Wizard Wars: Someone Else Won!

The final battle

I haven't had a bad string lately. After deferring them for most of the year, I won BattleTech, Sentinel Worlds, and Star Command in succession, and I'm on the cusp of winning Wizardry V, rounding out all the games that I was having issues with towards the end of 2011.

But there was another game I abandoned around the same time: Wizard Wars, the odd game from Paragon. I noted during my first posting that there were no walkthroughs online, so even though I didn't really like the game, I thought I'd try my hand at creating one. It ended up being a lot more trouble than I cared to invest in it, although I did get about halfway done. I gave up prematurely, and offered a premature GIMLET, when I couldn't find a spell components list, only to be told (to my embarrassment) that there was one in a pretty obvious place on MobyGames. But even with this, I finally got frustrated with trying to find spell components through repeated searches, especially where Skyrim had just been released. I never really returned to the game.

Well, since then, Tarn Adams took the resources linked from my postings and the associated comments, and won the game. Since my blog seems to be the Wizard Wars authority on the Internet, I thought I'd finish that series of postings with Tarn's endgame.

He reports that:

• Many of the spell components I was searching for in the First Dimension were, in fact, hidden on the eight maze levels of the Second Dimension.

• The purpose of the Second Dimension is, ultimately, to get the components necessary to cast a "death" spell on a chimera guarding a bound unicorn in the First Dimension.

• Rescuing the white unicorn then allows access to the Third Dimension, where the evil wizard Aldorin awaits.

Doesn't "Aldorin" sound a lot like "Alduin"? And then you've got the whole dragon thing. I'm not saying there's plagiarism involved, but come on.

 

• To get to Aldorin, you first have to pass three dragons. You can defeat them with magic or by answering riddles that they pose.

My version: "In North America, you see it every night. And you often see it during the day. So my guess is they never see it in Australia."

 

• After the final battle with Aldorin, Mazeus, the "God of Passion," instructs you to remain there and teach magic to worthy students.

Tarn offers three other tips: 1) Save your "evoke falcon" spell for the final battle, 'cause it's one use only; 2) there's a more complete spell list here; F10 mixes spells (this key is easy to overlook).

I don't often offer other players' winning screenshots, but there's no reason I shouldn't, so from now on when I abandon a game, I'll post the winning shots and narratives of anyone who wants to finish it up. (I'll even offer my save files in case you want to finish with my party.) (That's not happening with Wizardry V, by the way, so don't get excited.)

But what particularly motivated me here was the realization that I could have pretended to have won the game myself. There's no "character creation" in this game; you don't name your character or select any attributes. Every player has to get the same set of spells, go through the dimensions in the same order, and fight the same battles. There is literally no way to distinguish one player's screen shots from another's. What a depressing approach to a CRPG! After looking through Tarn's screenshots and reading his messages, I don't see any reason to adjust my GIMLET of 24. In Tarn's own words, "It really is not a good game."

I'll meet Paragon again in 1990 and 1991 with the two MegaTraveller games. The company went out of business shortly after.

Not much time to play Wizardry V over the last couple of days, but I'm still going at it. Maybe one more posting before the end.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Over the long weekend, I took CRPG-playing way too far by spending at least 30 hours on four separate CRPGs--and I have almost nothing (blog-wise) to show for it.

The first game was, of course, Skyrim. I've taken a hit on some discussion boards for praising this game, but honestly, the only reason I can think not to like it is that you deliberately want to be contrary. Sure, there are things not to like about it, but to not like it as a whole? Do you like games at all?

Running into dragons keeps cramping my style, though. I get stocked up on potions to make a run at some dungeon, and on the way there I have to drink them all fighting a dragon.

       

The second was Dragon Age: Origins, and playing it has entirely been against my will. My wife, Irene, went and picked up Dragon Age II a few weeks ago, but she insisted on replaying Origins, and all its expansions, this time as a female PC, so she could marry Alistair. Much of my weekend was a fight with Irene about playing Skyrim longer versus stopping it for Dragon Age. First-world problems, I know.

