Eamon Deluxe
| title: | Eamon Deluxe |
| url: | link |
| download page: | link |
| license: | freeware |
| genre: | Role Playing Games |
| developer: | Frank Black |
| platform: | 32 bit Windows, unics, dos. |
| release: | 1998, ongoing |
| features: | text, sound, visuals |
| last edit by: | Dark |
Description
Eamon was a fantastic system of adventure games for the apple Ii computer produced in the 1980's. Though similar in their room descriptions and layout to conventional interactive fiction, the eamon games were far more rpgs in style, and relied upon turn based combat and character experience as much as puzzle solving and exploring. Also unlike conventional interactive fiction, Eamon adventures tended to have far fewer commands in the parza meaning that getting stuck on guess the verb style puzzles was far less likely than with usual text adventurees.
In eamon, rather than each adventure being a stand alone quest, you would create a character who would depart from the main hall of the Eamon adventurers guild on successive adventures, gaining experience by fighting enemies and casting magic spells then returning to the Main hall with hopefully lots of gold which you could then use to buy better weaponry or upgrade your character's abilities before heading out again. Over the last thirty or so years, many of author's have created hundreds of Eamon adventures (nearly 280 in all), which range wildly in style from the humerous and surreal to deadly serious. From a short romp through a commical Alice in wonderland style realm full of strange objects and surreal traps and enemies, to entering grim environments full of horrific monsters and complex tasks with the fate of the world in the balance, or even just heading into the local cave to slay some convenient goblins and trolls and grab some loot in the best barbarian tradition. likewise, though most Eamon adventures sent your character to some varient of a dungeons and dragons like world this was by no means the norm, and you might find yourself in the far future commanding space marines, battling Darth Vader aboard the death star, outwitting russian spies or crime lords or even entering that horror of horrors, the shopping mall! The very diversity of Eamon settings is indeed one of the strengths of the system, and the fact that a character can at one and the same time carry a magic axe, a light saber and an ak 47 is all part of the game's charm.
Eamon deluxe is an attempt to port the eamon games to windows, maintaining the flavour and style of the original Apple Ii adventures while adding various enhancements and updates, both to the classic adventures themselves and to the general gameplay of the system. it is for instance possible in Eamon deluxe to select one of a number of custom characters or create your own, you can even use the in built character editer to create a cheater super character if you wish. The main hall is also expanded from the original Apple Ii version with various new services and diversions for building your character too. Eamon deluxe also comes with a deluxe dungeon designer program which will let you write your own Eamon adventures, and indeed several authors regularly create original, Eamon deluxe adventures directly for the system.
Unfortunately, sinse the games are still (even when converted), quite old, they run in a dos style console window, meaning that currently they will only run on a 32 bit operating system such as Windows xp or 32 bit Windows 7, so will require a virtual machine on other versions of windows (one can be downloaded from Microsoft's own website). Eamon deluxe however, being purely text based is easy to read and navigate since it's just a standard console window. The developer has included a very complete screen reader compatibility mode (just use the vi mode option in the start menue to activate it), which outputs everything to text, even describing the very few graphics that did exist in the original games, and reconfiguring all in game menues to make reading and selecting choices as smooth as possible. there is also an html copy of the manual found in the program shortcuts as well as the more standard pdf.
Eamon deluxe is currently in a beta version and thus not all of the 280 or so classic Eamon adventures have been converted to the format, though certainly many have and work is continually being done to convert the rest, and there are also of course new Eamon deluxe specific adventures made by other authors. It is therefore highly recommended to keep checking the Eamon blog at the above site for news, as well as reviews and humour. Particularly, those interested in the developement of Eamon Deluxe should also keep up with the Eamon deluxe news letter which reports regular edx news as well as contains interesting articals and reviews (including some written by a nutter calling himself Dark).
As well as it's own website and Blog, another great source of Eamon information is The wonderful wiki of Eamon which includes everything from walkthrus to character information and is being continually expanded.
If your an rpg fan, and have always wanted to explore and battle your way through huge and often very well described worlds in text, grabbing loot, slaying goblins and generally having a roaring good time, Eamon is absolutely the game for you, indeed the fact that a system first created thirty years ago is still! having games made for it should show just how addictive the Eamon format is. Even if it is necessary to undergo shenanigans with virtual machines to run, the quality and entertainment of many of the Eamon Deluxe games is highly worth it.
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The following users have added this game to their favorites: grryfindore, Dark, death, fa1ckg, Luel, the best in the world, Lovely lavender, huwmanbeing, EamonDeluxe, blindncool, renfro92w, aaron
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Updates: entry 2 Feb 22 and description 2 Feb 22