Amulets & Armor

Amulets & Armor is a first-person role-playing video game created by David Webster and Eric Webster and United Software Artists, published in 1997.

Gameplay

The player chooses a character between 11 default characters: Knight, Paladin, Rogue, Mercenary, Sailor, Magician, Priest, Citizen, Mage, Warlock, and Archer. The game is divided up into quests made up of multiple separate levels which are each against different foes in different areas with different end goals. According to the promotion, the game is overall set, "In the underground catacombs of the castle Arius," but only a few levels actually are.

Release

The game was released in 1997 after two years of development, but the outdated production values, confusing user interface, and inadequate shareware marketing resulted in fewer than a hundred sales. The game's graphics use 256 color VGA 320x200 resolution. In comparison, Quake came out the previous year and Quake II came out the same year as Amulets & Armor. It remained generally unknown until it was released by abandonware webpages. The features of the game include varied character class selection, the magic system, the character advancement and inventory system, musical score (both CD quality and MIDI versions of the music were available on the disc), and detailed level construction. It was somewhat noteworthy for its implementation of features commonly associated with fantasy RPG games in a first person shooter engine before this was common, but it did not innovate. The much more famous Ultima Underworld games implemented similar features a half-decade earlier with comparable VGA/MIDI production values, although a more apt comparison is perhaps the much more famous The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall released by Bethesda the previous year.

Amulets & Armor was re-released as freeware in 2013 on the game's official site.

Notes and references

External links

• Amulets & Armor official site
• Amulets & Armor at MobyGames
• thecan.org article
• Amulets and Armor Forum