Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasures of Tarmin

Oh, what a joy Treasures of Tarmin is. If you ever wanted to teach a baby or a kid how to play an RPG, this game is so elementary it's perfect. Both this and Utopia are the two Intellivision games of the greatest importance for game historians.

You pick one of the four difficulty levels, each with a progressively greater number of floors to break into. Easiest mode has two floors, easy has four floors, medium has eight, etc. At the bottom of every dungeon is the final boss, a great Minotaur warrior which you must defeat and take his treasure. Do this, and you beat the game.

In spite of Treasures of Tarmin taking every first-person dungeon-crawling lesson from Wizardry, it is super-curbed and streamlined into an enjoyable experience: All the heavy number crunching is distilled down into a handful of weapon types, color-coded for their quality(orange for rusty, blue for steel, white for platinum swords), and all the stats are limited to just 'warrior power'(a stand-in for HP and strength) and spiritual power, which boosts your Def and Magic Def. The items are plentyful, easy to find and are very useful, though sadly everything that is not a ranged weapon has only a one-time use. Meaning that swords and axes will always break after you use them once.

Operating the inventory screen and the many options in this Intelivision game is cumbersome, but yet well-organised. You have an inventory of six separate items where you can stock weapons, potions and books, and you can conveniently swap any of them in and use them any time you please, even during battle without risking enemy strikes(the attacks are turn-based). Unless you play in the higher difficulty modes, the enemies are very easy and fun to smite. As you travel, just like in Wizardry, you will be bound to hand-draw your map, especially necessary since the levels are randomly-generated. The progression becomes one of a templated search for better weapons and upgrades, beating harder monsters, until you reach the Minotaur himself. But be careful on the last floor, because you may very suddenly find the Minotaur hanging around and engage him, which is why I recommend you always have your best platinum weapons at the ready everywhere you walk in the last floor.

Think of this as the prototype of Diablo, or Rogue: Kids Edition.