Tag: tealeaves

Andrew Greenberg, RIP

I just got back from DragonCon, and I’m pretty amazed that I didn’t get the connection that the Andrew Greenberg there, who created the classic TTRPG Vampire: The Masquerade, shared a name with Andrew Greenberg, co-creator of Wizardry. And how much of a coincidence it is that the later Greenberg passed away during DragonCon this year, while the former one was there and presenting panels.

Of course this post is about the Wizardry Greenberg. His passing was reported by the other major Wizardry creator, Robert Woodhead, on his Facebook page. It is nice that Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord made it out while he was still alive. The name of the evil wizard in that game, Werdna, is Andrew spelled backwards. (Spelling names backwards was a popular way to name fantasy characters in early CRPGs. Trebor, the Mad Overlord himself, is Robert, as in Robert Woodhead, reversed, and Yendor from Rogue is Rodney backwards.)

Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. Image from Woodhead’s Facebook page

Youtube channel Tea Leaves has an obit video (6 minutes) that fills in some of the context:

Which Version of Wizardry 1 to Play?

Let’s keep rolling with these Youtube finds. There’s millions of them, but most of them are obnoxious, with the emphasis on noxious, so I try only to repost here the best. And this one’s pretty informative.

Which version of the classic foundational CRPG Wizardry should you play? I’m going to emphasize that you should play one of them. Wizardry inspired so many people, but one ever quite duplicated its mixture of tabletop-inspired party-based play, permadeath, and overwhelming difficulty. Wizardry is a game that doesn’t want you to win it. That’s why characters cost a fortune to revive, cost an ever greater fortune to bring back if that process fails, and it becomes impossible to revive them if that fails too.

If characters die in the dungeon, their corpses aren’t even brought back to the surface for you! You have to take a different party of characters into the dungeon (assuming they’re strong enough to survive the journey!), move the dead members into empty slots in your group, then return to town, unload them into storage, and repeat until you’ve rescued them all. And woe to the characters who mistype a teleport spell and end up embedded in rock, because they’re utterly destroyed, vanished, obliterated, annihilated, eradicated, gone.

Wizardry hates players, and that’s why you should play it: to teach it a goddamn lesson.

Youtuber Tea Leaves played a lot of versions of Wizardry, including a very promising upcoming version by Digital Eclipse, which has modern quality of life features and modern graphics, while also having, at its foundation, the Apple II original, with all its hatred for organic life. In summary, he thinks that version is great, but also has positive things to say about other versions, especially the fan-patched translation of the Japanese Super Famicom version. But they don’t like the DOS version-it has a terrible bug which Tea Leaves emphasizes makes it unplayable. Noted!

Which Version of Wizardry Should I Play (Youtube, 27 minutes)