Subject: REVIEW: Pool Of Radiance
From: [email-masked]

Pool of Radiance is a good game trapped within a terrible user
interface. PoR is essentially a software version AD&D in the same
vein as Bard's Tale and Dungeon Master. It is not as good as either.

[ed. note:  Does anyone use this on an A3000?  Does it function?]

            Pool Of Radiance - A Review with commentary
            -------------------------------------------

          Title: Pool of Radiance - A Forgotten Realms Fantasy RPG Epic, Vol I
      Publisher: Strategic Simulations, Inc.
                 675 Almanor Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086
          Genre: Adventure game a la Bard's Tale
   Requirements: 1MB of memory
Copy Protection: Code wheel, can be installed on hard-disk.

   The game comes on two disks and can be installed on your hard-disk.
   It uses a code-wheel copy protection scheme. Also included are two
   booklets totalling 72 pages and a platform specific Referece Card.
   One booklet concerns itself with the mechanisms for play and
   the second, the "Adventurer's Journal", is full of supplemental
   information essential to your game progress. The game refers to
   entries in the journal, tavern tales, and proclamations.

   You can save the game at any time under one of 10 labels (A-J).
   To restore another game you must quit out and start again. The
   game also multi-tasks (but see below) and the game screen supports
   the Amiga-M and Amiga-N control keys.

   In PoR, you create and control a party of adventurers that have travelled
   to a city called Phlan. Phlan is an ancient city that fell many many
   years ago. New Phlan is an attempt to reclaim the lost city from the
   monsters which now inhabit it. There is a 'safe' reclaimed portion
   and a number of sectors of unreclaimed city. These unreclaimed portions
   include the slums, the Library of Mendor, Podal Plaza etc... Each
   sector is 16x16 and typically has some conclusive encounter. For
   comparison, Bard's Tale used 22x22 mazes which are nearly twice as
   big (484 vs 256). 16x16 is a little small and somewhat lacking in
   'atmosphere'. There is also some wilderness adventure but I have not
   yet reached that state (and may never) so cannot comment on it.

   Speaking of detail: the walls have very little detail and
   perspective is not handled as well as in Bard's Tale. In BT, it is
   possible to map a great distance ahead, 5 or 6 sectors, if your
   light is good enough. In PoR, it is difficult to interpret the walls
   more than one sector distant. You must resort to the over-head, 2D
   'Area' perspective that the game offers you. This also allows you to
   cheat somewhat although it doesn't show you where doors or arches
   are.

   Pool of Radiance has a fair amount of game detail, there is an overall
   mystery involved, and the play balance is pretty good. The game
   itself would be very good indeed if they fixed up a few problems:

   o There is no type-ahead and the game uses polled i/o. This is
     unforgivable! While I am grateful that the game can be installed on
     my hard-drive and that it multitasks, the polling chews up so much
     cpu as to seriously debilitate the Amiga's multi-tasking
     capability. The other side effect is that there is no type-ahead. This
     slows down game play interminably. In any game involving repetitive
     maze navigation, the player becomes accustomed to the key strokes
     necessary to move about. Consider movement in Bard's Tale where it is
     possible to move the characters about very rapidly indeed. In PoR,
     this is impossible.

   o Every command and output message involves a very slow re-display
     of the text. Every single key press results in a complete
     re-display of all the text on the screen.  This is bizarre
     and also contributes to the gameplay slow-down. It's doubly
     strange in light of the fact that the graphic display is updated
     very quickly indeed.

     There is a mechanism for controlling the text speed but it is a
     kludge: Instead of controlling the duration of each message put in
     the display areas (there are two), it controls the wait between
     each word typed. This yields an effect not unlike a primary
     reader.

   o On the other hand, output messages all appear in the same space
     and always overwrite each other. Frequently one misses the output
     entirely. In fact, due to the continual refreshing it is possible
     to be oblivious to the text and not even realize that you have
     missed it. If these last two comments sound like text display is
     paradoxically too fast and too slow simultaneously, that's about
     how I feel about it. It took a mighty poor design team to come up
     with this display mechanism.

     How they managed to avoid learning about scroll-bars is beyond me.

   o The command menus are illogically ordered. Some items are
     accessible almost everywhere and others inaccessible except in
     special situations. For example, it is possible to 'pool' the group's
     funds when purchasing goods but not when purchasing training.
     Instead, you have to 'trade' money from character to character.
     This is only one of many examples. The designers made absolutely
     no attempt to streamline the menus according to frequency of player
     use. (Did they have play testers? Perhaps not - the credits don't
     mention any.)

   o In keeping with the poor quality of information display, it is
     impossible to examine a player's attributes during combat until it
     is his turn to act. Further, once a character is injured, there is
     no way, AT ALL, to determine what his full hit-points are. Thus
     when a cleric wants to distribute healing, it is impossible to
     distinguish between a character merely scratched (down 1 hp), and
     a more seriously injured character (say, down 10hp). Strategy is
     thus difficult to apply during a combat. Which fighter do you go
     help when you can't tell whether either of them are bleeding?

   o Combat in general has its own host of problems but most of these
     are of the same flavour as mentioned above. Suffice to say it is
     slow, slow, slow!! In keeping with AD&D, (where if you aren't
     following the Gygax Gospel EXACTLY, well then, you are a stupid
     heathen who doesn't merit the name 'gamer'), realism is pursued by
     pasting kludges upon kludges, typically at the expense of
     playability. Disengaging from combat is a good example: Even if
     the enemy you are adjacent to has his hands full with three
     adversaries, if you back away he gets a free strike at your rear
     with bonuses.

     Another problem I have with the combat is that there are too many
     40-kobold attacks and not enough fewer-but-more-challenging-enemy
     attacks. This of course aggravates a combat system suffering from
     continual text re-refreshes.

   o The graphics are very poor. I understand the requirement for
     portability but that doesn't require that they distribute the
     lowest quality graphics across all platforms.

     Why don't the graphic artists draw in a high resolution and then
     use one of the innumerable format conversion programs (the best of
     which are free such as fbm and pbm) to 'scale down' the graphics
     to each appropriate platform? In fact, the dithering etc that is
     done by these programs is incredible and would result in better
     looking graphics even for the EGA outputs.

   o The manual has problems, largely stemming from the countless
     nested single-line menus. It is difficult to find particular
     topics and there is neither index nor cross-reference.

   o The game doesn't take advantage of all the memory available to do
     caching. Each sector is loaded and unloaded every time you enter
     and exit even if you have the memory to contain it. The same is
     true of character and monster graphics. Pretty mickey mouse.

Hope this helps. Please pressure game producers and designers to work on
their user interfaces!

Regards,
Keith Hanlan  [email-masked]  Bell-Northern Research, Ottawa, Canada 613-765-4645

[Ed. note:  I understand that this is a rather negative review of the
    program.  It is, however, well written and expresses the author's
    opinions about Pool of Radiance in a clear and organized manner.
    If you have any disagreement or corrections to make (I'm sure that
    there will be some) then mail them to me at [email-masked].  I
    will collect them and post them all together.]