Swords and Sorcery
The 85th most pointless Apple II game ever.

This one was on half the Applesoft-programmed discs I owned, yet took me years to find in ROM form. "Swords and Sorcery" was a text-only simple dungeon crawler. And I do mean simple--the only thing you did to play the game was choose which direction to wander next. When you ran the program, you got this message to start out with:

I think the appearance of the dryad at the beginning was intended to be random, but they got their math wrong...there was only one time I booted up the game and didn't see her there. Letting the dryad help pretty much guaranteed you would win the game, as she told you the correct direction to go through every corner of the realm. However, you could lose her...

YOU FIND GOLD!!!
HOW MUCH WILL YOU TAKE?

You enter in: $250000000

HOW GREEDY!
THE DRYAD IS OFFENDED
SHE LEAVES IN A HUFF

If you didn't have the dryad, the only other way to guess which way to go was to "cast lots," which did nothing for you but decide a direction randomly. An average journey through "Swords and Sorcery" depended entirely upon luck. There was no way to know which direction was wrong, and if you took one incorrect fork in the road, you could get:

Mean, ain't it?

Sometimes you get an oracle instead of a dryad. And unlike the dryad, the oracle IS greedy:

Aw.......heck, I'll splurge. Five.

Despite the slow setting of the text crawl, the action moves fast and extremely randomly. I can't say for certain, but I think the ultimate goal might be to make it inside a dungeon you eventually find if you survive long enough. Not that it matters. I've never beaten the troll they put out on guard duty.

None of this was my fault since the computer chose all my moves automatically at random. I like how they put "game" in quote marks, as if they weren't sure.

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