DOS

Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers get all the Girls

Contributed by Indra was here... (13176) on Aug 02, 2003.

Spellcasting 101 (1990) was the very first project for the Legend Entertainment Company. Steve Meretzky, the Author and designer of the game came from the Infocom Company where he was responsible for developing some of the all time classics text adventures such as Leather Goddesses of Phobos. The spellcasting series added to his reputation for the slightly raunchy. The game play was a development of the parser based text adventure typical of the Infocom games but included graphic images that changed as the puzzles were solved and the game progressed. Legend ran with this style, which to me has a unique timeless appeal, with other games such as "Gateway" and "Eric the Unready", until the release of "The Companions of Xanth" (1993) which inevitably dropped the parser text in favour of the developing technology which led to pure graphics controlled by the mouse click. This early pure graphic style also has shown to have a timeless appeal. Infocom for example also released "The Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2" (1992) in this style, and both of these games are still much sought after.

If you managed to wade through the entire file VOCAB.DAT, one word that would snatch your attention, would be "gwcheat." "Gwcheat" is generally an all-purpose cheat that is often never mentioned (even in the hintbook), and the usage is extremely simple. If there is an item that you know of (one that exists, but one that you don't own), simply type: "gwcheat [item]" and the item will be yours.

However: Interestingly enough, if you use "gwcheat" to ask the parser to do something frustrating and mind-numbingly impossible, it will tear its electronic hair out, and eventually will freak and hallucinate. For instance, if you're riding the surfboard on the high seas, and you type "gwcheat surfboard", the picture on the screen will change into all sorts of colors, and will lock on you.

Computer Gaming World rated it "Best EGA graphics we've ever seen" and "Legend Entertainment will turn the adventure game market on its ear".