'Slog' is a term we came up with ourselves to describe Stu's torturous play-through and blogging of the TRS-80 Color Computer CRPG, "Gates of Delirium". The idea being that in some cases, playing these old games is more tedious than fun.

I'm not sure yet if I can "slog" Paladin's Legacy... this is a really BAD grind. And I have no idea if I can get around the corner so that my character can actually survive and have enough gold to keep his health full and be able to buy decent equipment and enough food to be able to explore and talk to NPC's without loss.

SLOG IT, baby!!! :)

I love that people are actually using this little coinage of mine. I'm sure it will show up in a hiphop song any day now.

Yo yo yo, baby I was readin' yo blog
And thinking how nice it'd be to slog
Through yo underbog, yo underbog
Sloggin' it with my sloggas, yo yo yo.

Is there any way possible that you're missing something? That sounds like a serious, serious flaw that someone along the way to publishing would have discovered just wasn't going to work, no?

Wii: 1345 2773 2048 1586 | PS3: ArmchairArcade
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.

I just loaded up Paladin's Legacy to give it a try. I was thinking about doing a "slog" like Stu did with Gates of Delirium.

Unfortunately, the game's got some serious flaws with the game play. In particular, the early grind curve is brutal. You start with 50 gold and 20 food, and no weapons or armor. While you start with a good number of hit points, they go very fast. And when I hunted around to find an Inn or someplace to get more hit points, the only one I found was a bishop who would sell a healing potion for 100 gold. Keep in mind you're getting 1-2 gold per monster kill here, and after a dozen or so fights you're nearly dead. I split my ability score points evenly among all four; possibly overloading Strength and Dexterity at the start of the game may give a bit of an edge, but I doubt it's enough.

Now when you die, you get send to a graveyard. This is cool, but when you talk to the Resurrector, he restores you to the START OF THE GAME. No experience, level 0, 20 food, 50 gold. What the heck?! Unless I cheat, there's nothing short of pure LUCK or a lot of save/restores to somehow magically scrape enough money/XP together to get ahead of the curve so you can actually afford to get healing. I don't even know if going up in level will help at all... I've gotten around 130 XP and the Queen still won't raise me a level.

It's really a pity, because I can tell you that the game's got a LOT more interesting dialogue than Gates of Delirium, by a long shot. Every NPC gabs on and gives you a lot of information. They even have NAMES. He has a decent background and plot mapped out. And some funny stuff too. But with no way to recover HP without cheating or pure luck... I just can't play it any further.

Yeah, that's the classic CoCo2 artifact color scheme. These screen shots are particularly BRIGHT, though. And a bit sharper on the edges than a classic composite monitor could do. It's funny that a lot of emulators work hard to recreate the original NTSC messy pixels, because it doesn't look "right" otherwise. :)

I'm very approving in that he went for his own appearance scheme rather than directly copying Ultima's, as Gates of Delirium did. However, I would also say that it's a bit too "busy" on screen. Since he didn't more than four colors, the UI design must focus on clearly distinguishing between different elements like game screen, text, and so forth. As is, it's a bit of a mess... it looks like it could give me a real migraine in a few short hours of play.

May have to play this one and blog on it, though.