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Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8
NichG writes "Sir-tech Canada has finally released
Wizardry 8. This has been long awaited by fans of Wizardry 7 (1992) and the series of games which precluded it. It should be available at Electronic Boutique. For those not familiar with the Wizardry series, they are first person, turn-based (more precisely, phased) RPGs, which grew from pure dungeon crawl to RPGs with plot and characters with whom to interact." This, the Bard's Tale series, and the first four Ultimas together were where most of the late 1980s went for me.
Now everyone will finally understand why I named my kid Werdna
I may very well owe my geekdom to Wizardry (I). It was the first game I ever played on my friend's Apple IIc. I can remember plenty of floppy disk switching, and punching holes to make single sided disks double sided.
I just got to play "Day of Defeat" last night. Man how things have changed!
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
... that it's what everyone hopes it will be.
u ter Ultima 9, it'd be nice to have a proper RPG that would bring back all of those memories of IBM games with low-resolution CGA/EGA computer graphics with absolutely awful PC speaker sound tracks.
;)
After the below average Ultima 8 and the visually spectacular-but-totally-incompatible-with-my-comp
Then of course, there's playing the same game on your Amiga.
Taffyd.
i alwayst felt that 6 and beyond were dreadfull. there are lots of fans of wiz gold, etc but post maelstrom + werdna, etc, they totally lost the plot.
4+5 imo are the best of the trilogy and i especially liked playing Werdna and starting at the bottom of the tower.
the wiz series was also the first to my knowledge to award your characters for winning the game, and taking that into the next game, so when you won you got a chevron. quite cool.
the best bit was that from 1 to 3 required you to have played and passed characters along, so you could only play wiz3 by playing wiz2 and wiz1!! (although it limited market share i guess)..
nice to see an old school title come back. pity it has no old school charm.
no sig for you
Don't hammer the server too much, though. There're limited login spaces, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Gameplay movies:
MPEG file
Zipped File
The demo is available from here..
3dgamers [download link]
or here
FilePlanet [download link]
No accusations re: Karma, please. I'm at the cap. And Wizardry 6 and 7 were the best RPGs I've ever played.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
Hell yeah. I've played 7 since '95 and I still haven't beaten it! I got around to beating Wizardry 6 though ;0. It's great to see that one of the greatest games ever is up to 8. I had the baddest party too, untill my drive got formatted. Level 35 characters who could kill fiereos, demons and such in one shot! Never quite got around to beting the game though :( I need to see if I've got an old savegame SOMEWHERE to import into 8, which is way overdue by the way. On my CD, I have a Preview for Wizardry 8 that says it's out in summer of 99! I sure hope the extra time means they did things right. Man, I think I'll have to play 7 tonight.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
i got one word for you..
TARJAN
no
Here you can download the original Apple II disk images and an emulator for windows/dos. There are also links to the SNES ports.
In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.
*Excelsior!*
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
17 hours 53 minutes.... That was my first all night graphic RPG. My friend and I waited weeks to pick up our copies.. We then "signed-out" a couple schools Apple II+'s for a weekend of gaming. Halfway through the session we had to crack the covers and have cooling fans blowing across the mobos to cool em off.
:)
It's been YEARS since I've played them, but it's kinda neat to remember lahalito, dilto, Montino, Mahalito, and the all mighty Tiltowait.
Also just a bit of trivia....
Wernda and Trebor are the names of the programmers who wrote it backwards..
yeah yeah everyone should know it, but I thought I'd repeat that for people new to the old school game thing
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds"? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...
This has been long awaited by fans of Wizardry 7 (1992) and the series of games which precluded it.
Wow, what series of games prvented them from creating Wizardry 8?
I remember the good old days when it was just me, Werdna and my Blade of Cuisinart. And if that didn't work I would just go TILTOWAIT on your ass!
I'm excited to see a new Wizardry. I haven't played Wizardry since I had my old PCjr years and years ago. But, the screenshots make it look like it's a 2-3 year old game already. Is it just me, or does it look like they really skimped on the graphics?
I played as a bishop and kept trying to Identify item #9, but nothing happens. Did they take this out?
--YAAC
Yet Another Anonymous Coward
From the screenshots, it looks like a 1st-person Doom/Quake perspective (which is nothing new; they all had that, just not the modern look)... can't wait to see if they toss in a beholder for face-to-face combat.
Anybody play test or review this yet?