I've had a curious reaction to Dragon Age. On the surface, it seems to have all the things I like about CRPGs--an original game world with lots of lore, memorable NPCs, copious dialogue options, loads of side quests--and yet I find it curiously soulless. Few CRPGs are brilliantly original in their game worlds--most are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons in some way--but Dragon Age more than most feels somehow...assembled. It has that characterless feeling of "master-planned communities" in the mid-west and west, where the streets are all arranged in a grid and there's a strip mall at every major intersection.

It's interesting to compare the two modern games in respect to their approaches to role-playing. In Dragon Age (like most Interplay and Bioware titles), role-playing is almost entirely through dialogue. You decide who you are and you speak accordingly. Someone says something and you get maybe five choices:

1. The "good" option
2. A slightly lamer good option
3. The selfishly-evil option
4. The psychotically-evil option
5. Something to kill the dialogue in case you hate dialogue

    

Sometimes there are fewer, but they basically boil down to good, selfish, bad.

    

Thus:

A young girl approaches, crying. "I've lost Mr. Snuffles!" she wails. "If you can find him, I'll give you these five shiny pieces I found in my da's desk!"

• "I'll do it! And don't worry about the gold. Use that to buy more bread for your family." [Morrigan disapproves]
• "I'll see if I can get to it."
• "Sure, I'll find Mr. Snuffles. But why don't you go home and see if you can find some more shiny pieces first?"
• "I'll take those 'shiny pieces' off your corpse!"
• "Go away, kid."

Again, this is normal in a lot of games from these developers and publishers, but it just feels so much more formulaic in Dragon Age. While I generally like dialogue, I agree that basing role-playing and quests around it forces you along a limited selection of paths. Dragon Age way overdoes it both the dialogue and romances for my tastes, anyway. The fact that I like both doesn't mean I want to spend 20 minutes reassuring Leliana that she's good in the sack.

In Skyrim, on the other hand, role-playing is based on how you interact with the game world--on what you do rather than what you say. The dialogue options, though better than in Oblivion, can't hold a candle to Dragon Age. More than once, indeed, I've found myself forced into accepting quests because I had no dialogue option to tell the quest-giver to sod off. In one city, a knight asked me to accompany him into a haunted house and started me on a path where the only option to get the quest off my quest board was to beat a helpless priest to death with a rusty mace.

I care more about clearing my "to do" list than I do about role-playing!

    

But what happens in between the dialogue in Skyrim is priceless. In Dragon Age, no matter how you role-play, combat and exploration go the same ways. You fight the same enemies in the same places for the same results, and all that matters is your overall motivation. Skyrim offers essentially limitless possibilities in combat and exploration. I'm just outside a bandit chief's room and I need to get a key off him. I could:

• Snipe him with a poisoned-soaked arrow
• Sneak up behind him and try to slit his throat
• Sneak up behind him and pickpocket the key
• Use an invisibility potion to walk up next to him and then let him have it with lightning blasts from both hands
• Summon a wave of skeletons
• Send a follower to take care of him
• Lead him outside and use a "shout" to send him spinning off a nearby cliff, then take the key from his corpse
• Lead him to the nearest guard outpost and let them deal with him
• Get him to chase me into a room full of his bandit friends, then use my "rage" scroll in the room, causing everyone to attack each other

The only way they could make it better is if I could talk to the bandit chief before attacking him, then try to persuade or bribe him for the key. Unfortunately, the game features two types of NPCs: those that you can talk to, and those that come charging at you, swords drawn, the moment they see you. Dragon Age usually has dialogues even when combat is inevitable.

Aside from combat, role-playing in Skyrim manifests itself in doing things like running from animals rather than killing them, ambushing every wandering Thalmor patrol you find, happily stealing from jarls' palaces but not the homes of townsfolk, and of course choosing to specialize in certain skills. The game doesn't generally acknowledge any of this, so you're essentially role-playing for yourself, which I guess some people find lame.

