audience for this blog has probably had some exposure to KoL already, but in case you haven’t, let me start by describing the mechanics a little. The main thing you do in the game, as in most CRPGs, is fight stuff. You initiate contact with monsters by choosing a zone on a map: with a couple of exceptions, there’s no exploration within encounter zones, just randomly-chosen monsters appropriate to the zone. (The Goatlet, for example, is populated exclusively by various kinds of goat, while the Misspelled Cemetary has skeltons and zobmies and the occasional grave rober.) Each encounter uses up one turn, or “adventure”, as they call them here (probably to more easily distinguish them from combat rounds). By default, every player gets 40 adventures per day, but there are ways to get more: certain items grant more adventures at rollover when equipped or installed in your campground, and consuming food and drink will grant a number of immediate extra adventures depending on its quality. (Cooking is an important skill in the game for improving the quality of food and thus getting more adventures out of it. Cocktailcrafting does likewise for beverages, producing ones with a better adventures/intoxication ratio. At the more advanced levels, Cocktailcrafting lets you enhance drinks by means of special ingredients like little paper umbrellas and coconut shells.) This whole system is a fairly brilliant bit of design, if you ask me. Most multiplayer games have a flaw that they wind up being (perceived as) “unfair” to casual players, and dominated by the few who are obsessed enough to spend all day playing. KoL gets around this by making it impossible to play all day, ¹Unless you use multiple characters, which is frowned upon and considered an abuse by the developers. but still provides some leeway for the dedicated enthusiasts to play longer. Enthusiasm has an effect, but it’s capped.

The overall goal of the game is to rescue King Ralph XI, who has been kidnapped by the Naughty Sorceress. Once you do this, you can “ascend” and start over from level 1, using a different character class if you desire. Ascension is not mandatory, and you can just keep on gaining levels if you want, but there are certain advantages to it: ascending players get to choose one skill to keep permanently (thus letting you have skills from more than one class simultaneously, like in the FF5 Jobs system), and may receive other rewards on the basis of voluntary restrictions. If you choose to go “hardcore” for an ascension, for example, you don’t get access to your items from previous runs — they’re kept in a mini-storage unit until you free the King. Your reward for completing a hardcore run is a special piece of stainless steel equipment, determined by your class. Swear off food and drink as well (that is, become “oxygenarian” for an ascension) and you get an even better item, forged from plexiglass.

Although each player proceeds through the plot of the game independently, there is a certain amount of interaction between players. Players can open stores in the Mall of Loathing to sell items to each other, cast spells to buff each other, create “clans” to share resources. The most recent big development in the game was the addition of Hobopolis, a dungeon designed for a clan to tackle as a group. The mechanics of the game mean that you’re basically adventuring solo all the time, but your actions in Hobopolis can have effects for everyone in your clan.

Hobopolis is one of two recent developments that got me investing more time in the game than usual. The other starts with the Traveling Trader. The Trader is a sort of special event: once every few months, he shows up for a day, always with one new item to sell. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but always he leaves with his wares at rollover. Back in January, for example, he was selling “strange shiny discs” for the exhorbitant price of 10 Twinkly Wads apiece. ²Wads, which come in several flavors, are kind of like concentrated magic, and are mainly obtained by pulverizing powerful magic items. They can then be forged into new items, or simply eaten. The discs had no obvious use, and looked suspiciously like AOL CDs ³The first letter on the label was smudged, raising some suspicion that it actually read “KOL”., but I bought one anyway, figuring it might be a setup for something later.

And it was. Three weeks ago, the Travelling Trader showed up again, selling a book called Rainbow’s Gravity, which contained the secrets to a new skill, one that lets you take one of each type of wad and smush them together into a Prismatic Wad. The price for this book: 50 strange shiny discs.

