Ishar

Ishar is a series of computer role-playing games, which were developed by Silmarils. The first part, Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, was released in 1992, and has been for the systems Amiga, Atari ST, MS -DOS and Apple Macintosh. One year later, part 2, Ishar: Messengers of Doom published, and in 1994 was the series with Part 3, Ishar: The Seven Gates of Infinity, complete.

Game History

The action followed in every part, although a common thread, but is otherwise quite nonlinear. You control a single hero at first, but can expand its adventure group up to 5 companions later. Playful one moves through a world in pseudo-3D look, which was updated incrementally, and consisted of pre-drawn tiles. The battles take place in real time, and offer quite an extensive magic system.

The remarkable thing about this series are especially impressive realistically drawn and varied graphics, through which one moves, and even today considered as a benchmark for this kind of game. Also striking is the integration of various small aspects that in other games were standard until much later. Thus, it is possible to position the own group tactically to protect mages or archers in the back rows, while warriors fighting at the front. There is interaction between the members of their own group, which commented depending on sentiments more or less well with each other, which can lead to struggles in the group. Admission and change of group members is practically democratic, the group votes on whether a new hero is taken or not, and whether anyone is allowed to go, a decision that you can not influence as a player. There is a simple alchemy system, which complements the fairly extensive magic system. In the external environment and the cities, there is a day and night system, which affects the environment. In addition, could be imported in each subsequent part the group of the predecessor.

Predecessor

With Crystals of Arborea released in 1990 a quasi- predecessor of the Ishar series. The game concept is used and the technique is largely already recognizable as a model, but the game itself was kept much simpler and shorter. The group with which you are traveling (7 characters ) is specified, it moves a lot in 2D maps that you can go through even in pseudo - 3D, the fights take place in a plan view is shown in a chessboard pattern.

MUD

Since 1994 there is also a free, eponymous game MUD (Multi User Dungeon ).

Republication

Since July 2009, the Ishar Trilogy is available as a commercial download at Good Old Games. To make the games in the new release on Windows run the DOS emulator DOSBox was used.