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- Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
- A Review by Mark Bylander
-
- Bane of the Cosmic Forge, while a continuation of the Wizardry series,
- requires absolutely no knowledge of previous games. It is a very enjoyable
- role-playing game. Its plot makes up for the EGA-only graphics.
-
- The first thing to do in Bane of the Cosmic Forge is character generation.
- This is very simple and straightforward, but it will take hours to create
- a set of decent characters. To get any of the impressive characters, you
- have to keep "rolling" characters until you get a "bonus score" of, say,
- 17 or higher. Maybe one in ten or twenty characters will be acceptable
- by this criterion. I have found that a Ninja is an excellent character--
- my Ninja has almost as many kills as my big spell-casters. Bards are
- extremely useful, especially at the lower levels.
-
- Characters can belong to many races and classes:
-
- Race Description
- ==== ==================================
- Human Bipedal mammals of genus homo
- Elf Magically inclined and lithe
- Dwarf Stocky and pious
- Gnome Magically inclined and short
- Halfling The consummate thief
- Faerie Tiny! (A Faerie mage will have 1-2 hit points)
- Dracon Part dragon, breathes acid.
- Lizard Man Tough and reptilian
- Felpurr Bipedal cats
- Rawulf Bipedal dogs
- Mook Mysterious and Mystical
-
- Class Description
- ========= ===================================================
- Fighter Me stomp. Me kill. Me strong.
- Thief Picks locks, Picks pockets, Disarms traps, Hides.
- Mage Lots of damage causing spells.
- Priest Lots of support spells, and a few damaging as well.
- Bard Mage spells, Thief skills, and magical instruments.
- Alchemist Lots of acid and poison spells. Cannot be silenced.
- Ranger Fighter with alchemist spells and scouting.
- Bishop Mage and Priest spells.
- Psionicist Mental spells. Many immune, others go insane.
- Valkyrie Fighter with Priest spells. Female.
- Lord Fighter with Priest spells.
- Samurai Fighter with Mage spells and funny weapons, crit hits.
- Ninja Critical hits, Thief skills, Alchemist spells.
- (For some reason, can't use some Alchemist spellbooks)
- Monk Thief skills, Psionicist spells.
-
- After selecting race, class, and sex, you will get your "bonus score".
- I recommend that you not keep a character with less than a 16 or 17 bonus
- score. This will lengthen the rolling process, but will yield better
- characters in the end. After this, you will receive some skill points
- to distribute. There are many different weapon skills, and these will
- increase dramatically just by using a weapon. My Lord has 100 in Sword and
- I have never put a point into it. (Of course, he just switched to a hammer,
- and has about a 15 in it.) Physical skills include Scouting (which will NOT
- increase automatically), Music (available only to bards), Oratory (enables
- spellcasters to pronounce their spells--not needed for Alchemists), and
- Thieving skills. The three thieving skills are Legerdemain (Picking pockets),
- Skullduggery (Picking Locks and Disarming Traps), and Ninjutsu (Hiding).
- Academic skills increase automatically (except the spell-casting skills), but
- very slowly. Academic skills include Mythology (identifies monsters),
- Artifacts (how to use those wands), Scribe (how to use a scroll), and the
- spell-casting skills of Thaumaturgy, Theology, Theosophy, and Alchemy.
- Spell casters should probably put most to all of their points in these
- skills as well as in Oratory.
-
- After creating your characters, you will enter the castle. The graphics
- are adequate, but not incredibly impressive. The game does not support
- 256 color VGA. If you have an Adlib card, you will hear various footsteps
- and random dungeon sounds. These sound pretty good, although in combat
- some of the monsters' musical themes get fairly annoying. Combat in Bane
- is similar to that in the Bard's Tale series. You input all of your
- combat commands, and then the computer computes initiative and adjudicates
- the combat. Your desperate HEAL WOUNDS may occur too late in the round to
- save your front-line fighter. An undead monster may go incorporeal before
- you can hit it with your DISPEL UNDEAD. Combat can get tedious if a lot
- of the monsters have missile attacks, as you must watch the missile come
- toward you for each of these monsters. After a combat round, the monsters
- may start changing their positions. This can be extremely annoying,
- especially in encounters like 1 ghost, 1 zombie guard, 1 zombie guard,
- 1 zombie guard, and 1 zombie guard. Since the ghost casts spells (SILENCE
- is helpful!), the zombies will decide to move up, taking 30-45 seconds of
- shuffling.
