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Tag: 1986

  • Defender Of The Crown (Cinemaware, 1986)

    Defender Of The Crown (Cinemaware, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Cinemaware
    Released: 11/1986
    Completed: 22/01/2026
    Completion: Finished it by conquering the invaders, but remained unmarried…

    Defender Of The Crown is a game I’ve been eager to play, and I had a reason to boot it up a bit earlier than I intended, so I jumped at the chance. But of course, a problem immediately reared its head.

    Which version to play?

    The game is famous, really, as an Amiga game. If you’re not familiar with the story, video game agent Bob Jacobs saw a prototype Amiga in action, realised that the system provided a huge leap in the potential for video games, and went into business as Cinemaware1, with the explicit intention to create not merely Hollywood-inspired but Hollywood quality video games by (generally) making the graphics really fucking good. The first game to come from this was the Errol Flynn swashbuckler-inspired Defender Of the Crown.

    As an “Amiga first” project, you think it would be easy to choose that version to play (after all, when I played through Pirates, I decided to play the C64 version, as it is Sid Meier’s preferred version.) But the Amiga version is not generally considered the best version to actually play because of its somewhat tortured development: originally intended to be developed by Sculptured Software, Cinemaware attempting a more “Hollywood” process than keeping everything in house, Sculptured ended up so behind on schedule–indeed, seemingly with nothing useful–that the game was handed off to a previous acquaintance, R.J. Mical, to crunch until the game was in a state it could be released.

    (As usual, you can read all about this on The Digital Antiquarian. The guy’s a legend.)

    Something I’ve always wondered about Cinemaware’s early releases is just how arbitrary their release dates were. It particularly stands out with Defender Of The Crown, the Amiga version of which–and I can speak from experience, now–is slight to the point of being unfinished, with apparently weeks of work from the artist, Jim Sachs, going unused. Considering the game would be improved for basically every other release, Jacobs couldn’t have let them spend a little more time on it?

    That all said, no one can exactly agree which version of Defender Of The Crown to play. The Amiga version is the best looking, but the Atari ST version is somewhat close visually; versions on the Mac, PC, NES, even the humble CPC and C64 get design improvements. I was originally of a mind to play the Atari ST version, but I discovered that there’s a Defender Of The Crown II on CD32 that is, apparently, not a sequel but kind of an “ultimate” version of this era’s Defender Of The Crown, so I thought… well, I probably want to play that. And if I’m going to play that, I might as well just play the very original version so one day I can compare and contrast. After all, the whole selling point of the game originally was those graphics, so no point being short-changed there!

    (As my mother would say, what a roundabout road for a shortcut.)

    Now, I have played Defender Of The Crown before, briefly. My main memory of it was not quite getting the game’s mix of Risk-style strategy and simple mini-games, but thinking that when I had time I’d be able to dig into it properly, imagining it was, you know, a proper wargame.

    Playing it this time round? I learned within, hmm, an hour? that while the game initially seems challenging, there’s absolutely nothing going on. No strategic depth. No “play” in the mini-games, each solvable if you can just practice them enough. If you restart the game a few times after learning the mini-games, you will essentially become unstoppable, meaning you can rinse what was once an expensive, system-selling game in an afternoon. The emperor–or I suppose, the crown defender–has no clothes on.

    But dang does his body look good, am I right? As I said, it was the selling point, and playing it, you get it immediately. What you very quickly realise however is that those graphics quickly become a hindrance, because every time one of those big, gorgeous splash screens appear, you have to sit through the Amiga loading them off a floppy disk. Which is, and I always forget this for some reason, not fast. There’s a lot of waiting around so you can see a picture you’ve seen many times before (thank goodness, to be honest, that you can be done with the game so quickly.) 

    That zzz bubble isn’t a sleepy herald; it’s the game making it clear you’ve got some waiting to do.

    But that all said, what actually is the game?

    Set at the time of Norman conquest (but in an extremely “made it up as we went along” anachronistic fashion) Defender Of The Crown starts with Robin Hood letting you know that the king has been assassinated, the crown lost, and the kingdom in chaos, so it’s up to you (yes, you) to sort it out.

    You start by picking a Saxon hero–each of whom have different stats in leadership, jousting and swordplay, although this matters less than you’d think and the stats for one of these characters are even wrong on the selection screen–before you’re dropped onto a map of medieval England where you, two other Saxons and three invading Normans hold one castle and territory each. On each turn you have some options: to grow your army by buying soldiers, knights and catapults; to conquer territory or raid enemy castles; or to hold tournaments where you can joust for land or honour. On each turn, your opponents make the same moves (one thing I’ll say for Defender Of The Crown: it does seem to play completely fair.)

    This is pretty basic, so as well as being dressed up with the graphics, it’s also dressed up with a range of mini-games. Something fascinating about Defender Of The Crown is that it’s, at least in its Amiga incarnation, completely mouse-based. This has a bit of cost in that in none of the games is the feedback that great, which is probably the reason that, for example, the jousting section is so infamous.