Now, I felt a little put out by that. I probably could have obtained 50 discs when they were available if I had known that I would need that many, but I had only bought one. So I felt like I should have this skill, but had been denied it. There were shiny discs available in the Mall, of course, but with the demand for them what it was on that day, I couldn’t possibly afford enough to buy the book. (I did, however, manage to make a small profit by buying some discs from the shops owned by players who hadn’t yet heard that they were suddenly valuable, and putting them in my own shop at a markup.) The book itself also started showing up in people’s shops in short order, but the asking price teetered around 6 million meat.

(I should explain: Meat is the main currency in the game. ⁴There are a few other kinds of money that are only usable in specific situations. For example, bounty hunting gives you Filthy Lucre, which can only be spent on special bounty-hunter items in the bounty-hunter store, and can’t even be traded to other players the way meat can. I imagine this is was developed in reaction to the absurdity found in a lot of RPGs, where you kill a wild animal, such as a wolf, and it drops gold. It is, of course, entirely reasonable that killing the wolf would yield meat. Of course, just swapping “meat” for “gold” creates opposite absurdities, such as when you find meat in treasure chests, but these are absurdities that KoL enthusiastically embraces. At any rate, it’s more or less equivalent to gold pieces as far as gameplay goes, except for the addition that meat can be pounded into meat stacks and used to craft meat-based weapons and armor.)

So. Six million meat. As it happened, I had a couple million on hand already, the remnants from when I sold my stash of Zombie Pineal Glands to buy some Time Trousers (both of which are no longer available except from other players who hoarded them). Could I cover the rest? Well, there are some skills and special items that increase the amount of meat you get from monsters. I don’t have them all yet, but I have most of them, and a little experiment showed that in my current state, I can easily make more than a million a week. I was surprised at this: I’ve been doing most of my recent adventuring in Hardcore Oxygenarian mode, which severely limits one’s ability to get extra adventures and spend them meat-farming. But outside of that mode, I can get upward of 200 adventures per day, and spend most of them hunting the meatiest creatures in the game by means of Transcendent Olfaction — a game-transforming tracking skill, and a recent acquisition for me. Specifically, I’ve been hunting the Cubist Bulls that show up in the Haunted Gallery. If there’s a more efficient way to meat-farm, I’d like to hear about it — the bulls have one of the highest yields in the game, but you don’t get them all the time even when you’re tracking them, and several of the other monsters in the Gallery yield no meat at all. It’s also possible that I’d be better served by farming for items to sell. Still, just doing as I’m doing, I’m making meat faster than I thought possible.

Of course, once I started on this course, I started wondering: Is Rainbow’s Gravity really the thing I should be spending all this meat on? There are a host of other items that I’ve generally thought of as out of my reach, mainly Items of the Month. This gets into the game’s revenue model. See, a $10 donation to the developers gets you an accessory called “Mr. Accessory”, which is a pretty nice item in its own right (+15 to all stats, no prerequisites), but which can also be traded at “Mr. Store” for various things. And one of those things is a new thing every month. I personally bought a Mr. Accessory early on in my KoL career, only to have it stolen when some griefer guessed my account password, which left me with a distaste for spending more money. But there are people who send in their $10 every month to get the new item and its associated content — it’s sort of like the monthly fees charged by conventional MMO’s, except completely voluntary. There are even people who buy more than one Item of the Month every month and put the extras up for sale in the Mall for millions of meat. And now that I know that I can produce millions of meat when I want to, these special items suddenly seem accessible.

I still haven’t bought Rainbow’s Gravity — its mall price has declined quite a lot as the Prismatic Wads lost their patina of novelty, and is still going down as of this writing. But I have bought the item from this last May, the Mayflower Bouquet, which seemed like the best buy for its price. I’ll probably go for the Naughty Origami Kit next, but maybe not before I ascend.

