Knight Orc

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Knight Orc is a text adventure with graphics developed by the British computer game manufacturer Level 9 . It was released in 1987 for various home computers.

action

The player represents the Orc Grindleguts, who had amused himself with other orcs the day before in the restaurant "Orcs Head Tavern" located in a fictional fantasy realm. After Grindleguts alcohol-induced awareness had lost him were his drinking buddies with a group of people in a dispute, they under which the people taking part in a joust pledged. In order to keep their word, they prepared the helpless grindleguts for competition and ran away themselves. At the beginning of the game, Grindleguts finds himself tied to a horse, a lance tucked under his arm and on the best way to serve a human knight as a defenseless victim in a joust. It is the player's task to orientate himself in a world populated by orcs hostile to people and to take revenge on his tormentors of his own race.

Gameplay

Knight Orc is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the actions of the player are also entered as text via the keyboard and processed by a parser . In almost all versions, the scenery is shown illustrating, hand-drawn and then digitized still images that occupy the top half of the screen. In the Spectrum version, the player had to do without graphics due to the limited storage space.

Development history

Due to the limited storage capacity of early home computers, Knight Orc is divided into three parts that must be played one after the other. The development environment that Level 9 worked with was specially developed for this game and was given the name "KAOS", which stands for "Knight Orc Adventure System" - the misspelling was deliberately ignored by Level 9. A special feature of the KAOS development environment was the ability to comprehensively simulate computer-generated characters, which was still an unusual approach when the game was released. Knight Orc makes use of this possibility and integrates numerous computer-controlled characters with a life of their own who go about their business independently of the actions of the player.

Included with the original game was a printed short story by Peter McBride called The Sign of the Orc , which explains the background story for the game.

reception

Despite the lack of graphics, Sinclair User was completely enthusiastic, highlighted the “exquisite” room descriptions and the pseudo-intelligent NPCs and compared the humor of the game with that of Douglas-Adams novels. The SPAG Magazine was also noted anything negative, praised backstory, parser, and particularly the independently operating characters and threw the thesis, Knight Orc had been denied because of an anti-hero as a character the commercial breakthrough. Boris Schneider-Johne criticized the“overqualified” parser and the graphicsfor Happy Computer ,while his colleague Anatol Locker praised the action and interaction of the NPCs with one another.

magazine Rating
ASM 8/12
Happy computer 77/100
Sinclair users 10/10

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Sinclair User # 071, February 1988, p. 81, available online
  2. SPAG # 015, available online