    Something I find slightly annoying about Defender Of The Crown: the game is letter-boxed, but it’s not centred on the screen. It annoys me so much that I edited all the images other than the first one. You’re welcome!

    As befits it, it’s definitely got the most pomp and circumstance, and also seems to have the most confusion about it online. There’s a lot of discussion about when you need to hit the button to strike your opponent in a joust, or whatever, but if you just play it a bunch of times in a row you’ll eventually get it: at least on the Amiga, you don’t have to press anything at all, and the trick is knowing that you collide on the “upswing” so you just have to make sure that your lance is aimed at the center of your opponent’s shield at the peak of its bobbing movement. Once you know that you literally can’t lose, and it’s actually one of the quickest ways to win the game, because you can as of the second turn just joust the Normans to immediately take any of their land gains off of them and (probably) make a clear path to their castles all for the cost of some loading time and counting the amount of times you’ve bounced up and down on a horse (it’s seven, you hit them after seven. Spoilers, I guess.)

    My understanding is that Jim Sachs put in a ton of effort to represent realistic castles in a game that’s otherwise basically nonsensical.

    Once you’ve bought some catapults–each piece of land you have pays upkeep that allows you to buy units–you can attack castles, which is similarly simple to work out. You have to knock down the castle wall with a limited amount of ammo; each shot’s height is selected by “pulling” (placing your mouse) to a certain position, and it requires adjustment after each shot to make sure you’re still hitting the wall. It’s a little harder to practice this one–you have to have a castle to attack–but once you work out the first shot, you basically just have to move your mouse a few pixels up when needed and you’ve got more than enough ammo to make a few mistakes.

    This fuckin’ suuucks.

    I wish I could be as smug about the last mini-game, but sadly, I can’t. A castle raid mini-game is triggered either by choosing to raid a castle to steal gold (don’t bother, it’s not worth it) or, occasionally, when you are notified that a comely Saxon lady has been kidnapped by the dastardly Normans and needs rescued (which, amusingly, you can turn down doing.)

    This game is… awful. It’s an attempt at a side-scrolling sword-fighting game, but we’re in late 1986 so it’s not like it’s never been done before, and even being hamstrung by only being able to use the mouse is no excuse. You hold the cursor in front of your hero to move them forward, behind to move them back, and you click the mouse to attack with your rapier, with the idea being you and your companions will fight the guards until you make your way to the lady’s chamber. 

    I can really imagine what Jacobs pitched here: one of those amazing old swashbuckling scenes where the hero, like, swings in on a banner and then fights the enemy on a banquet table, all feints and parries. Instead what you get is this weird shuffling back and forth, hitting the mouse button constantly with absolutely no sense you’re doing… anything. As the only reward for doing this is a wife, it’s really not worth learning (am I right fellas? Take my wife, please? I wouldn’t even go and get her in the first place, etc.)

    Of course, I do say that as a grown man who has seen a boob or two, but I do think if I’d been playing this contemporaneously as a kid I’d have probably gone to the effort, as the real reward is a chaste love scene between your hero and the rescued lady that I’m sure set teenage loins afire (the shadows do have some unintentional, uh, implications.)

    They’re holding hands! Get your mind out of the gutter.

    Thankfully on my winning run I got everything sorted in England so quickly the Saxons didn’t have time to kidnap anyone (hmm, I didn’t get married in Pirates! either. I’ll need to get married in something soon otherwise people will start to talk.)

    The “real” game of Defender Of The Crown is actually the Risk-style strategy game. Now I’m an absolute Risk hater–random, unfair, takes fucking forever–and Defender Of The Crown is only really preferable that you’re not going to fall out with any mates over it because you can only play it single player. The game boils down to just making your campaign army as big as possible and steamrollering opponents. Every turn, send your army home, buy more soldiers (you don’t seem to really need knights) and then smash whoever gets in your way. The game even gives you a wee bit of help in that three times you can ask Robin Hood for help (he bolsters your army a wee bit) and there’s three Norman castles, so it’s pretty obvious when to use them. 

    This is the screen you’ll spend most of your time looking at–especially because the battle screen got cut from the Amiga.

    Because of the game’s design–more land means more money, more money means a bigger army–there’s really no “play” in it. If you start the game knowing what to do–grab land, win tournaments, build your army every turn, attack castles while the Norman campaign armies are in other regions–you win. It really makes this game’s smashing success seem absolutely bizarre.

    But I’ll be kind to Defender Of The Crown and say that, well, most players at the time weren’t going out of their way to min-max the experience. I’m sure most players who got this played obviously losing campaigns to the bitter end; I’m sure many people never worked out jousting and found it exciting and risky. At a certain point I’m sure they found a winning, repeatable path (you really do just get the biggest army) but the game, simple as it is, will have worked until then–a generator of minor player stories as they remembered great victories and losses.

    The funny thing is, it’s so uncinematic. For a company that was literally called Cinemaware, it’s strange that their games are so gamey. You would assume that a Errol Flynn-inspired swashbuckler would have started with a story, a script; a blend of cut-scenes and action scenes in order. In many ways I’d imagine the design would be more like the movie licenses released by Ocean later in the 80s and 90s–half-assed mini games with a cinematic connective tissue, and it would have probably been easier to make, less wasteful, and just as successful.

