Obscure DOS Shareware Game: War Wizard (1993)
Saturday, February 20th, 2010
I always wanted to try this game. The only copy I could ever find was on a shareware compilation and the game seems bugged all to heck because it refuses to work past putting your character name in. The end of this video is where it crashes!
Wikipedia Says: WarWizard was a fantasy computer role-playing game that was released as shareware in 1993, first for Amiga, then ported to Ms-Dos for IBM-compatible computers. It was developed by MicroGenesis, a small company founded by Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover in 1989. Today, the game is most notable as the commercial start for McQuaid, Clover, and artist Milo Cooper, who would later work together at Sony Online Entertainment on EverQuest and at Sigil Games Online on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
The player acts as a “WarWizard”, a powerful magic-using character that fights and completes quests. WarWizard features VGA graphics and sound effects, but touted greater emphasis on gameplay than on anything else.
One notable feature of the game was its combat mode, which featured the ability to target specific parts of an opponent’s body, hampering movement or disabling the opponents altogether, rendering them unable to flee from the battle or to retaliate. The same thing could also happen to the player, WarWizard, himself.
Today, the game is mostly unknown except to a few fans and appears impossible to find anywhere on the net. Even the official site, which became unavailable from September 2007 (possibly connected to Sony Online Entertainment’s takeover of Sigil Games Online on 15 May, 2007), offered only a shareware version of the game for download. According to Brad McQuaid, the full version seems to be misplaced and nowhere to be found.
Few people mentioned to have ordered the full Ms-Dos/PC Version of WarWizard at the time, but never received any answer or the game. It appears that the game has been discarded by its makers without any chances ever for the full version to become available today for anyone.
UPDATE, NEW FEATURE:
DOWNLOAD THE SHAREWARE:
http://www.4shared.com/file/114114876/2a149fd6/WWIZARD.html
This is the only download available of the game on the whole internet apparently… See if you can get it to run better than I could.
Duration : 0:0:25
This is a hard to find DOS shareware game. It features play similar to many other fighting games of the time and had graphics that were actually top notch for back then. Too bad I can only see the story, my floppy disc which had the game is corrupted so the actual game portion doesn’t load. A shame really. This game is in the vein of Kung Fu, Yie Ar Kung Fu, the original Street Fighter and many others.
Eyeguard is a very obscure, very strange DOS password security program (which means it’s largely innefectual in the era anybody could walk up with a boot disk). The shareware version only had the two messages, Eyeguard is on duty and Eyeguard is watching you, but the registered version supposedly had different avatars and you could customize whatever messaged you wished it to say. The reason for the horrible audio quality also is because it didn’t even use a sound card. It put the synthesized voices straight through the old PC speaker!