Desperate to name that game...

[oldtimefun]

A long lost friend of the family used to bring his Atari 800XL over and we played great RPGs and adventure games like Apshai and WIzard's Crown, Phantasie, Ultima and such. There was one game we played which I have never been able to figure out after years of searches.

It was an RPG, in that you had characters with skills and I am pretty sure the combat was similar to Wizard's Crown and the like. I recall fighting "Mutants" that had icons with four (or six?) arms, but again, we're talking Wizard's Crown and older Ultima 3 type graphics here. They also had Berserk Robots to fight. I could swear that one of the weapons you could use were called "Gemstone Grenades." Due to it seeming so much like Wizard's Crown (but in space or futuristic), I had asked SSI about this a few times in the past and they kept getting hung-up on the "gemstone" aspect and trying to say it was Gemstone Warrior/Healer, but that's *definitely* not it, since those are arcade style games and not futuristic RPGs. It was probably not an SSI game, but it seemed to have that SSI feel to it. I thought maybe it was tied to Gamma World or something, but apparently unlike AD&D there were no Gamma World games in the 80's (well, then there was Wasteland, which I recall coming out several years later but not on Atari)?

Less clear to me (I may be confusing this with another game, as I was young) is that I believe that there were "Adventures" or "Quests" that you could choose from, and when you chose one, you had to fly this spaceship in an arcade-like way to get to the quest. If I am not mistaken, one quest started with lockpicking skills and if you did not have that skill (or the right level in same) you wasted your time flying that darn spaceship to a door you couldn't open and then had to fly it right back for nothing. I may be mistaken, but if you crashed that spaceship, your party was dead (which is why I recall it being such a hassle to waste two trips on the locked door quest).

If anyone can recall this game, it's the one of the great old games we played that still escapes me to this day.

[oldtimefun]

BINGO!
I scoured the Atarimania database and finally did a search for the word "adventure" (after "quest" and "space" yielded nothing), which turned up a possibility, and then Google sealed the deal.
Those bums at SSI couldn't even help me ID their own game all those years (and many tries) ago. It *WAS* an SSI game:
Galactic Adventures
Here's a video (albeit from Apple II):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8Bz21lzx0

It has 6-armed mutants, gemstones (they're grenades), robots, a lock pick skill and the goofy arcade spaceship flight and all.

Thanks Atarimania!!!