Wizardry V: Won!*

The hearts really make this special. The people love me.

 
We're going to have to call it a tie. I won, but I played like a jackass. And I cheated.

I'm looking across the void of years at the younger CRPG Addict that played Wizardry I in the winter of 2010. How innocent he was. He had set a mission to play games without cheating and without looking at spoilers, and by the gods, he didn't cheat or look at spoilers. He mapped all the levels faithfully and carefully recorded each encounter for posterity. When one of his characters died, he raised the character. If the character became "LOST" during the raising, he started over with a new character at Level 1. If his party died in the dungeon, he mounted a rescue expedition, brought them to the surface in groups, and raised them. It took him a while, but he played the game like it was meant to be played, and victory sure tasted sweet.

Of course, Wizardry I only occupied about 3,000 squares. Wizardry V is closer to 8,000 (even accounting for the unused ones). What was new and exciting in 1981 was old and tired in 1988. But I'm just rationalizing. Being older, and more jaded, and more cynical doesn't excuse the deceitful way in which I "won" Wizardry V.

To take it from the top: when we wrapped up last time, I had just finished Level 6. At the time, I thought there were four more levels to go (I had it in my mind that the game had 10 levels, just like the first one). But it turned out that there were only three more, and two of them were so small and predictable that it wasn't even worth mapping them. Level 7 was really where most of the endgame took place.

On Level 7, we finally found some symmetry.

Mapping Level 7 took a long time, mostly because I kept running into monsters bent on killing me for good. Repeatedly, I had to fight parties with multiple spellcasters who thought nothing of casting mass-damage spells like LAHALITO and LADALTO, wiping out half my party members in a single round. Eventually, I got so sick of returning to the surface to raise my dead party members that I simply started reloading every time one of them died. Thus did I start on the slippery slope to the CRPG scum that I ultimately became.

I was just sick to death of being killed by a shirtless Kris Kristofferson.

In various places on this level, I found four magical staffs--air, earth, fire, and water--in places that required me to have certain inventory items to pass. For instance, in order to get past a gust of wind, I had to have a lark in a cage that would sing to the wind. Who would have guessed?

The game also had one last bout of goofiness to throw at me: an encounter with King Kong and Fay Wray. I don't think they did her justice in the portrait.

By the time I reached Level 7, I also had three cards, and it turned out that I needed to show them to the guardians of the Triaxial Gate to get passage to Level 8. There were four guardians, and four portals to Level 8, but I only got the fourth card after doing some fighting.

 

On each of the four sections of Level 8, I had to face a party composed of my own characters. Someone--The S*O*R*N, I guess--kept cloning my party and sending them against me. Since these characters had all the items and spells of my regular party members, they were reasonably tough. 

 

Level 8 had me fight myself. It was very metaphysical.

After defeating them, I encountered glowing orbs that corresponded to the four elements. Using the appropriate staff on these orbs (it took some trial and error) caused a talking head to ask me a riddle.

I had no idea how to solve this riddle. There were multiple options, and I had to make multiple selections for each element. None of it made any sense at all, and there was nowhere that I encountered any hints as to how to solve them. And thus did I engage in the next level of cheating: I looked up the answers in a walkthrough.

Friends, I can't overestimate the significance of that. My rules clearly say "no walkthroughs," and for over two years, I have faithfully played each game, winning most of them, through my own wits and copious notes. I am appalled and embarrassed that I capitulated here. But the good news is that I never would have come up with the solution without the walkthrough. Figuring out the answer would have required finding some obscure NPCs back up on Level 5--wandering NPCs that I didn't even know existed--and then asking the right keywords of NPCs back on Level 1 that I thought I was all done with. So between cheating and abandoning the game, did I make the right choice? I give myself to your judgement.

Ah, but it's not over yet. After I "solved" the four puzzles and broke down the barriers keeping me from the Gatekeeper's prison, I marched up to the Gatekeeper himself. At this point, The S*O*R*N (Are we supposed to read something into that? Is it an abbreviation?) whisked him to another dimension before attacking me with a host of demons. They slaughtered me quite badly. Part of the problem was that she had a magic shield around her that prevented me from doing any damage. It turns out that the solution was to cast the SOCORDI mage spell, which normally summons an elemental to aid you in combat, but which for some reason summons back the Gatekeeper in this combat. I have no idea where I was supposed to get that information, but I was cheating at this point so I got it from the walkthrough.

