Masters of Serebal - The who and a what now?
MASTERS OF SEREBAL
(M.C. Lothlorien)
I can already feel the number of views plummeting on this site as I start to write some bon mots about the game which has gone and won this little compo for 1984’s unreviewed and unloved titles. This one ain't quite as sexy as the previous two it's true. If you can call Super Chopper and Treasure Island that, which you clearly shouldn't. But I have to stick to my principles and not review just the games people know and love. “Gentlemen, let’s broaden our minds. Lawrence!” I think I’d better lie down, I’ve gone a bit peculiar…
Before M.C. Hammer came M.C. Lothlorien, and they dropped tons of sick tracks, like Austerlitz and Waterloo (probably). They came from Cheshire, just down the road from me, and were absolutely obsessed with warmongering. Alan Partridge would have loved them and featured them on his niche TV channel, UK Conquest, just after Skirmish. Hope you enjoyed that reference, I certainly did.
They released so many war games it got silly and even Matthew Broderick complained. So they thought they'd do some games for pacifists too, as that was a large part of the market that they hadn't even considered yet. There was Micro Mouse Goes Debuggering, Arena, Hyperblaster, Billy Bong (their pro-drugs classic) and... well alright there were a few, but suffice it to say the vast majority of their stuff involved playing with toy soldiers and were bought by the same nineteen people. Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh nineteen (*slap*)
So nobody expected an adventure from the fair elven folk of Lothlorien, not even Galadriel herself foresaw it. But lo, in the second age of man, in 1984, the year of our Lord Sauron, the Masters of Serebal did cometh. And not even Saruman the all-knowing big head kneweth who the freak they were. But he was vaguely curious for a few minutes at least, it had his staff twitching a little.
Talking of epic literature, the inlay to this title spins quite the yarn, as a lot of fantasy games like to do, and it comes dangerously close to getting skimmed royally. It's pretty dramatic. "In the beginning the land was bare, still and lifeless". Sounds like what Leslie Nielsen might say if you asked him to tell you something from the very start. Then "the earth screamed out as its heart cried out for the souls of its lost children." Yeah this definitely isn't Micro Mouse.
Soooo to summarise. Blah blah blah... "11 races of the earth... a darkness descended on the people... famine and floods... the Serebal masters struggled to save the Earth... eleven scrolls given to them... the land was the law, the law was the scrolls... years passed... now it's 5016 P.T. (no idea)... cross-breeds and mutants now roam the land... only man has kept his scroll safe, the rest are scattered across the land... you are tasked to find them all and restore peace." Phew. It’s all a bit much.
Find ten more scrolls then and you've got the lot, and your collection might fetch a nice price on Ebay. Each one has a little poem which points you cryptically to the location of the next, so a cross country treasure hunt awaits. A beardy guy called Altaborn holds the first scroll and thereafter the rest are all hidden in underground caves, which will please those who enjoy crawling in dungeons no end.
Your screen has a nice, clear little map of the area, and a lot of bars off to the right. These are for stamina, provisions, gold, shiny gems, armour, health potions and scrolls collected so far. Yellow blocks represent one unit, magenta blocks are units of ten. This tended to confuse me somewhat, leaving me wishing they'd just have gone with numbers, but I guess this way looks prettier. You move around the map pretty darn slowly it has to be said, leading me to think this game might be in BASIC, but I couldn’t seem to BREAK into it, so maybe not? Once you reach the edge of the map and move off it, the whole scene does a jerky scroll to centre you again. I suppose it was 1984, you can’t reasonably expect miracles.
There are a lot of keys to remember in this game, which seems bananas these days, but it was quite the done thing back then to have to press all sorts of letters for all sorts of actions. I think a lot of companies had shares in those keyboard overlays people often resorted to. I had a few myself, although the one I had for Space Raiders was just plain silly on reflection. In Masters Of Serebal, you get various options depending on where your character is located. There are many villages around where you can top up on food, armour and health potions, so long as all your funds haven’t been robbed by wandering baddies or the annoying blokes who ‘guard’ every bridge around the place as though they’re Tony Soprano. You can pay them or fight them, which often proves tricky, so you end up fighting, losing, then paying. What a racket.
Fighting’s a quirky old thing in this game. When you encounter a foe, you’re suddenly thrown into a game a bit like Wizard’s Warriors, from my murky recollection. You have to take cover behind the scenery and have a bit of a Star Trek one-on-one duel with the monster, both using 'triorangs', a fork-like thrown affair, of which you handily have an infinite supply. It takes quite a few successful throws to defeat a monster, and I was terrible at it. So usually they ended up nicking some of my gold and food, and giving my health bar a fair old whack. It’s an odd little sub-game, but it's rather nice to see such originality in an olde worlde dungeone crawler... -e.
When you actually reach a cavern which contains one of the scrolls, things change unexpectedly again. You’re suddenly confronted with a snazzy 3D view of proceedings, like a smaller version of Transylvanian Tower, and hopefully quite a bit better. You have to brave the odd creature as you’d expect, and watch out for sneaky secret doors to disorientate you. But the most confusing thing I found was that your usual direction keys moved you by compass point rather than by the 3D view you see onscreen. Until I realised this I was forever moving in circles and getting nowhere (like life itself), but if you just follow the overhead map instead, things improve. Probably me being dumb, poor adventurer that I am.
So once you’ve found your scroll, out you come and onto the next one, with your clue in hand as to its whereabouts. And on it goes in familiar manner. But what is quite nice about this game is its tendency to throw relatively random events at you as you go. The usual scenario of getting robbed by brigands ain’t nothing new, but on occasion you may have to avoid a leper colony, get ambushed by giant ants and sometimes, just sometimes, locals even befriend you and feed you, rather than attacking you holding flaming torches. Way to smash that stereotype, you go, locals! Every few spaces something tends to happen, which makes the going a tad slow, but means you don’t end up being bored for long. The monsters are an odd blocky lot, most resembling Space Invaders aliens, and for some reason when you press the G button, you have access to the Monster Guide, which contains 20 pages totalling 400 creatures, but is merely a graphic representation of what they look like, no further useful info as far as I could tell. And once you open this guide, you have to flick through all 20 pages to get out of it again – this part is total craziness. I think they just wanted to show off all the graphics they’d done.
Collecting all 11 scrolls would appear to be quite the challenge, so luckily you can save your game, which is a considerate feature for the time. The map contains all sorts of types of terrain so is a fairly interesting place to wander about in, though I’m not too sure how large the whole playing area is, as I came nowhere near to completing this game. You run into various characters of varying beardiness, who offer help or hindrance, so you don’t get too lonely on your mighty quest. Though sometimes you’ll wish the monsters would leave you alone for a while to collect your thoughts.
Graphics? Well they’re functional but work well enough, and are colourful too, making for a visually appealing map generally. There isn’t much sound apart from some bloopy effects at the start of each battle. But this game isn’t about looking pretty, it’s all about the questing. And it shows that the programmer, a Mr. Keith Hunt, has put a lot of love into it, which I reckon has resulted in a very passable offering, reminding me a little of some recent homebrew efforts that people have knocked up. Old school adventuring has always had its fans, and I reckon they might want to check this hitherto unheralded title out, for something a bit more Serebal, sorry cerebral, than jumping on platforms.
MASTER-FUL MARKS
74%
THE GAMES THAT TIME FORGOT: 1984 EDITION
1st place!
- FIN -