Gateway to Apshai (Epyx)
Gateway to Apshai is one of the O.G. granddaddies of the top-down dungeon crawling RPG genre, and one of the granddaddies of adventure/RPG games in general. The game was released on the Atari 8-bit line of computers, the Commodore 64, and the Colecovision, I have neither the C64 or an Atari-computer, but I do have a Colecovision, and I have a Taiwan Cooper bootleg which goes by the name Gateway to Apsh (great name change there fellas, they'll never figure it out). The only thing standout about the box is the hilarious box art, look at the dog head peaking in from the right and try not to either laugh or groan at the awfulness. The other main problem with the game in general is the lack of controller overlays, thank goodness Pixelboy exists, they've created several custom overlays and Gateway to Apshai happens to be one of them. Unfortunately I can't figure out if they're for sale or not, or if they were ever for sale at all, so I formatted one of the images Pixelboy provided, printed it out, and laminated it with shipping tape, not as good as the real thing but it'll do. So enough about how I prepared to play the game, and let's just play it already.
This game looks quite basic, even for Colecovision. There are several elements that go into making this game look the way it does, first is the rooms of the dungeon, they are rectangular with a blue wall with a basic pattern on it, a basic all black floor (which is mildly disappointing), and the 'unknown space', which are unexplored areas. When you start you can only see the one room, and as you progress through the dungeon the 'unknown space', which is a weird tan colored pixel-y mess, changes to more rooms, it makes sense when you play the game. There are also locked doors which are indicated by little red squares in the walls. One aspect of the graphics which I find to be extremely disappointing is the enemies, one of the great motivators of a dungeon crawler, or RPG in general, is to see what sort of new and fantastic enemies you'll be faced with as you get further and further into the game, in this one however, all the enemy sprites are monochrome, small, and messy. If the quality of the enemy sprites didn't hurt enough, they're reused throughout the game, same sprite different name, and that just sucks. Speaking of sucks the treasures you collect sucks. They all use the exact same sprite, and it's so abstract I have no Idea what it is, some item sprites are self explanatory, the armor, the sword, the bow, the arrows, the potion(s), and the dinner pla- I mean shield, and the spell scroll. What sucks is that I've seen better quality treasures and Item sprites in Atari games, Dragonfire is the first to come to mind, and even the treasures in Mythicon games were multicolored. When Mythicon is doing something better than you, you know you messed up.
Sounds don't fare much better, they are few and far between, and definitely below par when it comes to quality. The main sound you'll hear when playing this game is the walking sound, which is more like shuffling. The Colecovision was capable of so much more than the Atari 2600, so why does it sound like an Atari 2600 is making these sounds? There is very little in the way of music, just a little arpeggio when you pick up an item. It is seriously disappointing, especially since it's Colecovision.
I don't know about the home computer ports, but the Colecovision version sucks to play. Most of i-well actually all of it comes down to the atrocious controller. You can barely control yourself, and I wish I could say you can use a 2600 or Genesis controller but this game RELIES upon the keypad. Whats worse is, the game never had a controller overlay until later, when Pixelboy drew one up back in 2006. You spend your first few minutes pressing all of the keys to figure out which one does what, thankfully the function is deisplayed on the screen, so you don't have to press all the buttons to guess. The biggest detractor out of all of them is the combat though, it renders this game nearly unplayable, and again it's due to the controller. You can barely hit anything with that floppy noodle of a sword, if you are not lined up perfectly with an enemy when you swing, you will not hit them. Even though the game shows your dude waving his sword side to side, I have hit so many enemies with my sword only to have them walk through it and damage me. You cannot move and attack, if you are attacking you are standing still,but guess what? Enemies damage you by simply making contact, meaning they can move and attack you at the same time. I would recommend against playing on a keyboard, just playing the first dungeon, trying to get screenshots, I got a game over on the first enemy. It is seriously an awful game to play.
Once the cool factor wears, off this game is nothing more than a pain in the wrist (Seriously). Don't buy this game, all the versions are fairly expensive, but the Colecovision version especially. It's about twenty bucks for a loose cart and probably forty to sixty for a boxed copy. Needless to say this game goes into the Collector's Zone, because it's influential crap with a price-tag. I seriously rather play Dark Chambers on the 2600 than this game.
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