RPG Spotlight: Dragon Wars

Ahhh Interplay. Once a company whose name was happily upon the tongue of gamers everywhere, known for quality games and great times, how the mighty have fallen these days. However, in spite of their current situation, the company's back catalog still holds up fairly well these days. So, without further ado, I'll start off this little spotlight with one of Interplay's great role playing games: Dragon Wars.


Shit...

Once the party manages to escape from Purgatory, the real adventure begins, with travel between different towns, and adventures into various dungeons as the party looks for revenge against the one who stuck them in Purgatory to begin with. Aside from the various enemy encounters you'll face, Dragon Wars also has a few puzzle elements, which will require use of both character skills, and player skill to figure out. Characters are fairly customizable, earning points each level that can be added to stats ranging from Strength and Spirit, to skills such as Swords and Bureaucracy... damn red tape. As an added bonus, characters from The Bard's Tale can be transferred in at the beginning of the game, allowing you to bring over old favorites if you don't want to start from scratch.

In the end, Dragon Wars is not the best dungeon crawler, but it is fairly enjoyable, and fairly well made for the time. There is a version for both DOS and Apple IIgs, of which I would recommend the Apple version for the nicer looking color palette and slightly better enemy artwork. One thing to keep in mind is that the game uses a paragraph system, both as a way to fit more text into a game that once fit on a single floppy disk, and as a method of copy protection. You'll need to find a copy of the paragraphs somewhere out on the net if you plan on getting very far into the game. It's not uncommon to come across a prompt that says "Read Paragraph 9" followed by the prompt "Y/N?". Without the paragraphs, there are some very dangerous questions that could result in bad things happening to your party if you give the wrong answer.

Welcome to Purgatory, and good luck. You'll need it.