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Simon the sorcerer amiga5/21/2023 Unfortunately it lacks the right-click context sensitive actions of LucasArts games, but the interface can highlight all of the hotspots on the screen, an extremely useful feature that also carried forward to most of the future games. The menu bar is almost exactly the same, with a few verbs added in like “Wear” and “Consume”. On the surface, Simon the Sorcerer also shares more than a few similarities with Monkey Island, which the Woodroffes acknowledge as an obvious inspiration. After wandering around the game world – which includes a small town and a fairly expansive forest – Simon will pick up a bit of skill to give him a fighting chance against the nefarious Sordid. Although he wears a garish purple wizard outfit, complete with a goofy hat, Simon actually isn’t very skilled at magic… at least, at first. His quest, detailed by a note left on the table, is to rescue the good wizard Calypso, who has been kidnapped by the bad wizard Sordid. Just a bit bewildered, Simon follows him, only to end up in a medieval realm called the Magic Kingdom. Simon the Sorcerer begins in the house of an average British teenager, whose dog wanders into the attic and disappears into a chest. (Another developer a few years down the line was able to secure the Discworld license for its own series of games, which turned out alright, although Simon is distinct enough to stand apart from its obvious inspiration.) They weren’t able to, so they created their own fantasy universe in a similar style, and thus was born Simon the Sorcerer. After tiring of working on horror themed games, their name was changed to Adventure Soft, and they tried to obtain the license for Discworld, a series of comedic fantasy novels by Terry Pratchett. Although they initially worked on porting Scott Adams’ text adventures to British micros, they eventually formed Horrorsoft and created a few games based on the horror hostess Elvira. It all began with Simon and Mike Woodroffe in the early ’80s, owners of a computer shop in Birmingham. It’s probably just a result of them not finding proper distribution, because any fan of British humour will find a lot to like in the Simon series. It’s not that the humor doesn’t translate – people all over still appreciate British classics like Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, or more recent series like The Office and The IT Crowd. It’s a bit of a weird situation – since the series’ inception, the Simon the Sorcerer games have been quite popular in their homeland of Great Britain, as well as the rest of Europe, but they never remotely caught on in North America. Adventure Soft’s Simon the Sorcerer is one such series. That didn’t stop numerous other European outfits from trying their hands at things, and some of the better entries rival the quality of games from the other side of the pond. For quite awhile, the adventure gaming scene was dominated by American companies like LucasArts and Sierra.
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