Lordship
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Last modified 2011-10-08 06:45:40
ZZTurbo's Lordship is a really interesting Megazeux game. It's a medieval-themed RTS where you, well, direct your soldiers to kill the enemy soldiers.
That's all there is to it: once the last enemy is dead, the game progresses to the next mission. There's no building or recruiting no soldiers. You have to use what you're assigned in the beginning to complete the level.
Where it gets interesting are the controls: the cursor doesn't go through walls on the game board, or over player or enemy characters. If it touches an enemy character, the cursor goes back to the "side menu" and you have to move it out again.
To move a character, you select it from the menu on the right, position the cursor where you want it to go, and hold the space bar. It will automatically move toward the cursor. When you get mages you can press "X" to have them do a magic attack, but this is nearly useless.
If you get one of your units near an enemy, the combatants will simply drain each others' health until one dies. At full health the player's units are slightly stronger and faster than the enemy units. Basically, the player unit will leave a battle against a single enemy nearly dead, and won't leave a battle against two or more enemies at once.
This is where clerics come in: you can heal your characters by moving them next to a cleric. The cleric has no attack and is useless in combat, but is the most important unit in the game. The slightly weaker enemies attack in groups sometimes three times the size of the player's. If you don't move your injured characters toward the cleric enough times you won't make it through the game.
Unfortunately the clerics also create some of the game's biggest problems: if a cleric is in contact with another character he is immobilized because of bad programming. Sometimes trying to fight an enemy cleric results in the player unit becoming paralyzed. So if you're in a fight and only have one combat unit left, and get stuck against an enemy cleric.. you might as well restart the level.
There are other glitches too, the second most major being that sometimes the side menu can get screwed up if you hold in the "A" or "Z" keys too long. The only way to recover from that one is to restart the level, also. The worst part is that after mission 24 you're warped to mission 14, and there's no way to advance past that point. I had to play the final mission through the Megazeux editor.
But probably the game's biggest problem is it is SLOW. Sometimes it is frantic in its slowness, given the density of the enemy groups in some levels. But often you will find yourself adjusting the Megazeux speed between 2 and 4 to get through it with your sanity intact. Even doing that, the game takes a long time to beat, and is pretty tedious. You won't be winning this game in a single session the first time.
The graphics are decent, but pretty repetitive. Most of the levels have the same two or three different structures and eventually you'll be wishing that there was even something minor like a little color variation thrown in. There are some nice palette and tile edits, and even basic use of effects like pulsing colors. It looks pretty polished for a Megazeux game from 1996.
The music and sounds are pretty bad. ZZTurbo managed to get some original compositions for it, and they're some really basic, sloppy songs. That would be fine, except the same song plays on almost all 25 missions. Only the final boss has a different song. Also the sounds are hilariously bad. The knights use the "yes, my lord" and "by your liege" samples from Warcraft. And they play every time you move a unit. By the hundredth repetition I was hearing "by your liege" as "buy or lease." The other character classes have even worse voice samples.
Overall this is an interesting game! An RTS in Megazeux is ambitious, and was especially so in 1996. This is actually a pretty well-designed game despite its glitches, and there's some fun in its tedium. It's definitely worth playing after some other higher-ranked Megazeux games.
That's all there is to it: once the last enemy is dead, the game progresses to the next mission. There's no building or recruiting no soldiers. You have to use what you're assigned in the beginning to complete the level.
Where it gets interesting are the controls: the cursor doesn't go through walls on the game board, or over player or enemy characters. If it touches an enemy character, the cursor goes back to the "side menu" and you have to move it out again.
To move a character, you select it from the menu on the right, position the cursor where you want it to go, and hold the space bar. It will automatically move toward the cursor. When you get mages you can press "X" to have them do a magic attack, but this is nearly useless.
If you get one of your units near an enemy, the combatants will simply drain each others' health until one dies. At full health the player's units are slightly stronger and faster than the enemy units. Basically, the player unit will leave a battle against a single enemy nearly dead, and won't leave a battle against two or more enemies at once.
This is where clerics come in: you can heal your characters by moving them next to a cleric. The cleric has no attack and is useless in combat, but is the most important unit in the game. The slightly weaker enemies attack in groups sometimes three times the size of the player's. If you don't move your injured characters toward the cleric enough times you won't make it through the game.
Unfortunately the clerics also create some of the game's biggest problems: if a cleric is in contact with another character he is immobilized because of bad programming. Sometimes trying to fight an enemy cleric results in the player unit becoming paralyzed. So if you're in a fight and only have one combat unit left, and get stuck against an enemy cleric.. you might as well restart the level.
There are other glitches too, the second most major being that sometimes the side menu can get screwed up if you hold in the "A" or "Z" keys too long. The only way to recover from that one is to restart the level, also. The worst part is that after mission 24 you're warped to mission 14, and there's no way to advance past that point. I had to play the final mission through the Megazeux editor.
But probably the game's biggest problem is it is SLOW. Sometimes it is frantic in its slowness, given the density of the enemy groups in some levels. But often you will find yourself adjusting the Megazeux speed between 2 and 4 to get through it with your sanity intact. Even doing that, the game takes a long time to beat, and is pretty tedious. You won't be winning this game in a single session the first time.
The graphics are decent, but pretty repetitive. Most of the levels have the same two or three different structures and eventually you'll be wishing that there was even something minor like a little color variation thrown in. There are some nice palette and tile edits, and even basic use of effects like pulsing colors. It looks pretty polished for a Megazeux game from 1996.
The music and sounds are pretty bad. ZZTurbo managed to get some original compositions for it, and they're some really basic, sloppy songs. That would be fine, except the same song plays on almost all 25 missions. Only the final boss has a different song. Also the sounds are hilariously bad. The knights use the "yes, my lord" and "by your liege" samples from Warcraft. And they play every time you move a unit. By the hundredth repetition I was hearing "by your liege" as "buy or lease." The other character classes have even worse voice samples.
Overall this is an interesting game! An RTS in Megazeux is ambitious, and was especially so in 1996. This is actually a pretty well-designed game despite its glitches, and there's some fun in its tedium. It's definitely worth playing after some other higher-ranked Megazeux games.