Tangled Tales: The Misadventures of a Wizard's Apprentice

Plot

In Tangled Tales: The Misadventures of a Wizard’s Apprentice, the player is a young apprentice wizard without friends, spells, or money, about to go out and learn the wizard trade. The player makes new friends from various fictional universes, such as a werewolf, a surfer, a snowman, Goldilocks (a thief), and Isaac Newton, each of which can help the player reach wizard status. The game consists of three separate scenarios, each must be completed before going on to the next, but the player can always go back to an old area in case something is missed.

Gameplay

The screen is divided into several areas: One displays the player's view of the world, one shows a bird's-eye view of the player's position, one contains the function icons, and one is a small text-information area. The player can select a function to move, talk, cast a spell, get or drop an item, and so on.

Reception

The game was reviewed in 1991 in Dragon #166 by Patricia and Steve Sheets in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 4 out of 5 stars. Compute! stated that Tangled Tales was a good introductory game for those new to adventures. Scorpia of Computer Gaming World gave the game a mixed review, saying, "it appears to be an attempt to integrate adventure game elements with role-playing elements, and this attempt is not entirely successful." The review also noted puzzles were solved primarily by having the right person in the party, "which reduces the main character to spectator at many critical points in the game."

Tangled Tales was perhaps more noted for its controversial copy protection scheme, which involved saving games to the original disk on Track 0. Reviewers complained that it would cause the heads on the Apple Disk II and Commodore 1541 to bang against the drive stop and throw them out of alignment and that it was advisable to back the original game disks as quickly as possible and avoid using them.