If you're curious about the third and fourth games I was spending time on, well, they're the ones this blog is supposed to be about. If you haven't been following, last Wednesday, I decided I couldn't get any further in Wizard Wars because of copy protection issues, only to have Skirie immediately find the information I needed. I had done a GIMLET and everything. So I spent some more time trying to win that game, and I determined that knowing the ingredients that go into certain spells means nothing if you can't find these ingredients. I visited every territory several times, ending up no further than I was on Wednesday. I'll keep trying.

I need five items to progress, but a golden potion isn't one of them.

      

The last game was Wizardry V, and I confess I devoted the least time to it. I got hung up a bit on the character creation process, which I will detail in the next posting, and I barely got out of the gate.
              

Hint: bonus points of 28 are only possible in 1 out of every 3,426 rolls.

         

Travel has again made both Skyrim and Dragon Age impossible this week, so I should have some more stuff on Wizardry V and maybe Wizard Wars for the next few days.

Wizard Wars: Need "Defeat Copyright Protection" Spell

Note: The first comment on this posting completely rendered it moot. Despite this, I never returned to the game, but a commenter did later report on how it concluded.

I'd really like to help.

Well, it turns out that I won't even be able to win Wizard Wars, let alone finish my comprehensive walkthrough--not unless someone reads this and comes through with the game manual. It turns out the game features an evil bit of copy protection by which the manual provides the "ingredients" you need to create the spells you need to solve the quests.

It's too bad, because I was developing a real fondness for it. Wizard Wars is the oddest little game. It's clearly intended for novices, or children, but it has a certain frivolous charm, and it's been an interesting counterpoint to Skyrim.

The first section is like a cross between a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" book and a game of "Concentration." Amidst the 30 territories in the first dimension are a number of quests to solve using items that you find in other areas, so ultimately you end up visiting most of the territories in a precise order that you have to work out through trial and error. There's no real danger, because you can visit a territory multiple times, but figuring it out and taking notes is simplistically fun. It would prepare young CRPG players for more complicated games later on--at least, it would have in this era. Nowadays, games take all your notes for you and make your maps for you and have big arrows indicating where you're supposed to go next.

Unfortunately, it was in the first dimension that I started noticing that a lot of the encounters required spells I didn't have. I thought maybe I'd find them somewhere--I did get one spell called "Psychic Energy" as a quest reward--but after exhaustively visiting each of the territories multiple times, I'm forced to conclude that I'm supposed to create them.



The "Create Spell" screen brings up all of the different objects that you've found and asks you to combine the right ones. The manual apparently lists which items you need for which spells. I started to try them randomly, but there are something like 30 items in the game, and I don't know if the spells occur in combinations of 2, 3, 4, or more. I haven't had to calculate binomial coefficients in a long time (remember "n choose k"?), but if I did the math right, there are, out of 30 objects:

• 435 possible combinations of 2
• 4,060 possible combinations of 3
• 27,405 possible combinations of 4
• 142,506 possible combinations of 5

Now assuming there are no spells that require six objects, that's still 174,406 things to try. This still sounds like something I might have done when I was a kid; at an average of one attempt per 3 seconds, I could do it while watching all 7 seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard--60 times. But I don't think you'd all have the patience for it.

Somehow, these objects combine to create spells.

I was getting pretty far with "Lightning Bolt" and frankly beginning to question whether I needed any of the spells or objects that these quests would give me, but progress to the third dimension requires defeating a chimera guarding a unicorn in the first dimension, and neither of my existing offense spells will even touch him. Clearly, there's some trinket or spell I need from one of these unsolved quests.

I miss every time.

I did progress some distance through the second dimension, which turned out to be a 15 x 15 maze. Unlike similar 15 x 15 dungeons in, say, The Bard's Tale or Pool of Radiance, it was an actual maze, with essentially one path from beginning to end, and no special encounters anywhere else.