In fact, I’ve been fairly well agonizing over the decision of what formerly-unattainable thing to try for next, and when to try for it. A complete list of past Items of the Month can be seen on the KOL Wiki, which is an invaluable resource — as with Nethack, familiarizing yourself with the literature is key to success. ⁵Incidentally, the developers are familiar enough with Nethack to pay it tribute in a special Nethack-in-joke dungeon, where the monster illustrations are drawings of letters of the alphabet. And there’s a certain commonality of spirit there, of simple presentation on top of complex gameplay. There are also areas that are tributes to, or satires of, early text adventures, the Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Final Fantasy series — in decreasing order of respectfulness. And it’s all too easy, once you’re out of adventures for the day, to spend time poring over the list, checking the prices at the mall, and considering your options.

This reveals something unexpected: the limitation on the number of adventures can actually increase the amount of time spent on the game. In any other game, I’d spend my time actively pursuing my goals. I’d farm until it was possible to buy something, then I’d decide what to buy (if I hadn’t decided already), then I’d buy it. But these forced pauses in gameplay give me endless opportunity to make plans, and then to re-evaluate and reconsider them.

I’m posting this several days late: again I’ve spent a week out of town, and that means Pokémon. I actually didn’t do much with the game this time, but I did make another trade attempt.

The last time I tried to trade pokémon between two GBAs, I had problems. To trade, you go (in the game) to the Cable Club, an area found in every Pokémon Center. If you’re connected to another gameboy via gamelink cable, the Cable Club receptionist tells you to wait for the other party to join; if you’re not, she sends you away. So it’s easy to tell who the system thinks is and is not connected. The Cable Club was consistently accepting one side and rejecting the other. Furthermore, when I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in the other way around, it switched which one it accepted and which one it rejected. I concluded that there was something wrong with the cable.

Well, now I’ve tried it with a different cable, and I’m usually seeing the same symptoms. Tantalizingly, the bad end occasionally manages to recognize the connection, but never for long enough to actually execute a trade, as if there’s a loose connection. Or maybe it’s just the wrong sort of cable for this game: some docs I’ve found online suggest that I have to hack around the middle socket (which wasn’t even present on the first cable, but whatever). I’m not completely sure if that’s what I actually need here, though. Like all other gameboy hardware documentation I’ve found online, it assumes more knowledge than I have. But what the heck, I’ll dig out the multimeter and soldering iron and give it a try. The worst that can happen is that I’ll lose a cable that was useless to me anyway.

After all the side-quests were done, I had two options for the end: enter Lord Bane’s citadel, or follow my sword as the necromancers instructed. I did go so far as to try the latter, but when you do so, you get some dire warnings from Princess Serephine (who threatens to leave you if you continue on that course) and a final opportunity to chicken out, which I took. I may play through again with another character class, and if I do I’ll definitely want to give the alternate ending a look. But for now, Bartonia is safe.

Beating Lord Bane took me five tries, with various different collections of stuff, including some items I forged specifically for this fight. Lord Bane’s basic trick is that he casts spells that make him more powerful. For each element, he has a spell that destroys all of that element on the board and increases his mastery of that element by the number of gems destroyed, and in addition, his equipment makes his elemental masteries benefit him in other ways. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is his shield, which gives him +1 to all resistances for every 3 points of Earth mastery. So if you let him get enough Earth mastery, your spells start fizzling more and more. As I see it, there are three things you can do to overcome this. First, you can do what you can to hurt him with spells at the beginning of the fight, before he can resist it. Second, you can try to forestall his resistance by having high earth resistance yourself (to keep him from casting the spell that raises his earth mastery) and by using up the green gems on the board before he gets them. Third, you can increase the damage you do when matching skulls so that you’re less dependent on spells to kill him.

