Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls
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| Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls |
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| Developer(s) | Legend Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | Legend Entertainment |
| Designer(s) | Steve Meretzky |
| Platform(s) | DOS |
| Release date | 1990 |
| Genre(s) | Interactive fiction |
| Mode(s) | Single player |
| Media | Floppy disk |
| Input methods | Mouse, Keyboard |
The text adventure game Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls is the first installment of the Spellcasting series created by Steve Meretzky during his time at Legend Entertainment. All the three games in the series tell the story of young Ernie Eaglebeak, a student at the prestigious Sorcerer University, as he progresses through his studies, learning the arcanes of magic, taking part in student life, occasionally saving the world as he knows it - and last but not least, having his way with any beautiful women he can get his hands on.
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[edit] Story
Ernie Eaglebeak is a teenager just out of high school living in the town of Port Gecko, pining for his sexy neighbour Lola Tigerbelly and struggling in a seriously bad relationship with his stepfather, Joey Rottenwood. A break-through in his miserable life comes when he gets accepted by the Sorcerer University, a prestigious university of magic. After a dashing escape - parts of which involved walking around naked and pushing old ladies - from Rottenwood's custody, Ernie makes his way to SU and enrols as a freshman.
Ernie's life as a first-year SU student is split between learning magic, marvelling at the rapidly deteriorating quality of the student newspaper, exploring the university and getting to know such, ahem, interesting females as the university president's daughter Gretchen Snowbunny or Hillary, the young wife of his ancient advisor Otto Tickingclock. All is well until one day SU gets attacked by mysterious foes who kidnap Tickingclock and take away the Sorcerer's Appliance, a powerful magical device which could become extremely dangerous in inappropriate hands. As usual, it is up to our protagonist to save the day.
Equipped with his trusty spell book and a magical guided surfboards, Ernie sets out on a mission to several islands on the Fizzbuttle Ocean in search for items that will aid him in getting into the sinister Fort Blackwand. On the Island of Lost Soles he restores the cursed souls of its inhabitants, on the Island Where Time Runs Backwards he has to work hard to avoid destroying the universe with a temporal paradox, on the Island of Horny Women he finds out that there is such a thing as too much female attention, at the Restaurant at the End of the Ocean he witnesses the six stages of a life of a restaurant and at the Island of the Gods he learns that goddesses need love too. And everywhere on the way he finds places where the Great Attachments required by the Sorcerer's Appliance to operate used to be located, but are gone now.
With the spells he has learnt and the items he has obtained during his quest Ernie can now take on the challenge of the fort and confront the mastermind behind the theft of the Sorcerer's Appliance - who turns out ot be none other than Joey Rottenwood! In a climactic final showdown Ernie manages to shut down the Appliance's self-destruct system by burying it, along with Rottenwood, under a pile of whale dung, frees all the prisoners - including his presumed-dead real father! Finally everybody returns to the University, where our hero gets... scolded for irresponsibility, given a hefty bill and abandoned by Lola, who has decided to go shopping, for all his trouble, but at least gets to advance a year.
[edit] Technical details
Spellcasting 101 is a text adventure game. However, much like all other games of this sort produced by Legend it runs in graphics mode (up to EGA) and takes advantage of certain EGA capabilities. First of all, while the traditional type-your-command approach is still possible, one can also assemble commands from words displayed in lists on the screen by clicking on them with the mouse; second, a graphical representation of the present location is also displayed on the screen and certain operations can be performed by clicking on different parts of the image as well. Finally, a compass rose is visible on the screen at all times, which in addition to enabling movement by clicking on it shows valid movement directions for the present location.
Unlike many text adventure games, Spellcasting 101 uses sound - with sound card support for music and sound effects played over the internal speaker using the RealSound technology.
Like the famous earlier risque work of Meretzky, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Spellcasting 101 offers multiple (two, to be exact) gameplay modes of differing levels of sexual content. In the default, nice mode the females Ernie encounters have to be satisfied by such means as entertaining them, performing chores and so on, whereas in the naughty mode, such situations are resolved by sexual intercourse; the latter also replaces some of the images displayed by the game with more graphic (albeit still not pornographic, of course) versions. A word of warning here: please note that a lot of innuendo, double entendres and so on remain present even in nice mode and sometimes understanding them is important to gameplay (for example, at one point of the game, in preparation of a party Ernie receives a spell from a fellow student whose purpose is to increase bust size - and promptly uses it to transform a stone bust into a makeshift ladder), therefore younger players will simply miss out a lot.
The game features a two-part copy protection system, with the first one involving filling in the gaps in Ernie's enrolment records with information from the registration form and class schedule enclosed with the game, at the time of him enrolling at the university, and the second - using the enclosed map to obtain co-ordinates for various locations Ernie must visit on the Fizzbuttle Ocean. A note on the form test: while this kind of protection is quite common in interactive fiction, in this particular case its effect is somewhat different from the norm: thanks to the word-list interface offered by Legend games of this genre this is in effect just a multiple-choice test.
