Wizardry 6+7

These games are essentially complex tabletop games programmed into a computer. So far in Wizardry 6 I'm spending as much time with my graphing paper as I am with the computer screen. I'm okay with that! It's VERY challening, but also extremely satisfying to conquer an area. My long term plan to complete 6,7 and 8, transfering my party from game to game. I have a family, job and other hobbie so it will likely take me several years, but it will be a fun journey.

While I think Wizardry 7 is gold and aged really well, Wizardry 6 is just an overkill. On paper, it's heaven, and it really is. But it aged terribly. I will take first Ultima games over this. While I started playing it with high hopes, and indeed had fun creating my team and cracking up the Castle area, soon enough (~30 hours in) I noticed I'm pushing myself to play this, constantly thinking about importing my team to Wiz7/8 and how much fun I will have in Wiz7. Yeah, how much fun I WILL have. Because Wiz6, although having good rules and character development, falls short. Playing it through your dosbox is a real pain in the ass, interface is just awful to navigate with your mouse and don't let me start on save management. It might have been comfortable enough using your floppy disks (hard to get lost with them), but emulating that via dosbox lead me to constant frustration with save corruption and loosing progress on my teams. Fights can take even longer than those God damned ant hordes in Wizardry 8, and oh boy we all remember them. And that were just the mines in this game, the second area. Random encounters often forced me to reload (resting ambush by a horde of aoe enemies). And you can't just go back to the main menu during the fight. You have to click it through (with awfully long waiting times between actions even if you fasten up the text notifications) or shut down the game and restart it. The graphics are fine, but the UI is just way too tedious to use. It's like trying to drive casually with rusted and unkept car saying to yourself it's all right. WIzardry 6 needs some serious refreshing update, because there is a ton of good content and wonderful gameplay to experience, but its interface is just putting me off. It's not the age itself, since I loved first Ultima games, which are way older than this.

Wizardry 7 was the first RPG I ever played. I got it in a CD software bundle and learned to play it through trial and error. It says up to 500 hours of play on teh description for these games. I probably had over 2000 hours into W7 and still hadn't explored everything. It's brutally difficult and gives you no direction whatsoever. You are literally dumped into the game world and have to figure everything else out for yourselves. I played this in the days before the internet and I suggest you try and fully explore everything without using it. A word of caution: The game is so huge and long your characters are capable of dying of old age. My original party began to drop dead and I had no idea why, it took me while to notice that the ones dying were 99 years old and when you roll over to 100 you die. There is an item used to reduce your age by a year for each one used, but I'm not going to tell you where to find them. BUY THESE GAMES!

Wizardry 6 was a blast, I ended up playing through it twice. Wizardry 7 Gold does not work properly, and seems inferior to me, so make sure you play the DOS version instead. I found Wizardry 7 to be a little too vague and open ended in comparison to 6, so I eventually burned out to finishing it. It does have much better graphics and different environments, but there was something about 6 I found more entertaining. The sound effects/music in both games is repetitive and I ended up muting it entirely in Wizardry 7 (this also seemed to speed up the fights when it didn't have to play the "FIGHT STARTING" music). That being said, you just don't really find games anymore that blend so many different aspects of folklore, culture, mythology, etc., into one game. At one moment you're fighting giant creeper vines, in the next skeleton warriors, a dinosaur, and even ninja/samurais. The story keeps you interested enough to push on in 6, but a lot of times in 7 I kept wondering what was going on, who is this race of alien/people and why do they hate each other. Some of the puzzles are very cryptic and I wonder what the expectation was in figuring them out back in the pre-internet days. You see more of this in 7 rather than 6, which is pretty straightforward. On the whole, if you're the type not to get turned away by older graphics, they are both very fun games that should keep you occupied for a long time. I didn't even mention character creation and the class system which in themselves was very fun to learn and enjoyable to play. Definitely worth your time.

A blast from the days past, when some games were unbeatable without either a step-by-step guide or hundreds of hours sunk into them. Wizardry 7in particular stands out as one of the most epic games in scope, and only the most determined players will ever beat it. I could not, despite more than a hundred hours of playing, but I still had incredible fun. Nothing today offers a comparable experience. Nothing at all.