Eric the Unready
| Eric the Unready | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Legend Entertainment |
| Publisher | Legend Entertainment |
| Senior Developer | Bob Bates |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1993 |
| platform | MS-DOS |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | Mouse keyboard |
| medium | Floppy disk, CD |
| language | English |
Eric the Unready is a text adventure with graphics by the US manufacturer Legend Entertainment , which was released in 1993 for MS-DOS .
action
Fudd the Bewildered, king of the fictional kingdom of Torus, set in the fantasy genre, is dying. His unmarried daughter Lorealle the Worthy, the rightful heiress, visits him at his castle to stand by him, but disappears without a trace the following day. The player finds out that behind the disappearance is Queen Morgana, Fudd's wife and stepmother Lorealles, who, together with her lover Sir Pectoral, is planning to help her daughter from her first marriage, Grizelda the Hefty, inherit Fudd's. Morgana had Lorealle kidnapped and is keeping her captive in the castle of her sister, a witch. The queen's plan is to force Lorealle to marry a monster in order to exclude her from the line of succession. She foresees that the nearest village will send a knight to free Lorealle and bribes to ensure that the most incompetent knight available is chosen. This is Eric the Unready, embodied by the player.
The player's task is to get five magical objects that can be used to open the gate to the witch's castle:
- the pitchfork of Damocles
- the adjustable wrench of Armageddon
- the bloody steak of eternity
- the crowbar of the apocalypse
- the doomsday bolt cutter
The game is now divided into five sections, which the player visit one after the other and in each of which he has to get one of the said items. Finding an object is accompanied by a catastrophe in the game world that Eric accidentally initiated, but it does not affect the player and only serves to satirically exaggerate Eric's clumsiness. Each of the five time periods is subject to a time limit as Sir Pectoral is on the player's heels to stop him. If the player has all five items, the finale begins, in which Eric opens the doors to the witch's castle and prevents the forced wedding.
Game principle and technology
Eric the Unready is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. In contrast to classic text adventures, which do not have any graphic decoration, Eric the Unready comes up with a picture of the respective environment and a point-and-click interface with which simple commands can be created with the mouse. For complex control commands , however, the player still has to use the text parser .
Production notes
Eric the Unready is designed as a parody of the fantasy genre, but also references other topics such as Star Trek . Author Bob Bates calls the game his personal favorite among the games he designed because he had more fun writing the script than any other game.
At one point in the middle of the game, the graphics and interface of the game are suddenly faded out, so that, like a text adventure from the early 1980s, only pure text can be seen on the screen, and the player finds himself briefly in the opening rooms of the genre classic Zork again.
The cover of the original 1993 edition was designed by Boris Vallejo . The CD version of the game contains animations, improved graphics and a soundtrack that have not been integrated into the diskette version for reasons of space. In April 2018, a version that ran on modern PCs was released via the GOG sales platform .
reception
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The German magazine PC Games was very positive and particularly emphasized the wit and the user interface. The Power Play praised in particular the "narrative talent" by author Bates and demanding, but always logical puzzles the genre text adventure was as such but "slightly dusty". Hardcore Gaming 101 saw clear parallels between Eric the Unready and Monty Python's Knight of the Coconut in terms of humor, and regretted that the game was niche in the face of Monkey Island- style graphic adventures that had emerged some time before . Computer Gaming World named the game "Adventure of the Year" in 1993.
Web links
- Eric the Unready at MobyGames (English)
- Emulation of the game on Archive.org
- Walkthrough of the game
Individual evidence
- ↑ Interview with Bob Bates on AdventureClassicGaming.com. Retrieved February 17, 2015 .
- ↑ Eric the Unready . In: Dragon . No. 193 , May 1993, p. 63 ( annarchive.com [PDF; 12.3 MB ; accessed on August 30, 2020]).
- ↑ a b Thomas Brenner: Eric the Unready . In: PC Games . No. 4/93 . Computec Media , April 1993, p. 54–55 ( archive.org [accessed August 30, 2020]).
- ↑ a b Volker Weitz: Eric the Unready . In: PowerPlay . No. 4/93 . Future Verlag , April 1993 ( kultboy.com [accessed August 30, 2020]).
- ↑ Review of Hardcore Gaming 101.Retrieved February 20, 2015 .