Here’s the combination of equipment that ultimately worked for me:

• Spells: Channel Air, Entangle, Forest Fire, Sanctuary, Lightning Storm, Charge!
• Equipment: Quartz Relic (+5 damage for each full mana reserve, +8 Air Resistance), Armor of Minogoth (prevents 1 point of damage when you receive 2 or more, +15 Earth Resistance), Deep Edge (+6 damage when you do 6 or more damage, +8 Earth Resistance), Frozen Harp (+4 to all mana reserves when you match 4 or 5, +8 Fire Resistance)
• Mount: a level 8 Wyvern (Rend spell, +6 to Battle skill)

By this point, I had enough Battle skill that just matching three skulls did 6 damage, and thus triggered the Deep Edge bonus. Like I said, I wanted Earth resistance more than any other kind, but this loadout provides a certain amount of resistance in all elements (water resistance being provided by one of the companions). As for the spells, I basically didn’t use Sancutary (adds to your resistance in a randomly-chosen element) at all, and would have swapped it out for something else if I had to give the fight another try. The most useful spells were Entangle and Charge!, both good for setting up moves; if you can get a foursome out of them, they can almost pay for themselves, given the effect of the Harp. Charge! is notable in that it takes advantage of the board in ways that Lord Bane can’t, so it’s relatively safe to cast when he has high resistance: you lose an opportunity, but at least that opportunity can’t be used against you. In the end, despite Lord Bane’s increased resistance, I struck the final blow with the direct-damage spell Forest Fire.

All in all, this was a satisfying game. Tile-matching games provide one of the purest experiences of flow, and RPGs, with their promises of greater power if you keep leveling, provide buckets of player motivation even when the gameplay isn’t particularly compelling, so it’s a winning combination. And on top of that, it has excellent production values. I haven’t even mentioned the sound: cascades involve one of the best thunderclap sounds I’ve heard in a game, and the background music has prominent bassoon solos. (Or possibly english horn. It can be hard to tell sometimes. Regardless, it’s a good thing.) I understand there’s a sequel due out soon, with a sci-fi setting and hexagonal tiles. I’ll definitely be playing that when it’s released for PC, which will probably happen months after it’s released for everything else.

I started off this whole series of posts by comparing Puzzle Quest to Bookworm Adventures, and I’m not the only one to make that comparison. It’s a pretty obvious comparison to make, since they’re two of the only representatives of the Puzzle/RPG Fusion genre. But now that I’ve experienced them both more fully, when I look at them side by side, BA seems little more than a proof-of-concept, while PQ is a full-fledged game, as complete and complex as any RPG on the market. I’m probably being a little unfair to BA because of its length, but even taking that into account, PQ has a more involved system of stats, provides more freedom of action on the main board, and gives you more options during combat — which is a little strange, because I’d call the underlying tile-matching mechanic weaker in that respect than BA‘s word-making. It seems to me that the main reason for this is PQ‘s decision to make both sides use the same board. BA had the computer opponent not act on the board at all — instead, it just hit at you and did damage. This meant that your actions on the board didn’t affect what the opponent could do, which put limits on the kinds of tactics that the game could support.

I also compared Puzzle Quest to strategy games such as Heroes of Might and Magic. It turns out that there’s a closer connection than I suspected: PQ officially takes place in the same campaign setting as the Warlords series (hence its subtitle, “Challenge of the Warlords”). I’ve played a couple of the Warlords games, long ago, but I’m basically not familiar enough with their trivia to recognize the names of its gods and kingdoms and so forth; apparently to a real Warlords fan, the connection would be obvious the moment the game said “Bartonia” or “Lord Bane”. Anyway, Warlords is basically the thing that Heroes of Might and Magic stole most of its ideas from, including the whole business of besieging cities, and running around to collect regularly-replenished resources. So now we have a direct reason for those elements to be present in PQ.

