Reviews by GDL
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Ambitious, but Dated, June 8, 2011The Wizard and the Princess was Roberta and Ken Williams's second adventure, following on the heels of Mystery House's success. The game's appeal at time of release is easy to understand. This was the second graphical text-adventure ever, and the big, colorful graphics are a huge improvement over Mystery House's unappealing line drawings, helping to build a story-book atmosphere with a certain charm to it. This is also clearly a much larger and more ambitious game, one that sets the tone for the grander scope of the graphical adventures that were to build on its model. However, attempting to play it today is likely to only lead to disappointment.
The simple act of navigation is troublesome: the game begins with a highly frustrating desert maze(Spoiler - click to show) (good luck guessing which of the identical rocks in a series of nearly-identical desert areas doesn't have a deadly scorpion under it!) and is loaded from beginning to end with similarly confusing wilderness areas, with an actual brick-and-mortar maze at the end. Even in non-maze areas, it is frequently unclear what directions are valid exits, and which will go where.
The puzzles are the typical mixed bag of obvious actions and apparently unguessable ones familiar from later King's Quest games (this is officially counted as the beginning of that series). The original method for obtaining hints--other than frantic experimentation--reminds us that this is a game from a slightly different era: the manual includes the actual home address and telephone number for Ken and Roberta Williams, which you are encouraged to use if you find yourself stuck! These days, a quick play with walkthrough in hand may be the best idea for those who want to see the earliest incarnation of the King's Quest series's particular sort of whimsy without tackling the endless mazes and arbitrary puzzles head-on.
A Typical Early BASIC Game (Literally!), June 7, 2011This game is best known for being the first text adventure to have its source code released to the public, having appeared in the May 1979 issue of the TRS-80 magazine Softside, predating the release of Adventureland's source code in 1980. As a result, its code obviously provided the foundation for many other BASIC adventures that followed.
Gameplay is in much the same manner as Adventureland. There's a two word parser, an abundance of things which can be dropped off in your ship to increase your score (although they aren't clearly marked as *TREASURES*), and a "maze" that consists of a single room where most of the exits just don't take you anywhere. The puzzles, such as they are, are fairly simple, and you mostly just need to wander around gathering all the items you can. Sadly, there are some fairly arbitrary actions that need to be taken, as is common in games of this vintage. (Spoiler - click to show) Good luck guessing what you need to pick up from a room containing "all kinds of things", or divining that the security robot eats hamburgers (provided they haven't grown cold)! The game's greatest frustration is the occasional random appearance of stormtroopers, which may occasionally force you to restart or reload for successful completion.
Mostly, though, this is a basic "pick up everything and drop it off in the score area" game(Spoiler - click to show)--embarrassingly, even Princess Leia is implemented as an item which you must get and then drop in the ship--and can probably be played from beginning to end in under 10 minutes. The whole thing will feel a little familiar to anyone who's played many old BASIC games--as it should, as many of those games copied the code from this one wholesale!
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