Name: Wizards Crown
Platform: Atari 800
Region: USA
Media: Disk
Controller: Keyboard
Genre: Role Playing Game - Adventure
Gametype: Licensed
Release Year: 1986
Developer: SSI
Publisher: SSI
Players: 1
Programmer: Paul Murray, Keith Brors
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Wizard's Crown is a fantasy role-playing game in which the player creates a party of up to eight adventurers and takes them on a quest to retrieve a magical crown from a wizard named Tarmon, who sealed himself and the crown in his laboratory five hundred years ago.

The game features tactical battles, during which the player navigates the party members in turns over the battlefield. Different weapons demonstrate unique characteristics; for example, spears can attack two squares away, flails ignore the enemy's shields, and axes have a chance of breaking them completely. Shields are used to defend against frontal attacks and those coming from whatever side the shield is equipped on. The player can opt to skip these details and have the battle proceed automatically.

Experience gained by characters is spent on skills, attributes and life points. Unlike in most comparable games, classes and their unique abilities are not assigned to the characters, but must instead be "bought" by using intelligence points. The classes are Thief, Ranger, Fighter, Priest and Sorcerer; any of those can be combined with another one for a single character.

Weapons can be imbued with various enhancements. Magical weapons inflict elemental damage (called "injuries" in the game); "Plus" weapons cause extra bleeding, which may affect the character's health, making him faint; "Life Blast" weapons can kill a character in such a way that he cannot be resurrected afterwards.


Trivia:

This game is quite flexible in terms of character creation, particularly in the area of character classes. In essence, you can multi-class your characters as much as you'd like (keeping in mind that this will cause slower development). It would be possible for you to design a character as a Warrior-Priest-Ranger-Wizard-Thief... if you had the patience for it!

This game has a neat feature that allows you to reset any of the dungeon levels. In essence, you can keep one set of characters playing in the game forever, if you're that patient.

This is known to be the game that had the tactical combat engine that was later tweaked into Pool of Radiance.



http://www.mobygames.com/game/atari-8-bit/wizards-crown