    Because the hero of Defender Of The Crown is undoubtedly artist Jim Sachs. Games–even in arcades, really–in this era simply didn’t look this good, so I do understand why this was mind-blowing to anyone who brought it home for their unbelievably expensive Amiga 1000 (the 500 wouldn’t show up until 1987.)

    Truly, even though I don’t think Defender Of The Crown is good (at all) Sach’s art is so beautiful and full of life that even now I think “might be nice to play Defender Of The Crown.”

    That’s insane!!!

    Will I ever play it again? Obviously, the thing to do is to play Defender Of The Crown II which, in a stunning plot twist, was developed entirely by Sachs!

    Final Thought: Of course, now I’m thinking about how that compares to the later, more fully featured but “official” Cinemaware versions of Defender Of The Crown, which doesn’t even include the second incarnation of Cinemaware in the 2000s which put out a remaster, a PS2 version, a GBA version… like maybe I should play the Atari ST version after all, just to get the full picture??? Gnngh.

    1. Well, actually as “Master Designer Software” but a bit like Tales Of The Unknown, that would be almost immediately dropped. ↩︎
  • Mappy-Land (Namco, 1986)

    Mappy-Land (Namco, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Tose / Namco
    Released: 26/11/1986
    Completed: 14/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. Save state at the start of every level.

    As we all know, ACAB includes Mappy, but I’m a bit unclear on his status with the police force in Mappy-Land. He’s got his rozzer clobber on on the cover, but when you actually play the game, he’s noticeably not got his policeman’s hat on, something he was still wearing in Mappy’s arcade sequel, Hopping Mappy (which came out in early 1986). So we could suppose, like we’re the Supper Mario Broth account but for Mappy, that at some point in 1986 Mappy did something to get himself thrown off the force. Or maybe being transferred to the pogo cop division was an attempt to get him to quit, because he’s actually a tiny mouse Serpico.

    Or more likely, he just doesn’t wear his police hat while on holiday.  Mappy-Land, I suspect, is Namco–or possibly Tose, who were tasked with developing this–trying to compete with (of course) Super Mario Bros., and looking at the success of Tokyo Disneyland, which had only been open for three years by this point, and going “oh, we have a wee mouse mascot, can we do anything with that?”

    It’s not exactly a 1:1 copy or anything, but I find something very suspicious about Mappy’s redesigned sprite, with those big round ears. There’s also his new girlfriend with a strangely similar name (Mapico, in Japanese “マピ子”, “Mappygirl”). And he’s adventuring across a “land” which features levels that include, pretty transparently, analogues to Adventureland, Westernland… you go up a “main street” and end up in front of a fairytale castle!

    I mean, case-closed. Though a bit like Mappy–where you play a mouse defending a house that’s full of trampolines–the narrative is a bit confused. It would make sense to say Mappy’s on holiday at Mappy-Land (convenient for him!) and then the Meowkies have shown up to create havoc that he has to solve–you know, sort of a Die Hard thing, Mappy our John McClane, he’s forgot his hat instead of his shoes, etc.–but actually the game tells the story of Mappy’s courtship with Mapico, where he first has to collect cheese across Mappy-Land as a gift (women, what are they like, always demanding cheese, etc. etc.) Then he has to collect rings in order to marry Mapico, who apparently feels forty-eight rings is the required amount for an engagement. Then it’s tiny Christmas trees for I assume their first Christmas together (again, forty-eight seems… extravagant, unless they’re planning on running a Christmas tree outlet). Finally, in a twist, you’re collecting baseballs… because many years have passed and you’re actually collecting them for your son!!! That’s right Mappy Jr. appears, and maybe it’s one of those situations where his little league is in danger of being cancelled because they don’t have enough baseballs, and Mappy just loves his son enough to, uh, steal them from an international theme park?

    I mean what is Mappy really doing here? Look, it’s nice to see a policeman whose interaction with his wife and child isn’t solely beating them, but it’s almost like the tables have turned–he’s here ripping the trees out of a theme park and if anything the Meowkies are trying to stop him.

    Anyway, none of this actually slightly matters, because it’s all just background to the game, that no one involved in the making of thought even slightly as hard about as I just have. And, to be honest, they probably didn’t think about the game as hard as I have either. As I said above, this is clearly an attempt to Mappyise Super Mario Bros. so Namco can get in on the action, but it’s strange how they went about it. Even as early as this companies were working you just slam your IP into a left-to-right platformer with some vague design signifiers and call it a day (even Jaleco understood this with JaJaMaru No Daibouken.) Tose and Namco go a different route where they’ve decided to keep as much of Mappy’s DNA as possible. It would have been easy, I think, to just do Super Mario Bros. with more of a focus on trampolines, but instead the core here is very much what Mappy was: collect things while being relentlessly hounded by the Meowkies.

