Dragon Wars - Unleash the Dragon
Looking for a wizard to smite? Dragon Wars might just be your ticket.
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Looking for a wizard to smite? Dragon Wars might just be your ticket.
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Dragon Wars - Unleash the Dragon
- Thread starter StewShearerOld
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To be honest I'll admit I'm not very interested in the game itself, first person dungeon crawler style rpgs never were really my thing, but that picture on the front page is glorious. So beautifully cheesy it could have come straight from the cover of a Robert E. Howard book.
In any case interesting write up.
In any case interesting write up.
Played it and beat it back in the day, one cool feature about it is that you could transfer characters from "Bard's Tale III" into it of course if you won Bard's Tale III it made the beginning of the game sort of amusing since at the finale of BT3 your characters defeat the Mad God who killed all the other gods, and then become the new deities of the cosmos yourselves... so basically you have a party of deities being mugged by a bunch of cops and thrown into a slum. Starting that way has pros and cons, namely because it will usually put all of your stats at 18 but you start out without much in the way of actual skills, which as you note can be a problem.
I believe Dragon Wars was also one of the first, if not THE first game to actually have an automap feature and it was presented as being a big deal at the time. Simply not having to use your own graph paper was kind of a luxury. This was at a time frame when say "Might and Magic" shipped with a pad to make your own maps on and that was your "automap". Of course that was also part of the experience arguably since when you played live RPGs back in the days when PnP games were still actual RPGs as opposed to shared storytelling expericnes (long tangential discussion) the players would wind up doing the same thing as the GM had a complete map and the players were responsible for making their own as they explored, and of course any mistakes they made were on them. The party's designated mapper was very important as a result. This was also sort of the point of limited saves and such, because as many old school PnP players will tell you, fighting your way down say three levels of Undermountain is awesome, but part of the trial is if you mapped things well enough to find your way back out.
It should also be noted that the whole "Paragraph System" which also appeared for games like "Wasteland" or even the SSI "Gold Box" games was part of the copy protection since it was relatively simple to say whip out something like "Fast Hack 'Em" by "Basement Boys Software" and run off some copies for all your friends, or spend a day uploading to a BBS system with your speedy 1200 baud modem (or not so speedy 300 baud one). One thing you'll notice is not all of those paragraphs are used in the game, which means it's difficult to just Xerox the relevant sections, furthermore in some of the games using that system important information was present. For example in Wasteland the passwords you need at certain points are in the paragraph section, as is the words of certain NPCs that generally tell you where you need to go next. For example in "Wasteland" again I believe you can't get into Junkyard Village which is eventually needed without knowing the password (which is the name of an NPC that joins you) but unless you guess right your likely to be stuck because your only told that the password is his name if you read the paragraphs... so basically the point is that it wasn't so much due to technical limitations, it was part of a primitive copy protections scheme. You'll notice some of the artwork and page coloration in various books from that era is set up to make it more difficult to get coherent Xerox copies as well. Another common system (aside from code wheels, which I sort of miss actually) was games that required you to look up a specific word on a specific page of the game's manual. Of course there were ways to remove this sort of copy protection, but it did help somewhat against casual pirates.
Oh and one mild trick with old RPGs, as a general rule the further away you get from the start point the harder things are. As a general rule head for the closest area you can. When that pattern breaks there are usually clues and/or some directive in the text or whatever. Part of the fun was being able to get in over your head though, and really what's the point of winning if you can't potentially screw yourself? Bard's Tale 1 and "Deathlord" both had "Stasis Rooms" which were just plain out evil, basically rooms you enter and just can't leave, pretty much "Format your disks and restart" unless of course you have the right spells to escape. For example the one in "Bard's Tale" is in "The Catacombs" the second dungeon your likely to do if I remember and can be hit before you learn "apport arcane" and if I remember that dungeon is also teleport shielded except for specific squares so you will have needed to walk around and try and teleport everywhere to learn the X-Y coordinates of someplace you can escape to. The term "evil" comes to mind. I could be wrong but the one in "Deathlord" warns you but there is no escape (it's pretty much there for players who go 'hah I will ignore the sign and assume it's protecting something cool').
