Spellcasting 301
| Spellcasting 301 | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Legend Entertainment |
| Publisher | Legend Entertainment |
| Senior Developer | Steve Meretzky |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1992 |
| platform | DOS |
| genre | Text adventure |
| medium | Floppy disk , CD-ROM |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Spellcasting 301: Spring Break is a text adventure game with graphics by the US manufacturer Legend Entertainment , which was released for MS-DOS in 1992 . It is the last part of the manufacturer's spellcasting trilogy, which also includes Spellcasting 101 and Spellcasting 201 .
action
As in the previous games, the player takes on the role of Ernie Eaglebeak, who is now in his third semester at Sorcerer University. Together with his fellow students from the Hu Delta Phart fraternity, he visits a beach resort in Fort Naughtytail during the spring break . There they meet members of the Getta Lodda Yu student association from St. Weinsberg Magician University. The nerdy Hu Delta Pharts and the sporty Getta Lodda Yus are in a fierce rivalry. A mysterious, attractive woman who calls herself "The Judge" organizes a seven-day contest between the two compounds. The winning connection is allowed to call itself "Kings of the Beach" ("Kings of the Beach"), the underlying connection is banned from Fort Naughtytail for five years. It is up to Ernie to help his association complete the twelve disciplines. During the week he has to find a girl for a wet T-shirt contest , win a game of volleyball and organize a party. The handsome and sporty Getta Lodda Yus have an advantage in all disciplines, which Ernie has to compensate with ingenuity and the pointed use of magic. The game is divided into twelve chapters, one for each discipline to be completed.
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 can display still images from around 80 locations in the appropriate quality; there is also background music for individual scenes.
A technical novelty of the game compared to its predecessors is the use of 256-color SVGA graphics, which significantly improved the graphics of the game compared to its predecessor.
Spellcasting 301 has a magic system with 24 spells, which is based on the system in Infocom's Enchanter trilogy and ultimately based partly on the Earth Sea saga by Ursula K. LeGuin and partly on the Vancian system of the role-playing 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 sturdy vine that can be climbed. Some of the puzzles in the game are time based; H. after a certain number of moves they can no longer be solved. Some other puzzles require knowledge of the outcome of events; the player must experience the failure of his efforts and master the situation with the knowledge of the background in a new attempt. Both types of puzzles are considered bad design in the interactive fiction scene today, but were not criticized in the press at the time of publication.
Like the other two parts of the Spellcasting series, Spellcasting 301 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, in "Naughty" mode a (according to European understanding, harmless) representation of sexual acts takes place. The selected mode also affects the graphic representation of women in some places.
Production notes
The game's packaging included instructions for using a magic carpet as well as a hotel reservation for the Royal Infesta Hotel in Fort Naughtytail. Both supplements were referenced in the game and thus represented copy protection . A solution book could be purchased in addition to the game. The solution book contained hints for solving the game (which were not yet readily available on the Internet in 1992) as well as some criticism of the computer game industry satirizing texts; for example, it was claimed that Ernie Eaglebeak was a metaphor for the dissolution of the USSR and that the game conveyed satanic messages when played backwards.
The spellcasting series is a trilogy. At the time of publication, a fourth part was planned, Spellcasting 401: The Graduation Ball . This was never published because of the lack of sales opportunities in the dwindling text adventure genre; After Spellcasting 301 , Legend published the text adventures Eric the Unready and Gateway 2 - Homeworld and then switched to graphic adventures . Author Meretzky, who had previously written several popular titles for Infocom (including Sorcerer , which had a comparable magic system) and was considered the most important designer by Legend, worked as a freelancer for the company.
A re-release of Spellcasting 301 took place in 1993 as a package with the two predecessors under the name Spellcasting Party Pak .
reception
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The game journalist Carsten Borgmeier ( PC Joker , Amiga Joker ) saw Spellcasting 301 as one of the “funniest text adventures of recent times” and praised the “quirky story” and the “challenging texts” in addition to the humor. He only criticized the quality of the parser, which couldn't keep up with Infocom's. The specialist magazine Adventure Classic Gaming praised the graphics, sound, humor and scope of the game. The locations are also "worth a visit" beyond the focus on solving the game, the magic system invites you to experiment and the numerous puzzles in the game are well thought out. The magazine only criticized the game's "somewhat frustrating" finale. For Power Play , editor Richard Eisenmenger found that the game texts were “funny written” and that the game had a “touch of eroticism”. He praised the configurability of the game, criticized the parser and pointed out that a good knowledge of English is necessary in order to be able to follow the humor, which is often based on linguistic jokes. The ASM praised the entertaining and “cryptic-underhanded” content of the game, but criticized the “somewhat worn” user interface and lacked new impulses. For Computer Gaming World , editor Charles Ardai drew parallels to the comedy film Die Supertrottel and said that interactive fiction authors could still learn a lot from Steve Meretzky, who with Spellcasting 301 was following his bestseller Planetfall , Sorcerer and, in particular, Leather Goddesses of Phobos . According to Ardai, the game conveys a relaxed atmosphere reminiscent of vacation, since Meretzky dispenses with essential threats that are otherwise common in adventures and gives the player the feeling of an open-world game : Although the plot progresses linearly, the player can up to a certain point Deviate degrees from the plot, just explore the game world and chat with the NPCs in it and still win as long as he wins the majority of the given disciplines.
The ludologist Jimmy Maher pointed out the latent sexism of the game series and thus also of Spellcasting 301 , which is noticeable in the unchangeable male perspective and the stereotyped portrayal of women, but which did not attract criticism either at the time of publication or in retrospect because it is relativized by the “unmanly” protagonist Ernie and the stylistic device of exaggeration that pervades the entire game. Maher, however, denies a satirical intention of Meretzky. Maher described Spellcasting 301 as the "disappointing ending" of the series; His criticism was sparked by design decisions such as time-based and trial-and-error puzzles, but also by uninteresting and uninterested protagonists, according to his analysis, for whom the player could not warm up, and the graphic representation of women who looked as if they were they were "assembled from incorrectly assigned spare parts that were left over from other girls' assembly". Maher also criticized excessive texts, which he attributed to the fact that Meretzky, as a freelancer, who also lived in New York and thus hundreds of kilometers from the Legend headquarters in Chantilly , was insufficiently involved in quality management processes, while the other authors were corrective at Infocom influenced his works.
Web links
- Spellcasting 301 at MobyGames (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gamasutra.com: The Player's Bill of Rights. Retrieved June 29, 2017 .
- ↑ Legend Entertainment: Spellcasting 301: The Official Hintbook . Compute Publications, Greensboro 1993, ISBN 0-87455-286-9 .
- ↑ a b c AdventureClassicGaming.com: Spellcasting 301: Spring Break. Retrieved June 29, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Filfre.net: The Spell Casting Series (? Or, How Much Ernie Eaglebeak is Too Much Ernie Eaglebeak). Retrieved June 29, 2017 .
- ↑ a b Michael Anton: Leisure Suite Ernie . In: ASM . No. 12/1992, December 1992, p. 52.
- ↑ a b Power Play 12/1992: Spellcasting 301. Retrieved June 29, 2017 .
- ↑ Carsten Borgmeier: The Adventure Book II . Sybex, Düsseldorf 1993, ISBN 3-8155-0084-2 , p. 286 .
- ↑ Computer Gaming World # 102, January 1993, p. 110: A Young Man's Fancy Turns. Retrieved June 30, 2017 . (PDF, 59 MB)