One final comparison. There is at least one blatant PQ imitation on the market: BattleJewels, a game written primarily for those few handheld platforms too geeky for PQ to run on (such as PalmOS and GP2X). Except that apparently it’s not an imitation: according to the developer, Stephen Bickham, it was in development for years before PQ was announced, and his real inspiration was Magic: the Gathering, so the massive similarity is just coincidental. Well, I’ve already noted how PQ has some M:tG-like aspects, so that part is believable. And there are some significant gameplay differences: BJ by default doesn’t refill empty slots, and it doesn’t have the whole campaign scenario and map treatment (being more geared towards PvP). To me, the campaign is a large part of the charm of the game, so I don’t feel compelled to plunge into BJ‘s context-free fights. In their basics, though, the two games are amazingly similar, even down to the choice of skulls for the damage tiles. But I’m not saying Bickham ripped off PQ, like many others have. For one thing, for all I know maybe PQ is the rip-off, and for another, there’s been such a general exhaustion of the possible variations on match-3 in recent years that it’s inevitable that some would be used more than once. Anyway, you can compare them for yourself, as both games have downloadable demos. PQ‘s has limited content, BJ‘s is nagware.

It turns out that level 50 is indeed the highest attainable. I have attained it, and I am now spending my time doing the last remaining batches of side-quests, forging new items, and researching spells. I’m a little reluctant to pursue the main quest line, because it seems to be funneling me towards another potentially regrettable decision.

There have been several choice points in the game so far. The first one occurs when you’re told to recruit Syrus Darkhunter, famous slayer of undead. When you first meet Syrus, he asks for your help capturing a necromancer named Moarg and bringing him to a prison in a city where Syrus is unwilling to set foot. Why won’t he set foot there? He refuses to say. Moarg, on the other hand, is quite willing to give you information, provided you set him free. Now, as far as I’m concerned, Syrus has only himself to blame if I don’t trust him. I’ve had experiences in D&D with NPCs who were supposedly on my side but who put everyone’s safety in jeapordy by withholding plot-crucial information for no good reason, and this scenario reminded me of that a lot. (See also Yeesha vs. Esher.) So I accepted Moarg’s proposition, hoping that his intelligence would be more valuable than Syrus’ assistance. It turns out that it wasn’t particularly valuable, but to my surprise, I got Syrus’ assistance anyway, due to my character lying to him.

Only in Lord Bane’s realm, when we were fighting Moarg’s colleagues, were my unintentional lies exposed. And so Syrus left the party — not a great loss, since his “10 damage to undead at the start of battle” is a mere drop in the bucket at this point, but still, a loss. I suspect it might have been possible to keep him by temporarily disbanding him before fighting the necromancers, but I didn’t think of it at the time. Removing people from your party is something you don’t usually don’t have any reason to do in this game, sort of like closing doors behind you in an adventure game.

Another early choice involved a potential ally who wanted me to escort his daughter to another city, where she’d be forced into a loveless political marriage. Once more, I struck a blow for freedom and against keeping promises, gaining the princess as a party member and incurring some extra encounters later on when her father sent soldiers to get her back. In general, though, other choices have been less morally ambiguous — things like choosing whether to return a magic item to its rightful owner or keep it for yourself. (I’ve been forging my own magic items anyway, thank you very much.)

That choice about Moarg, though, apparently “started me down the dark path”, if the necros are to be believed, and there’s someting I can do with a sword Moarg gave me if I “want to know true power”. I kind of want to defeat Lord Bane and achieve my primary mission objectives for the whole game, but I’m also curious about what the bad guys are so eager to show me. So far, their one big claim to power is that when they die, Lord Bane just raises them from the dead again. And as the player, I have that power already.

I seem to be approaching the end of the game. At least, I’ve reached the vicinity of the castle of Lord Bane, God of Death and primary antagonist, who’s appeared personally a couple of times to taunt me and set his minions on me. I’m also nearly up to character level 50, which may or may not be the highest attainable level — it’s certainly the last point at which you get a new spell just for levelling.

At this point, a couple of things are happening to change gameplay. First, my opponents and I have high enough skills all round that any move has a significant chance of being followed by a free extra turn, especially if there are combos and cascades involved. Things can change very rapidly without your being able to do anything about it. Second, elemental resistance is becoming a large factor.

