An Appeal From The Game Preservation Society - The Temple of Elemental Evil and the Circle of Eight

Some games aren't blessed with an easy life. Born to underfunded developers, jerked around by indecisive and focus-group-led publishers, and abandoned before patches can even begin to address the worst of the launch issues. Most of these games just die out, unable to support a fanbase despite whatever good intentions they may have had, leaving a legacy of dissapointment and disdain. Some, however, are lucky enough to catch the attention of dedicated fans, modders, hackers and more.

Hit the jump for the second in a series of quick looks at the best in revivals, fan-patches and independent translations. Today: The Temple of Elemental Evil as restored to something approaching glory by the Circle of Eight, who are possibly some sort of band of digital necromancers.

The Temple of Elemental Evil
Circle of Eight Modpack

A troubled studio, and a troubled game. During their brief existance as a company, Troika always seemed to be Activisions whipping boy. The victims of cost-cutting, layoffs and last-minute decisions forcing game content to change mean that the few games that they put out may have been some of the best RPGs out there at heart, but the delicious gameplay filling was wrapped in a fragile and sickly shell. Fortunately, their dedicated fanbase saw well beyond the technical limitations of the games, and set to work on a series of epic projects to patch, tweak, tune and restore lost content to these games.

The Temple of Elemental Evil was one of them. A videogame adaptation of one of the very first Dungeons & Dragons packaged campaigns. It's classic 'explore the dungeon, beat the foozle, save the kingdom' stuff. Light on characterization, big on exploring deep caverns, slaying weird monsters and taking their stuff. It's very hard, very hardcore, and undoubtedly old-school. Most notably, it used the newest (at the time) edition for the D&D ruleset, V3.5, to great effect. A direct adaptation of almost all the rules, so that your characters can maneuver, grapple, disarm, charge and much more, all on a gridless and open battle map. Problem is that the game was horribly rushed out. Bugs everywhere, crashes aplenty, incorrect text, broken quests, and large chunks of 'darker' content cut out at the last minute because Activision wanted the game to have a more family-friendly age rating on the box.

The Circle of Eight pack fixes pretty much everything. It's still an uncompromisingly retro dungeon crawler, but it's a remarkably polished and complete one now, and one I can wholeheartedly reccomend to anyone who grew up with the old Gold Box AD&D series, or classic crawlers like Eye of The Beholder. The change-log for the Co8 pack is beyond enormous, and the amount of stuff they've changed, tweaked, tuned or restored from the depths of abandoned data files is beyond compare. Not only that, but they've now got the foundations in place for an upcoming fan-made expansion, entitled Tales of The Wild Coast. You can now find ToEE for just a couple of dollars or pounds (or whatever your local currency is) in most stores, online or otherwise. If you were put off by the initial reviews and horror-stories of bugginess, now is the time to check it out. It's a must-play for any seasoned D&D adventurer. Just don't go expecting much in the way of story.

Next from the Game Preservation Society: Sometimes a game doesn't need any help, but ambition knows no bounds for some crews. It's Jagged Alliance 2 and the unassumingly titled '1.13' patch.

Click here for a full list of Game Preservation Society articles.