    What’s interesting, however, is what they’ve changed. Doors are completely gone, instead there are stage-specific counter attacks. Mappy gets a short hop, that allows him to (shockingly) jump over enemies if you’ve got extremely good timing. And you can collect items, up to fifteen, which you can drop to distract Meowkies–for example cat toys that they dance around and become harmless for a while, or coins that the head Meowkie, Goro, is specifically attracted to. 

    And then there are levels that break the system completely out of nowhere. The jungle stage instead features you jumping off moving trampolines to catch vines and avoid parrots (which is all a bit Donkey Kong Jr., weirdly) and then the spooky stage has you flying around with a balloon, shooting microwaves at ghosts and collecting keys.

    Things get even more complicated because not every level finishes the same way either. Generally you’re just trying to collect everything and then run off to the right–a weak sop to being inspired by Super Mario Bros.–but many times you have to do things like find a secret entrance on the level to then play another level where you have to collect an item. So on the spooky stage you either have to collect a cross in the church to scare off vampire Goro at the exit, or enter the haunted mansion (full of warp doors!) to find an alternative exit to the level (vampire Goro just hangs out in the middle of the mansion, which feels… sort of unfinished, to be honest.)

    Mappy-Land is… odd. It’s ambitious, adding probably too much to the core Mappy design, but it’s just wrong-headed in trying to do that, because the core can’t support the weight of everything that’s been added. Mappy was always a bit of a clumsy, seat-of-the-pants arcade game for me, but Mappy-Land quickly requires absolute precision and a dedication to a racing line and it doesn’t feel good at all. Maybe it’s just poor programming–sorry Tose–but the game has an infuriating number of collision edge-cases particularly with trampolines, and it makes the jungle levels especially complete bullshit as you hop on a trampoline and sort of vibrate off to your death, or fall onto one and miss it despite visually colliding with the edge. And idiosyncrasies from Mappy here make less sense. If you fall any distance onto a hard surface, you die. Unless you’ve been thrown in the air by a trampoline. So you have absurd situations where you drop down about three pixels and die, but you can fall from the top of the screen onto a hard surface if you’ve bounced off a trampoline? It’s hard to remember this in the heat of the moment, and by the third set of levels, the game intentionally uses it all against you, as you have to learn levels first before you can expect to complete them due to all the dead ends and death drops you can end up caught out by–the items help, but you really need to know how to use them and you use them in order of pickup, so you might have the exact opposite one you need to use at the wrong moment.

    Ultimately, I treated Mappy-Land as a puzzle the way, say, the original Pac-Man is–what’s the exact route you can use and recreate consistently to beat a level? Doing so I wouldn’t have had that bad a time if it wasn’t for the horrible collisions, and some later levels absolutely take the piss anyway–there’s an entire level where you can’t see where the platforms are!

    After playing something like Castlevania, Mappy-Land just looks sort of crappy [“Crappy-Land, more like”–Ed.] I get what they’re going for–big, bright, childish graphics–but it does nothing to change my mind that in this era Namco is being left behind in a big way on Famicom after Xevious: GAMP No Nazo. This is… I mean, it’s ok. But if you want to play Mappy, you should probably play Mappy and enjoy it as a wee high score challenge, because this is less good as a high score challenge and actively not something you want to play through as an adventure.

    Will I ever play it again? I shall not.

    Final Thought: Worth noting that I played the Namco Museum Archives version of this, and, weirdly, despite the fact that the game was never included in the Namcot Collection, it’s the Famicom ROM, not the NES ROM that is included. The NES version includes a continue and stage select and even a “remaining items count” (absolutely necessary–something I forgot to mention is the game doesn’t make it clear when the stage exit is open or not–or even where the stage exit even is sometimes). That’s the version you can play on the Nintendo Switch Online service, but you probably shouldn’t bother either way.

  • Rolling Thunder (Namco, 1986)

    Rolling Thunder (Namco, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Namco
    Released: 09/11/1986
    Completed: 18/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. Save states at each checkpoint… though I also had to use a few more in lulls just for my sanity on levels 8 and 10 for very obvious reasons.

    It’s strange, the games you remember, and the games that you don’t. I suppose it’s about the games that make an impression. Something interesting, I suppose, in my trip through these early(-ish) days of arcade games is not even how few I have any connection to, but how few I even remember seeing in arcades. They’re all from an era “before my time” but only a rarefied few managed to make a consistent enough profit to hang around until it reached my time, and even then, they were probably in some dusty old corner or a banged up cabinet in a chippy, something I probably never played but just stared at the attract mode while I waited for my mum to pick up… hmm, probably a fish supper and a sausage supper? Maybe a special fish if my nana’s over? A couple of pickled onions and a red cola?

    Personally, I rather like this separation from nostalgia. That I can really experience these games with fresh eyes. And I can’t say that Rolling Thunder represents that we’re reaching an era that we’ll start to see more things that I remember, or might have played (looking at my to-play list, it absolutely does not.) But Rolling Thunder definitely had something to it that I remember it really well. This isn’t a vague, childish memory of maybe a Gradius or a Salamander machine in the Magnum–god knows, it could have been an R-Type–this is a “I played this. I played this more than once. I will have been annoyed because I’ll have lost my credit so quickly. But I definitely put good money after bad.”