The way elemental resistance works is this: Each side has a percentage rating in all four elements. That percentage is the chance that a spell cast by the enemy will fail if it uses the relevant color of mana. Resistances don’t usually go very high — the highest I’ve seen was a Fire Elemental that had something like a 30% resistance to red. Still, even a 10% resistance is enough to put paid to certain tactics. For most of the game, I’ve been making heavy use of Entangle, a spell that makes your opponent skip a number of turns determined by your green mana reserves. Whenever there were multiple sets of skulls ready to go off, or other tempting targets, I’d cast Entangle to get them all — not even necessarily to get them myself, but to keep them from being used against me. In other words, I was using it at exactly those moments when I least want to risk losing a turn to a miscast and giving the enemy first crack at everything.

Resistance isn’t the only thing that’s making spells useless. Some of the more advanced undead have abilities that drain green mana, making it a lot harder to cast spells with green components. Now, I know a lot of spells, but you’re only allowed to take six of them at a time with you into combat (plus a seventh determined by your mount). I’ve been making only occasional adjustments to my loadout through most of the game, as I learn new spells or decide to experiment with new tactics, but now I’m starting to pick my inventory on an enemy-by-enemy basis. I commented before on emergent changes in effective tactics. It’s nice to see that this is still going on, in a reasonably unforced way, this late in the game.

At its core, the way you interact with Puzzle Quest is identical to the way you interact with Bejewelled. On a PC with a mouse, this means that you have two ways of swapping gems: either click on the two gems that you want to swap, or hold and drag one gem in the direction of the thing you want to swap it with. Either of these two input methods suffices for any swap you can make, and indeed it took me a while to notice that two existed. I’ve been clicking rather than dragging, and only discovered the dragging version accidentally, when my hand joggled too far during a click — something that’s happened often enough that I wish I could turn the dragging off. It isn’t even just a harmless annoyance: when you accidentally enter an invalid swap — which is to say, one that doesn’t form a row of 3 or more — you lose 5 hit points and your turn ends. The hit points don’t hurt so much, but failing to act can be devastating.

The presentation, though, can and does go beyond that of Bejewelled, for the simple reason that there’s more to present. There’s a good deal of information on the screen — hit points, mana levels, spell names and costs — and even more available through tootips — both combatants’ skills, the effects of their equipment, descriptions of spell effects. Whenever any aspect of the game state changes, the change is indicated through glowy particle effects over the appropriate part of the display. This is a nice touch. I’m seldom watching the particle effects, since they occur at the exact moment that the board changes and I’m anxiously scanning it for exploitable patterns, but they register in a near-subliminal way.

Combat in RPGs is always an abstraction. Even in a relatively concrete system like D&D, there’s a sense that the actions explicitly taken aren’t all that’s “really” going on: combat rounds are supposedly six seconds long, which is an awfully long time to make a single sword thrust. Combat in Puzzle Quest is of course a great deal more abstract than that, but it still makes me wonder how much can this be regarded as an abstract representation of combat.

It’s the spells that are really suggestive in this regard. I call them “spells” because the game does, but in a lot of cases “special attack” is more apt. For example, ogres have a “spell” called “Thump!” that simply does 10 points of damage. It’s not hard to imagine this as an action that the ogre performs, and the “red mana” that it needs in order to perform it as a matter of summoning up its strength.

Or consider the sandworm. The sandworm has a potent combination attack consisting of the spells Sinkhole, which doubles the target’s green mana while halving mana in all the other colors, and Swallow Whole, which is a direct damage spell that increases in strength with its target’s green mana (the color that Sinkhole just doubled). Now, the four colors of mana correspond to the four elements, with green being earth. So one can imagine how sinking into the ground would increase your access to earth magic while decreasing your access to any other kind. Swallow Whole is trickier to explain — does your contact with the earth enable the sandworm to swallow you more thoroughly or something?

