Review: Wizard and the Princess

Submitted by Mat_Tschirgi on Tue, 08/23/2005 - 16:00

Review Of

Williams, Roberta. Wizard and the Princess. Oakhurst, CA: Sierra On-line, 1982.

It is rather telling that Roberta Williams' Graphical Adventure Game (GAG) "The Wizard and the Princess" opens up with neither a wizard nor a princess. Instead, the scene is set in a barren desert populated with snakes, rocks, and the scorpions which hide behind them.

Williams' first attempt at creating a GAG was "Mystery House"; indeed, "Mystery House" is considered the first text adventure game with graphics. She followed this up with "The Wizard and the Princess." The big draw for this title at the time was its color graphics. Unfortunately, modern day gamers will find little to draw them to the game at all.

The interface of the game is fairly identical to "Mystery House." A rather child-like drawing takes up most of the screen as a parser fills the bottom portion. After reading a meager description of the room, the player must type in commands at the command prompt like a standard Interactive Fiction piece ("Zork", "Planetfall", etc.)

Early GAGs tended to rely on mazes. They were a relatively effecient way to recycle art elements and also functioned as an artificial way to extend the length of a game. "The Wizard and the Princess" is no exception. Poor puzzle design and an ever poorer text parser round out this gaming experience.

The first puzzle in the game presents the player with a fairly obvious problem: a large snake blocks your path. A rock is also seen on the screen, right next to the snake. One would think that typing "THROW ROCK AT SNAKE" would result in the snake perishing. Of course, one that would think such a thought would have something called common sense, a trait Roberta Williams did not have while designing this game.

Instead, to rid the desert of the first of many snakes you will vanquish over the course of the game, you have to search around a bunch of identical looking desert screens until you find a rock your avatar can actually take with him. Simply navigate your way back through the desert maze to the snake and slay him with your rock to proceed past the first puzzle. Fun, no?

Actually, it's not fun at all, and that's a big problem with the game. With all its faults, at least "Mystery House" used the construct of a murder mystery to at least present an intriguing scenario for a game. "Wizard and the Princess" tosses you into a desert with no real clue of where to go and a bunch of illogical puzzles. If you've ever wished that a cactus in the desert would have a saltine cracker hidden inside of it, perhaps you would enjoy this game.

Certainly the color graphics add a bit of visual punch to the whole affair and Roberta Williams' artistic skills are improved over her stick figures of the damned from "Mystery House," but are the graphics truly integral to the gameplay experience? They might provide visual clues to a puzzle, but the gameplay is ultimately the same as an Interactive Fiction piece.

One of the reviews you pointed...

Submitted by mattbarton.exe on Wed, 08/24/2005 - 01:49.

One of the reviews you pointed out to me about this game instructed players to check out the Infocom games released the same year as Wizard and the Princess and see how superior they were to anything Roberta Williams could cook up. It truly is a case of "reading a novel vs. a kid's coloring book." Wizard and the Princess has color graphics, true. It also has an utterly miserable storyline, total lack of coherence, non-intuitive puzzles, illiterate parser, interface from hell...I could go on. It wouldn't surprise me if one of the key puzzles required the player to type in a misspelling of a word to get it right. The game is like listening to a hyperactive five-year old making up a story on the spot. "And then you see a cactus with a hole in it! You look in the hole! You find a cracker!" Uh, okay.
The Wizard and the Princess is so bad, bad, bad, so utterly awful--that it frankly boggles the mind that people actually bought it, much less liked it, much less ever bought anything else with the words "Sierra" on it. Damn. Given the choice between a game like Zork and a game like Wizard and the Princess--then again, I guess most kids would prefer a coloring book over a "novel" anyway. Yay, color pictures. Not so different nowadays, is it? Blow them away with graphics technology and they'll overlook everything else.
I had a damnably hard time locating Wizard and the Princess. I finally found a C-64 version. I'm thinking that perhaps the Apple II version wasn't so bad, but judging from the reviews I've read, that's not the case.
I guess my question would be, other than the fact that Wizard and the Princess is the first graphical adventure game to feature color graphics, does that make it worthy of mention? Or can we just shove this one under the rug and forget about it?

It's worth mentioning... It ...

Submitted by Mat_Tschirgi on Sat, 08/27/2005 - 00:07.

It's worth mentioning... It is so bad it reaches a point where it's almost "so bad that it's good."
Our method of playing the game while using Yahoo Messenger to record our thoughts on the game worked pretty well. It was a wonderfully stream of consciousness way to work.
Maybe the game was created as a bet Ken Williams had with Roberta to see how many puzzles she could make involving snakes and crevices?

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I really don't think you

Submitted by Cris (not verified) on Wed, 08/02/2006 - 13:35.

I really don't think you can accurately look back at a game like this. It's just so freaking old that it's impossible to judge it, even from a historical standpoint, unless you knew what life was like before computers had graphics.

From what I understand, what made Zork able to have a complex plot and puzzles was that it was a purely text game and so had more physical memory to grow. Back then, a 10k game was seriously taxing the system it was designed for, and since all of those images just guzzled memory it was hard to fit anything else on there.

Wizard and the Princess is just not a good game by today's standards, but I don't think that says anything about Roberta Williams. She DID bring us the King's Quest series, the Laura Bow series, and Phantasmagoria, so she obviously wasn't a complete dunce.

No comparison

Submitted by paul (not verified) on Thu, 11/09/2006 - 18:51.

Honestly, this game was the exact opposite of a winner. I grew up with this game, Mystery House and text based games, and this one was definitely the worst of them all. Imcomprehensible desert mazes combined with perplexing actions do not a good game make. It was, however, the best of what they had back then. You cannot possibly make a comparison between this and any game made now. Stacked up against the neverending stories of the Atari games of yesteryear, however, and it seems like a diamond. There was nothing even close to compare to it, and even though you had to watch the cursor draw things onto the screen, it was still better than the endless repetition of an Atari game.

Back in the Day

Submitted by Super Mario (not verified) on Sun, 03/04/2007 - 22:07.

I was a young teen back when Wizard and Princess came out. It was, in its day, the most exciting program out there. I remember how thrilled we were with the graphics. I know this sounds funny by today's standards but I clearly remember being thrilled that they had developed some kind of dithereing routine on the Apple II that allowed for more than the standard 4 colors. We played with a group of us. It was long before they were famous and I remember calliing Roberta herself at her home number to get clues when we got stuck. We soon formed the "Official Ken and Roberta Fan Club." which consisted of myself and three friends. We often called Ken and or Roberta ay home to ask questions or just talk about future games. We played Mystery House too. And yes the games were sometimes illogical and weird but that was the fun of it. Everything was new and it was an exciting time.