Temple of Apshai Trilogy

This version of the game is broken an unfortunately that seems to have always been true of the DOS build. Issues: * No experience is ever earned meaning character progression is completely broken * Combat is broken, the enemies do very little damage. Temple of Apshai is a punishing game and it's fairly common to die without a proper build and paying attention to health. * The item values are broken. For example, there's a Copper Ingot in a hidden room on the first level that's normally worth 20 silver - this version gives 450 silver. With the combat system broken as well, it's trivial to walk in, pick up that copper ingot a few times and have enough money to get maximum equipment. That's not supposed to happen. I never thought I'd give Temple of Apshai a poor review as I have good memories playing the C64 version back in the day, but what's released here is a very broken version. It's sad that they didn't catch this themselves with some basic play testing. After talking with some others in the DOS retro gaming community and checking original disks, the DOS version has always apparently been broken. They should really replace with this another emulated version (C64, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Amiga) that actually plays correctly. This version is just broken and as long as they're offering the DOS version stay away. It's a shame because this is a classic RPG and any other version of the Apshai Trilogy would be worth playing.

I love this game, but not the bugs. The Temple of Apshai is definitely a retro/nostalgia game for 70/80s gamers -- or those who want to see what the first "legitimate hit" RPG game looked like. Unfortunately, they simply released the IBM version of the Temple of Apshai Trilogy (1985) without dealing with the bugs. The Trilogy features three different dungeons with four levels each. I've put 9+ hours into the game and unfortunately discovered a bunch of bugs. The biggest? It fails to track your experience, so while you gain money and weapons by killing monsters and retrieving treasures, you don't get better at fighting. This becomes immediately apparent when you run into the tougher Level 3 and Level 4 monsters. I played the Temple of Apshai dungeon for hours on my family's Apple II in 1980-1982 and loved it, but I never found the Trilogy version for the Macintosh (which I had in 1985 in college). I just stumbled across this on Steam and in a fit of nostalgia decided to clean all three dungeons (it's nice to have accomplished something in the decades since high school). Hours of play later I'm through the first four levels and starting on the "Upper Reaches", but to do that I have to constantly manually re-enter my character to level up the experience points. There are other annoying bugs, but the experience issue is the biggest. This is still a fun (if hopelessly obsolete) RPG, but to play it right, you need patience. You'll have to manually re-enter your character to add experience. (How much? Who knows?) I am trying to complete all the dungeons the "right" way but could lose patience. When that happens I'll create a super character and just hack my way through the remaining levels just to say I finished something I started in 1980. One of the best bits of the original games were the room descriptions, which they printed in the manual because the tape drives/disks lacked storage space. They offered a lot of clues about where to search for secret doors and the like, so if you want to play the game it's worth Googling up the manual and command card online. This game scores extremely high in the nostalgia department for me and might be fun for younger gamers who want a taste of the 8-bit life, but the experience bug means you need to track some things yourself. Pro Tip: if you really want to be methodical you need to make maps of the dungeons as you clear them. That way you can quickly run back to the easier levels for things like healing potions and weapons when you exhaust them in the harder levels.

[u]Recommendation[/u]: Learn from my mistake and [i][u]do NOT buy this[/u][/i]. It is a distribution of the 1989 re-release of the 1985 DOS port of the game, [u]not[/u] the 1979 TRS-80 original. The DOS port was broken when it was released in 1985, and has never been fixed in any subsequent release over the last 38 years. The most egregious problem is that [u]your character cannot gain levels in the DOS version of the game[/u], but there are numerous other bugs on top of that. This happens sometimes. Back in the 80s, there were many games that were originally released on any of a dozen different computer platforms, and that usually didn't include MS-DOS. Games were only ported to DOS when both a) they were wildly successful and b) the PC began to catch up to the other computers in processing and graphics power [b]years[/b] later. Many programs - not just games, but particularly games - were often ported to DOS long after the original developers had left the project and without any serious attempt at QA testing. This one was released for DOS [i]six years[/i] after the game's original launch, and when it was released, it was a simple port, not a remaster or tailored release. The PC didn't really develop as a respectable gaming platform until about 1990; you should always research whether re-releases of titles originally published before 1990 are adaptations of the original games from a different computer platform, or just images of the lousy DOS ports from that time period. I didn't take my own advice in this case, and am sad as a result.

I wish Steam had the Commodore 64 version instead.

It's safe to say Temple of Apshai's popularity doesn't owe anything to this buggy, half-arsed, con-job of a port from 1985 (or '86). Just because PCs of then were mostly CGA 4 colour and bleeper-speaker, doesn't mean you couldn't make a decent adaptation of the game. There's other games of the time, ported to the various computers and consoles and the DOS port seemed like "Oh well, the PC isn't really meant for games like the other computers are so of course you're getting a crappy inferior port". For perspective, the Apple II version of the Apshai Trilogy, looks good and plays well and I don't know of any bugs. I mean the game doesn't really have much of a goal, you just collect treasure and amass wealth, build your experience score and boost your stats. It's not like other such games, where as you build your bank account, you get access to more costly and powerful equipment. You soon have enough silver to buy everything from the inn/store, so there's no use for it except to stare at your massive balance on the screen and pretend it's real. The final episode of the trilogy, The Curse of Ra, is a bit more interesting, because there are a lot of hidden paths, much harder to find than the standard hidden doors from the previous episodes. They're quite clever really and I don't think I know of any other games with secrets hidden in quite the same way. In the final level, the Temple of Ra, there's a room at the heart that is very hard to get to. It has a sacrificial altar made of platinum that you can take with you (because it's hollow!). The game doesn't end when you get it back to the inn, but you could view that as your ultimate goal.

One of the first dungeon crawler games I played...in all its CGA glory.

Has not aged well. Play Rogue from Epyx (1985) for a much better experience!

Трилогия включает в себя три игры: собственно саму игру "Temple of Apshai" и два дополнения к ней "Upper Reaches of Apshai" и "Curse of Ra". Все игры не имеют определённого сюжета. Продвигайся из комнаты в комнату открывая сундуки, да моча монстров на своём пути. Нашёл подробный, огромный мануал к игре в интернете. Только любителям древности.

I played this game when it was released on the C-64 and have fond memories of this game but there are no instructions to tell you what keystrokes do what. I expected the graphics to be not so good but these are worse than that. \It's nearly impossible to tell what you're looking at. Save your money.

Brings back memories of using my TRS-80 computer in 1980. The first real dungeon crawl in vivid 4 colors.