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
You dare not recognize the Eye of the Beholder series in your dungeon-crawler schema?! I still, to this day, think that those are some of the best first-person RPG's that ever lived. Although they didn't have a huge plot it was about as close as you could get to tabletop RPG in a bite-sized candy shell, imo.
Poor site design, reliance on non-standard software for functionality that can be provided by standard HTML.
(Web site designers: Score -1, Poor Effort)
Ohh man, I know what I am doing for lunch time! I played Wizardry 7 for SOOO long, I remember standing in the hallway of the Umpani Headquarters forever, fighting that battle outside the general's door to gain levels for DAYS!! LOL, my ninja's were the ultimate fighting machines. :) I'm going to say goodbye to my weekends for a while!! *grin*
No I didnt spell check this post...
I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.
Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??
Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.
The trick of opening the drive door when you got killed was a classic...
Really playable, truly enjoyable game. Simple, yes - but it had all the necessary elements and it played fast without superflous graphics and glitz.
Ahead of it's time, IMO.
Now only available for the PC! Well, at least right now, hopefully. :(
But this appears to be the last of the sir-tech games..
If i remember correctly, Sir-Tech's publishing arm went out of business around 15-18 months ago.. Their development house struggled for a while afterwards, finished wizardry 8 and one other title I don't remember..
Wizardry 8 languished, finished, for a while.. They didn't have a publisher.. I think somewhere during that period they shut down operations (Or at least laid off a LOT of people)
And now wizardry 8 is out.. An extremely depressing moment for computer gaming.. One of the longtime companies and founders of PC gaming is gone..
Sure sir-tech had some big stinkers.. Virus, Druid.. But they also did some of the truly great games. Jagged alliance, Wizardry..
With Interplay foundering, sir-tech gone, Origin DOA, SSI on its last breaths.. Well the old school rpg makers are gone.. Sorta depressing if you ask me..
BUT! Its not all lost.. We've got new blood on the horizon.. Mostly in the shape of those rascally canadians, Bioware.. And even the longtime scapegoat.. Bethesda..
So we've lost the old school.. Which is depressing from a historical standpoint.. But we've still got RPG developers building games that we couldn't have even dreamed of 15 years ago..
You just can't do better than that game. It was the first to totally capture my gaming spirit. I even loaded it up the other day and realized I still have the first 5 levels memorized. How sad is that. Who remembers the creeping coins, talk about an exp stream.
Anyway, as with all games it hold a strong grip on what I love as a game. Build, crawl, build, craw.....I would still love to see a game just like PGOTMO to come on in an online form. You controll a group of 6 leveling characters as a group, turn based timed combat. I telling you this would be very interesting PVP in an online setting. Anyway, you just have to love that first Wizardy it was the game that started it all with me.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
This might be the last in the series, Sir Tech is in financial trouble, and the balance rests on the sales of Wizardry.
If you are a fan, go purchase the game.. if it sells well, sir tech might be able to pull out of their slump and bring us Wizardry 9 in a few years.
Slashdot: Press Releases for Nerds.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Wizardry was one of the original computer RPGs, but my hopes for this latest title are very, very low, almost to the point of not caring.
The Ultima games--kindred spirits to the Wizardry games--had the same spark to them, way back when. But it has been shocking just how much the series has degenerated. Ultima VII was so horribly bad that Richard Garriott publicly apologized for it. It was a Mario-style game in the guise of Ultima. Ultima IX was an embarassment to everyone involved. In the process of making the game fully 3D everything else was sacrificed. When the demo first shipped, it was laughably bad. Why did they even bother?
I still have a functioning IIe, with a hacked copy of Ultima IV. One of the best games ever. Used to go into the character stats via some program whos name I can't recall and change all the stats to 'FF', along with my inventory. I would then proceed to attack Lord British, just to see how many guards I could kill before being taken out. Don't think I ever managed to kill LB, though...
Anyone remember the program that allowed you to rebuild the Ultima III world?
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box, along with with purchase receipt (1987-7-2). i keep it in a book case for chuckles. can you say 'tiltowait'. i knew you could.
i like the long beep that someone mentioned when you found wernda. i think i still have the maps i made sitting up late nights trying to beat it. and my play disk of my 3 level 53 ninjas.
