Times of Lore

Times of Lore

Founded	1988-12-??
Last Release	1991-05-??

Times of Lore is an action adventure game using a top-down view. You play either a knight, valkyrie, or barbarian who is searching for a way to bring order to the kingdom of Albareth which has slowly fallen into chaos. In order to do this, you must seek out knowledgeable people to give you advice and send you on quests to vanquish the source of the chaos.

Although the setting suggests an RPG, the game is actually a simplified action game. Dialogue is light, you don't have any stats to increase, combat consists of mashing the same button over and over, and there are only a handful of items to collect in the game. Despite its flaws, the game does feature a game world which, at the time, was unprecedented in size. You could move about the entire map freely without loading or having to go in and out of separate town maps.

The game's menu system is an icon-based graphical user interface, another innovation that was ahead of its time. The player brings up the menu and selects from various icons like a mouth to speak, a eye to look, and a hand to use. While this idea is great, it is implemented poorly, and slows the game down a lot. For example, to pick up an item you have to walk near the item, open the menu, select the "pick up" icon, and then choose the item you want to pick up in a list. Compare this to the much simpler, you pick up items when you walk over them.

The game was originally released on the Commodore 64, and then ported to the bulk of the other home computers of the time. Of the releases, the Amiga port has the best graphics, the DOS port has the highest quality music, but the NES release is the most playable and makes the best use of its music.