Review by apenao on 02 Sep 2009 (Rating: 3)
This game hold my imagination for years until I could finally grab a copy and try it. Wich such detailed and colourful graphics, nice map and funny history (the description of the items you have to collect) I expected much more than a pixel-perfect-at-the-exact-moment platform game.
I find much more enjoyable to watch the rzx than to play it. Still, I have too many memories on this little game to score it lower than 3.
I have fond and also almost violently hateful destructive memories of this game from when I was younger.
Dinamic basically made a brutally difficult platform slasher arcade adventure type thing with this game rather loosely based on the Arthurian legends. The game has 4 levels split into platform jumper type screens and long scrolling sections where you have to walk from left to right or right to left, whilst avoiding, or making a vague attempt to kill things as they come at you.
Each level has a special object with clichéd names like the unburning fire...spoiler...it's a fucking light bulb! But not much of a spoiler as it's on the first screen where you start. The others are equally silly, wait til' you see what the elixir of life is!
You have to take the 4 mystical items to the wise men/druids who drop them in their cauldrons to destroy them? Maybe? The Spanish instructions translated into English are practically the scrawlings of a 4 year old, and the original inlay instructions in the English version were pretty patchy as well if I remember rightly.
I remember this game being one of the few Flippy tapes released in the late 80's early 90's that had Speccy on one side and Amstrad on the other.
Anyway I got my general vitriol aside I think on with the game...
The graphics are really nice, really really nice, but I generally wouldn't expect anything less from Dinamic, the majority of their games looked really nice, even if the difficulty made them borderline unplayable. That aside I somehow....somehow actually managed to finish this game when I was younger? How the hell I managed that I'll never know? I can get near the end of the first level these days and that's about it Hahaha!
The game starts off hard, and continues to the point where it's a memory test, this is fair enough with a game that has infinite continues or an energy bar or some kind of leeway. No this is one hit death, a handful of lives and that's it.
The sword is crap, and if you're lucky you can kill the bees and sometimes the owls if they're at the absolute perfect height and distance to do so, a pixel off and you're royally fucked basically, the jumping is a weird anti-grav pyramid type affair, which is terrible with a 16x8 sprite nevermind a 48x16 sprite. Yet somehow they managed to make the collision detection reasonable, it's not perfect, there will be moments where you know it didn't hit you, but there will also be moments where you're like OK my fault.
Of course none of this matters once you're past the second level and just about every screen needs to be almost robotically traversed, the very very slight margin for error, and I mean very very slight is gone by this stage. It's not really fun at all.
Of course if traversing this insanely difficult game is too much for you and you mash the keyboard in anger, there's a 50/50 chance the ending will pop up Hooray that will save you hours and hours of hair ripping frustration.
So basically a nice looking game, but one that's about as much fun to actually play as getting a pint glass smashed in your face, then having said face stamped on by an angry mob for no reason other than you were standing there minding your own business.
I'd like to give it more than a 3, but no it's so hard that most people won't see more than a few screens into it, most won't even make it past the first scrolling section.
In spite of the usual Dinamic quality graphics and the very good artwork of Alfonso Azpiri, we find a dissapointing game. Even though it has an adventurous atmosphere, movement is clumsy and low and the sound is poor. The difficulty level is high and once you finish it (if you can), you won’t fancy playing it again.
As a curious note, Dinamic displayed stunning advertisings for this game on magazines, one of them were an amazing double-page ad, maybe the best one for a Spectrum game I've ever seen.