The game helps you out by giving you your starting position, and then updating it after you finish every combat:




There are several named monsters in the maze, and the end of it brings you face-to-face with a wizard named Kalzir, who starts the combat by summoning a random monster. When you defeat the monster, he casts a "light shield" spell that defeats your attacks for a few rounds. He's a tough customer, and I died twice before I finally was able to return and defeat him. You can't save in the maze, but you can return to the main screen by "fleeing" combat with any enemy.




After defeating him, I was rewarded with a trip to the second level of the maze, which promised more of the same. But the foes were so much harder, I realized I needed to bring a lot more loot from the first world. It was a bit of a shock, actually: the combats in the first dimension and the first level of the maze had been fairly easy, even lacking all of my available spells.




Anyway, even if I defeat the second level (I'm not sure how many levels there are), it's clear I won't be able to progress without the puzzle-solving spells that the game requires. It's pretty clear that there's nothing online. I've Googled "Wizard Wars" with "Create Spell" and gotten nothing, and I've tried Googling the specific object names and similarly returned nothing. The only way I'm missing anything is if there's a PDF manual somewhere that hasn't been OCR'd. Couldn't find a legitimate copy on eBay or Amazon. If anyone else has any suggestions, please let me know.

The GIMLET on this game (which I'll update if I do get a manual and can finish it) looks a bit horrible. The game world is thoroughly outlined in the descriptions of the territories, which sound evocative but don't allow you to do much interaction with them (3). Character development is very light, with boosts to the four attributes through combat and encounters, but you don't even get to name your character (2). There are NPCs of a sort, but you have no interaction with them except to agree to help them or not. There are some roving NPCs like dwarves which provide various clues (3). Encounters with enemies offer no role-playing except to decide to "reason" with non-evil monsters, and combat consists of blandly casting your chosen spell over and over until one of you dies, although there might have been some tactical aspects involved in choosing the right spell that I didn't get to experience (3).

The equipment part isn't bad: in addition to spell-creation items, you find a variety of potions, gems, staffs, and other "usable" objects that each serve to make you more or less effective. You have to figure out the uses through trial-and-error or through hints obtained from NPCs (4), but there is no economy (0). Not all of the little quests seemed to be necessary, so I have to conclude that the game has side-quests in addition to the main quest. These were very simplistic, with no role-playing options, but still satisfying, in a very basic way, to check off (3).

The graphics are actually reasonably good (although they take a turn for the worse in the maze), but the sound is virtually non-existent. While the keyboard controls are okay, transitioning between screens takes to long, even with the processor cranked (2). Overall gameplay is methodical, mostly linear, non-replayable, and easy--but at least reasonably fast-paced. I'm pretty sure that if I had the manual and hadn't been trying to write a walkthrough at the same time, I could have won it in 6-8 hours (unless the third dimension ends up being really huge). Still, I can't give it much more than a 2 here despite, as I said before, a certain unreasonable fondness for it.

That gives us a final score of 24, lower than all but a few games, most of which I didn't finish. I would have finished this one. Maybe I felt I needed an easy win before another Wizardry title.

Wizard Wars: Walking Through

The game is easy enough that the death screen is rare.

As a long time connoisseur of CRPG walkthroughs (see my September 2010 posting), I've always been interested in creating one. (Before I started this blog, I used to use them liberally during gameplay, and I still like to read them after I've finished.) But every time I thought to create one for a game I particularly liked, I would find out that someone like Andrew Schultz had already beaten me to it. Now, at last, I've reached a game--Wizard Wars--that has nothing online. No walkthroughs, no let's plays, not even a significant user review. The best we have is an old 1989 article from QuestBusters that Xyzzy Magic linked me to. And while it seems to have a lot of spoilers (I stopped reading), it's still not a proper walkthrough.

