![]() ![]() ![]() While Eye of the Beholder doesn’t revolutionize the genre in any way, it still remains one of SSI’s more well-known and successful series. Though some characters are reoccurring throughout the series, the narrative seems to have taken a back seat and serves no true purpose rather than to give you reason to hack through monsters. The story is then introduced through a short cutscene, and your band of explorers are then thrown into some dungeon. You can take time to create a party of four adventurers, or choose to import characters from the previous games a feature that was incorporated into various other SSI games. ![]() This does add some strategy to how you can approach battles, but ultimately running up to most enemies and simply attacking with your melee characters is all you need to do for most encounters.Įach game usually begins the same way. The characters in the front row take most of the damage, and can attack with standard melee weapons, while those in the rear can throw weapons or cast spells without being in harm’s way unless, of course, the enemy attacks you from behind. As long as you can see the enemy, you can immediately begin combat with long range attacks as you approach the same goes for your adversaries. Fights are triggered as you approach enemies without the need to ever enter a battle sequence. I do get a little further into the level each attempt, but not quite made it further.Combat benefits the most from this approach, and is handled fairly well. After hacking my way through some webs, my party is confronted by giant spiders, and after killing a few of them, some of my party usually end up poisoned with no way to recover - All hints welcome! I’ve reloaded my save at the start of the level numerous times. The game’s iconic red walls are replaced by darker, danker blue coloured walls, and spiders’ webs. It’s the 4th level of the game, and the first major palette change. I was able to reach the point where I usually get stuck. I’ve never beaten Eye of the Beholder, so I knew my review of the game would only include maybe a fraction of the whole game. Accessible via the “M” key, you’ll see your current location denoted by an arrow, together with all previously visited locations, and even markers indicating interactive wall and floor switches. I was given a fully playable Beta version more than 2 years ago to play on my Twitch stream, as well as coding and pixelling streams from Andreas, and regular press releases to Indie Retro News.Ī new feature which wasn’t in the original PC or Amiga versions of the game, is an extremely useful automap. Updates from Andreas and the team have been regular, so most people will know the game’s been in development. Then in 2018, a chance encounter with TwoFlower reminded Andreas that he needed to finish C64 Eye of the Beholder, and suggested he target the EasyFlash cartridge format… The C64 now had the hardware required to overcome the C64s lack of memory! So work started from scratch, and this time there would be no stopping them. Whilst the rights holders were unlikely to allow a solo dev to publish the game on a commercial basis, the process of completely reverse engineering the game would prove invaluable later on. After reverse engineering the entire game in less than a year he had a pixel precise replica of Eye of the Beholder, including automap. In 2010 Andreas got a Macintosh PC, and decided to learn Objective C and attempt an iOS port. In 2009 despite having all the levels, wall rendering, and items, the memory ran out, and Andreas had to call it a day on another valiant porting effort. Focus switched to a dedicated C128 version and work continued until 2009 with Two Flower and Mirage contributing some icon graphics. The memory limitations of the C64 forced Andreas to quickly abandon the C64 version - releasing a preview of a single level on CSDB. Work started around 2006 targeting C64/128. Whilst this was abandoned fairly quickly, it did allow Andreas to learn the file compression, maze format and parts of the game’s scripts. Even creating a fully fledged save game editor using AMOS which featured a very nice UI.įast-forward to 2005 and Andreas had dug more into the inner workings of the game and created an open source dungeon crawler engine called JAD (Just Another Dungeon crawler). Andreas began hex editing game saves as a way to gain bonuses in the game. The story of C64 Eye of the Beholder really begins with the Amiga release in 1992.
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