Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

I really need to ignore the nostalgia bug when it flies around my head, pointing out games like this. Almost every time I jump to buy an older game, whether it's been revamped like this one or not, I end up disappointed when I play it. This game is not only brutally difficult, it's really shallow and repetitive. Run around the dungeon ("Maze") a little bit, get your backside handed to you, go back up to the surface to rest (and more often than not resurrect) your characters, then go back down into the Maze again... only to find out all of the encounters have been reset. Hooray! You get to do it all over again. Classes are your typical selections: fighter, priest (cleric), thief, and mage. There's also a bishop class and a samurai. There's no explanation anywhere in game about what a bishop is, and how it's different. The samurai requires such crazy stat numbers that you can't possibly start the game with that class. You can adjust your stats as you level, and change class later in the game. So, I guess that's how that works. You get six characters. I started with 2 fighters, a thief, a priest, a mage, and a bishop... whatever the f- that is. There's a "town" that consists of several static building images, you click to do various management things. In the center of the town is the Maze, where the core of the game takes place. There's also the Training Grounds, an Inn, a Tavern, the Temple (church), and a Trading Post. With some of these buildings, there's no rhyme or reason why you'd select them to do a certain thing. For example, the Training Grounds are used to create and modify your characters. I figured this is where you go to level up and manage your team, right? Nope... you need to go to the Inn to level up and to the Tavern to reorganize your party. (WTF?) The Inn is also where you go to rest and heal your characters, and the Tavern can also be used to recruit pre-built characters and delete existing ones. You visit the Temple to resurrect or de-poison your characters. And finally, the very lackluster Trading Post sells items that are ridiculously overpriced... a single healing potion (that only heals 1-8 hit points) costs 500 gold. A single trip into the Maze, early in the game may net you 150-200 gold... that is, if your characters don't die. More on that in a minute. You navigate the Maze, in old-school, Eye of the Beholder, dungeon-crawling fashion. I still love this aspect and it's kind of cool that a replica of the old pixel based version of the game is shown on screen, too. You'll maybe find an occasional secret door, sometimes a random chest, but mostly you'll open a door into a room and you're hit with an encounter. At least 1/2 the time, you're outnumbered. Combat is ultra simplistic: a single button click for each character, per turn. Fighters are boring as they only have a single attack. You can try to hide your thief, which fails 1/2 the time (and costs a turn). If you do succeed, and try an attack from a hidden position, it almost always misses. You absolutely, positively need a thief though. Almost every chest you discover is trapped, and they HIT HARD when you fail a trap check, or to disarm them. Your mage/bishop can cast a spell. You get to do this maybe twice, before their spell points run out, and the spells fail half the time. A mage/bishop can also attack, but if she's in the back line of your party, she can only defend every turn. You need to go back up to town and rest at the Inn to recover spell points. A priest (cleric) can dispel undead, but that's (obviously) situational, based on the encounter. He can attack like a fighter, or cast a spell... with the latter being the same as the mage/bishop. In combat, you're gonna get injured and *your characters are going to die*. There's a "Camp" feature when you're in the Maze, but all you can do is look at your inventory or move party members around. There's no resting with it. How is that camping?! So, as I pointed out earlier, you need to go back to town *a lot* to rest, regain spell points, and resurrect your party. The latter is free, the first time. (Temple, my backside... more like a street-level dealer, "Hey buddy... your first taste is free. But, YOU'LL BE BACK!") Add insult to injury, the price increases each time you resurrect the same character. I was always in the red, financially because any gold I made, I had to spend resurrecting 1/2 of my party after each trip down into the Maze! That's pretty much it with what you can do in this game. It's just a lot of "rinse and repeat." Maybe if the encounters didn't reset, or if you could actually rest in the dungeon, it'd be worth continuing. But, with the repetition and so little substance, it's just not worth my time.