D&D: Eye of the Beholder

Genre:	Turn-Based Strategy/RPG
Developer:	Pronto Games
Publisher:	Infogrames
Release Date:	8 October 2002
Released On:	GBA

Amazing Ben Describes the Plot in 10 Words or Less: 

Walk around a dungeon.  Get lost.  Fight.

Overview: 

I grew up playing games like The Secret of the Silver Blades and The Curse of the Azure Bonds on my Commodore 128.  Back then, the whole "first-person perspective" was a new and interesting thing, but it was still primitive at that time and therefore you spent much of your time lost and spinning around in circles trying to find the door that you apparently just missed.  Over time, game designers managed to perfect this concept and since then we have been blessed with a horde of kickass games such as Half-Life and DOOM.

Eye of the Beholder is a gigantic step backwards in the history of gaming.  Gone are the smooth first-person animations and back is the time-honored tradition of "press the up button and get an entirely new picture to indicate that you've moved forward in the hall".  It's confusing and horrible, and then when you tack on the fact that many walls that you see are actually FAKE walls that you can walk through one way but not the other way you end up with an incredibly frustrating game that makes you angry.

This game features the most difficult navigation and control system of any game I have played in the last fifteen years.  If you have the patience to sit through it, you will eventually grow accustomed to it, but you will never "get used to it".  It's awful.  You can never find your way around anywhere without getting lost, since every corridor looks exactly the same as the one before it.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.  Eye of the Beholder is a D&D-based game where you put together a party of adventurers and head into a dungeon for some reason that is never actually explained in the game.  You stumble through level after level of this dungeon trying to figure out what the fuck you're looking at before walking head-first into an army of apparently invisible enemies.  When you enter combat, you are taken out of the aneurysm-inducing first-person view and are thrown into a standard third-person turn-based battle mode where you lead your party against whatever monsters you happen to be facing.  The animations and characters are comprised of about five pixels, and look awful.  The combat is painfully simple, as the monsters just continue running up to you and attacking while you attack them back.  You never really need to move any of your characters and you can win every battle by just hitting the "Attack" every time the Action Menu comes up.

You are given the ability to build your party from scratch by choosing class, race, and other crap in standard D&D fashion, but none of it really matters.  The party I beat the game with consisted of one cleric, one wizard and four fighters, and I never had a single character die during the entire playthrough.  I did, however, feel that playing this game all the way to the end actually made me stupider.

X-Tremeness Level: 

Having a girl you're trying to sleep with walk in and catch you playing an actual game of Dungeons & Dragons with your friends.

Overall Badassitude Score: 

Uh... I guess the combat is pretty cool, but mostly just because it takes you out of the first-person view.  Your fighters are all tough as hell, but that might just be a function of the AI being retarded and the monsters being weak.

  

SCORE:  1 out of a possible 5 2nd Edition D&D Player's Handbooks.

Addictiveness: 

RATING:  Really stale potato chips when there's nothing else to eat.

Now that I've spent the entire update talking about how horrible this game is, I will mention that I played it almost every day for a month.  It may have been a function of the fact that the only three Game Boy games I owned at the time were this, Tetris and R-Type III, or maybe just that it brought back nostalgia of the old C64 games... it's hard to say.  For some reason I just couldn't pull myself away from it.  It was so mindless that it was something to do to kill time on the train and I was just sadly and inexplicably drawn to it for some unknown reason. 

Multiplayer Component: 

N/A.

Hot Andrea's Take: 

Hah.  You think I would let Andrea catch me playing this?

Awesometer Score: 

-3

-3 is most likely not an accurate indication of how bad this game is, and probably would be given around a -6 if anyone but me were to review it.  However, it's almost exactly like the old C64 D&D games that I grew up with so there was some sort of nostalgia for me.  Also, the fact that I couldn't put it down no matter how much I wanted to leads me to believe that I should probably rate it higher than it deserves.  I guess sometimes it's the intangibles that make all the difference.