GameWTFs.com

Super Nintendo, NES & GameBoy tomfoolery;

(back to article list)

Up from (Super) Obscurity

There are some pretty good RPGs on the Super Nintendo; it was the console when "Console RPGs" really hit their stride. However, talking about that is pretty dull so today we're going to talk about...
Putting the "Dung" in Dungeon Crawl
Eye of the Beholder, also known as AD&D: Eye of the Beholder, or to be formal, An Official Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Computer Product: Eye of the Beholder, is not a very good game.
It's what's known as a "Dungeon Crawl", where you are in a maze of twisty little corridors, all alike. For no particular reason, tradition dictates that you call this a "dungeon", rather than a maze, labyrinth, cave, or catacomb. The only way to tell why this is would be to ask Gary Gygax, and since he's dead (and, despite popular rumor, has not returned as a Lich), you'd need great powers of the occult to speak to him. While many hysterical parents in the '70s and '80s believed that playing Dungeons and Dragons gave you access to immense occult powers and secrets unknown to man, in actuality it just gave you access to mildly pornographic drawings of women in chainmail bikinis, and the secret that "there are dice with more sides than the cubes with white and black spots which came with your copy of Monopoly."
Anyway, you must walk, or to use the parlance of the genre, "Crawl" around this "Dungeon", fighting monsters (and killing them), gathering gold (from killed monsters), and "Leveling Up" by somehow absorbing the ethereal substance known as "EXP" which is emitted when any living thing is slain (usually with a sword). Evidently Dungeons and Dragons (and every role playing game which followed it) postulates a world like The Highlander, except even spiders and rats have a little bit of "the quickening" to impart upon the opportunistic swordsman!
However, you can usually have some fun with even the lowliest RPG: you get to explore, you get to fight the same enemies over and over again to get more powerful. Some games embellish this a little bit, with bells-and-whistles like "towns", where you use "golds" (or "GILS") to "buy" new "equipment". These "towns" may also contain "people" who "say the same 20 words every time you bump into them."
Well, Eye of the Beholder, like most dungeon crawls, isn't having any of that rubbish! You're here for one thing and one thing only: crawling around a dungeon! And killing the monsters that are also crawling around the dungeon (so, kind of two things, but anyway). Even this isn't the death-knell for some gamers: there's lots of sword-smiting to be done to a large number of enemies, and a fair amount of dungeon puzzle-solving (locked doors and keys, semi-hidden buttons on the walls to be pressed, pits and teleporters) which are required to continue to circumnavigate the big, bad dungeon.
Unfortunately, Eye of the Beholder is one of the irritating "real-time" Role Playing Games, where your combat prowess is measured partially in arms, armor and STR-points, but also by how quickly you can use the "pointer" icon to click on the little "weapon" icons by your character's faces. Given that the pointer moves slowly, and you have to manually glide it to every weapon you want to attack with (there's no way to make it automatically jump to each character or weapon in turn), this sort of saps the fun right out of the game.
But on the upside, You also have a bunch of in-game characters to pretend to be -- and who can have complex social relationships with each other (if you have a good imagination)!
So; without further ado, let's dive into the...
Character Creation System!
As is the tradition in Dungeon Crawling video games, you can make your own characters, choosing from a variety of different species and character classes. These decisions will determine if you are hardy and robust and can hit things with swords, or whether you can throw at most three fireballs then require a long nap.
However here at GameWTFs.com, we like to focus more on the important aspects of games: WHICH TEENY TINY PICTURE REPRESENTS "ME"?...and so now, we're proud to present:
EySpace of the Beholder!
We've harnessed the same "pawing through tiny pictures of strangers" power that made MySpace.com the eternal king of the internet to help YOU find YOUR ideal Eye of the Beholder character portraits! Just pick as many or as few filters as you want then press the "Behold!" button, and find your mystery date character portrait!
Note: aside from Gender, I made all these categories up off the top of my head...and some characters qualify as multiple things within the same category!
Gender:
Attitude:
Species:
Extra:

click Behold to search!


— carlmarksguy, 2012-01-27
(back to article list)

more me!

