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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.
Punching holes in floppy disks to make them double-sided was where its at (was?). Any others got cool examples of technology that's screwed that you can improve with dodgy methods? (no overclocking stories, boooorrring!)
Best thing I ever did was at my Amiga game piracy club - there was a fervour waiting for Speedball 2 to come out. We modified a floppy disk with a melted chocolate mouse under the disk cover and scribbled 'speedball 2' on the front. Much amusement when some poor bastard put it into his computer. Even better, you should have seen the excitement on the poor bastard's face when he 'found' a copy of Speedball 2 on the floor. Swwweeeet. Jesus, children are evil!!
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
A: "Life... don't talk to me about life."
Breakfast served all day!