Dragon Bane

This really is what you see on a Pilot!

I recently discovered a new game for the Pilot. It is called Dragon Bane, by Palm Creations (http://www.palmcreations.com ). It is a good game, in fact a very good game, but it is more important than that.

This may seem like a strange admission, but I don't play many games on my Pilot. It is too useful as a PDA for it to seem right to use for games. However, I do play Klondike and sometimes MineHunt from the 3com games pack when I am travelling and getting bored, and have the Infocom player (ZIP) loaded with the Zork trilogy for when I get really bored.

Dragon Bane, I am told, is a lot like Bard's Tale for Apple II and PCs. I haven't played Bard's Tale, so I can't comment; however, it does remind me a lot of Wizardry, which was also an early Role Playing Game (RPG) for Apple II and PCs. In short, you assemble a party of characters with different attributes, and battle your way on a magical quest through towns and dungeons, fighting random opponents and casting spells along the way. If you are used to RPGs, then you will probably want to know that it is turn based as opposed to real time, and has automapping. The graphics are superb, making full use of the four bit graphics possible on the Pilot, giving a player's eye view of the terrain your are passing through, and the combatants when fighting, although it doesn't do any animation. It takes up about 210K when installed, which is comparable with large business applications, and is somewhat smaller than my ZIP installation with a couple of Infocom games installed. The demo version lets you play the first three levels (out of 20) for no charge, and can be enabled by a simple license code.

Minotaurs are a pushover

The game play is extraordinarily well balanced; choosing various combat strategies will really make a difference, and opponents are well chosen for the levels your characters should be at by the time you encounter them. Different combat strategies are appropriate for underground and above ground play. I can compare it with two adventure/RPG games that I have recently played on a PC, to the advantage of Dragon Bane. Wizardry:Nemesis took me two days to complete, with very boring real time (meaning click... click... click...) combat. I have also recently completed Starship Titanic, which was very slow to respond (although not an RPG), and suffered from the traditional adventurers problem of an over fussy parser.

gone shopping

Although I did discover a rather entertaining bug that lets your party walk into the final level from the start of the second quest, resulting in a short but exciting life. The developer, Gabe Dalbec, promises me that this will be corrected in the 1.1 version, due out very soon.

So Dragon Bane is a really good game, and worth the $24.95 you'll be expected to pay for it. That doesn't make it important. However, this is a game that is at least as good as similar games in its category on PCs from six to ten years ago, and with better graphics. That's right, the graphics are better than games in the same class were until very recently, on any platform. Other PDAs have good games, but the best in the class are either arcade games (like MineHunt mentioned above), or emulators and ports from other platforms, like the Spectrum emulator and Doom clone from EnRoute for the Psion Series 5.

Dragon Bane is sufficiently capable that it endorses the use of PDAs as a complete replacement for desktop computers. That is important, especially considering that the Pilot appears to be the least technologically advanced of the main PDAs. That appearance is deceptive, and deliberate - Palm chose to adopt a low technology approach to the Pilot so that it could be both cheap and compact, which doesn't make it a less capable device.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: August 13, 1998