What is Dragonsphere? Its a medieval fantasy point-and-click adventure. It has an evil sorcerer. His name is Sanwe. He’s from another dimension. It has a wizard. His name is Ner-Tom. It has three stones of power. But why Dragonsphere? Is it a game with spheres? And with dragons? Yes, and yes, well, one dragon. It’s a magical spell cast on the evil sorcerer to imprison him. He’s the dragon and he’s contained in a magical barrier, a sphere. According to the intro text of the game, Sanwe is a threat from days gone by, and there’s no reason to fear him. Yeah, right…

MicroProse

Mobygames says that Dragonsphere is the third adventure game from MicroProse. The first being Rex Nebular and the second Return of the Phantom, both of which are already in my collection. And both of which I’ve not yet played. As is the same with Dragonsphere. When I bought Return of the Phantom in July last year, I wondered if it would take me another two years to get my hands on a copy of Dragonsphere. Well, I guess not. It took me just a year. And without actively looking for it, and without resorting to Ebay. Well done!
Later adventure games from MicroProse are Bloodnet and Nightlong, although the first is classified as an adventure with rpg elements. Interestingly, both these later releases saw releases on the Commodore Amiga, which by then had already faded from the main public’s interest.

Memory requirements

Browsing through the manual gets you eventually to the memory requirements. Which is always fun with these later DOS games. It states that the games takes advantage of all the memory resources of your system (EMS, XMS, UMB, and so forth). Remember those? Dragonsphere requires at least 575,000 bytes free. conventional memory. When in a pinch, you can also cut 20k off by running the game with “No sound”.
The CD version, which I have here, requires 753,644 bytes of EMS memory to deliver digitized speech. So you’d need a system with at least 2 megabytes of RAM. If you have more, the game will run faster and better. Sample CONFIG.SYS syntax is also provided for different configurations. That really takes me back.

Packaging

One of the reasons I wanted to add this game to my collection is that it has nice that I like. It’s a thin thick carton gatefold like affair with the CD-ROM on the one side and the manual fixed on the inside of the back. Its very much like the way audio books on CD were packaged. I have one such other games: Discworld and I remember seeing that in my local library back in the nineties. I guess it’s the ideal packaging for such use. And I find it ideal also, because it takes up almost no space while offering a nice quality feel at the same time. I wish other games would be like this. Especially those late nineties games which often have very big boxes with only a CD and a thin manual inside. That would save so much space.
The only downside is that the manual is only black and white. And while Discworld has that also, that one doesn’t feature screenshots but only drawings that come over very nicely in black and white. Black and white screenshots are so ugly!