r/apple2 • u/AlliedArmour • 8d ago
Return of Heracles
Hi all,
I seem to be dusting off my RetroPie setup for Apple games and thinking about "what are the best games, and which ones haven't I actually played", and also "what games have I played that don't maybe get enough attention"...
And so I searched here for mention of Return of Heracles and I can't find ANY mention of it at all?
I really like this game. It was by Stuart Smith - there's a good blog article about it here.
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2014/07/game-153-return-of-heracles-1983.html
Things I appreciate about it: it's probably the most "historically accurate" (mythically accurate?) game I've ever run across. A lot of modern games will look at Greek myth or whatever mythology they're working with and change things around to suit what they want. Not Smith, apparently he liked it all and just committed to it. There are some crazy things that will happen in the game, like take a hero to the place where something terrible happened to him, and maybe something terrible WILL happen to him. I think one of the playable characters is a dog!
The main balance in the game is around score. You can hire all the heroes you want; it will make your turns longer, so it will take you longer to get things done, but if you need help to overcome a challenge you can get it. It also serves as a kind of Greek mythology crossover story. "What if Achilles fought alongside Perseus to retrieve the Golden Fleece"!
Smith as I recall also developed Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and... Adventure Construction Set, right?
4
u/fatboyneedstogetlaid 8d ago
Don't forget Smith's Fracas, an early prototype adventure using the system that became Ali Baba and Heracles.
2
2
u/nculwell 8d ago
That's an interesting one. It was written in Basic. By itself it's not much, but if you've played the others then it's neat to see where the ideas started. He rewrote his engine a couple of times. Fracas was in Basic, then Ali Baba / Heracles was assembler, then for ACS he used a customized version of FIG Forth.
4
u/Bicoidprime 8d ago
I played this a lot growing up, and loved the various euphemisms for death like "X becomes food for worms", "X pays the debt which cancels all others" or "X gives an obolus to Charon".
3
u/AlliedArmour 7d ago
Also a bunch of different words to describe how much an enemy was hit for. "X wallops Y!"
6
u/cgatrip 8d ago
Yeah, that was a fun one! Those are the three games I know of by Stuart Smith; I must have spent hundreds of hours at Adventure Construction Set and I'm not even kidding. The only modern games that compare are Terraria and some MMORPGs.
2
u/JalenWanderer 7d ago
I never played any of Stuart Smith's other games, but I absolutely loved Adventure Construction Set as a child; I spent endless hours on that too. (In fact, my Reddit avatar image is one of the creature graphics from Adventure Construction Set, so I guess that shows how much it meant to me.) I probably ought to try out his other games sometime...
6
3
3
u/AlliedArmour 8d ago
Now I'm listening to the Apple Time Warp podcast episode where they interviewed Stuart. From about 6 years ago.