18th March 2010, 9:57 PM
Wizardry 8 is a game that I only played the demo of, thought was fantastic, but didn't buy then... and obviously since it's gotten much harder to find. I absolutely mean to play it sometime, though, for sure.
Wizardry Gold... honestly it'd probably be easier to get the DOS games (VI, VII, etc.) working, Win9x games which don't easily work in Win Vista/7 just will probably never work I think. I have several such titles, nothing I know of can make them work in Vista... but DOS is easy. Not all older Windows games have problems of course, but the ones that do seem to have bad ones.
... I'm sure I wrote stuff about Wizardry VI back when I tried playing it, but can't find anything at the moment. The kind of stuff that made me stop playing though...
-Character creation -- Basically it all depends on one random number. A single random number determines how many skill points you get, and that determines not only how good a character you start with, but which classes you can choose. There's no "reroll" button or "back up" or "cancel" or something, so you just need to go through the full character creation process every time until you get lucky and get one with a high enough number to get the number of points and class you want.
-If you fail to open a lock it can jam. It's very easy to fail and very easy to jam locks. Jammed locks are nearly impossible for lower-level characters to open and can get you permanently stuck if you're not really careful.
-Either draw out the maps yourself on graph paper or print off maps from the internet. There is no ingame mapping.
-One save slot. Save anywhere (as long as you're not in battle).
-All the areas look identical... I know this is true for all the first-person RPGs back then, but I didn't PLAY first-person RPGs back then, so I don't have nostalgia value for this stuff...
-Related to the above, when you need to find something the only "solution" I ever found was face every direction on every tile and search, until you find it. If it wasn't for that guide that at least told me the areas to look in for each vitally important hidden desk or passage or bed or whatever, I'd never have gotten even as far as I did. (That is, all furniture, etc, is entirely invisible, so good luck standing in the right place to search the invisible chest...)
The graphics were simple but nice, the writing good, the game interesting in its extreme hardcore nature, but it just wasn't tolerable for more than a few floors before I gave up.
Wizardry VII for DOS does have a map, but you don't get it at the start. You need to find it first, and it's WELL hidden in the first area -- without a guide, good luck! Also even then you can't just use it. You need someone with the correct skill in order to use it, and, you guessed it, no one will have that for some time. I didn't play far enough to see how useful the map actually is...
And stuff like that is why I think the high point of PC RPGs was between about 1997 and 2002. :)
Of course I do love the classic Quest for Glory series, but those are quite different... and awesome... a few minor issues (such as that there's no quest log of course in the first four games so don't stop playing for long enough to forget what you're supposed to be doing!), but mostly just amazing. The first one is the only one that I actually played 10+ years ago though, I didn't own the other four games until five or six years ago.
Wizardry Gold... honestly it'd probably be easier to get the DOS games (VI, VII, etc.) working, Win9x games which don't easily work in Win Vista/7 just will probably never work I think. I have several such titles, nothing I know of can make them work in Vista... but DOS is easy. Not all older Windows games have problems of course, but the ones that do seem to have bad ones.
... I'm sure I wrote stuff about Wizardry VI back when I tried playing it, but can't find anything at the moment. The kind of stuff that made me stop playing though...
-Character creation -- Basically it all depends on one random number. A single random number determines how many skill points you get, and that determines not only how good a character you start with, but which classes you can choose. There's no "reroll" button or "back up" or "cancel" or something, so you just need to go through the full character creation process every time until you get lucky and get one with a high enough number to get the number of points and class you want.
-If you fail to open a lock it can jam. It's very easy to fail and very easy to jam locks. Jammed locks are nearly impossible for lower-level characters to open and can get you permanently stuck if you're not really careful.
-Either draw out the maps yourself on graph paper or print off maps from the internet. There is no ingame mapping.
-One save slot. Save anywhere (as long as you're not in battle).
-All the areas look identical... I know this is true for all the first-person RPGs back then, but I didn't PLAY first-person RPGs back then, so I don't have nostalgia value for this stuff...
-Related to the above, when you need to find something the only "solution" I ever found was face every direction on every tile and search, until you find it. If it wasn't for that guide that at least told me the areas to look in for each vitally important hidden desk or passage or bed or whatever, I'd never have gotten even as far as I did. (That is, all furniture, etc, is entirely invisible, so good luck standing in the right place to search the invisible chest...)
The graphics were simple but nice, the writing good, the game interesting in its extreme hardcore nature, but it just wasn't tolerable for more than a few floors before I gave up.
Wizardry VII for DOS does have a map, but you don't get it at the start. You need to find it first, and it's WELL hidden in the first area -- without a guide, good luck! Also even then you can't just use it. You need someone with the correct skill in order to use it, and, you guessed it, no one will have that for some time. I didn't play far enough to see how useful the map actually is...
And stuff like that is why I think the high point of PC RPGs was between about 1997 and 2002. :)
Of course I do love the classic Quest for Glory series, but those are quite different... and awesome... a few minor issues (such as that there's no quest log of course in the first four games so don't stop playing for long enough to forget what you're supposed to be doing!), but mostly just amazing. The first one is the only one that I actually played 10+ years ago though, I didn't own the other four games until five or six years ago.
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