    Because Rolling Thunder looks. so. cool.

    I don’t know if I can explain it. There’s just a very clean, clear style to the graphics. Although you’re actually playing a member of the “World Crime Police Organization” on a mission to save another agent, there’s a real 60s spy flick feeling from the very first screen–like you’re James Bond, attacking the base at the end of You Only Live Twice. And the action is fast and more importantly stylish. The hero, Albatross, ducks behind cover to shoot enemies, and leaps over rails to switch between low and high ground. It looks cool as hell. It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun to play.

    Historical Aside

    There was a meme going around on Bluesky a while ago that looked like this:

    via Bluesky

    I’m absolutely not going to disagree with it, not having sucked it up and tried to play the Portopia Serial Murder Case (yet). But history is a many faceted thing, and I think if I was going to make the meme from what I’ve learned over my time spent digging into the history via what I’ve played, it would look like this:

    The Tower of Druaga on top of Xevious, and the stalk is Spartan X.

    Now, I haven’t written about Spartan X (better known as Kung-Fu Master) because, well, I’m trying to not keep loading more games onto my to-play list (uh, more than I already do) but it’s an unbelievably important keystone. It takes the rhythm of the designer Takashi Nishiyama’s previous game, Moon Patrol, and translate it into a side-scrolling action game (one that, weirdly, starts with you scrolling right-to-left). The main thing you need to know about it is that pretty much any game you’ve ever played where dudes relentlessly stream in from a side of the screen? That’s from Spartan X. Something like My Hero is an obvious, but the DNA is over Ghosts n’ Goblins, even Super Mario Bros., and, absolutely, Rolling Thunder.

    Rolling Thunder is, actually, very fun! But it absolutely suffers for the nature of arcade games of the era (or any era, I suppose): the requirement that it remove the quarters from your pocket like you’re being held upside down and shaken by a bully. From the very beginning of the game, you have to play it in an exacting fashion, and be prepared to learn the game’s layout, because you can’t survive via reaction–you have to know what’s coming and act before it happens (literally, in many cases.)

    It’s a shame, because the core design is unbelievably solid. You can move and shoot. You can leap between the two levels (as long as there’s a railing–Albatross will only jump if it looks cool) and there are doors enemies come out of and which you can enter, which is a bit like Elevator Action but actually the only doors you want to go in are the ones that have more bullets or the machine gun upgrade, because coming in and out of a door is dangerous and confers no advantage (you can’t duck into a door to avoid taking a hit, it’s too slow, and enemies often just hang out in front of them. In fact, you quickly learn to not even stand above or below doors, because enemies might pop out and leap on you before you can do much of anything.)

    The design is a game of forward momentum, enemy and area control. You want to keep yourself positioned so you don’t get overwhelmed or surprised, take on enemies and move forward. When it works, it’s amazing. You shoot an enemy when they pop out from cover from behind cover yourself. You leap over the cover, spin around, shoot another enemy. You leap up to the higher level, pop a few more enemies, move forward so an enemy on the lower level leaps up too, you shoot them–and so on.

    The problem is that it only rarely feels like play. The game plays a genuinely ridiculous trick on the player from the off–it claims you have eight bars of health, but actually, you generally die in two hits, and often what is one or feels like one (I think headshots kill you in one, and some enemies hit you twice in quick succession.) There are no ways to regain health, and you get a maximum of one checkpoint on the often long levels (and the 5th and 10th levels have no checkpoint!) so you just can’t style it out ever. The game doesn’t have strictly deterministic enemies or enemy layout, but you can plan around the doors and spawns.

    If you do this, the game is… mostly fair for the first five levels, which the game calls “Story 1” (this is a confusing bit of framing. Story 2 feels like a second loop, but it’s actually different. There is a narrative, of sorts, to the game and levels, so is Albatross failing the first time? I’m overthinking it). A player with a patience could probably single credit the first story with some effort as long as some particular gotchas are memorised (the section where you have to jump an obstacle to get to an enemy throwing bombs at you stood out to me, but there’s also the timing of invisible, flying and fire enemies to worry about). Story 2, however, is absolutely fucking bananas.

    Something I’ve failed to mention about the design–once you’re three levels in, the game, almost quietly, introduces the ability to switch between the foreground and background planes on the lower level via doors, and that seems to allow the designer(s) to increase the chaos on screen tremendously. So no longer are you just dealing with enemies in front of you, behind you and above or below, but also in all those locations on a second plane. If you’re on the upper level and there are enemies on the background, well, they can jump up and kill you the same way the enemies in the foreground are.

    This gets pretty bad, but the true depths of Rolling Thunder are in any of the sections where it tries out being an actual platformer. Albatross is stiff in the way Arthur in Ghosts n’ Goblins is, but he’s also about twice the size and only has a short hop laterally compared to his leaps over railings. The 4th level is bad enough, but the 8th introduces a final section where you’re hopping across tiny columns after an enemy gauntlet where you literally have to position yourself correctly to avoid being killed immediately by enemies below you–I have no idea how anyone did this when they had to start from a checkpoint minutes earlier.

