9/21/20 Lords of Doom: Part One- The Black God (1996)

Lords of Doom: Part One- The Black God (1996) developed and published by Dzikosoft for DOS. This is a funny scenario, because just yesterday I was complaining about how Space: 1889’s limitations had made it fall flat, and today’s game is interesting for the same limitations. Another CRPG, Lords of Doom was developed by one guy, Bartek Dzik, a Pole who admits to his own limited English skills in the README. This game evokes the feeling of a really ambitious Newgrounds game, everything is very primitive, but at the same time there’s so much effort put in. Unfortunately, the music only works if you have the specific UltraSound Card, but you can export the midi files (The music was composed by what I believe is the creator’s brother). For some reason, the combat interface is what drives that home for me, the button to switch targets, the row of unlabeled hotkey commands with unique sprite art for each, the feed of information. Even in my short time with it, I encountered many awkward phrasings and a few misspellings; I just get this image of a guy sitting in his room making something that he’s really passionate about. Lords of Doom doesn’t do anything super unique, but that’s because it isn’t approaching the big fish in the pond as a competitor, it’s punching up to be like what the creator obviously loved. Doing some research into Dzikosoft, it appears that he was active until 2013 on his website, dzikosoft.com, and was heavily involved in the scene for games made using Microsoft Excel. To my knowledge, there was never a Lords of Doom: Part Two, but stories about small creators like this are why I do this.