-
- The spell system is pretty good. There is a fairly large selection of
- spells, and 4 main types of spellcasters. Based on my experience with
- a psionicist, I would recommend having a plain Mage somewhere in your
- group. The Psionicist's spells fail to affect monsters much more often
- than plain Mage spells do. I have a Bishop, who is a very nice character,
- but who is only able to cast only low level spells, since he learns both
- Mage and Priest spells. On the plus side of Psionicist spells, however,
- is the fact that they will often leave a monster insane, which usually
- prevents it from attacking you. Alchemists cannot be silenced, so are
- useful in that respect. It will be a long time before you meet a monster
- capable of silencing you, however. At first level, your mages will
- probably be using a lot of ENERGY BLAST, while alchemists use ACID SPLASH,
- psionicists use MENTAL ATTACK, and priests use HEAL WOUNDS (or MAKE WOUNDS).
- Each time you go up a level, pure spell casters will get a new spell, provided
- that they have sufficiently advanced the requisite spell-casting skill.
- Make sure your spellcasters use most of their bonus skill points in their
- spell-casting skills and oratory.
-
- The plot line is fairly interesting, although there are long stretches of
- hack and slash involved as well. You are looking for the Cosmic Forge,
- which is some sort of magic pen which writes reality. On the way, you
- learn of the Evil King and his lover Rebecca and the mad Wizard Xorphitus.
- There is a lot of mapping to do in this adventure! I have found that it is
- easy to advance in the plot quicker than you have advanced your characters,
- which can make combat difficult. Most of the time this is little problem--
- if you get ahead of yourself, go back and try some random encounters.
- I have been told that at one point late in the game, it becomes impossible
- to turn back, so be careful. I recommend that you save often, and that you
- refrain from resurrections for the most part--you can restore a game by
- using <QUIT GAME--NO SAVE> followed by <RESUME SAVED GAME>. There are
- two main reasons to avoid resurrections. First of all, resurrections
- drain vitality from your characters, and secondly, resurrection magic items
- can be sold for large amounts of gold. Queequeg (the first NPC you are
- likely to meet) will buy the Amulet of Life for about 18000 gold! The
- Sword of Striking which you find early on is a +2 to hit weapon which does
- 1-8 points of damage. You will also find a Heraldric Shield sometime in
- your first few hours of play. This shield gives a two point bonus to the
- armor class of the person using it. You probably should not invoke it until
- you are 5th level or so--when invoked, it vanishes, but increases its user's
- strength by one. Later, you will find a green parrot. IDENTIFY marks it
- as cursed, but if invoked, it increases your charisma by one. I noted no
- ill effects of the object.
-
- When I first started playing, the disarm section mystified me (until I
- looked it up in the manual), so I'll give a short synopsis of this procedure.
- When you come to a chest, you'll choose <OPEN>. You can then have each
- character examine the chest. You will get a list of letters, some red and
- some green. The green letters are definitely in the name of the trap. The
- red letters might be in the name of the trap. Red asterisks mean that one
- of your characters has determined that another character's red letter was
- incorrect. The letters of the trap name are anagrammed. The spell
- DIVINE TRAP is very useful for disarming. If, for instance, you had the
- this list of green letters -- RFYA EEEBF ONEL -- you would select "RAY
- OF ENFEEBLE" from the list of traps when you try to disarm it.
-
- Despite some shortcomings in the combat area, I have thoroughly enjoyed this
- game. You can expect many hours of play to complete it. (I personally have
- not yet finished--I'm wandering the River Styx, which seems to be too
- difficult for my characters right now.) The graphics are adequate, but not
- stunning, and the sound is good. I highly recommend this game.
- PX@╚ â @╚ ????????????*** ** ** * * **