Trying to find info on old Mac game "Citadel"

[Stephen Broberg]

Does anyone here remember this game? It came out sometime between 1988 and
1990. I'm pretty sure it was called "Citadel" or "The Citadel". It was a
CRPG along the lines of Wizardy/Bards Tale (pseudo first person perspective
while 'dungeon crawling'), but with combat that was reminiscent of tabletop
miniture battles.

It was a really amazing game with many interesting ideas. Probably the
first CRPG where the combat was in real time, incorporating concepts of
weapon speed and reach. You would fire ranged weapons by dragging from your
characters to the enemy, and your likelihood of hitting was determined by
how 'jumpy' the line was that connected the two - and it was possible to hit
your party members if they were in the way.

Other cool ideas were things the incorporation of the graphical elements of
the game into the actual gameplay. For example, many treasures featured an
image that would pop up when you examined the item. However, one item (a
crystal ball) would activate its powers only if you 'rubbed' the surface of
the ball with your mouse pointer - but this wasn't documented anywhere, you
just had to discover it by accident (or by careful observation that your
pointer turned into pointing finger when it passed over the ball).

Another nice touch was one dungeon level that had doors that wouldn't open -
the door handle was a living creature that would screech and run away when
you clicked on it or hit Return (the standard ways of opening the doors).
Only by 'forcibly' grabbing the creature (which mean clicking and holding
the mouse button down instead of immediately releasing) could you open the
doors.

I remember the magic system being pretty fun & interesting as well. The
only real downside was that the game was rather short, and it had a few bad
bugs that would screw up your save file (I seem to remember having the game
end up in broken state if you died by falling down some elevator shaft
between levels).

Anyway, I can't find any reference of the game on Google. It really seems
like one of those lost classics that was way ahead of its time. Does anyone
know anything about it, or what happened to the developers that produced it?

-S

[T'erril]

I don't know if this is it, but it's a good site to check:

http://www.happypuppy.com/mac/demos/citadeloft1.html

[Stephen Broberg]

Thanks for the info. I also had Quarterstaff, although, to be honest, I was
never able to finish it - I vaguely remember getting stuck towards what I
assume was the end, where there was some implike being who kept harrassing
our party but we couldn't finish him off, and we were stuck in some sort of
dead-end series of rooms with no apparent exit. The combination of InfoCom
text adventure and CRPG combat never really jelled with me - there were too
many spots where the solution to progressing to the next spot lay in
guessing exactly what the game designers had decided was the right way - a
big beef I've always had with the "adventure" genre.

"Jeremy" <n...@spam.please> wrote in message
news:no-240801...@p116-tnt8.akl.ihug.co.nz...
> In article <no-240801...@p116-tnt8.akl.ihug.co.nz>, n...@spam.please

> (Jeremy) wrote:
>
> > > On Wed, 22 Aug 2001 06:28:20 GMT, "Stephen Broberg"
> > <ste...@mediaone.net> wrote:
> >
> > > > Does anyone here remember this game? It came out sometime between
> 1988 and
> > > > 1990. I'm pretty sure it was called "Citadel" or "The Citadel". It
was a
> > > > CRPG along the lines of Wizardy/Bards Tale (pseudo first person
> perspective
> > > > while 'dungeon crawling'), but with combat that was reminiscent of
> tabletop
> > > > miniture battles.
> >

> > The game was called "Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Fortress". It was
>
> Sorry, that should be "Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep".
>
> > published by Postcraft International (now out of business). That is all
> > the info I have unfortunately, but I agree that it was an excellent (if
> > somewhat buggy) game with some very original ideas. "Quarterstaff: The
> > Tomb of Setmoth" was another excellent mac-only rpg from that period.