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Master of Magic (PC) (1 Viewer)

Joe Szott

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Joe S.
Anyone played or playing this little gem from the 80s?

A friend here at work was telling me about his all-time favorite game, Master of Magic. So I look on my friendly abandonware siter and bingo, there it is. Been playing it for a few days now, what a totally great game this is! Why Microprose hasn't released a MoM 2 I couldn't guess, this game is just so well made.

Here's what it is like: You select a wizard and have a certain amount of 'points'. You can put points into magical spell types (Life, Death, Nature, Chaos, Sorcery) or special abilities like Warlord or Archmage. Then you pick a race to command, like Dark Elves, Men, Orcs, etc. Each race has special abilities or units they can produce.

Now you start the game, which is about 85% like Civilization. You build settlers, swordmen, engineers, city improvments, etc. And you meet other wizards with empires and fight, ally, trade spells with them. But instead of researching tech trees, you research spell trees. You also accrue mana just like gold or food that you use to cast these spells to enhance units, improve cities, destroy enemies in combat, piss off other Wizards.

It is just such a fun game, I'm shocked it wasn't as big as say Populous or Half-Life. Anyone who enjoys Age of ... games or Civ titles owes it to themselves to check Master of Magic out. It is an incredibly fun and addictive game, even still today!

Anyone else here an old fan of MoM? Romier at least must have given this one a shot back in the day.
 

Mark Evans

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Oct 10, 2001
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Oh I invested many an hour into this game back in the day. It rocks. It was actually a game from the early 90's, not the late 80's, to properly timestamp it :p).

There are some things that are not implemented well (the mirror world for example) but for the most part the game is quite awesome. The ability to make your own wizard is the best part, as I love loading them up with various magicks to good effect.

An update of this with better spells etc would be welcome, but I wouldn't count on it. Lots of MoM2 ideas have been tossed around and to my knowledge they were in fact working on one, but it died an ignoble death like every great MicroProse idea (Agents of Justice, X-Coms that didn't suck) from the day.
 

Craig S

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I enjoyed this one as well back in the day. Hmmm, may have to drag out my old copy. Joe, what OS are you using? I've never had a chance to try any of those early-90s DOS games under Win2K.
 

Joe Szott

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I use Win ME, it runs fine. My bud at work uses it on Win 2K. He had to jump through a few more hoops than me, but his copy runs just fine too. There is an FAQ he found about running DOS games on 2K/XP platforms, I can try to peel an URL off that later if you are interested.

Basically, I think you need to pull up "Properties" on the magic.exe file and click on "Memory". Then you either set everything to Auto or max value (4096?) and it runs just fine. For my bud's 2K machine, he had to make an edit or two to HIMEM or something to get EMS386 working correctly. It was all in that FAQ.

Microprose is definitely FUBAR on this stuff, but I would never say never. MOM sold pretty well from what I read, so if MOO3 can get the nod, who knows?
 

Craig S

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Joe, thanks for the info. I was pretty sure you could tweak the VDM to run most of this stuff. Nice to have it confirmed.
 

JayV

Supporting Actor
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May 30, 2002
Messages
612
Boy, I loved this game back in the day. I might have to check out the link.

Now, if I recall correctly, the ultimate unit is a warship (virtually unlimited ammo) enchanted with: Levitation and Invisibility.

I remember jumping through hoops to get the thing to run, even though I had plenty of memory.

I also remember calling tech support and having a patch mailed to me on a disk (a removable, non-durable magnetic storage medium popular on the Olden Days, when computers ran on coal).

-j
 

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