Swords and Serpents

Swords and Serpents is a fantasy role-playing video game developed by Interplay Productions for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In this game, the player controls a party of four adventurers on a dungeon-crawling quest to destroy a terrible serpent. Along the way, the party encounters an onslaught of fantasy monsters and collects gold and treasure while gaining experience points needed to raise their individual attributes. Swords and Serpents focuses mainly on gameplay and contains very little plot development.

Swords and Serpents
Developer(s)Interplay Productions
Publisher(s)Acclaim Entertainment
Designer(s)Paul O'Connor
Bruce Schlickbernd
Composer(s)George Sanger
Platform(s)Nintendo Entertainment System
Release
  • NA: August 1990
  • EU: 28 November 1991
Genre(s)Role-playing video game
Mode(s)Single-player, multiplayer

The game was originally designed by Paul O'Connor (lead designer for Dragon Wars) but he only worked on the game for two weeks before leaving the project. Bruce Schlickbernd was assigned to revise the game design, but didn't feel it was appropriate to be listed as the sole designer. Thus, there is no game designer listed within the documentation for the game.

Boris Vallejo crafted the box art. This game has no connection to the Mattel Intellivision game of the same title.

Gameplay
Split-screen formatting allows the player to view a map and the party's health meters while exploring the dungeon.

Swords and Serpents can be played by one, two, or four players (by use of the NES Satellite or other 4-player adapter[1]). Control of the characters is divided evenly among the number of players, but one player must be chosen as the party leader to control navigation through the game. Upon starting the game, the player creates a party of four adventurers, choosing one of three available classes for each character: warrior, thief or magician. Character statistics can be randomly generated, or the player can choose a prefabricated party which includes characters of each class plus another magician. Continuing the game requires the player to record and later input five passwords: one password for each character, and a fifth password for overall game progress.

Gameplay is simple. The player navigates through a crude representation of a dungeon, presented in split-screen format which allows the player to simultaneously view the dungeon from a first-person perspective and a simple map of the current level showing the party's location. Encounters with monsters occur randomly (and occasionally in specific locations), during which the map is replaced by gauges representing the creatures' health. During fights the player controls the characters' actions to attack, cast magic spells, or flee. The entire game takes place in an underground dungeon composed of 16 levels, with the serpent at the end.

Reception
Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
GameRankings80.00% (1 review)[2]
Review score
PublicationScore
AllGame[3]
gollark: I roughly agree with that. Though competence is hard to measure, so people tend to fall back to bad metrics for it.
gollark: Yes, since if you try and talk about nuance or tradeoffs that's interpreted as "you do not agree and therefore must be part of the outgroup". Sometimes.
gollark: There are arguments both ways. On the one hand you're trying to make sure that the people you have match the population, but on the other you're going about hiring people based on factors other than how well they can do the job (though that was... probably going to happen anyway, considering), and people may worry that they got in only because of being some race/gender.
gollark: Also, more than that, political polarization generally.
gollark: Sadly, yes, first-past-the-post is awful that way.

References
  1. Acclaim, ed. (1990). Swords and Serpents Game Pak Instructions. Acclaim. p. 6.
  2. "Swords and Serpents for NES - GameRankings". Retrieved 2 September 2013.
  3. "Swords and Serpents - Overview - allgame". Retrieved 2 September 2013.
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