The Battalion
Friday, August 31,1984
Computer Age
Video games addicting to ‘wizards’ of all ages
By AL ROSSITER
V Columnist for United Press International
There are times in the night when my
wizards disappear and my priests are
out of spells, that I wonder if there are
any other 46-year-old men hooked on
computer adventure games.
Personal computers can do many
wonderful things, but none more mar
velous than running these sophisticated,
complicated, involved and excrucia
tingly difficult games.
They come in two basic forms — with
and without graphics. The all-text ad
ventures are available for virtually every
computer on the market. Those with
graphics are written for a much smaller
group of machines, primarily the Apple
II series.
They are expensive — if you pay list
price it can run as high as $60 for one
game. But in terms of mileage, they are
dirt cheap. A player my age, with most
ofhis ganglia already fried by less enter
taining pursuits like making a living, will
take months, if not years, to complete
one.
I’m currently running three graphics
adventure games — Wizardry, Ultima
III and a new one on the market called
Questron. All are based more or less on
the game Dungeon and Dragons; Wiz
ardry, the oldest of them, is quite similar
to D&D.
In all three games, you create your
own characters, name them and to some
degree determine their strengths and
weaknesses. Wizardry takes place en
tirely in a vast, 10-level dungeon; Ul
tima III and Questron also have large
surface areas to be explored. But in all
three, painstaking maps have to be
made or your characters will become
hopelessly lost.
The strongest theme running
through these games is economics; your
players start out impoverished and rela
tively weak. Only through killing
monsters can they grow stronger and
richer, and it takes strength and wealth
to win. So a large part of the game is 9-
to-5 monster whomping; this can get a
little dull after your characters reach the
point where they are more than a match
for the garden-variety monsters.
All action is controlled from the key
board; no joysticks or other equipment
used in arcade-type games is necessary.
You direct your adventurers in their ex
plorations, and command their every
move in an encounter.
Wizardry is the smoothest running of
the games; Ultima III — written by an
astronaut’s son who uses the name Lord
British — is relatively smooth. Ques
tron, a recent entry on the market, is
full of distressing grammatical and spel
ling errors, but has the most involved
and enchanting background story of the
three; it’s a very good game that will
surely get better in subsequent versions.
All of these games have some provi
sion for saving your position at any
time, and it should be done before every
critical junction in the action. Appar
ently a great many players never do this,
and the result is a flourishing little side
industry in programs that essentially al
low you to cheat.
In the early going your characters are
going to die quite often, and it’s no great
problem then. But as time goes on you
nurse them to great strength, power
and wealth, and become increasingly
identified with them. To suddenly find
them wiped out by a demon of unimagi
nable power, or teleported into solid
rock by a booby-trapped treasure chest,
is total disaster if you haven’t been regu
larly backing them up to another disk.
The cheat programs allow you to res
urrect any character, even if you have
been notified that he is “Lost Forever.”
They also allow you to indulge in plain
and simple cheating by creating a char
acter with strengths that would take
many hours of play to develop in the
normal way.
The complications of these games are
enormous. You have to keep track of
each character’s equipment, food sup
plies and health. Wizardry has virtually
complete instructions; only the final
puzzle necessary to complete the game
is unmentioned. But in Ultima III, the
voluminous instructions make no men
tion of the complicated routines that
must be followed to increase your crew’s
strength and magic power; you are ex
pected to figure those things out for
yourself by interrogation of various
non-hostile individuals your characters
meet in the course of their wanderings.
The all-text games are entirely differ
ent. The best are marketed by a firm
called Infocom, and are stunning in
their sophistication. The games cover
science fiction, fantasy and murder mys
tery themes in which the computer
serves as your simulacrum. It tells you,
in extremely literate, colorful and often
wryly humorous prose, what it sees,
hears and feels. You, in turn, tell it what
to do next.
Early all-text adventure games were
relatively primitive; the computer could
act only on two-word commands, a
noun and a verb — ’’get axe” or “drop
parrot.”
But the Infocom games understand
complete sentences embodying any
number of separate commands; the lat
est of the adventures are said to have a
vocabulary of 1,000 words.
Picking the programs
before the computer
United Press International
NEW YORK — A computer is
a dumb machine that is useless —
until you buy a program for it.
But it will continue to be a dumb,
useless, machine if you buy the
wrong program.
Those knowledgeable about
computers think it is more impor
tant to decide on the kind of
software, or programming, you
need before picking a machine
that runs it.
That can be much more diffi
cult than it appears on the sur
face. “There are more that
40,000 software packages on the
market,” said Alfred Glossbren-
ner, author of “How to Buy
Software.” “So don’t take any
thing for granted.”
“There are about 1,000 ac
counting packages on the mar
ket,” explained Cliff Bradley, a
computer salesman in Brooklyn.
“I try to keep up, but I only
know about three or four of them
really well. Can you imagine the
scope of the problem for a new
user?” Bradley said.
Glossbrenner, whose book has
taken on cult status, said the lack
of any kind of standardization
compounds the problem of find
ing the right software.
j[ust because a program is
called a word processor, it doesn’t
mean it will work like any other
word processor.
“If you were buying a car, you
could expect it to have a steering
wheel, brakes and a motor. That’s
not what you can expect when
you buy a software package.”
Glossbrenner said.
The problem seems insur
mountable but some common
sense things can be done to mini
mize the trauma of wading
through the morass of 40,000
programs.
One thing to do is to get as
much information as possible.
Another is to ask someone who
has used the program to show
you how they use it.
Glossbrenner suggests you
compare reviews from several
computer magazines.
In the beginning, buy only
through a good dealer.
Insist on a complete demon
stration of the program. Be pre
pared to work on real problems.
If you are buying a word proc
essing program, arrange to do
the kind of writing you will be
doing normally.
The fastest way to find out if a
program will be a help on a hin-
derance is to do real work.
“Now is the time for all good
men to come to the aid of their
country,” rdrely gets typed in real
life (this is the first time outside a
typing test I’ve ever been able to
use the phrase).
A welcome trend among some
software distributors is the mar
keting of demonstration disks.
These are copies of the program
that sell for a modest fee, usually
$20 or less.
The demo disk has all the fea
tures of the full-fledged program
but imposes a limit on how much
work you can actually do.
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