Dragon Warrior... ah, I remember that game. I remember sitting in front of the TV long enough for my eyes to see spots from the simple tiled background, for my
mind to ache from listening to the extremely simple,
epic little midi-like score that played incessantly. This game was the stereotype of an
RPG: You first offensive
spell was "Hurt", and later you got access to, *gasp*, "Hurtmore".
I remember playing the game for as many hours in a stretch as I was allowed by my father so I wouldn't have to waste precious
gold to buy the "Wings". Of course, if you were a die hard, you could always walk back to the castle to save, but that required long, painstaking navigation over the landscape. Such
negative reinforement on the part of the developer guarranteed a few more hours out of its gamers every day... those bastards!
Later, in high school as I was experimenting playing with TI-Basic for the
TI-83, I began to write a simple
RPG to fill up those empty hours in math class. Dubbed "Dragon Warrior CE", this program soon ate up every drop of memory available on the
TI-83, and it got so that my calculator required several seconds to perform 2+2. There were over 80 screens total, some saved as backgrounds, others generated on the fly. My favorite part was the weapons choices given to the PC. You started with the
Pointed Stick, and progressed up through such martial favorites as the Paperclip Chain and Can of Whup Ass to the most powerful, formidable weapon ever: Biting
Sarcasm.