Is there anyone out there who managed to beat Wiz7 w/o the help of the hint book? That game is so unbelievably complicated to beat! One of my housemates, with the book open the entire time, still took 4 months to play through.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
As long as you're not wanting GameCube-like graphics (the 3D world compares to EQ), this is a good game. The sophisticated plot and character development is a welcome change from the likes of Diablo.
But don't take my word for it, there's a free demo available from the official site. I also run one of the larger Wizardry fan sites - check it out for more information on the series (maps, walkthroughs, etc.).
Wizardry 8 isn't widely distributed (part of the game's delay in release was finding a distributor), but it's available at your local mall's Electronics Boutique (full retail is 50 bucks) and there's also a few cheaper prices online.
Someone better mod this post based on my user name alone.
The game world was so huge, there was tons of stuff to explore, the storyline was pretty long and branched off in a bunch of different directions, there were a bunch of puzzels and problems to overcome, you could replay the game and still find new stuff. I loved this game.
The cheat book was really helpful, because the game was long and the world so big, that to find out everything would take forever.
If the new wizardry is even close to the previous one in terms of play, it will be awesome.
People will KNOW why... but very few will understand.
http://windows.scares.us
Oh, wow, I thought the entire Wizardry series was abandownware. Crusaders of the Dark Savant caused me to exhange countless hours for pure enjoynment... There is just something about casting eldritch spells at rocket-sled-riding space mutants that gets my blood pumping :-) Hopefully, Wizardry 8 has kept the original initiative-based combat system, and the wacky technomagic atmosphere...
>|<*:=
Nothin like the good ol' Fight-Fight-Fight Parry-Parry-Parry.
And the super bishops. And the tiltowait spell. The memories..
Hopefully I'm within my fair use rights as these are just excerpts and the authors, as they are, are attributed
Do you know that in Japan not only movie-filled FF-like RPG games are popular, but also Wizardry series are as popular as them and have cult fans? Why Wizardry got so many fans in Japan is I think because those versions released in Japan for PC and NES are with beautiful monster graphics... though old fans prefer wireframes. There are even Japanese-original Wiz scenarios. For GameBoy there were 5 or 6 Wiz titles, and some others were released for SuperNES, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Windows PC. They are based on old-style, no spaceships involved, swords/sorcery background as original scenario 1-5. Only new classes and races are introduced, without losing balance. And now, original Wizardry world ceased at 8, while Japanese studio Atlus released new Wizardry title "Busin" for PS2 in Japan, called "Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land" http://www.atlus.com/Wizardry.htm outside Japan.
It worked like this- when you were in the tavern resting up, the program went to the drive to read the level advancement tables. If you pulled out the normal Wizardry disk and put in a newly formatted blank disk at that time, it would read that the experience points needed to advance to the next level were 0, so of course you would advance. Repeatedly. Of course, when you put the right disk back in, you would need a ton of points to advance to the next level, but that could be fixed by getting intentionally "level drained" by a vampire or somesuch undead to get you down one level= to the midpoint of one level below your current one, which would actually add tons of experience instead of draing it (if you had done the "advance with nothing" strategy above.) Those were the days... Contra-dextra avenue, tiltowait, oh boy!
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days? Wizardry was truly revolutionary... Andy was a student at Cornell in the early 80s but I don't know what happened to him after that...
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
means:
can it read 5 1/4" floppies stuffed into my 3 1/2"-drive
im as sure as hell going to love it.
:-)
Could be worse. Could be raining.
"Sorry, this site is temporarily unavailable!
l oa ds.html"
The web site you are trying to access has exceeded its allocated data transfer. Visit our help area for more information.
Access to this site will be restored within an hour. Please try again later.
http://www.geocities.com/pb_wizardry/pages/down
Sadly, I've only played Wizardry I. Pretty cool game though, despite the limited size of the dungeon. Have to put Wizardry on my christmas list then, right next to Civilization III and Heroes of Might and Magic IV.
My first job in the computer industry was as a developer at Sir-Tech on prototypes for the Wizardry 8 3D Engine. It was part-time during my last year at High school. Would you believe that was back in last 1996 and early 1997?
The guys at Sir-Tech are a good bunch though and I hope that this game comes through for them in holiday sales.
Sir-Tech Canada is dead and nothing will bring them back. They went bankrupt a few months ago. I'm not sure where the money is going to go, probably just the shell of Sir Tech Canada or to their creditors.
