Sword of Farga- Fark- Fairgal?
Posted in CRPG on December 4th, 2009 by adamantyr – 6 CommentsLast month of the year! I’m hoping I can get some serious infrastructure work done on the combat engine. It’s been too easy of late to be a “consumer” and not a “producer”… Plus, with Christmas coming, the weekends are getting busy. Even a snow day wouldn’t help me, since I can always remote in to work.
In other news, an old classic has recently been resurrected on the iPhone, the famous “Sword of Fargoal”. My blog title is a bit of a joke; he had originally intended it to be ‘Fargaol’, as in ‘deep prison’, but his publisher recommended he change it.
Sword of Fargoal play screen
The original game was developed by Jeff McCord in 1982, on his Commodore PET. He later sold the game to Epyx Software and ported it to the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64 machines. I think it’s really cool that he has been involved in porting his own classic game to a modern platform. I don’t own an iPhone myself (and have no interest in one), but if he makes a PC playable version I’d definitely buy it.
The game has been called a “Roguelike” at times, but it has substantial differences. The main one being that it runs in real-time instead of turn-based. The monsters move more slowly than the player on the upper levels, but speed up until they match his speed on the bottom levels. Each dungeon level is randomly generated, even on the trip back up. Also, given the scale of memory on the original, it doesn’t quite have as much depth to the character design. In many ways it looks like a single-player Gauntlet game with more role-playing game mechanics.
Like a lot of awesome games from that era, I am a little irked that no version of the game existed for the TI. I’m not particularly interested in a direct port (especially since the game is “still in business” they may have to reject requests for vintage ports just to protect their IP even if it’s harmless), but an inspired game may be a project I want to take on.
Yes, yes, I know… finish the other one first. 
I would say, though, a side project of a little less epic proportions may be a nice break.