"To remain forever!...unless you think to cast an obscure Level 5 mage spell."

 
It still didn't do me any good. Even with the Gatekeeper on my side, her minions killed me again and again. I realized that I hadn't really paid my grinding dues. Most of my characters were only Level 14-15, and my constant avoidance of combat on Level 7 meant I wasn't really getting any better. I needed to buckle down and spend a few hours killing demons before I could hope to defeat The S*O*R*N.

But I didn't want to do that. I was sick of the game. So I engaged in my third form of cheating: save-scumming so bad it would have horrified a 13-year-old playing a first-person-shooter. The S*O*R*N's companions seemed to be chosen at random, so I just reloaded, reloaded, and reloaded--probably 40 times--until I finally encountered her with a relatively pathetic set of minions. I won, but just barely; only two of my characters were alive at the end. Fortunately, one of them was my mage, and I was able to get back to the castle and get the winning screenshot above.

I really came to over-rely on the mass-damage spell TILTOWAIT.

 

Killing The S*O*R*N freed the Gatekeeper, who had a little narrative for me:

I am the Gatekeeper, and guardian of the Triaxial Balance. It is through your courage, and more importantly, your understanding and wisdom, that the Triaxial Balance of the forces has been restored.

Hereafter, I bequeath to you the power to guard this mortal plane, for none are more worthy or more deserving than thee. I thank thee, both for my life and for thy effort.

And now that I have found worthy successors, my duty is done in this world, and I shall soon return to that higher plane of the everafter. You shall be remembered, and I offer this small token, from which I hope that you shall remember, not me, but what you yourself have done this day.

Fare the well, my friends.

Is he being sarcastic? Does he know I cheated?

 

This all sounds great, but what if I had been playing with an evil party?! That's not much of a reward.

In college, I felt bad about cheating on a term paper, but I was still happy to get my degree. And here, I feel bad about cheating in this game, and yet I'm still happy that I won. Let's GIMLET this baby and, for La-La's sake, finally get the hell out of 1988.

The shamefully victorious party.

Wizardry V: Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Yo mama's so frigid, the only man who will have her is called the "Ice King."

Damn, this game takes a long time. I thought if I made a major push, I could win it this weekend, but now I'm thinking I've got another week or so at least. The bloody game does a brilliant job trying to revoke every bit of progress you feel you've made. I've been level-drained so often it's a wonder my characters aren't all Level 1 again. It seems like every level throws me up against armor-eaters (you can figure out what they do). Thieves and magnetic traps rob me of my hard-earned quest items. A few crucial items are hidden at the bottom of pools, but exploring them runs the risk of attribute and hit point drains. This game is brutal.

In 1988, I would have torn the disk out of my floppy drive and run it through a blender.

 
I can guarantee you one thing: I never would have won this without backups ("cheating"). I suffer a full-party death about once every 20 minutes. Three or four times, I've teleported into rock, which renders your party lost forever. My characters have suffered more failed resurrections than I can count. Any hard-core gamer that finishes this without frequent backup and restoration has my highest respect--and concern for his or her mental health.

In terms of overall progress, I've mapped six levels out of, I think, ten. The levels have been crazy in their size and shape--so much so that I'd assume I was missing something if I hadn't exhaustively searched every wall for secret doors. Here are Levels 4 and 5, for instance:

I feel like the shape is supposed to suggest something, but I can't figure it out.

On Level 6, I nearly put out a plea for hints, because for the longest time I couldn't figure out how to get past one encounter involving repairing a mannequin. It turns out I needed to steal a gold medallion from a character so I could wake up a character who told me how to fix it. I haven't had to "steal" prior to this part of the game, and it was only because I was trying every possible action that I was able to figure it out.

Fortunately, I finally found the answer, because there are 7!, or 5040, possible combinations of these different items.

 
I recorded a couple of videos over the last few days. The first, a short one (c. 5 minutes), shows how I go about the process of mapping in Excel as I explore the levels (I keep saying "Level 6" when I mean "Level 5," though):

The second illustrates other gameplay elements, including combat and puzzle solving, and it's almost half an hour.

I know some of you don't like to watch narrated video, so to summarize: I leave the castle and MALOR (teleport) my way to Level 6 (03:00), cast some exploration spells (04:25), and head out. After a couple of combats, I make my way to a pool (09:00), where my thief dives to the bottom level, triggering a tough encounter with Lady Neptune and her minions (10:00). I am victorious. I continue on, defeat some undead (13:52), and arrive at another part of the level, where there's a puzzle involving the repair of a mannequin (17:07). After solving the puzzle, I find myself encountering the Ice King (19:49), who kills two of my characters and reduces the rest to single digits before I finally kill him (21:42) and escape by MALORing back to the castle (23:00). After that, I resurrect my dead party members, identify my new equipment, swap some equipment around, and rest in the inn.

MALOR has made getting around quite a bit easier. As you can see from this screenshot, my mage somehow acquired priest spells. I have no idea how that happened.

I have to say, I have been enjoying some of the graphics. They're not nearly as polished as the colorful animated characters in The Bard's Tale III or Pool of Radiance, but they're very detailed, and the monochrome imparts an aura of gothic horror.

This woman looks scary.

The creatures themselves, on the other hand, continue to tend towards goofiness. We've got the "yomamas" that lead this posting, a whole level full of storybook monsters such as Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula, and of course that terrifying symbol of French horror:

I don't remember Victor Hugo giving him an axe.

 
A pair of creatures that kept attacking me were labeled "Beauty" and "The Beast." They would have been fun if they hadn't kept paralyzing and killing my characters.

They'll paralyze your men / On your corpses they will feast / Fighting them is hell / They resist every spell / Beauty and the beast

 

On every level, I encounter some runes or glyphs that I am completely unable to decipher. I'm hoping I don't need them for the endgame or something. Hints appreciated here.

What is this? "Cive?"

I haven't really described the "plot" much, but you'd probably just think I was on drugs. I know I already covered this in my last posting, but it drives me crazy that the developers didn't even try to create a sensible plot that hangs together. To describe it, I'd have to say stuff like, "Today I met a thief called The Snatch who told me to use a pocket watch in the chamber of the Loon. The Loon--technically 'Thelonius P. Loon, Master of Time and Prophet Extraordinaire'--told me that I need to go into the triaxial gate four times holding a rod and cast a spell of summoning. Oh, and I bought a bird in a cage from him, but a thief stole it later so I guess I have to go back and get it again."

They might not mean that as a compliment.

I suppose we have to give it points for originality, at least. But I'm really ready for it to be over. Hopefully, it doesn't take much longer.

The End of My Blog

The devil will do me in.

 

I just came off a spate of intense work that prevented me from making much progress with Wizardry V, but I'm ready to sit down this weekend and finish it up.

In the meantime, I have a question that will betray how little I've been keeping up on the latest news and trends in computer games.

Do I understand correctly that Diablo III requires players who are playing even the single-player game to be permanently logged into Blizzard's servers? This seems so ridiculous that I feel like I must be missing something, but every site I read seems to confirm it. If you don't have an Internet connection at the moment, you can't play the game? At all?

Given the nature of my blog, this naturally worries me a lot. I'm already going to miss out on the classic MUDs and first MMORPGs, including the first Neverwinter Nights and Ultima Online, but I was prepared to accept that. If Blizzard's approach to copyright security takes hold, though, I'll miss out on single-player games, too (I doubt Blizzard's servers will still be supporting the game in 2032). Is there any suggestion that Blizzard will remove the login restriction as the game ages?

I suppose it's silly for me to be thinking so far ahead, but if other developers pick up on this trend, it sounds like my blog is going to reach a point in which great old games are simply no longer playable.

LOLCRPGS

"Bouh se souvient!... mort, le nain, a mort!" There is no language in which Minsc isn't funny.

Different people find humor in different things. I like it most when it grows out of situation and character. I like it slightly less in the case of outright parody, but I can appreciate it: witness my positive review of Ultima IV, Part 2. I like it least of all--hate it, in fact--when it's just absurdity. I can't watch more than five minutes of Jim Carrey as Ace Ventura, early Steve Martin, or unscripted Robin Williams. And they don't pretend to be doing anything but making comedies. It gets worse when such absurdity is plugged into otherwise-straight films or plots.