    As I played this via Namco Museum I had no rewind to abuse like I did in Ghost n’ Goblins, so finishing this–particularly the ridiculous final level–was an absolute test of my nerve. Rolling Thunder is so determined to strip you of your money that even the level timer is stupidly tight–I finished many levels with less than ten seconds to spare, and that was booking it as much as I could–which made me save state only when absolutely necessary. That I still finished this makes me think that the game is easier than Ghost n’ Goblins, though not by much.

    I think also that I liked it a bit more (even if it was, at times, deeply annoying and frustrating.) As the enemies are more predictable and the layouts simpler, the game is easier to learn, though for many the more reactive play in Ghosts n’ Goblins might be preferable (but at this level of difficulty, I don’t think I agree.)

    Because Rolling Thunder gates its “true” ending behind the last five, brutal levels of Story 2 I’m not certain I can give it an unequivocal thumbs up. I wish that they’d been able to ease off the gas a little bit, maybe let the levels live a little more (like a lot of these arcade games, it introduces ideas briefly, forgets them, moves on.) But I don’t know… it’s still as cool as it ever was.

    Will I ever play it again? I don’t say this for every arcade game, but if I saw this in an arcade, I’d see how much I could show off by how far I could get into this. I suspect only the second or third level, but still, most people don’t make it to the first checkpoint, so I’ll take it.

    Final Thought: Rolling Thunder received a couple of sequels, but the true legacy of the game is almost certainly that it inspired Shinobi quite directly, a series that would go on to far outlive it. Also the game’s Blogas absolutely 100% had to at least slightly inspire Blanka. I mean look at their colours! That’s basically Blanka’s alternative palette!!!

  • Christmas Crackers (Micro User, 1986) – Part 2

    Christmas Crackers (Micro User, 1986) – Part 2

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  • A Computer Christmas (Sierra, 1986)

    A Computer Christmas (Sierra, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Sierra On-Line
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 02/12/2025
    Completion: Well, it’s not really a video game. Watched it until I was pretty sure I’d seen everything.

    Christmas is drawing ever closer, so let’s relax, let’s have those Christmas party vibes, and let’s just watch Sierra’s 1986 “Christmas Card” A Computer Christmas together:

    (For maximum vibes, I suggest running it for real–well, at least with emulation. You can do so, easily, at archive.org!)

    Sierra are a company that I’ve not really dug into here on exp.–I’ve really only played King’s Quest I and II–and I have to admit I’m a bit disappointed that in 2025 I didn’t get to King’s Quest III or Space Quest (especially considering their release dates land right around the time of other games I’ve been writing up, like Pro Wrestling and Alex Kidd in Miracle World.) But I got a bit stuck in an earlier PC game I was playing by another historically important developer and did that thing where you put it down for slightly too long, and I loathe to start something else.

    But I think it’s alright that we’re getting to enjoy A Computer Christmas together, now. For such a beloved company, with quite a lot of history written about it, and even though Sierra’s Christmas “cards” would become a regular occurrence–there are four between 1986 and 1992–I’m surprised by how little information is online about any of them, and especially not this first one. There’s a bit of irony to that, because it seems that essentially all the information that there ever was about Sierra’s Christmas cards was uploaded to the Sierra On-Line BBS–BBSes, of course, filling the market before internet access went mainstream.

    BBSes are not well archived and I can’t exactly ring up (209) 683-4463 to get the details, so really all I’ve got to go on for context is a random Facebook post from an Aaron Micah Wester (dug up for me by ftb1979 on the Gaming Alexandria Discord–thanks!). It’s unsourced, so I’m a bit unsure about calling it the gospel, but he notes these were something “the Williams family were very fond of” while being a “a low-pressure way for developers to experiment with various features they wanted to potentially add into their games.”

    I think it’s fair to assume that this first card was intended specifically for stores (it does, after all, say in the intro it’s intended to promote “the Christmas spirit within your store”) though Wester notes that these cards would go on to serve double duty as a way to draw more users to Sierra’s BBS (a 1988 Sierra Newsletter claims the BBS was getting 6000 calls a week, and had 25,000 active users). But this is a marketing tool first and foremost. Distributed to computer stores on disk (“Egghead Software, The WHEREHOUSE, LECHMERE, FEDCO, B Dalton Software Etc, Electronics Boutique, Babbage’s, Walden Software, or RadioShack” Wester seemingly exhaustively states) the staff were more than likely to leave the demo running running across the festive period, and as at the end of each loop of festive scenes there’s an advert for a Sierra game–here Space Quest and King’s Quest III (the ones I haven’t been able to play yet, boo!)–this was a cheeky, very Sierra way to try and push more product.

    (The card also mentions The Black Cauldron as part of the default text scroll, but doesn’t seem to include a demo for it. I forgot all about Sierra making a game for The Black Cauldron.)

