Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Spellcasting 101 (Legend Entertainment)

Yes, Steve Meretzky's Spellcasting 101! Oh, the excitement! Not only that, but this is the first transcript crossover with another site. See, Robb Sherwin over at http://www.caltrops.com asked me to review S101 for his site. Somewhere along the way, I thought, huh, I can still share the transcript over here. So, before or after you read the transcript here, go over to caltrops and read my review, which will definitely cover some things I don't talk about here.

How it Begins



"In the corner is a pile of rotting hay -- the only thing you have that passes for a bed."

The Transcript


Final Thoughts

Things I forgot to mention in my review- first off, I made a fair amount of progress into the game using Trizbort's automapping feature (this is why my transcript is peppered with >see commands) before eventually realizing that S101 has a built-in map feature.

Also, it is interesting that despite no longer being burdened by the space limitations of the Z-Machine, S101 has its share of throwaway responses, like the response to >TALK TO <person>, which is "Blah, blah, blah..." On one hand, this is a missed opportunity to present a very polished game, but on the other hand, it shows just how important it is to have priorities when writing responses. Sometimes I wonder if the cross that modern IF bears is its obligation to try to provide a nice response to everything. Maybe we need to take a step back.

Update:  

Yes, I have noticed that this post has attracted several spam bots, but it is spellcasting spam which I find hilarious so I'm going to just let it accumulate for a while.