Spellcasting 201 - The Sorcerers Appliance

Year 1991, late at night, my parents asleep and I've got a game running that I really shouldn't have been playing. Spellcasting 201 by Legend Entertainment was exactly that — a text adventure with graphics that looked innocent, but Steve Meretzky packed it with humor so mature that I didn't understand half the jokes back then. Today I get them all. And I'm still laughing.

It's the second installment in the series about Ernie Eaglebeak, a sorcery student at the mythical academy in the land of Peloria. Ernie is an average mage with above-average interest in the opposite sex and a talent for landing himself in absurd situations. The series builds on the original Spellcasting from 1990 and follows the same formula — fantasy parody, college humor, plenty of wordplay and suggestive adult content that was pretty bold for the time. Legend Entertainment combined a text parser with illustrations and was one of the few publishers that didn't kill the Infocom tradition of text adventures but pushed it forward.

The game runs on a hybrid system — you type commands into the parser, but you also get a simple graphics window with scenes. The parser is solid, and Legend was always proud of it for good reason. It handles pretty natural phrasing and lets you experiment. The puzzles are mostly logical within the game world, though you'll occasionally hit one where the solution requires thinking in a way that's a bit too twisted to be healthy. The difficulty is medium — it's not Zork, where the game loves to kill you for a wrong move, but it's not a walk in the park either.

What keeps the Spellcasting series afloat to this day is Meretzky's writing. The dialogues have rhythm, situations have escalation, and the humor isn't just for humor's sake — it builds on character and world. Ernie isn't a fool, he's just young and hormone-driven, which Meretzky exploits with precision, not a sledgehammer. On the other hand, the graphics have aged predictably — static images in EGA palette are a period artifact, not a strength. And the parser, while good, demands patience from players today that we're not used to.

Who will Spellcasting 201 appeal to today? Those who love text adventures and Meretzky's dry English writing — yes, the game is in English and no translation ever came out, so solid English is a must. And those who want to be reminded what an adult adventure looked like when "adult" meant jokes, not polygons. You can fire it up in your browser today via DOSBox emulators without much fuss. It's worth it — if you know what you're getting into.