REVIEW: Game39: Pool of Radiance (by Ray Dyer)

[Olivier Leroux]

Game39: Pool of Radiance
by Ray Dyer

Reviewed by noyb_bg

     
    Good job.  I felt like I was back in 92 (when was it?) playing the game again.

    Differences from the SSI version:
    I'm pretty sure I fought more than 15 random encounters in the slums back there.  This is actually rather irritating as they were a nice place to rest after you were done fighting.  All you have is 'pieces of gold', but I guess that's unavoidable.  Mages and Clerics can advance above level 6.  I like to see this as an improvement on the original, though it did make the graveyard a little easy.  I really dug turning all the spectres.  You couldn't pick fights with the council guard.   I guess this isn't that big a deal but it was a fun challenge for my party after beating Tyranthraxus.  Overland and random encounters didn't adjust to party strength (there's no way to do that in FRUA unless you condition on the number of times the party enters the training hall or something).  Monsters don't use items.  Has anyone found a way to tackle this in FRUA?

    One thing the game made me realize is just how easy old Pool was.  Think about it...how many times were you really challenged, besides the twelve 8th level fighters at the end?  I doubt this is a spoiler for anyone on this list.

    And here's a test for any of you to see if you've played the original as much as I have...did anybody notice:

        You fought the vampire facing north, instead of west?
        The sheets of gold in Mendor's Library are gone?
        The efreeti bottle in the Kobold Caves was gone? (Or did I miss it?)

[Olivier Leroux]

Game39: Pool of Radiance
by Ray Dyer

Reviewed by Susan McKinney

What a treat!  What a joy!  This game started my love of the "gold box games" oh so many years ago.  Ray did a fantastic job of recreating the ambience of POR but giving us the ability to "fix" and other things.  I still hate that maze in the pyramid as much as I did originally.

Rating:  9.95

[Olivier Leroux]

Game39: Pool of Radiance
by Ray Dyer

Reviewed by Airamil

     
    I was very excited to see that Ray had converted Pool of Radiance (my favorite goldbox game) to FRUA.  It took me a little while to get through the game because I really took my time with it.  The conversation is great for nostalgia purposes and for playing the game without some of the annoying things that were in the original version and fixed later on with other Goldbox games.

    The Best:
    Fix button, auto spell rememorize, cool stores (although I might have liked a few more items to be able to spend all the jewels you get for completing quests in this game), graphics, close detail to sequences that amazingly match the original game, no level maximums, etc.

    Few Bugs:
    I didn't find much for bugs; the main one was with Codorna.  When in the Castle near the end, if you try to talk to Codorna when he is held captive, it dumps you into the Codorna map (which looks just like the Castle SE map, but none of the events work or are configured).  It took me awhile to figure this out, I thought I was in the Castle SE map at first.

    Irks:
    A few items were missing that are not found in the Realm item database.  The main ones were no efreeti bottle (which is fine you never actually got the item in the original game either), the other was the manual of bodily health that was found in Mandors Library was missing.  Some of this could be because Ray ran out of text or didn't want to substitute these items.  Lastly a Vault would have been nice.

    Summary:
    I highly recommend this module, it is great and I sure hope Ray could use his talents to convert some more of these (Curse of the Azure Bonds, hint, hint).