Casting a fireball spell into the midst of a large group of enemies never got old, no matter how many hit points they had. Magic missiles always hit, sleep spells take out the right number of monsters that someone familiar with the rules would expect, clerics heal, thieves backstab, and so on. The tactical combat is truly superb and accurately reflects the tabletop rules from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Due to disk space limitations of the time, these discussions and events are normally only a few lines of text, though the text will also tell the player to flip to certain sections of the manual for a more verbose description. As characters explore their area, there are numerous NPCs to meet, shops to visit, and events that will occur. The game is entirely turn-based, and counters on the display show the current time along with the current map location via X and Y coordinates. The game perspective is shown through a first person view while exploring, and a top-down look that reveals all combatants during engagements. It would be popular enough to influence a more recent game developed by Ubisoft and given a similar title (though maybe we'd better forget that atrocity). Pool of Radiance would spawn the Gold Box series of games, whose engine went on to support an amazing total of a dozen SSI games. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) was looking for a video game producer to bring its famous Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rule system to the ever growing personal computer market, and the staff of both companies found in each other kindred spirits, as they both possessed backgrounds in tabletop wargaming. Pool of Radiance was not Strategic Simulations Incorporated's (SSI) first foray into computer roleplaying games, but it may have been the company's best remembered one.
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