In Alternate Reality: The City, you are one of many people who have been abducted from earth by aliens and transported to an alternate dimension where you are dumped in a strange, yet familiar city. Your quest is to explore the city, and find the clues that will lead you to your captors and help you get back home.
In addition to standard first-person RPG features of that era, like skills, stats, experience points and a repertoire of shops and places to visit, the game offers moral evaluation of your character, and depending on your actions you become good or evil, and that affects how the environment reacts to you. Encounters are not necessarily just resolved with the turn-based combat system, but you can also try to trick, charm or bribe opponents. The storyline is non-linear, for example allowing you to take a job in order to enhance a particular skill or just to pass away time.
A chance encounter with Bigleg, a dying dwarf, hastens your wary adventurer to the tower of the helpful wizard Yaztromo, who supplies you with magical equipment you will need in order to survive a trip through the adjacent Darkwood Forest, searching for lost Dwarfish Runes of the Ancients needed by Stonebridge's mayor, Gillibran, to save his people from the predations of hill trolls.
At the start of your journey you are equipped with a sword and a backpack which contains enough food for 9 meals.
A very by-the-book adaptation of Ian Livingstone's Fighting Fantasy gamebook #3, published the previous year, this computer game version dishes up its Choose-Your-Own-Adventure illustrated multiple-choice plot paths courtesy of pages of narrative text displaying down an endless scroll and automates the random RPG elements of generating and managing your character's statistics, inventory and performance in combat, ordinarily determined through die rolls.
Cursed by the gods, on the verge of death, the protagonist of the game is transferred to a different realm - a fantasy land ruled by sword and sorcery, in which humans are threatened by rampaging goblins, orcs, and a mysterious dragon. The hero must find a powerful artifact known as the Heart of Phantasm in order to return home.
Mugen no Shinzō is a role-playing game similar to early Ultima games. The player controls a lone character with basic attributes who roams the vast land, visiting towns and dungeons. Overworld navigation is done by scrolling with arrow keys, without an icon to represent the player character. Town locations have little to no graphics; along with the dungeons, they are displayed in small windows. The maze-like dungeons are represented by abstract pseudo-3D vector graphics. Combat is random; the protagonist fights enemies one-on-one in simple turn-based fashion.
In this role-playing game, the player begins as a peasant whose land is under attack by monsters. After killing one, a princess names the peasant champion, and issues a quest, to rid the country of enemies. She can provide no map, but says that part of the quest involves learning the layout of the land by traveling it...and so the game begins.
Gameplay is very close to the original gamebook with branching decisions entered by keyboard, except for combat which is handled in a real-time 2D combat interface.
DND is the seminal mainframe classic, which started computer role-playing games. The name of the game clearly comes from the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) pen and paper role playing systems, and it uses D&D rules. Further inspired by Pedit5, the game itself is a classic dungeon crawl. It could be counted as a "rogue-like" but doesn't have random dungeons.
An evil demon named Varalys casts a curse upon the princess Ann, turning her into three fairies. You control Sir Jim and set out to find the fairies, and then slay Varalys. Only by vanquishing Varalys can the curse be lifted. Once the princess is restored the kingdom will be saved. The fighting is a little more in-depth than hack and slash. You can either fight with a defensive or offensive stance, or you can use magic spells.
Dragon Slayer is an action RPG designed by Yoshio Kiya and developed by Nihon Falcom. The title helped to pioneer the action RPG genre in Japan and spawned many sequels that would spin-off into their own franchises over time.
The Black Onyx is a role-playing game developed by Bullet Proof Software. It was released, among other consoles and computers, for the SG-1000 in 1987. It was the last SG-1000 game to be released in card form, and the last to be published by Sega, but it is currently unknown as to whether it was the last SG-1000 game. MSX and PC-8801 versions had been released in 1983 and 1984, respectively, meaning this version is unusually late.
The game was followed by The Black Onyx II: Search For The Fire Crystal, which saw its original MSX release in 1984.
Cells & Serpents is a roleplaying game. The player explores a series of unending randomized dungeon rooms fighting monsters and looking for treasure. At any time the player can choose to move left, right, or forwards. These can take the player to stairs up, stairs down, a blank wall, corridors, rooms, or doors. The player can not move beyond level 1, but as they move lower they encounter harder enemies and acquire greater treasure. Blank walls damage the player, and corridors present more movement options. Doors allow movement into rooms, and the player can listen at the door for clues prior to entering. Treasure contains gold, but sometimes contains armor and scrolls which make the player more powerful. When encountering an enemy, the player can choose to zap it with their limited spells to weaken the monster before attacking. In combat the player receives a randomized amount of damage, and if hit points reach 0 it's game over. The player receives a final score based upon levels cleared and monsters defeated.
Halls of Death is an adventure game where you play the role of one of many explorers who have entered the caverns and rooms over many floors, searching for the treasure within, the only difference hopefully is that you make it out alive. The screen is split into five different parts with two parts text, one a map of the floor you are on, your stats and finally what you can see in front off you or the creature you are fighting. Starting at the bottom of some steps, you move around the map searching each room and text tells you what you see and how many turns you have taken.
As you explore, some rooms will have traps, some will have treasure and others will have a creature or monster that wants to fight you seen from the side. You have a certain level of strength and psionics (magic) and you can either swing at the creature, retreat or use one of four spells which are sleep, teleportation, lighting and fireball. Spells sometimes don't work and can sometimes rebound and hit yourself. You both take it in turns to figh
Khufu-ou no Himitsu is a role-playing dungeon crawler developed by Kou Shibusawa.
Players assume the role of an adventurer who seeks to discover the hidden treasures of King Khufu inside an Egyptian pyramid. Gameplay consists of exploring labyrinth levels filled with mummies, spiders, and all kinds of creatures; running into them reduces endurance points. The protagonist dies if their endurance is fully depleted or if they neglect to consume food rations.
Pac-Kong plays very similar to Donkey Kong. The player controls an "adventurer" (called Kong in some versions of the game) and has to reach the treasures the evil octopus hid away.
Each level consists of a series of platforms that are interconnected by ladders. The only action the player can take besides moving around is pressing fire to make the hero jump. This is necessary to get across the gaps between some of the platforms. At the same time, the player has to avoid the smaller octopi as well as clouds of poison gas which move around the screen randomly. Once the player reaches one of the treasure chests at the top of the screen they won the level and a new round starts.
Player(s) travel the land of Greece to accomplish the 12 tasks assigned to them by Zeus and the other gods. Gaining fame and fortune by fighting strange beasts and completing the tasks, the player(s) get help on completing the quests from the Oracle at Delphi. Several human players can play together on the same computer.
You control up to 19 mythological heroes in an effort to perform all the tasks of Heracles. You can visit sites such as Mt. Olympus and Troy, recover the golden apples, and even combat famous creatures such as the medusa, the Minotaur, and the hydra.