Let's have Moraff that

 Last Friday, The Navigator posted about a favourite piece of legacy software. It brought to mind the very old days of computers - pre Windows - and what that world looked like. 

It reminded me of an old game I played when I was younger, Moraff's World.

In the early 90s, my gaming PC was a Tandy 1000 TX, with a massive 640k of RAM and 16 blazing colours if you pushed it hard enough. Yeah, it was great in 1985, and I was still using it in 1996. 

In this pre-Internet age (or at least pre-Internet in everyone's home age), you had to go to a physical place called a "store" to buy video games. The games would be held on a physical object called a "floppy disk." In my hometown, there was a little shop that sold and fixed computers, software and general tech stuff. They had a little shelf full of blue discs where the owner would load the latest in Shareware games to be purchased for $5. I think that this is probably technically against the spirit of Shareware, but he had to do the work and pay for the disks, so... whatever, it gave me access to games I wouldn't otherwise have.

One of those disks I bought had the game we're featuring today on it, Moraff's World. I think it also had another Moraff game, Moraff Stones, on the same disc. Not quite a sequel, but set in the same universe as World. 

Moraff's World is a role-playing game with no real plot, and the only stated goal is to get stronger and more powerful. 

The player starts in a top-level town and needs to descend through progressively more challenging dungeon levels, encountering monsters to fight for experience and loot.  It's a lot of climbing up and down ladders and pushing "F" until you or the monster die. 

In addition to the ladders, occasionally you get caught in an invisible (and occasionally visible) chute that drags you down to ever deeper levels. It's like a high-stakes version of snakes and ladders. 

You start the game off by creating a character. I'm not a big D&D player, but I think that this plays out much like rolling your character for a campaign. You get to pick a race and a type that defines what kind of weapons, spells and actions you have access to. 

The top level town is free of monsters and has a number of shops you can enter, including the store, inn, temple and bank. These are each noted by a different colour square, and without a key of which is which, is super annoying. I'm sure in time I'd memorize them all or put a little note on my monitor. But for this short term play it was really frustrating. Additionally, when I was younger, I played on the 4-colour setting because my computer was such a beast, so telling the difference between shops was impossible. I wish there had been a letter or symbol representing each spot. 

On the subject of the graphics quality, an oft-repeated criticism of this game is the at best-childlike drawings of the monsters featured in the game. 

I never noticed this when I played as a kid, but as I say - I only had 4 colours to work with and everything looks bad when the graphics are this bad. 

Looking back on the game 20-30 years on, and I'm a bit mixed on how I feel about it. I was able to play long enough to recapture the depth of this game. Trying to figure out what spells to use when, building up my character and trying to get deeper and deeper in the dungeon. But playing it through an online DOSBox console is very unstable, and it would crash before I got too deep. 

On the other hand, the terrible graphics are all the more clear the better the graphics quality gets. Go figure. Plus, the game is agonizingly slow even on a modern computer, and it's not something I can see myself returning to in much depth. I certainly don't feel like pursuing finding the full version. 

This game could be fun with a reskin, some more efficient programming and some quality of life updates. I think the core game really could be something fun on a mobile.

I took a poke at the sequel, Moraff's World: Dungeons of the Unforgiven, but didn't give it much time. The graphics are slightly improved, but the control scheme is all different and pretty frustrating. 

All in all, Moraff's World is probably best kept in the past. It was a fun introduction to the RPG genre for me, but looking back on it now, there were definitely better games available at the time. I'm not saying I had access to them, I'm just saying better was out there.

And if I want to scratch the same kind of dungeon-crawling itch, I could pick up one of the early Diablo games and get a far better experience. Although that's an addiction I swore I'd never go back to.