LameComics.com

latest comments

12/2/22: By the Programming of Grey Skull! by CarlMarksGuy
12/2/22: Faux American BADA$$ by CarlMarksGuy
12/2/22: 8-bit-nahld Spritezenegger by CarlMarksGuy
12/2/22: By the Programming of Grey Skull! by Schluppy Mi Puppy

systems

NES
Super Nintendo
GameBoy

categories

Articles
Up from (Super) Obscurity (87)
NES Obscurity Quicky! (49)
Smorgasbored! (30)
Boy in Gray (24)
Cover Art Theatre (24)
killer Vaniller filler (14)
Four Reflections for Filler (7)

Short + Sweet
New Ancient Wisdom (383)
Shenanigans &/or Shinola (33)
Picture-in-Picture (22)
Miscquoted (21)
Pointless Point Pointers (11)
Made Up Facts! (6)

tags

Bats/Cats/Rats/Gnats (33)
Beat-em-ups (44)
Bees Will End You (11)
Button Zone Defense (7)
CarlMarksGiger (5)
Censors on Maximum! (6)
Character DeCreation (7)
CHOPPAH (get to da) (8)
Cover Art...yeah. (9)
CRAZYGRAMPS-Approved (10)
Cross Hairs (14)
CTRL-ALT-Sports (39)
Cut the Cut Scenes! (50)
Delicious Power-Ups! (19)
Digitized Photos=Bad (34)
Dojo Mojo (15)
e-Pistolary Whipped (2)
Faces in the Crowd (8)
Fighty-Fight-Fight (39)
Foreground Peekaboo (3)
Form of: Plat! (86)
Fun with Cybernetics (28)
Glitched Pictures (12)
Go for the Gold! (19)
GOLF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (4)
Grappling Hook-y (5)
Gritty Urbs & Spices (37)
Haberdasher Galaxy (19)
Haiku You! (11)
Hellish Moppet (24)
Hi, Explosives! (16)
High Fashion (43)
I Give Up! (59)
I have bad taste (18)
Ice is Nice (14)
Informative Info! (46)
It's a Holiday! (12)
Jumpy-Stabby (43)
Keep on Truckin' (12)
Kids today! :P (15)
Laser-Powered Fist (10)
LevHELL Select (14)
Melting Flooring (6)
Mini(scule) Games (12)
Mission: Implausible (26)
Moto-cross/-cycle (14)
Movie Cash-In! (59)
Muscles n' Mullets (20)
no pants (19)
Not the BOSS of me! (21)
Oh, Aliens did it. (25)
Paid Celeb Spokesman (31)
Pigging Out (8)
Pirates &/or Ninjas (47)
Player 2 I <3 You (17)
Port-a-Porty (29)
Prehistoria Euphoria (18)
Puzzling, yes? (27)
Racing a La Mode 7 (11)
Random Spotlight! (15)
Rasslin'!!! (7)
Recursive Recursion (7)
Rushing Beat-ings (8)
Scan Th Funny Manual (3)
Scoot or Die (7)
Shabby Olive Drabby (20)
Shoot-em-U/D/L/R (62)
Shpiiidah! (10)
Snap th Game's a Job (13)
Spiky Apocalypse! (22)
SPOOKY (56)
Stupor Heroes! (16)
Sum-Sum-Summertime! (9)
Swords, Elves, Etc (32)
THAT'S how you win? (3)
The Grating Outdoors (24)
The InterNOT (2)
The Name Game! (18)
The Time Warp Excuse (18)
Toon In! (31)
Top 10 or so! (23)
U Stink But I <3 U (9)
Un-licensed to kill (22)
Uneven Challenge (18)
Unwieldly Projectile (33)
Warp Door Mazes (5)
Weird Animals (67)
What a scoop! (10)
What's the Password? (20)
Wheels + Feet = Go (7)
Whirled Tour! (13)
Woebegotten Sequels (21)
X marks the XTREME! (9)

etc.

elsewhere on the web...
VGJUNK
Flying Omelette
Rage Quitter 87
Codiekitty
Random Hoo Haas
JustGamesRetro
SNES HUB
ScrollBoss