[edit] Main characters
[edit] Ernie Eaglebeak
Ernie Eaglebeak is the protagonist. A somewhat nerdy young man in his late teens / early twenties who wants to become a sorcerer and win the heart of Lola Tigerbelly. Quite an adept, if initially unexperienced, magician, whose passion for this arcane art is rivalled only by his enormous (and apparently undisturbed by being in love with Lola) sex drive - if it's a humanoid female of appropriate age Ernie will definitely get her in his sights. Unlike another nerdy Don Juan of the gaming world, the infamous Larry Laffer, most of the time he succeeds at his advances, with his "one true love" being seemingly the only woman he's never managed to get into bed. Most other characters tend to get Ernie's name wrong, in which he is resembled by another adventure game protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood.
[edit] Lola Tigerbelly
Lola Tigerbelly is Ernie Eaglebeak's long-time neighbour and one true, secret love. The feeling is not mutual though, as the secrecy aside she is much more interested in athletic, jock-like and/or rich types than in her nerdy neighbour; add that to the fact she seems to be interested in little more than shopping and you will know the true meaning of the phrase "love is blind", although it probably would be more appropriate to say that it lacks all the other senses instead. A stereotypical shallow beauty.
[edit] Joey Rottenwood
Joey Rottenwood is Ernie Eaglebeak's stepfather. Passionately hates Ernie and makes his life as miserable as possible, up to the point of having him be essentially a prisoner at his own home, living in a locked room with a straw mat for bed and a chamberpot for other needs, and planning to thwart Ernie's plan to enroll at the Sorcerer University. Initially portrayed as a run-of-the-mill drunkard hating Ernie just for being another man's son, Rottenwood eventually turns out to be the arch-villain of the game - he has sworn revenge against the Sorcerer University, having been kicked out for cheating, and his attitude towards Ernie is a result of a prophecy he had once heard stating that young Eaglebeak would foil his plans. There is much more to Joey Rottenwood than meets the eye. For one thing, in spite of his superficially bad temper and a tendency to drink too much he appears to have almost infinite patience - planning his revenge took him 30 years, not to mention the fact he went through the trouble of faking Ernie's father's death and marrying Ernie's mother just to keep an eye on Ernie. Moreover, despite his abrupt departure from SU, Joey appears to possess quite good knowledge of magic. Much like Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future trilogy, he has a tendency to have his plans thwarted by getting buried under large amounts of dung.
[edit] Gretchen Snowbunny
Gretchen Snowbunny is a daughter of the SU president Aaron Snowbunny. Having been hit by a number of intoxication spells at a student party she attended, she asks Ernie to escort her somewhere she can rest. Once in Ernie's room she turns out quite willing to substitute rest with some, ahem, activity, but passes out before anything can happen. Being enough of a gentleman, Eaglebeak ceases his advances at that point and settles for nicking Gretchen's key to the president's house.
[edit] Otto Tickingclock
Otto Tickingclock is a professor at the Sorcerer University and Ernie Eaglebeak's advisor. While apparently a great magician, his advanced age tends to get the better of him quite often by making him only loosely attached to reality and prone to falling asleep easily. Married to Hillary, whom he loves dearly and would never, ever suspect of any unfaithfulness.
[edit] Hillary Tickingclock
Hillary Tickingclock is the wife of Professor Tickingclock, several times younger than him. And what shall a poor girl do when her husband probably doesn't even remember the meaning of the word "intimate" any more, especially living on campus and thus being pretty much continuously surrounded by willing men more-or-less her age...? One thing's for sure, she definitely knows how to make a dinner guest feel welcome after her husband has dozed off.
[edit] Notes
- After Ernie has escaped his stepfather's clutches, the narrator says "after a few days of hitchhiking [a subject about which this author has already written his fill]". This is a reference to Steve Meretzky's work on the Infocom game The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (on which he collaborated with the author of the book, Douglas Adams).
- The title of chapter 6 of the game, The Restaurant at the End of the Ocean, is another Douglas Adams reference - this time to the second part of the HHTTG cycle, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
- The role-players at Frogkisser Hall play the game of Malls 'n' Muggers, a reference to the real-world game Dungeons & Dragons.
- The game breaks the fourth wall on multiple occasions, too numerous to be all listed here. Examples include the following:
- when describing Meltingwolf Hall, the narrator states "a tiny trap door, hidden to most eyes but visible to the endlessly questing eyes of a veteran adventure game player like you, is set into the floor"
- trying to pick up the skull at the Boat Dock results in the game answering "you wouldn't want to ruin this beautiful graphic, would you?"
- the original forest on the Island of Lost Soles is said to have been cut down "sometime during alpha-testing"
- at the end, the Sorcerer's Appliance is seen being carried through a door marked "To the Sequel"