So I fired up Notepad and began my text file as I played Wizard Wars. Here's what I've discovered: writing a walkthrough is hard, even for an absurdly simple game like this.

A good walkthrough is exhaustive, which means that I have to do everything there is to do in the game. I've got to visit each of the 30 territories in the first dimension multiple times, making sure I don't miss anything. (It's hard, but not impossible, to miss something when your only options are "Search for Item" and "Search for Inhabitants.") Then I have to catalog each monster, noting both the statistics that are on the surface (hit points and armor points) as well as those on which I have to perform measures of central tendency and dispersion (average damage, average hit rate). After the monsters, I have to try to figure out what all these items do. I've got a bunch of stuff--brass cup, broken sword, platinum bracelet, rocksalt--that seems to serve no purpose. At least not yet.

My mysterious inventory.

Just when I start to feel like I'm developing a solid list of territories and encounters, something hits me: What if the game randomizes some of its encounters on every new game? Now I've got to play it at least one more time to makes sure I encounter the same things in the same places on the second go. Bloody hell.

"Chet," I can hear you all sighing. "Why are you wasting time on this game? Wizardry V is next, and we know you're sneaking off to spend time with Skyrim." And you would be correct. But Wizard Wars is too easy to give up on. When I say "too easy," I mean first that the encounters (at least so far) have been very one-sided, with my wizard blasting his way through every sort of foe, but I also mean that it's too easy in terms of knowing precisely what to do next. Twenty feet to the left of where I'm typing this is a nice long couch upon which currently rests a dormant Xbox controller that, if I press the power button, will launch Skyrim. Yet if I were to abandon Wizard Wars for Skyrim, I'd have to bring up my enormous quest list and figure out which of 49 active quests to embark on next. In modern CRPGs, you're almost paralyzed with indecision. Thus, there's something refreshingly rote about Wizard Wars, at least in the first dimension. You visit each territory one-by-one, search for...you know what? This is easier as a flow chart.

Click to expand.

This isn't to say there were no special encounters in the first dimension. I found a few, but they took multiple visits and only revealed themselves after defeating several random enemies, so it's going to be a long process of searching five or six times before I'm confident I picked up everything. For instance, in territory #30, Raknor, I found some cat people who needed help opening a chest:




The full encounter reads:

Aimex has been the ruler of a cat-like people who have existed since Mazeus created the dimensions. In their keeping is a large iron-bound chest containing a sacred book. In this book lies all the knowledge of this race and its entire history. Long ago, a magical enchantment was cast upon the chest's lock to safeguard the book. Since then, no one has been able to unlock the chest. Worse, no one knows what happened to the mage who enchanted the lock. There is only one way in which the chest may be unlocked and that is with the help of Agien's Magical Lockpick. Aimex says that in return for opening the chest, he will give you an item that has been in his possession for quite some time.

At the time, I didn't have such a lockpick, but I later discovered it while searching for items on another map:




When I took it back to the cat people, they were suitably grateful and gave me a scroll with the "Fear" spell--the second spell I've obtained. (There's an option to "create spells" on the main screen, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work.)

Some of the other territories featured encounters with unique enemies, or bits of advice from sages. Here are a few related screen shots:

Ultimately, I'm not sure what it all adds up to. The main purpose of the first dimension seems to be to develop your character sufficiently so he can survive the second dimension. When Temeres hit 200 wisdom points (he starts with 100), the game gave the second dimension to me as an option. It turns out to be wholly unlike the first, featuring a 3-D maze full of random encounters.




Unless they've done something extraordinarily creative here, I can't imagine an old mapping pro like me having a lot of trouble here.

Unless Wizard Wars offers anything groundbreaking between now and its end, I won't waste your time with more drivel on this game; I'll just give you the "won!" posting at the end. In the meantime, I might take one more diversion into Skyrim since several of my readers said they wouldn't mind another take on it.