I believe Dragon Wars was also one of the first, if not THE first game to actually have an automap feature and it was presented as being a big deal at the time. Simply not having to use your own graph paper was kind of a luxury. This was at a time frame when say "Might and Magic" shipped with a pad to make your own maps on and that was your "automap". Of course that was also part of the experience arguably since when you played live RPGs back in the days when PnP games were still actual RPGs as opposed to shared storytelling expericnes (long tangential discussion) the players would wind up doing the same thing as the GM had a complete map and the players were responsible for making their own as they explored, and of course any mistakes they made were on them. The party's designated mapper was very important as a result. This was also sort of the point of limited saves and such, because as many old school PnP players will tell you, fighting your way down say three levels of Undermountain is awesome, but part of the trial is if you mapped things well enough to find your way back out.
It should also be noted that the whole "Paragraph System" which also appeared for games like "Wasteland" or even the SSI "Gold Box" games was part of the copy protection since it was relatively simple to say whip out something like "Fast Hack 'Em" by "Basement Boys Software" and run off some copies for all your friends, or spend a day uploading to a BBS system with your speedy 1200 baud modem (or not so speedy 300 baud one). One thing you'll notice is not all of those paragraphs are used in the game, which means it's difficult to just Xerox the relevant sections, furthermore in some of the games using that system important information was present. For example in Wasteland the passwords you need at certain points are in the paragraph section, as is the words of certain NPCs that generally tell you where you need to go next. For example in "Wasteland" again I believe you can't get into Junkyard Village which is eventually needed without knowing the password (which is the name of an NPC that joins you) but unless you guess right your likely to be stuck because your only told that the password is his name if you read the paragraphs... so basically the point is that it wasn't so much due to technical limitations, it was part of a primitive copy protections scheme. You'll notice some of the artwork and page coloration in various books from that era is set up to make it more difficult to get coherent Xerox copies as well. Another common system (aside from code wheels, which I sort of miss actually) was games that required you to look up a specific word on a specific page of the game's manual. Of course there were ways to remove this sort of copy protection, but it did help somewhat against casual pirates.
Oh and one mild trick with old RPGs, as a general rule the further away you get from the start point the harder things are. As a general rule head for the closest area you can. When that pattern breaks there are usually clues and/or some directive in the text or whatever. Part of the fun was being able to get in over your head though, and really what's the point of winning if you can't potentially screw yourself? Bard's Tale 1 and "Deathlord" both had "Stasis Rooms" which were just plain out evil, basically rooms you enter and just can't leave, pretty much "Format your disks and restart" unless of course you have the right spells to escape. For example the one in "Bard's Tale" is in "The Catacombs" the second dungeon your likely to do if I remember and can be hit before you learn "apport arcane" and if I remember that dungeon is also teleport shielded except for specific squares so you will have needed to walk around and try and teleport everywhere to learn the X-Y coordinates of someplace you can escape to. The term "evil" comes to mind. I could be wrong but the one in "Deathlord" warns you but there is no escape (it's pretty much there for players who go 'hah I will ignore the sign and assume it's protecting something cool').
Ah, Dragon Wars. Never got around to playing it, but I think I still have the C64 copy I borrowed from a friend somewhere. It's a shame, but those were the days I let my gaming lapse because of my other ambitions. (One of which, becoming a boozehound, I pursued to some distinction, if I say so myself.) Also reminds me of the other games I gave up on at the time, like Death Knights of Krynn (too many damn random encounters with no time to rest between) and Space Rogue (trying to fly through wormholes to reach some areas was too much of a drag). Truly, Memory Lane is littered with regrets.
And yeah, as Therumancer pointed out, the fact that part of the game text appeared in the manual was an anti-piracy measure. I remember sometimes reading them in advance and trying to figure out which ones were fake. I think Wasteland had some that suggested going to Mars. Felt like the game was cut short cos we never got to go!
And yeah, as Therumancer pointed out, the fact that part of the game text appeared in the manual was an anti-piracy measure. I remember sometimes reading them in advance and trying to figure out which ones were fake. I think Wasteland had some that suggested going to Mars. Felt like the game was cut short cos we never got to go!
I'm going to be honest, if I was going dragon hunting, those are not quite the outfits I would pick out of the closet. Maybe something with a bit more asbestos...The Madman said: