Summary
Complete this game to become a junior-master adventurer
The Good
The Wizard and the Princess (or
Adventure in Serenia for PC users) is another "Hi-Res Adventure" from
On-Line Systems. In this game, you go on a quest to rescue a princess who is held captive in the wizard's castle, and to reach the castle, you must first survive a desert, safely cross a treacherous ocean, and explore dangerous areas of an island. Although the object of the game is quite self-explanatory, I simply have too many games with that "save-the-princess" theme, and Sierra's future games,
King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne and
King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow are examples of these.
Designed by
Ken and
Roberta Williams,
WAP is the second adventure game that was made after
Mystery House. Unlike the first adventure, though,
WAP contains a lot of color graphics that were hand-drawn by Roberta herself and a paint program was used to fill the graphics with color. After that, Ken programmed the game. The amount of detail of the graphics are what you expect from a primitive game.
The interface consists of the graphics, a description of what you are seeing at the moment, and the command prompt. You still have to enter "noun-verb" combinations in order to get things moving along. You can also view previous commands that you typed in earlier simply by pressing [Enter/Return] without typing anything. Directions that you wish to go can be abbreviated, so north, south, east, west, up, and down can be entered as N, S, E, W, U, and D. This technique was also used in On-Line's previous game.
The Bad
WAP seems to be much shorter, it would take you less time than the length of time that you would have spent playing
Mystery House. It took me less than an hour to complete. When you go out in the desert at the beginning, most of the locations are the same. Some more obstacles could have been added that would not have been added. Sometimes, my disk failed to load some scenes for no reason. There is no sound in the game, and I could picture some events that could have used some sounds.
The Bottom Line
WAP is a slight improvement over
Mystery House, with color added to the graphics. You still have to enter commands in order to get through the adventure, but I do not mind this at all. It's a shame that On-Line forgot to add the sound.
Rating: **