Game 66: Wizard Wars (1988)

It's important not to mix up Wizard Wars, a 1988 game from Paragon, with Wizard Warz, that horrible 1987 quasi-RPG that I played in January. It's also important not to confuse it with the browser-based Wizard Wars (2002). As far as I can tell, the Wizard Wars we're dealing with here has virtually no love online: no walkthroughs, no MobyGames reviews, no fan sites--and, unfortunately, no manual. So, if I can figure things out, my blog can be the authoritative online presence for Wizard Wars.

The game was produced by the same company that made the completely bizarre Alien Fires: 2199 A.D. (1987), which I played just over a year ago, only to scram as soon as my six-hour minimum was up. They later went on to make MegaTraveller, so not all of their games were doomed to obscurity.

As I said, I can't find a manual for Wizard Wars, so I don't know whether the opening sections are representative of the entire game, or if a more interesting world opens up later. It's rather hard to believe that a commercial publisher released a putative CRPG with such limited gameplay as I've been experiencing.

First off, there's no character creation. You play as Temeres the Wizard, on a quest to defeat the evil wizard Aldorin and do something regarding a white unicorn and a black unicorn. You begin with 100 points each of wisdom, health, and "s.c.e.," which I'm guessing is "spell casting energy" or something. Its maximum goes up as I defeat enemies but depletes as I cast spells in combat.

The limited character screen.

  

It appears that the realm of Wizard Wars consists of three "dimensions," only one of which is explorable at the outset. Each dimension consists of a number of geographic "territories" (the first has 30). You tell the game which territory you want to visit, and it gives you a bit of a description of what you might expect to find there.

Deciding where to take my next trip.

   

URBANIA: The ruins of a once-proud ancient civilization dominate Urbania, located in the center of the first dimension. The crumbling remnants of a once-sprawling ancient metropolis litter the Urbanian landscape. A tribe of nomadic elves inhabit the ruins. Impervious to magic, the elves can be extremely loyal allies or deadly enemies, so be wise in your dealing with them.

Sounds good so far, and I rather expected that upon arriving in a place like Urbania, the game would open up and I could explore it. Alas, this is not the case. Upon arrival in each territory, you have five options: Search for an item (which always takes you to a cave), search for inhabitants (which always takes you to a castle), use an item, return an item, and return to the map. It appears that both searches occasionally produce random results.




Sometimes I will find nothing; other times I will find treasure or inhabitants, even when revisiting the same territory. Treasures have included potions (the only other way to heal is a slow one hit point per combat round) and a gemstone that absorbs damage.

At last, the sidewalks of my kingdom will be safe to traverse in winter.

When you encounter another creature, you sometimes have the option to "reason" with it, which hasn't worked for me yet...




...but presumably leads to dialogue in some encounters. Otherwise, you attack. The attack screen offers the options to flee, cast a spell, use an item, or drink a potion.




Temeres starts off with no items or potions, and only one spell--lightning bolt--so options at the outset are fairly limited. The process of attacking and watching the enemy attack (there's no animation, just screen messages) is slow and boring. So far, the combat hasn't been very difficult; sometimes the enemies just stop attacking. This is going to be a short posting, so to compensate, here are a whole slew of enemies attacking me and missing:




As you can see, the graphics aren't awful, although the game does use the same monster graphics for multiple monsters.

The vivid descriptions of each territory prior to the visit are intriguing, which makes it all the more disappointing when you arrive and find the same two screens, with no encounters that have anything to do with the story. And there aren't many CRPGs that don't allow you to move. I can think of a couple others--Beyond Zork, Braminar--but both of those were fundamentally text games with CRPG elements.

There's not much else to tell about it. My plan is to work methodically through the territories, searching for items and inhabitants, until I win the game, reach my six hours, or encounter something more interesting. If anyone has any insight into this game--like why it was made--I'd love to hear it. I don't expect any particular appreciation or anything, but I could be playing Skyrim instead of this.