The Haste spell is a particularly interesting case: While it lasts, it does 4 points of damage to the opponent whenever you get an extra turn. This isn’t at all what I’d expect a spell called Haste to do. I’d expect it to do something more like grant its caster extra turns. But there are other spells for that, such as Entangle and Petrify — things that emphasize immobility on the part of the opponent, not additional mobility on the part of the caster. What Haste does, though, is it gives the caster an extra motivation to take advantage of things that grant extra turns. So the end result is that casting Haste has haste as an indirect effect.

The most tactically interesting spells are the ones that alter things on the board. There’s a spell called Burn that turns all the green (earth) gems into red (fire), and another called Freeze that turns all the red gems into blue (water, the closest thing the game has to ice). Griffons have a spell called Soar that turns all the green and blue gems into yellow (air) — a pretty clear representation of moving the arena of combat away from the land and sea and into the sky. Spells like these, executed at the right time, immediately create multiple rows of 3 or more, which collapse and then cascade and probably yield extra turns.

Even more intriguing, though, are the spells that involve the board geometry, such as Besiege (a “spell” used by catapults, which destroys a random 3×3 section of the board and gets full effects for every gem in it), Call Lightning (destroy one column and get the full effects) and Charge! (destroy one selected row, get the full effects, and do 5 points of damage). These paradoxically work against any attempt at interpreting the action as an abstraction of combat by not being abstract enough. They’re over-literal, and rebuff any attempt to take them seriously. They’re also among my favorite spells in the game — Charge! in particular has all sorts of tactical uses.

Although it could probably get by on the novelty of its gameplay alone, Puzzle Quest actually does something a little interesting with the plot. The premise is uninspired — the peaceful cities suddenly come under attack by orcish slavers and undead, just like in about half the D&D campaigns ever devised. But rather than just go on an uninhibited slaughter spree into Mordor, the player character, recognizing that the orcs are taking captives at an unusually aggressive rate, goes and talks to them in their city in order to get more information. There are even quite a few side quests you can do on behalf of the “evil” races, such as killing various monsters for an ogre gourmand who’s gotta eat ’em all. Do enough of these quests and he joins your party to save time.

This isn’t to say that it’s Ultima VI-style “we’re all brothers under the skin/scales/chitinous plates” time here. Sometimes the enemy can’t be negotiated with, even if you try. One ogre chief, when asked “Is there really any need for war?”, memorably replies “Is there really any need for PEACE?” But overall, the monsters have been more helpful to me than my supposed allies, who have been stinting on aid even in the face of the return of ancient evils bent on taking over the world, preferring to sit back and watch me win the war singlehanded. They’re far enough from the real action to think it’ll never affect them. It’s the orcs and ogres and minotaurs who are already starting to live under the lash of something scarier than themselves and, in some cases, not liking it.

Diplomacy with monsters isn’t unheard of, of course, especially in RPGs. I think of Ultima Underworld, which has settlements of peaceful goblins and ghouls, or the peaceful resolution to the Triton quest in Quest for Glory V. But it’s unexpected here, where all the story is really required to provide is excuses for ever-escalating combat. Also, to get slightly political here, I’m slightly reminded of the immediate aftermath of 9/11. People are already forgetting this, but at the very beginning, there was actually some debate about whether the attacks should be treated as acts of war or as crimes. Terrorism, after all, usually falls under the purview of the police, and the clearest antecedent — the 1995 car bomb attack on the WTC — was handled by the NYPD and the FBI, not the armed forces. Now, in Puzzle Quest, you’re not dealing with terrorism, but unquestionable acts of military aggression by foreign powers. However, the PC largely treats it like a criminal investigation anyway, questioning witnesses in order to try to find the guy at the top, and cooperating with the local authorities when possible, even when the local authority is a dragon god or something. I’m not saying that the creators of Puzzle Quest have a political agenda here, but it’s a strange way to write a fantasy epic.