Wizardry V is full of absurdity. Goofiness. And it is beneath the game. The book of lore supposes to tell a serious story of a kingdom in crisis, but it tosses you in a dungeon full of adventure-game-style inventory puzzles in which nearly every NPC and encounter is a CRPG equivalent of a child's knock-knock joke. So far, I've encountered:

• The "Duck of Sparks": a sentient duck with a yen for a rubber version of himself
• The self-same "rubber ducky," which for some reason allows my characters to swim without fear of drowning
• The "Mad Stomper": a giant cursed with a case of athlete's foot
• A nightclub named "Manfretti's," encountered on the fourth level of a monster-filled dungeon
• A beast whose primary characteristic is that it goes "Hurkle! Hurkle!"
• A priest who follows a god called "La-La"
• Another priest named Lord Hienmitey
• A talking kettle that takes my gold in exchange for hints
• A water monster named "Nessie"
• "Thelonius P. Loon, Master of Time and Prophet Extrordinaire [sic]."

Sigh.

 
You've seen me complain about this before, particularly in Might & Magic II, which abandoned the previous game's limited realism for NPCs named "Hari Kari" and "Thund R" and had encounters with goofy characters like the Gourmet and the group of lower-class residents upset that you'd eaten "roast peasant." Ultima II had those dumb in-jokes, pop-culture references, and one-line NPCs. Maybe the developers are trying to instill the game with a sense of whimsy, but to me it suggests that they didn't have courage in the integrity of their game worlds. If you're trying to set an immersive story in an original fantasy world, walk-ons from Carrot Top do not enhance enjoyment.

I have no idea what Richard Garriott was making fun of here; just that it was stupid.

There are plenty of analogues in film. Probably my favorite comedy moment comes from a little-known Glenn Ford-Marlon Brando film called The Teahouse of the August Moon. Post-WWII Army Captain Fisby (Glenn Ford) is feebly trying to explain to his superior how he's been helping a Okinawan village rebuild by forming a cooperative.

Captain Fisby: "Everybody in the village, they're all partners. Don't you see? You know, share and share alike--"

Colonel Purdy: "THAT'S COMMUNISM!"

If that doesn't sound very funny, well, it shouldn't, because you have to know the characters from their previous scenes to fully get the joke. Most of the humor in good comedies like Frasier, Scrubs, and Arrested Development are based on character; if you tried to describe these moments to someone unfamiliar with the personalities, the jokes would fall flat.

Complete parodies can also be funny if you're in the right mood. Airplane!, Mel Brooks films, and Robot Chicken are just full of outright gags, and they're funny because that's what you expect. The "plot," if it even has one, is just a thin excuse for the gags.

But then we have goofiness: Madea ruining every scene in the otherwise-serious Diary of a Mad Black Woman; Chris Tucker's character in The Fifth Element; any comedy that requires a male protagonist to dress as a female. When limited, I suppose it's inoffensive. The singing bush in Three Amigos doesn't bother me because it's over quickly and makes a funny joke about fanciful landmark names. Larry, Darryl, and Darryl's appearance in Baldur's Gate is silly but inconsequential. But when a CRPG (or film) is just relentless in its goofiness, I want to shut it off.

I didn't get a chance to do much playing in the past week, so I thought it would be fun to talk about authentically funny moments in CRPGs. The genre doesn't often lend itself to laugh-out-loud comedy, and yet I can remember a few moments in which the developers were in rare form:

1. The dialogue of HK-47 in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The homicidal droid insists on calling humans "meatbags," although he refers to you as "master"--except when he slips.

2. Minsc's dialogue in Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, particularly the latter. This is a perfect example of humor that grows from characterization. What might otherwise just be "goofy" becomes funny and endearing when you learn Minsc's story, alignment, and approach to life. ("Eh? He is like a bad penny, this one. An armored, deep-voiced penny of most sinister evil!")

3. Many of the throw-away "scenes" in Skyrim, including one that includes a bed, a copy of The Lusty Argonian Maid, and a potion of fortify one-handed.

4. Several moments in Icewind Dale II in which the NPCs poke fun at conventions of CRPGs. One character wonders why you're carrying around a dead cat, and you say something like, "I was kind of hoping it would be the solution to someone's problem and I could learn from the experience. I guess not this time."

Icewind Dale II makes fun of hauling around "quest items."

5. Smith the Horse providing me with the password INFINITY in Ultima V, instead of the previous game, in which it would have actually helped.

What do you think are the funniest moments in CRPGs?

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.