Spellcasting 201
| Spellcasting 201 | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Legend Entertainment |
| Publisher | Legend Entertainment |
| Senior Developer | Steve Meretzky |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1991 |
| platform | DOS |
| genre | Adventure |
| control | Keyboard Mouse |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance is a text adventure game with graphics by the US manufacturer Legend Entertainment , which was released for MS-DOS in 1991 . It is the continuation of the game Spellcasting 101 by the same manufacturer and the second part of a trilogy that ended in 1992 with Spellcasting 301 .
action
Ernie Eaglebeak, a teenager from Port Gecko in the fictional world of Peloria, is studying magic at the renowned Sorcerer University in his second semester. There two interwoven storylines are presented to the player: On the one hand, Eaglebeak applies for the admission of the Hu Delta Phart student association , whereby he has to do numerous tasks, usually student pranks , for the admission officer Chris Cowpatty, who is critical of him, in order to be considered worthy prove. At the same time he has to track down five components of a mysterious machine ( sorcerer's appliance ) for the rector of the university, Otto Tickingclock . Rector Tickingclock dies while completing a task for Cowpatty, and an election campaign for his successor flares up while Eaglebeak continues to search for the few missing parts of Tickingclock's mysterious machine. Eaglebeaks stepfather and archenemy Joey Rottenwood turns out to be the victorious candidate. At the last minute, Eaglebeak can revive Tickingclock with the help of the machine he has now completed and thus thwart Rottingwood's plans. Ultimately, he is also accepted into the Hu Delta Phart fraternity .
Game principle and technology
Spellcasting 201 is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. In contrast to classic text adventures, which do not have any graphic decoration, Spellcasting 201 comes up with a picture of the respective environment and a point-and-click interface with which simple commands can be created with the mouse. For complex control commands , however, the player still has to use the text parser . The interface can be adapted to the needs of the player by hiding graphics and buttons; the environment image can also be replaced by a map of the game environment and a list of objects carried along. The game supports the VGA standard and was able to display still images in the appropriate quality; there is also background sound for individual scenes.
The game confronts the player with time management. A game move, i.e. a command input by the player, corresponds to a unit of time. In the background, NPCs act independently of the player, and events happen depending on the time units used. For example, if after 50 moves two people meet in the university park and are talking about something relevant to the game, the player must also be in the park after 50 moves to be able to overhear the conversation. The player therefore not only has to do the right thing in the game to move forward, he also has to do it at the right time and, if he misses the time, can put the game in an unsolvable state. In such situations, the player has to fall back on previously saved scores in order not to have to start the game from the beginning, which is now generally regarded as poor game design.
Spellcasting 201 has a magic system that is based on the system in Infocom's Enchanter trilogy and is ultimately based partly on the Earth Sea saga by Ursula K. LeGuin and partly on the Vancian system of the role-playing game rules Dungeons & Dragons . As with Vance, spells must first be "stored" in the mind before they can be used, and as with LeGuin, a spell is represented by a nonsense term. This term can then be used as a verb in the game. For example, the "VAI" spell heals plants; Entering "VAI IVY" lets a sickly ivy suddenly mutate into a strong vine that can be climbed.
Like the other two parts of the Spellcasting series, Spellcasting 201 has two text modes that can be switched between and which have an impact on the display when Eaglebeak comes into closer contact with female NPCs. While texts and graphics are completely suitable for young people in "nice" mode, sexual acts are displayed in "naughty" mode (harmless according to European understanding). In terms of content, the game is divided into "levels", which are represented by days of the week. For each day there is a central task that must be solved in order for the game to continue on the next day.
Production notes
In the tradition of the Legend's predecessor company Infocom , so-called Feelies were added to the game packaging - material materials related to the game world, which were referenced in the game itself and thus served as copy protection . In the case of Spellcasting 201 , a map of the university campus, a registration form for the university and a textbook for learning a fictitious instrument were included in the packaging.
reception
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Since the development of the MacVenture engine in 1985, there have been adventures that rely on a graphical user interface instead of text input, and since the appearance of Maniac Mansion in 1987, graphic adventures have enjoyed great popularity and replaced text adventures as the previously dominant product within the adventure genre from. At the time of Spellcasting 201's release , The Secret of Monkey Island was already a game on the market that provided a technical standard for control in adventure games until the late 1990s. A text adventure had a difficult time in 1991, the genre had become commercially unattractive. Representatives who were successful in terms of content were still positively received in the specialist press.
In a cross-platform adventure special, the Amiga Joker rated Spellcasting 201 as a "fun adventure in the best sense". For Power Play , Boris Schneider-Johne judged the game to be even more complex and humorous than its predecessor, and described it overall as a "successful showpiece" in the text adventures genre. The professor of digital media and game designer Nick Montfort noted that Spellcasting 201 "is not as mature as Porky's Revenge and certainly not The End of the Parable ", but that it has interesting puzzles and is fun. The magazine Hardcore Gaming 101 accounted for in an analysis of Spell Casting -Spielereihe initially clear parallels to the (later published) Harry Potter book series as well as for (formerly begun) adventure series Leisure Suit Larry . The magazine described Spellcasting 201 as confusing and frustrating in places and determined this from the confusing layout of the university campus, the overriding importance of time in the game and the multitude of ways in which the mysterious machine can be operated. The magazine's conclusion regarding the level of difficulty:
"If you made it through the first game by the skin of your teeth, chances are this episode still will drive you insane."
"If you've got the first part [of the game series] creeping up on the gums, you have good cards that this part is driving you crazy."
Overall, Hardcore Gaming 101 also praised the game's humor and assessed that it was a "great writing" when it was almost as much fun to deliberately do mischief in the game as to strive for the solution.
Web links
- Spellcasting 201 at MobyGames (English)
- Package inserts on the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History website
- complete solution
- Play Spellcasting 201 online via Archive.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Essay on the series of games on Hardcore Gaming 101. Retrieved January 2, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Review in Amiga Joker special issue # 4. Retrieved January 2, 2016 .
- ↑ a b Review in Power Play 12/1991. Retrieved January 2, 2016 .
- ↑ Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction . The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5 , pp. 190 .
