Kzinssie
(she/her)
Wizardry is one of those series I've always wanted to get into, but just never got around to it. While stuck inside all day lately, I decided to finally start playing the original trilogy, more specifically the PlayStation version - despite being Japan-only it includes options to switch basically all text with a handful of remake-exclusive UI elements to English, and it also has an automap feature that I find first-person dungeon crawlers nearly unplayable without. I'm kind of surprise at how well it holds up? It's definitely pretty brutal in places, but with automapping it becomes a great game to just throw on and immerse yourself in for a few hours while watching a Youtube video in the background or whatever. I'm currently on Level 5 of Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and one thing I didn't expect was how this game has the same "gleefully playing with 3D space" quality you see in games like Doom or Mario 64. There's a lot of goofy little bits where they just do whatever with one-way doors, which is kind of cute.
Incidentally, the PSX version includes options to play with "classic" monster graphics, which I think are from the PC-88 version, and while I've always been a proponent of CRT filters for retro games anyway, the classic graphics in this go from "ugly dithered" to "beautifully textured" with a simulated NTSC display:
Incidentally, the PSX version includes options to play with "classic" monster graphics, which I think are from the PC-88 version, and while I've always been a proponent of CRT filters for retro games anyway, the classic graphics in this go from "ugly dithered" to "beautifully textured" with a simulated NTSC display: