Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

The Good
It was the first computer game that I ever saw that attempted to graphically render the D&D game. There may have been others out there that I was unaware of, but for me, it was ground-breaking.

Where to start? Character creation like D&D. Random numbers for wisdom, strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence. Pick a class, pick evil good or neutral. Buy armor for the front three guys and go down in the dungeon to kill monsters and gather treasure!

It doesn't get any better than that! (well it does, but it didn't in 1985). So over the course of weeks or months you built your characters up (and sometimes they would change from good to evil - forcing you to start over with a new priest or mage). But eventually you would get to the final showdown with Werdna! ...and he would kill everyone in the party. After several tries though, you could kill him. And that was the coolest thing in the world!

The Bad
Characters changed alignment occasionally when they leveled up, and sometimes you would have to start a new character up in the needed alignment to match the rest of the party.

Another thing I disliked was having to type out the exact text of the spell I needed my mage or priest to cast. In excitement or in the wee hours of the morning, I occasionally misspelled a word, so no spell was cast. A bummer when one of the other characters desperately needed healed, or I needed to cast a massive damaging spell.

The Bottom Line
D&D without the dice or graph paper.

The Good
This is the first computer role playing game I ever purchased. Actually, one of the main reasons I pestered my parents into buying me an Apple II was so I could play this game. It cost me $50 in 1983, which is over $90 today. The disk drives that came with my second-hand Apple weren't up to reading the sensitive Wizardry disks, so I had to get them repaired first.

But all the headache was worth it. I was a big D&D fan, but living up in the sticks, I rarely had anyone nearby to play with. This game was a great solution to this problem. Not only was I amazed by the flashy opening animation, I was enthralled by the gameplay. While the graphics were crude and splotchy by today's standards, they amazed me in 1983! There was a graphic representation of the actual monster I was fighting! Right there in front of me! Of course it was static--it wasn't animated--but I didn't have to remember what it looked like. There it was! I was fighting an orc! A skeleton! A slime! Woo-hoo!

And for the first time, I could actually see the dungeon from the point of view of my characters! The dungeons were rendered as crude line drawings, but in the 1980s, that was state of the art! Not even the staircases were rendered, but that didn't matter. There were the walls in blotchy Apple II "white." How could it get any better?

Though it wasn't strictly D&D, it was close enough for my tastes. Though it was just one dungeon, it was enough to satisfy my desire to role-play.

Wizardry allowed to user to carefully orchestrate his party's attack, just like all early paper role-playing games. And the party could consist of several adventurers of different classes (mages, fighters, clerics, etc.). Where in D&D I had to role all my own dice, the computer now took care of it for me, showing me my virtual "roll" versus the enemy's. While sometimes I groaned over the result, I couldn't argue that it wasn't fair. After all, it displayed my result, right there in front of me.

While I never finished this game, it gave me endless pleasure in role-playing alone or impressing envious friends.

While it was far outdone by later games (notably The Bard's Tale), Wizardry launched the genre and remains one of the most important computer role-playing games in the history of video gaming.

The Bad
Wizardry, like many early home computer games, was pretty unforgiving to the user. The player could only have one active game, and there was no way to prevent your party from getting killed when outmatched in a fight, or to back up and retry a battle. Once your party got killed, they really got killed! And the game was pretty merciless about saving the data to disk. If you pulled out the disk so it couldn't save the information that your party got killed (as I did on many occasions), there was a good chance that your copy of the game would become corrupted. Even though they warned not to remove the disk, I and many other players did, so as not to lose scores of hours of adventuring. The only way to recover the disk was to mail it back to Sir-Tech for repairs.

The Bottom Line
A great landmark computer RPG. Outdone by successors, but unmatched when it came out. Worth a look for any video game aficionado.

The Good
Wizardry on the NES was released after Dragon Quest/Warrior, which borrowed many ideas. Dragon Quest set expectations for console RPGs that Wizardry, as it was released on the Apple II, would not meet.

Many changes made to the NES version are improvements. Enemies are much more detail and the walls are solid (as opposed to a wireframe). There's even music, and it's actually a little catchy.

The battle system has been streamlined for the NES's controller. Menus are now selected using an arrow cursor and spells are listed (as opposed to having to type them out to cast them).

The Bad
The NES version, however, introduced a number of bugs. The most significant is that AC,apparently, does nothing. This makes the game a lot more difficult, though that difficulty is offset by the easy of hitting the reset button on the console and abusing Wizardry's autosave feature.

The NES version also removed many puzzles that were present in computer versions. This was because they usually required text entry, though replacements for these would have been a welcome change to dungeon crawling.

One problem that Wizardry has in general is accessibility with its spells. To new users, the seemingly jibberish names for spells mean nothing. Without a manual, there is no way to know that dios heals wounds and malor can kill you instantly if you don't enter coordinates correctly. This sort of trial and error is very unfair, especially for the more dangerous spells like haman and malor that can has permanent consequences.

The Bottom Line
Wizardry is a simple game, with a simple goal--get to the bottom of the dungeon. The key to success isn't your ability to grind and gain levels--it's your ability and patience to map each floor in detail.

Mapping is something that may put off many users, but it is the key to what makes Wizardry the adventure that it is. The constant fear of getting lost, the dread of walking through a door and having it vanish behind you--the act of mapping is what connects the player to the adventure. As the party transverses the blackness of the dungeon, the constant unknown created by mapping engages the player in a unique dimension.

The is really what still makes Wizardry unique and worthwhile today. It isn't just one of the first RPGs, it's still an experience that many games that followed could not reproduce.