Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse – A trip to an Arabian Past

[Dracos]

In the late eighties/early ninties, Strategic Systems Inc (SSI) was a large player in the strategy and role playing game, dominating the TSR license and producing a vast number of RPGs for them, most notably the gold box series.  Somewhat famous for their packaging quality and use similar engines for the AD&D games, they pushed out a number of good games.  One of their end of era games was one of the rare, if not the only, games in the Al-Qadim genre.  For those unfamiliar with it, Al-Qadim was an Arabic D&D setting during the 2nd edition.  It delivered a land of steeped deeply in Arabic mythology and culture with Djinns flying through the air, magic wielding Viziers, and acrobatic scimitar duels.

   The Genie's Curse places you in the role of a powerful warrior noble, the younger son of the Al-hazard trading family and fiancé for the Caliph's daughter.  Starting the game you are finishing your Corsair training, basically the equivalent of an Arabic knight, facing one last challenge to prove himself as a Corsair before returning to his family and his impending marriage to the princess.  Traveling back home, you proceed to interact with the townspeople and your family, using your position to arrange a peace agreement between your family and a rival trading group.  During this, word arrives that your family's genie has violated the very peace agreement set forth and sunk one of your rival's ships.  Even more tragic, your bride to be and the royal caliph were on board when it sank.  Searching the beach for signs of survivors, you find that the Caliph has survived, only to hear your family implicated by your own genie as having ordered his death.  For this, your family is brought to the capital and imprisoned and you are exiled from the city, left without wealth, without a ship to travel after them, or any way to clear your family's honor.

   From here you begin a number of fantastical adventures, passing through trapped dungeons, maneuvering through puzzles, battling beasts of all kinds, and seeking to figure out a way to recover your family's honor, their freedom, and your bride.  The game is heavily themed in Arabic mythology, sending you to journey through genie courts and battling mystic sha'ir.  It also, from a puzzle perspective, is very well designed, usually offering several methods of solving various challenges that face you, even if some might not be obvious.

   The combat system, while somewhat limited by today's notions, was pretty good real time combat for the day, underpinned by the 2nd edition AD&D rulesets and combined with weapon trainers and mystic sword spells to liven things up.

   Its graphics, notably, were pretty stellar for the era too.  They've got a very clean overall effect that makes it easy to come back and play such and old game without feeling the graphic barrier.  Overall, the graphics look like one might expect from a story book, with the genies especially being large and well detailed.  The sound isn't as good, but that's largely because its dos era sound and pretty much all dos era sound were little better than beeps.

   Unfortunately, it's still for sale.  At least last I checked.  Why is this unfortunate?  Because the company that created it has long past into the dust and thus payment for it is pretty abstracted from those who worked on it and for a product that you really need dosbox in this day and age to run.  A neat game to play if you ever come across a copy, but unfortunately, it's unlikely to enter the public domain until long after it is totally obsolete in terms of playable enjoyment.