Maddog Williams, an inventor (something that doesn't really matter much in the long run), wakes up one morning, gets out to deliver a beer machine he invented to the local bar, and ends up rescuing princess Leoria from the clutches of a cult worshipping the dark god Malthazar. Leoria promptly informs Maddog that her father, King Thaylor, who has been taken by the evil king Sarek, has escaped from his magical prison, where he was imprisoned after a brutal war. Sarek, of course, was made mad and evil by Malhazar.
Anyhow, after some tutorial combat and finding enough money to buy an ax as well as finding a gnome from the forest, Maddog can venture further to the realm of Duridian by finding his way through Caves of Despair filled with a couple of deadly traps and finding a wizard's staff from there if he wants to continue beyond the next village. That's really one of the themes in the main puzzles. You'd better be ready to rummage through the locations before leaving, as you might miss something important, which will force you to reload.
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| Maddog sleeping, just moments before his new alarm machine flips a glass of cold water on his face |
Having done all necessary, Maddog finally arrives at the old, crumbling castle of Sarek's, where he keeps the king as a prisoner. Before he can descend to the castle's dungeons, Maddog needs to solve one important puzzle, which, if left unsolved, would ruin the end game otherwise. And you don't want that. No, not at all, because the dungeon has some annoying pixel-perfect platforming.
The Adventures of Maddog have two kinds of action sequences. The first, and most used, is the combat system. This isn't some deep tactical system or even combat like in Sierra's Quest for Glory series. No, this is a very basic 1-on-1 system where you can hit the enemy with one of the three possible hits: high, middle, and low. There's no tactic in it, and while the game does have a difficulty selector, I'm not sure if it actually does anything in terms of combat difficulty. I tried the game with the hardest setting and saw no real difference in the enemy attacks or the damage given or received.
The second form of action is jumping. Outside of combat, the action button you use to attack performs jumping. This jumping is needed only after you get to Sarek's castle. And even there, it's needed in three rooms, one of which is the pixel-perfect room with pillars in the dungeon, which takes more time to play through than any other section in the game. This is a roundabout way of saying the whole jumping system is terrible and poorly implemented. I'd go even further and say that the whole of jumping could have been better handled by just using the parser input system for it.
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| The first actual fight you encounter. Note your own and the enemy's hitpoints at the top left. |
That rant is done; now the only thing left is to find the dungeon, where the king is held. And kill one little dragon, which would be the hardest combat in the game if not for a bug that makes it a cakewalk. In the dragon room, you simply turn your back to it and flail the air in front of Maddog. This keeps him out of the reach of the dragon but causes damage to it. A couple of seconds later, it's dead, and Maddog can pick up an enchanted piece of armour next to it, making him immune to Sarek's magical attack.
So, Sarek blasts Maddog and escapes to his evil god lord. Maddog frees the king and heads after Sarek and breaks the mirror portal to the realm, where Malthazar was hiding, locking Sarek in for good. You remember that one important puzzle I mentioned before entering the dungeon? Well, it requires you to open the portal before you ever meet Sarek, go into the realm, and push a chest into the void, causing Sarek to stay in his former prison realm longer, looking for the chest, giving you time to walk to the portal and break it.
And that's it. You've beaten the game; the king and Maddog venture back home; Maddog is knighted; and he gets to court Leoria as well. But alas, happiness is not on the cards, as Maddog is, during a romantic evening out, abducted by aliens in a flying saucer, and a sequel, Escape from Cylindria, is teased. Dungeons of Duridian was released in 1991, and the last news of Escape from Cylindria was teased in 2004. I do believe an actual conclusion to this tale is extremely unlikely.
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| Leoria, whom Maddog is instantly smitten with. |
The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is an old-school adventure game that is controlled by player input in the style of 1980s Sierra adventures. Some do claim it has RPG elements, but that's merely a superficial link because of the combat systems. This is not even an adventure RPG in the vein of Sierra's Quest for Glory; it's simply an adventure game with some combat.
The parser system is fairly competent and more forgiving than what Sierra's titles had. It accepts seemingly complex sentences, but its synonym vocabulary leaves room for improvement, meaning at times you need to be very exact on what you ask it to do.
Some of the puzzles might require you to backtrack quite a bit as well. It's entirely possible to miss some important plot item, and the only way to get it is to reload an earlier save. Then again, as the game doesn't change in any way, it's pretty simple to just quickly play back where you were. Only the final dungeon might cause you to lose some extra hair, thanks to the platforming bits.
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| Maddog is hitching a ride to Sarek's castle. What follows this scene is a short air battle in which you get to blast other dragons from the sky. |
Graphically, the game is merely fine. It uses something like Sierra-style low-resolution graphics, but instead of SCI and AGI engine-style vectors, it's all bitmaps. It looks pretty decent at times, but it never really manages more than that. The character art is serviceable, but the animation is rather basic. As for music, nothing really stands out. There's some music and SFX, and the best I can say about it is that I didn't feel like I'd have to turn off my speakers.
Maddog Williams is a decent enough adventure game. It's not really doing anything special that would not have been done better elsewhere, but even the most glaring faults it has can be relatively forgiving because the game isn't that long either. After you get the hang of the parser, it might even be called easy, if you can ever call a game like this easy, thanks to the easy-to-miss stuff and the necessity of knowing the exact things to write. That said, if you've played it through once, it's pretty hard to say why you'd want to play it again.
The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian is a game that is not sold anywhere, but if you want it, you can get it for free from the developer/publisher site. All you need to do then is set it up on DosBox. There's a Mac version of it as well, but I have a suspicion it won't work on any modern Mac.
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| Al Lowe did something similar in Larry 7: Love for Sail. Just like Maddog sequel, Larry 8 was never made, not by him at least.... |
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