Games developed by Castle Technologies
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Advanced Xoru
One of the best text-based RPGs, Advanced Xoru is an excellent but little-known shareware dungeon crawler reminiscent of Infocom's Beyond Zork, but with much more effective use of the RPG elements that actually affect gameplay.
You play an unnamed adventurer who, like the Avatar in Ultima, was inadvertently plucked one day from your familiar 20th century world into an obscure dungeon in a fantasy world. Your objective, as prompted by the HELP screen, is to make your way through three levels of subway labyrinths to find and defeat the Ebony Titan of the lands of Xoru.
There are many innovative features that set Xoru apart from most RPGs and text adventure games. As in Beyond Zork, an automatic ASCII map appears on each screen showing your location and possible exits. But Xoru uses the RPG mythos much more effectively in several ways. For starters, you can choose to play as one of five character classes: paladin, necromancer, barbarian, zen-druid priest, and grim tracker. Each of these classes starts the game with unique items. If you choose to be a zen-druid priest, for example, you will start the game with a useful spell in your inventory. Naturally, if you're a barbarian you can't cast any spells, so various scrolls found within the game will be meaningless to you. This makes Xoru replayable in a similar way to Sierra's Quest for Glory games: after finishing the game as one class, you may want to replay it as another to try different ways of solving the same puzzles.
The puzzles are fairly logical, but nowhere near as inventive as those in Beyond Zork. Xoru is arguably more difficult, however, as you only have 353 moves to finish the game. Unlike other IF titles that increase the counter with each move, the move counter in Xoru starts at 353 and counts down to zero. While this may seem like an unnecessarily strict number of moves, it's actually not that bad since non-move commands, such as LOOK, etc. do not count as a move.
Xoru has other useful features, such as allowing you to use the arrow keys to move. No more typing GO NORTH, etc. It also has a very useful HELP function, and an excellent DIAGNOSTIC command that indicates your character's armor value, strength level, score, rank, and general feeling (e. g. , you can feel 'good', 'tired', etc. ).
Overall, Xoru strikes me as an excellent, well-written and very enjoyable text-based RPG. It is worth a look for RPG fans who are curious about the IF genre, and vice versa. Highly recommended.
