The Book of Screed - March 16th, 2008

Way back in 2002, I happened to buy myself a copy of Wizardry 8, the final installment of Sir Tech's classic Wizardry computer RPG series. In the screenshot above, you can see a collection of villainous highwaymen catching a fireball in the teeth. (And flinching in perfect synchronization, to boot; apparently all Higardi Roustabouts take choreography classes.)

In six years, I still haven't beaten the game.*

To use the parlance of those modern hep-cat kids, this game is hardcore old-school. It has deep roots in the old "dungeon-crawl" computer games like Rogue and the Sword of Fargoal, back when everything was ASCII art on the screen and the entire world was a massive, trap-studded grid map. Needless to say, these games were pretty simplistic by modern standards. An automapper? Bah! Real gamers didn't need an automapper; they wrote down their game maps on grid paper! I don't think anyone enjoyed that; who wants to spend their leisure time making crabbed notes on graph paper?**

Wizardry 8 is one of these old-school dungeon crawls with the rough edges sanded away. It has a nice graphical interface, complete voice-acting, and a fully functional automapper. But this is still a hard game. You have to use terrain to maximum effect during combat; otherwise enemies will encircle you and cut your weaker characters to pieces (particularly spellcasters). And there's lots of combat, too; it seems you can hardly walk thirty feet without running into yet another band of highwaymen or undead or mobile flesh-eating plants for whatever. That gets frustrating; I had to turn the game's difficulty all the way down before it became enjoyable (and my characters still die on a regular basis).

But it's still a fun game, especially if you're in the mood for something old-school.

-JM

*Not that this is unusual. I play computer games at a glacial and entirely sporadic pace. It took me 7 years to beat Planescape:Torment. I bought Knights of the Old Republic back in 2004, and as my youngest brother is fond of reminding me, I have yet to even install it.  Also, in the old days when I got stuck on a computer game I usually just abandoned it in frustration; these days I just look up the solution on the Internet.

**Well, except for Darnak the OCD Dwarf.