However, I've downloaded the demo and it looks like a good non-rushed game. The demo locks up a lot, so I'll have to wait for a new computer or a patch before I dare buy it.
Anyone who likes CRPGs should play this game. I got into the Wizardry series with Wizardry 6 (I wasn't old enough to sit at a computer for the previous Wizardry games). These games have amazing character development and a great story line. The graphics in 8 are stunning. It's not Unreal or Quake, but it's better then any other CRPG out there right now. And also remember, that this game was ready to come out a year ago but the lack of a publisher stymied it's release.
Here's to a great job by Sir-Tech! Thanks for all the games over the years! You will be missed!
but only in Japan
That was the most frustrating times ever in an CRPG. I didn't have the internet to look up the correct phrase and happened to run into someone who had beat it who gave me the proper phrase.
That phrase is now burned forever into my mind.
Back in 1980/81, when I lived in Austin, this friend of mine was working on his second computer game. The first one was a little-known thing called Akalabeth. So Richard was working on his new product, something called "Ultima" ("the ultimate role playing game"). I play-tested that sucker for *hours*, and ended up as a character in the game.
Wizardry? Heh. Newbies.
Many RPGs from 87 til Baldurs Gate used as much as 50% of the screen for administrative function (character data, directional controls, list of active spell effects, etc.) The screenshots for 8 do away with this gross paradigm, a nice lightweight 50 pixel margin all the way around. But games should progress past this, and soon. The Mac got drop down menus in the late 80's, sliding toolbars have been around since the early 90's, Windows got right-click menus in the late 90's, how come these screen-efficient control devices never made it into core fantasy RPGs? Anyone who's ever caught themselves looking at the screen from an angle trying to beat the next Cow Level assailant to the punch knows why this is necessary.
lingeringdweomer
I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. For homeboys of that time and place, I owned a Level 63 boxer (Samurai) name "Sarge" and a Level 63 Valk named "Pandora". It all came down over a 300bps link to one of those funky orange plasma PLATO terminals and, man, did it kick some serious ass. With parties of individual players from all over the country, that exprience turned me on to the power of networking. A typical night lasted from midnight to 4 or 5, when the system went down for maintenance. A couple of hours of serious dungeon-diving, followed by a couple of hours of "Empire". Man, those were the days... Out!
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
I remember meeting one of the founders of Sir-Tech. They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry". O.K. people too!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
Andrew Greenberg is an intellectual property lawyer. He often posts in Slashdot legal and gaming threads (as "werdna", of course! and he's probably watching this topic even now ...)
Robert Woodhead is the president of Animeigo, an anime publisher and distributor.
This word "trilogy" -- I do not think it means what you think it means.
Maybe he means it in the sense of the Hitchhiker's Guide "trilogy"...
From the website: Hear your characters come alive with the revolutionary new Personality system.
I'm scared.
Personally, I think W8 will be good even if it sucks. I'm so desperate for a full-party RPG in the old 1st person mode that I'll take anything!
Don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate is the finest D&D computer game ever written (to date), but it's always fun to try out other tactical simulation rule (TSR) systems!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Mangar's Mind Mallet!
:)
Still the single greatest spell name in any RPG, ever. IMHO of course!
LEXX
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Yep one of my favoirte games Wizardy I. I spent many an hour mapping the levels on graph paper. Does anyone remember making ninjas then having to disband so that the rest of your party could come pick them up on the first level? I still have the IBM PCjr I used to play it on. I also in fact still have the original box, manuals and disks. Remeber when companies used to include decent manuals that were fun to read.
My characters from memory.
Thor Samurai
Conan Samurai
Fighter1 (i think) Fighter
Merlin Lord
Gandald Mage
Mephisto Theif
Feel free to post your names and classes if you can remember.
I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned or not, but for those of you that don't want to break out an old DOS box try Interplay's versions, which run on modern OSes.
:(
Interplay released the "Ultimate Wizardry Archives" a few years back. It runs great on Win 95/98/ME/etc and includes Wizardries 1 - 7 and Gold. 1 is still my favorite (kill those Murphy's Ghosts for big EXP points!)
You can even transfer the earlier versions of Wizardry to floppy and run them on another PC from within windows, all without those pesky scenario disks. I picked up the achives direct from Interplay for something like $15-20. I'd give you the exact price, but www.interplay.com is blocked by my work proxy
Still, for around $15 you get 8 classic Wizardry games for probably 1/3 of what Wizardry 8 will run.
