New space and looking to build it out – bottom of the blog page is a signup for our newsletter – if you fill it out nothing will happen right now but soon(ish) – you’ll start being able to get your Classic Gaming Brothers news in your email along with the rest of your other junk mail. We’ll look to provide updates on the podcast, maybe do excerpts from this new blog series, and maybe Zach will do something else outside of everything that he does now (he does everything for the show).

The rest of this blog entry I’ll use to talk about the other thing I’ve been working on and that’s a series of blog posts where I will playthrough and cover a game in a much more complete level versus what we cover on the show. First up I booted up a game we covered in Episode 52 – One Year of Classic Gaming Brothers and talk for most of the episode about Dragonsphere. This was quite some time ago and we should probably redo the episode but until then – check out this blog post!

Developed and published back in 1994 by MicroProse – Dragonsphere is a point and click graphical adventure game. MicroProse developed 3 in totality – Rex Nebular, Return of the Phantom, and Dragonsphere. We owned the 1995 release of Dragonsphere that was released on Player’s Choice. Player’s Choice were MicroProse games released with a purple box and were generally at a discount. Both Dragonsphere and Return of the Phantom were picked up by our father at a discounter called “Buck a Book”. This regional chain sold books and more than books at a value.

This game does have a twist towards the end, and I’ll cover it within this blog series so if you don’t want to be spoiled then avoid reading that article or play the game. Without further ado:

The game opens to a castle, and out of the castle three riders head out and cross the plain with the title screen. The riders all riding some sort of weird dinosaur creature which I cannot for the like of me remember being anywhere else in the game ride out and observe an evil mountain. There is a storm brewing and the purple rider who is the wizard Ner-Tom ends up riding out. The other riders are the King, and I believe the Captain of the Guard.  

The wizard (Ner-Tom) descends to the base of the mountain top and when he does that the castle of the evil Sorcerer Sanwe reveals itself. Ner-Tom uses some magic and gets into a magical fight with the Sorcerer and wins(ish). Ner-Tom ends up encapsulating Sanwe’s castle in a large bubble and they call it good and ride back to the castle.

Sanwe appears in front of the three riders and pronounces that in 20 years he’ll free himself and cause mayhem in the kingdom. Ner-Tom stays behind and says that Sanwe is lying and then rides after the King and the other rider.

20 years past by and lo and behold:
The king is dead. In the below image of the dead king is:

• The dead king in the bed
• The new King Callash who is kneeling at his dad’s side
• Ner-Tom the Court Wizard who is the old man in purple
• The Chief Guard who I think is the third rider, and I’ll update with her name when I come across her in game
• The Queen Mother – who is the stern lady in purple and a funny hat. She’s kind of stuck up but we’ll learn more about why later
• Finally, Fiona who is now the Queen because her husband is now the King

There are some additional characters that will appear throughout the game, and I’ll talk about them as they come up. Throughout the game you play as King Callash.

These next few scenes happen apparently right after the king's death. However sometimes things don't make sense with the timing, and I’ll try and reference back where there are some odd time idiosyncrasies. Side note - You only actually see this movie if you click Intro or don’t actually click start and let the game go idle, so I imagine it is actually possible that someone has played & beaten this game without seeing this intro.

Callash is immediately whisked off to be crowned.
He gets crowned by some sort of popelike figure – however the game has magic, other kingdoms that are populated by other creatures (fairies, shifters, and the Soptus who are just desert humans), and never really references this religion or this popelike figure ever again. Like why didn't the wizard do the crowning, maybe he was missing (more on that).
 
Shortly after this coronation – and an implied party – King Callash promptly goes to his dad’s bed that someone hopefully cleaned. He just goes and passes out in the bed. The introduction of the game ends with some creeper opening his room in a shadowy image but unknown if it is foreshadowing of Sanwe or just his creepy brother MacMorn. We’ll find out.

The introduction wraps up and we get booted back to the title screen where there is the ball (perhaps even sphere) containing a dragon that represents Sanwe that occasionally moves around. We’ll come across this sphere early on and it will eventually become our in-game timer – kinda.
The game’s timer is triggering base not an actual timer, but you can over trigger the timer. There are also deaths in the game – they happen occasionally and are usually funny – while playing there are a couple that I always do every playthrough so you'll see some. They do just restart you back before you made the wrong decision where you can make the right choice (or wrong one again).

The game then prompts you for difficulty and I forget the difference – a quick google result says that the puzzles are “more challenging” – I’m playing Novice this time around because I’m pretty sure this impacts the fairy puzzle and I’m not about that taking forever. I’m also going to do my darndest to beat the game without a guide and we’ll see how many points I have at the end by playing through by memory alone.

 The Dragonsphere stirs, my lord, and more powerfully than before.

The voice that I can hear so clearly in my imagination – and if you don’t watch the intro that is the first statement you hear to get you into the game. I played the game without watching the intro the first time and had to learn what was going on through playing the game and referencing the manual.

The dialog options are hilarious, like you can just wave off your wife to be like get out of here and let me sleep. I’ll play through the game as I would have as a child with this blog and pick the “best” choices.
I do really love that he just cranes his head upwards to talk to her – I tried to grab a screenshot but I’m playing in Dos Box in a window mode so I couldn’t grab it fast enough. I’ll think about playing through with a faster screenshot software then just using the snipping tool and if I do that I’ll get a screenshot of his face.

Okay so that’s going to be it for today.

As I play through Dragonsphere I’ll write up my commentary and provide some screenshots of the scene that I’m referencing and we’ll play through the entire game this way together.

If I enjoy writing this and you enjoy reading this then maybe I’ll tackle Return of the Phantom the same way.

Let’s find out – anyway next blog post – King Callash will get out of bed!

2024 is heading toward the end, and as we move towards 2025 I want to think back specifically on this podcast about what we have done in 2024 and where we want to go forward.

2024:

• We (Zach, Ryan, Ryan, and I) attended PAX East in Boston. We saw some great games (and some not so great ones), interviewed some developers on the floor of the show, and went out to a speakeasy called Suits and got some great drinks.