Pool of Radiance (NES)
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Pool of Radiance is quite large in scope for early RPGs, and does a good job of translating the rules of AD&D into a videogame. For some reason the team that ported the game to the NES thought that a brown background would look good for most of the game. Luckily, the music department upped the ante and gave the game some atmosphere. Your team of adventurers must clear the city of Phlan from monsters and then search for the legendary Pool of Radiance. Combat is turn-based, offering you plenty of time to plan ahead, but there is an unfortunately large amount of combat. There is also a rather small amount of gold early in the game which makes equipment and leveling up a bit slow. All-in-all, the game offers many hours of adequate adventure.
While the Nintendo version is a great port, it has several things missing from the computer ports; you can't customize your character's portrait, spells like "Bless" have been replaced with "Empower" (due to Nintendo of America's censorship policy), not being able to gamble in the city taverns, slightly subpar graphics, only one save feature (the computer featured ten) and the random caves that can be found in the computer versions were removed. Though the Nintendo version has some advantages of its own; there's no copy protection so you don't have to pull out the instruction manual to hear what people are saying, the game has a better difficulty than the NES version, gold as your only form of currency (in the computer versions, you had electrum, copper, silver, gold and platinum) and the addition of in-game music really helped the game's atmosphere.
Though the game says it was developed by Strategic Simulations, one of the programmers has said that it was developed by Marionette.
Screenshots
Music
Pool of Radiance has a large soundtrack for the NES era, and Seiji Toda did a good job composing the numerous tracks. None of the music is particularly memorable, but the music is very cohesive through the game, fitting to the action on the screen. When you're walking around the civilized and safe area of Phlan, the music sounds happy and upbeat. When you're in a dungeon, or other place where there's enemies, the music is suspenseful, and when you encounter an enemy, or what could be an enemy if you don't make the right decisions, the music sounds scary. When you're fighting Tyranthraxus, the song is an action-packed scary-sounding song. There is also an unused song. It sounds like it was a possible in-game theme when you're in a certain shop or temple, but it also sounds like it was used just to test the audio driver of the game to make sure it was working correctly. It could have also been used in the random caves in the wilderness in the computer versions that was taken out of the NES version. Seiji Toda later went on to compose the music for Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (NES).
Seiji says he wrote the music in Music Macro Language. Hironari Tadokoro programmed the sound driver while Yoshiyuki Ishii programmed the music into the game.
Recording
Credits
- Ripper: Gil_Galad
- Recorder: Doommaster1994
- Game Credits (USA):
- Music Composed By: Seiji Toda
- Music Programmer: Hironari Tadokoro credited as H. Tadokoro
- Music Coder: Yoshiyuki Ishii
- Game Credits (Japan):
- Music Composed By: Seiji Toda credited as とだ せいじ
- Music Programmer: Hironari Tadokoro credited as たどころ ひろなり
- Music Coder: Yoshiyuki Ishii credited as いしい よしゆき
(Source: USA 1 USA 2 USA 3, Japan 1, Japan 2, Japan 3)
The credits in the USA version give the real names of everybody involved with the sound except for Hironari Tadokoro, who goes by "H. Tadokoro". The Japanese version contains the names in hiragana and gives Hironari's full name, and he was also later credited with his real name in Phantom Fighter (NES). Hironari probably had nothing to do with programming the sound other than making the music play in areas of the game.
Game Rip
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Ripping NES music is a very arduous process that is beyond the scope of this site.
Releases
Links
- Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_radiance
