I’m stuck in Wishbringer. I’m feeling quite useless, because this is meant to be an easy Infocom adventure. I’m leaving it for another time. The next text adventure I’ll play will probably be the new The Curse of Rabenstein. Let’s see if I’m better in newly released text adventures.

I made so little progress in Dungeon Master a while ago, that I let it lie. But I cannot ignore the game, because I feel like I should play more of it before I can continue with Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore. So I started again but this time I choose the DOS version. Patr of this decision was fueled by the inconvenience of the WhdLoad version crashing about one of every four times I tried to save the game.

This time around I choose the exact same team as before. The same guys and girl that feature in the manual. I figured that I could always try another team if this again didn’t work out.

One thing I noticed is that I blazed through the second level. Partly because I had already mapped the place out and knew where I was going. But mainly because combat went so much smoother because I wasn’t hampered by the tank mouse. I’ve upgraded the mouse with a laser (link), but this one has very stiff buttons. My fingers start to hurt after a while. And that’s not good in a game that’s known for it’s revolutionary intuitive mouse-driven interface.

What also didn’t hinder was that I read some helpful remarks about the gameplay that helped me along. My earlier failure to make good progress left me wondering if my party was too weak, or if I just didn’t get it. So I decided to read a let’s play of the first two levels on the excellent crpg addict. Not only did the blog posts encourage me to try again, he didn’t do anything different than I had done, but also the comments were very helpful and mostly spoiler free. One of the tips was that I should actively switch players’ places during combat. A thing that’s perfectly natural, but that I hadn’t considered by myself. Maybe also because the controls via the tank mouse weren’t snappy enough to let me do much fast clicking.

So I betrayed my Amiga with DOS. But I guess she could have seen it coming. I did choose her above the Atari ST version that I own after all…