Yeah nice and good luck SirTawmis! It is my birthday today so I hope I can find it today. I was planning on looking for it a bit today anyways and did not even realize it was my birthday today...lol. Good luck I hope you find yours.

It took - what... over 2 months? And tons of digging... but I did just find my Wizardry Archives CD!

I've made DOSBOX installers for my Wizardry I - V games... but still hope that they land on GoG.com one day. The compleitionist in me is twitching that I don't have all the Wizardry games on here.

Same here. I was surprised at just how good Wizardry 1 held up when I played it a few years ago. I had a really fun time with it.

It's certainly rough around the edges, but still a fun walk down memory lane. My best friend (at the time) and I would spend ENDLESS hours on the weekend, staying the night at one another's house, playing Wizardry...

It's still the first thing I search for on here, when I log into the site - to see if Wizardry I-V have made their way on here yet...

I must admit that I didn't play the games when they were released. But I must also say that there are many other retro games that are the way more polished and interesting for new gamers and can even keep up with modern games gameplaywise. I bought and played the first few Wizardry titles because I'm a completionist (I need to own all parts of a series) but in my opinion you can play the older Wizardry titles for some retro feeling. If you are new in Wizardry they don't give you something special. Just my opinion. I didn't want to insult any Wizardry fan.

I found Wizardry 1 much more accessible than the later games (esp. 6-8; even tho I love them now).
I think it is very much worth a playthrough for every RPG fan. I just recently beat Dark Souls, and it made me think back on Wizardry; I think if more people approached Wizardry 1 more like Dark Souls, than they would get a lot more out of it. Rather than dismissing it and saying, well this is an outdated mechanic and we have moved on from that, we examine it deeper than that and see exactly what the developers were trying to accomplish with these mechanics. People often complain about the perma-death and things like beheading insta-kills- but I think these all serve a purpose in the whole context of the game.
I don't know, I think it is worth another look for anyone who may have been put off by the series at first. Now, I haven't played 2-5, so I can't speak for those, but Wizardry 1 is still a classic IMO. It should be up there with Dark Souls as a tough but excellently designed game for hardcore RPG fans.

(if there is one disappointment I have with Wiz 1, it is that there is not that much of a motivation to explore levels 5-8. But perhaps that is a boon rather than a mark against it.)

I also wish Wizardy 1-5 would make their appearance here. I'm too OCD to start off at 6.

It's worth mentioning that Wizardry 6 has no connection to the previous games.

Story-wise, it takes so long after the others that the kingdom of Llylgamyn is a distant memory.

Gameplay-wise, the game mechanics were completely re-done. You no longer have the menu-based town, instead being stuck inside the dungeon when you enter there (there are NPCs in the dungeon that you can trade with, so money still has a purpose), there's an entirely new growth system and magic system, and the internal mechanics have changed significantly.

In fact, even if you account for all the Japanese spin-offs, the only Wizardry games that are at all similar to Wizardry 6 are Wizardry 7 and 8 (and even then, Wizardry 8 had more major changes).

It is also worth mentioning that Wizardry 1-5 are infinitely better than 6-8.

But maybe that's just my opinion ;)

I wouldn't necessarily say they're better; they're just different.

With that said, one of my earliest criticisms of Wizardry 6 is the lack of the ability to change your party after the game has started, as creating and leveling new characters is something I find to be quite fun.

As far as my personal tastes and experiences go, I would say I enjoyed Wizardry 1 the most in pure practice. I do love the character creating systems of Wizardry 6, but I didn't enjoy the puzzle aspects as much; it wasn't as fun to actually play. I also think some of it's systems are a bit clunky, whereas Wizardry 1 feels extremely deliberate and polished.
I'm glad that series like Elminage and Wizardry Empire exist.

It's a shame that most of them never saw English release. (I believe that only 2 of the Elminage games and none of the Wizardry Empire games (or Wizardry Gaiden for that matter) got official English releases.)

Having looked at the decompilation, Wizardry 1, at least in its original Apple 2 version, is an unpolished mess. For example, many HAMAN and MAHAMAN effects can't happen (and the game randomly chooses 1 of 3 effects, though it appears intended to have more possibilities, including some that are coded but can't happen), and there's a tiny chance of the character's spellbook being scrambled (the game generates a random number less than the character's (new) level, and only if it's exactly 5 does this happen).

Not to mention there's the Afraid status, which is only partially implemented, but which is accessible via the identify glitch. It has really strange behavior:
* (I don't remember if the character can act while under this status.)
* At the end of battle, the status is cured.
* DIALKO doesn't cure it, but MADI does.
* On returning to town, the Afraid character will be removed from the party. You can retrieve the character, or you can go to the temple to pay for the cure.
* The cost of curing the Afraid status is rather high (though it's *possible* there might be a way to manipulate it). Looking at the code, it appears the game takes an uninitialized variable and multiplies it by the character's level to determine the cost. (The particular subroutine only checks for the status ailments that can normally happen in town.)

Then there's also the strange way level drains are handled; your level drops immediately, but your XP doesn't drop until you win the battle or run away. This, of course, means that there's an exploit; if you teleport away (LOKTOFEIT or MALOR) or your party wipes (be ware that this can cause the permanent loss of the character or of items), you can dodge the XP cost and easily gain the level back, complete with the usual level up bonuses.

I could also mention dungeon levels 5-8, which seem rather pointless. (The Game Boy Color version removed those floors entirely and replaced them with a post-game bonus dungeon that requires beating the final boss to gain access.)