Beginners Cave

a.k.a. Beginner's Cave / Eamon / Main Hall / The Wonderful World of Eamon

published by Load 'N Go! / author / Shever Software in 1980, developed by author, running on Apple II E

type: adventure
series: Lightning Eamon
perspective: other
player options: single player

game engine: Eamon Engine
languages: eng

4/5

Description

Official Eamon Adventure designation: #1
Requires Eamon version 1, 2, 3, or 4.
Rated quality 4.3/10 and difficulty 3/10 by Eamon fans (as of 2010).
Mode: Survival

The Beginner's Cave is a simple and easy survival adventure that will earn you some reasonable weapons, gold, and experience to prepare a new character for more advanced adventures and train the player in the basics of Eamon adventuring. To enter the cave, you must be allowed in by the guard. He will verify you are a beginning level character, have no armor and own no more than 1 weapon.

This is the collection of the Man Hall adventure, Beginners Cave adventure, and the base Eamon System. Note that the Main Hall and Eamon System were virtually synonymous and contained on the "Master Disk". Players would enter the Main Hall where they could generate a character for themselves. From the Main Hall, players could travel to and return from the various adventures that were packaged with it. Basic character attributes were preserved between adventures plus the player could carry up to four weapons in the Main Hall (thus use them in other adventures). Shopping for weapons, spells, depositing or withdrawing gold in the bank, exchanging treasures for gold, and examining your character are also Main Hall activities. (Most adventures do not allow you to see stats for the duration). Finally there is an exit from the Eamon universe in the Main Hall (quit game). You character is always saved when anything is done in the main hall so there are no worries. There were 7 main versions of the Main Hall, plus the Deluxe Version, Softdisk version, and various commercially released versions. Any Eamon adventure or collection of adventures was almost always packaged with a compatible version of the Main Hall (a "Master Disk") (just as any game based on an particular game engine will be packaged with a compatible versions of said game engine). Each adventure required its own 'adventure disk', some required more than one. Notably, adventures that shared the same version of the Main Hall could be used together (ie: the player's character could transfer between them); Kind of as expansions of each other but a more accurate description of the model would be to say it was a modular system. The adventures were not inherently cross-platform compatible (in contrast to Z-Machine or AGS games for instance), thus porting to another platform required both porting the adventure and a compatible version of the Main Hall, not just a simple software repackaging.

(Zerothis) - # 2010-02-20 18:54:39