Eye of the Beholder - ADG Episode 289

Описание: An Irony: There are no Beholders in this video. :(

Today on Ancient DOS Games, Gemini's taking a look at Eye of the Beholder, a 3D dungeon crawl based on Dungeons & Dragons, created by Westwood Associates and published through SSI, Strategic Simulations Incorporated, in 1991.

This game set a number of standards as to how to do a multi-character 3D dungeon crawl, to the point where even some modern games mimic the mechanics debuted here. It's actually for that reason it took so long to get around to this one, fearing that this game would be even more deadly than the clones it spawned, but the greater irony is that of all games to use these mechanics, this is perhaps the easiest of them all!

...which doesn't actually make the game even remotely easy, just that if you're gonna die it's probably YOUR fault, not some arbitrary game mechanic or such. :P

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Additional Information and Corrections:

Here's a link to the Eye of the Beholder trilogy (also known as the Forgotten Realms Archive Collection One) on GOG if you wanna give it a try with a digital copy: https://www.gog.com/game/forgotten_re...

For those interested in a modern game using these same mechanics, I mentioned and showed a screenshot of Legend of Grimrock, which is ALSO available on GOG! https://www.gog.com/game/legend_of_gr...

The two NES games I showed screenshots of are Pool of Radiance on the left and Heroes of the Lance on the right. Pool of Radiance is also exceptionally well balanced from what I remember and the DOS version might show up on ADG someday, while Heroes of the Lance on the other hand was... kinda dumb... though again, I haven't played either of these games since childhood so my matured game design and playing skills might see both, either or neither of them differently now if I gave them a second look. :B

There IS actually an option to see the HP numbers of your characters, though it's easy to miss as it's called "Bar Graphs" in the game's preferences, and it's still weird that you cannot ever see the HP numbers at all if you leave this option enabled. :P

For some reason, YouTube's system says this game was released in 1990, not 1991... Might have to do with the game's copyrights saying 1990, as it was probably in the works then but didn't manage to make it out until the next year. :P

I've been made aware of a game called "Dungeon Master" which came out a few years before this one which has much the same style of gameplay, even a similar font, yet was made by entirely different people. That means Eye of the Beholder was NOT the first game to use the kind of mechanics on offer here! :O

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