Just thought I'd pass the info along...
-Revoke
(void) signal(SIGALRM, (alarm_fired=1)); if (alarm_fired) printf("Revoke is clueless!\n");
I have seen mentions of the Ultima and Bard's Tale series, but what about the Might and Magic series from the 80's (I am of course deliberately neglecting the ones released in the past couple of years). Anybody have fond memories of trying to crack the inner sanctum?
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eat that, Cleve Blakemore... Wherever you are. Wizardry 8 did beat you out of the gate.
Sometimes it's irony, and sometimes the Universe just likes to deliver a smackdown to the unbearably arrogant.
Bander
What we need more of is science!
As we're adding a map-editor and a script compiler to the Exult project, it will be possible to 'enhance' Ultima7 (with EA's permission, of course), or create new games in the same style.
I get home after eagerly waiting all day, start the install, and as I go to insert CD-3, I see its labeled CD-1. Hrmm, so I check, and sure enough, I got (lucky me) 2 copies of CD-1 and 1 of CD-2, and no cd-3. I have got to tell ya, that drives me nuts!! Anyone else have a simelar experience? I bought this from EB.
No I didnt spell check this post...
As one of the original authors of Wizardry, one of the nicest rewards of writing the game is reading comments such as these.
/. so I'll let him reply himself.
..do the identify..
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days?
You can find out what happened to me (Trebor) at the family website, MadOverlord.com. Andy lives in Florida with his wife and two children, where he "hacks the law". He reads
In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.
This was caused by a simple bug in a check statement:
if (ch >= "1") or (ch <="8") then
It should have been an "and", of course. So you could type in any character, and since we'd disabled boundschecking on Apple Pascal, it would twiddle bits at various offsets. Someone once sent me a list of what every typeable key would do.
When we did the IBM PC version (which also ran Apple Pascal, btw), we deliberately left the bug in, for reasons of tradition. Thus we confidently lay claim to originating the concept of "It's not a bug, it's a feature" that later made Bill Gates billions.
We wrote Apple Pascal interpreters for the PC, a bunch of japanese machines, and the C64/128. Wizardry 4 was written on a NEC 9801 machine, it would boot into PCDOS, then you'd type a command line and see "Welcome to Apple Pascal" (and yes, we bought a copy of Apple Pascal to run on it).
I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school.
Both Andy and I were active on the PLATO system, which was a tremendous influence on us. PLATO had email, chat, newsgroups, multiplayer realtime game, and much more, all starting in the early 70's. The multiplayer dungeon games were particularly good. Pretty much all of the basic concepts of multiplayer gaming were developed there.
Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.
They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry"
That was mine. I was never a member of the SCA, however. But they were active at Risley Hall at Cornell, where Andy lived. I don't recall if he was a SCAdian. PS: I'm not nearly as dorky as I was back then.
i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box
IIRC, Wizardry was the first home computer game, and possibly the first home computer program, to be sold in a box. Before that it was all ziploc bags and binders.
Best
R
"World Domination - a fun, family activity"
I seem to recall that in 1980/81 Richart Garriot lived in Derry, NH, not Austin TX ...
..
that's why Derry, NH is a "city" in his Autoduel game, he moved to TX later than that
Lomilwa and Tiltowait... Still the classics.
;P
// emulator to play some 40 column Wizardry... Fun stuff ;P
(along with WizFix)
I loved that game, spent hours on Wizardry 1, Bard's Tale, etc.
Still sometimes fire up the Apple
Even today, when I make characters on Diablo 2, and the most modern games, I still use character names that I created for my original Wizardry characters!
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I work as a consultant, so I ran it on my Dell 850mhz laptop (w/ 500mb ram), and it's pretty groovy. Nice graphics, interesting bad guys, I can see it seriously sucking up most of my free time for a while.
See... and you thought your sig was boring - TT
Someone should port Wizardry 1-5 to the Palm pilot. Being able to play those classics on the go would rock. Although we wouldn't be able to pop the disk drive open to prevent it from saving our deaths but it'd still be fun.
You can only import characters from Wizardry 7
I've been playing the Demo and the interface for fighting is hard to use. To really enjoy this game, you need to become familar with the keyboard bindings something I intend to do when I get the game (the keybindings for movement is easy to remember, so I already use it).
I do not know if having menus and such would actually make the game much easier and it would look ugly.