    That A Computer Christmas includes ads does sour the experience of playing it, just a little–the games aren’t festive at all! I mean at least just put a Santa hat on the character sprites or something–but it doesn’t exactly ruin it. And that this card is limited to the PC beeper… well… let me just say I’ve heard a lot of horrible beepy version of Christmas music thanks to the BBC Micro by now, and this is the worst.

    Still, A Computer Christmas is a charming object, one you won’t regret leaving playing while you open your advent calendar or something. Unless you forget to mute it, I guess.

    Festive vibes ranking: HIGH (unless it’s an ad break.)

    Will I ever play it again? Onward and upwards: perhaps next Christmas I’ll try the 1988 version, which, thankfully, includes a Roland MT-32 option.

    Final Thought: Sierra’s computerised Christmas cards as stealth marketing, are, of course, not the only example of such a phenomenon. There are examples such as “Seasons Greetings from Thoughtware” from as early as 1984. Strangely, that’s as hard to find much online about as A Computer Christmas, though it is covered briefly on LGR as part of their longer video on the commercial “Jingle Disk” it turned into. Is this where Sierra got the idea? Probably not, but I suppose you never know.

  • Christmas Crackers (Micro User, 1986) – Part 1

    Christmas Crackers (Micro User, 1986) – Part 1

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  • Jingle Bells (Jack & Jill Software, 1986)

    Jingle Bells (Jack & Jill Software, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Jack Foster, Jill Foster / Jack & Jill Software
    System: BBC Micro
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 01/12/2025
    Completion: Finished it.

    *Ahem* time to drag out the old Noddy Holder impression again. It’s CHRISTMASSS!

    (Hmm, think I’m getting better at it.)

    Well, it’s December, at least, which means I get to spend the entire month playing Christmas games in an attempt to feel festive, but so far has meant I’ve accidentally mostly played BBC Micro shovelware. So I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the next game on my “as chronological and exhaustive as I can be bothered with” list: Jingle Bells, subtitled “A Sleigh Ride With Father Christmas.”

    However, it’s turned out to be a perfect bit of classic BBC Micro nostalgia: a short, very easy text adventure, the kind of thing that I’m sure was booted up for the kids at primary schools when they had some scheduled computer time in the anything-goes period right before the Christmas break.

    Developed by Jack and Jill Software, I can’t find any information about them online other than the developers were, well, Jack and Jill Foster. Brother and sister, husband and wife? Who can say? It’s like they’re the bloody White Stripes of video games! I took a dig into some contemporary issues of Micro User, Acorn User and even Beebug and couldn’t find much of anything, so I’m not completely sure if this was commercially sold. It seems very much like the kind of thing intended for schools–and the pair did develop a couple of other simple, childish adventures. The games all showed up on public domain disks at some point, but the breadcrumb trail stops there. Not that it was so much of a trail. A single crumb, at best.

    As for Jingle Bells: after the obvious–indeed, expected–intro where you get to listen to a bleepy version of Jingle Bells for the hundredth time, the game opens with you at the North Pole because–for unclear reasons–Santa had invited you to “sort out his presents for the year.” And then the dozy old bastard has forgotten where you live. And he also can’t be arsed to work it out, so it’s up to you. (There’s a cute touch where you get to type in where you live at the start: it doesn’t lead to anything but a changed signpost, but I appreciate it.)

    You solve this via some pretty standard kiddy adventuring around the North Pole. The parser is limited to classic VERB OBJECT and you can basically learn all the verbs by typing HELP (although there’s a couple of hidden ones, I don’t even think intentionally.) The game doesn’t understand it if you spell out directions properly (confusingly) so you might go through a period of typing “DOWN” pointlessly when you actually just have to type D (and it’s INV for inventory.)

    Take that you twat, you can sort out your own presents next year if you cannae remember where I live.

    The puzzles are… simple and obvious, with challenge expressed via a couple of classic design cheats: rooms that just automatically kill you so you have to start again (good when you want to rotate the kiddies off–one go each!) and a “gotcha” at the end for anyone who didn’t pick up one particular item (what is this, an Infocom game?) The game also–by virtue of you being on Santa’s sleigh–has a very funny idea of distances. One move and you’re at the South Pole from the North Pole, one other move and suddenly you’re in Australia. I laughed.

    The game doesn’t take into account that you might live in Australia, in which case you absolutely hadn’t taken a wrong turn.

    Maybe it really just is nostalgia for being in primary school talking here, but there’s a Christmassy charm to this. It’s much more playable than A Christmas Adventure, and though it’s not as pretty as Merry Christmas From Melbourne House, it’s more pleasant for being easier to understand (it doesn’t have a snow maze, for starters.) But I’m hard pressed to say much more about it. I had a nice, if very gentle, time with it. Could be worse!

    Festive vibes ranking: HIGH

    Will I ever play it again? I’m good!

    Final Thought: Because there’s so little about this game online, I thought I’d go ahead and provide a Christmas miracle:

    A full map for the game if you want to complete it yourself!It’s probably not really necessary, but if you’ve been looking for an excuse to spend fifteen minutes playing a BBC Micro game–and I mean who hasn’t–you can play Jingle Bells online right now!

  • Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Alex Kidd In Miracle World (Sega, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Sega
    Released: 01/11/1986
    Completed: 1/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. Save states were used (for some obvious reasons.)

    The discourse has long moved on, but a while ago there was a “revelation” that the extremely French CEOs of Sandfall (of Clair Obscur fame) and Lizard Cube (of Sega remake fame) didn’t play Nintendo growing up. This was one of those classic “Americans learn that their experience isn’t universal… and decide that’s stupid and wrong” online spats where everyone got annoyed at each other’s ignorance. Usually it’s like, learning people in another country prepare or enjoy a food in a slightly different way, and it’s always a bummer: that yes, the US believes its culture is the “normal one”, that the US view is dominant and pulls focus so much that even people in other countries might not know their own history, and that it’s never a learning experience for anyone because the urge to dunk on each other rather than celebrate a diverse history is completely overpowering.

    Which was interesting timing for me to play Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It’s really only the second time I’ve played a Master System game to write it up, having only previously played Fantasy Zone because I suddenly hungered to play a version of Fantasy Zone (because Fantasy Zone fuckin’ rules.) It’s interesting timing because the Master System, to me, represents so much about just how different video game culture is across the world, and how different people’s personal experiences of it can be.

    I mean, first of all, it wasn’t even originally the Master System, releasing in Japan in late 1985 as the Sega Mark III, where it failed to compete in really any way with the Famicom. It was then released in North America in 1986 around about the same time the NES went wide, only to get crushed by Nintendo’s stringent licensing agreements with third-party publishers, leaving it with a deeply limited game library.

    In Europe, however, it wasn’t released until 1987(!) and despite Sega managing to completely botch the UK launch, it managed to massively outsell the NES (as it would, quite famously, also do in Brazil under the Tectoy brand.) And then loads of games aimed at these specific markets would be released that wouldn’t see the light of day in Japan or the US!

    So the Master System was, and wasn’t, a success. It did, and didn’t, have loads of games and mindshare. And even on that you need to get a little more specific, because if you’re thinking about Europe things get even more fragmented. You might think “oh, it outsold the NES, so it was the biggest thing in games.” But of course, if you know anything about the era, you know the biggest thing in games there were home computers–at release it was competing with the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, even the Atari ST and the just released Amiga 500. And depending on what country you’re from, which of those was dominant could have been completely different–I’m sure for many of the developers at Sandfall and Lizardcube, the first 8-bit computer to mind is the Amstrad CPC due to its popularity in France1 [“It should be anyway”–CPC Ed.].

    Of course, they might not have an 8-bit computer to mind at all, depending on their age. Because not everyone is tiresomely playing through games before their time (ahem), and the era you came of age in has a huge effect on how you see certain things. To get personal, I don’t think I was conscious of a video game “industry” until around 1991(!)–I am pegging this, roughly, to the point when I started getting issues of Amstrad Action [“Hurrah!”–CPC Ed.]. But I’m also aware that by then my entire experience of, say, the NES was those kiosks in Currys or Dixons that let you play Fester’s Quest for literally ten seconds. I certainly never knew anyone who had one.

    Because I didn’t come of age–or at least, understanding–in the “true” 8-bit generation, the thing about the Master System that stands out to me–even as an Amstrad CPC owner in the twilight of the 8-bit systems–was that it felt like a “poverty” system.

    This might seem cruel, and indeed, incorrect. Even in the 90s the true poverty system was probably the Atari 2600–or the 7800, still being flogged in catalogues–but you have to remember one thing: Sega’s own advertising. The Mega Drive had been released in Europe in 1990, and kids were seeing adverts like this:

    It’s impossible to overstate how unbelievably cool this seemed to me as a child. A suave adult who lived in a truck with a spinning gaming chair??? You’re just going to have to trust me on this that it didn’t sound as bad then as it sounds now, because now that’s a real “hello, human resources???”

    But the point is–why would anyone want a Sega that wasn’t the Mega Drive? That wasn’t as good as the Mega Drive, a system that looked this cool? Poverty! Poverty!!!

    And it’s from this, perhaps, that you might argue Alex Kidd In Miracle World has caught a stray. Because as the in-built game on a poverty system, it just had to be rubbish. A wee game they included for people who couldn’t get any games with the system. I mean it had to be crap–it didn’t even come on its own cartridge!

    First impressions don’t help. Sure, the Master System had really bright graphics compared to the NES’s muddy browns, but the NES was a complete non-entity in the average British schoolchild’s mind. And Alex Kidd opens with probably one of the least exciting first screens ever, where you head down and immediately have to get to grips with Alex’s weird, slippery movement.

    As we know, platform game feel in 1986 wasn’t a solved problem–I’ve said it again and again that the original Super Mario Bros. just feels sort of weird–but Alex Kidd has a really slidey, sloppy feel, a little too fast in a way that looks wrong; you feel yourself sliding a collision box around rather than controlling a character, which isn’t helped by just how strict that collision box is–there are no close shaves here. Get even close to an enemy and die.

    Alex Kidd really only makes sense, at all, once you learn that the developers were literally just trying to do everything different from Super Mario Bros. to compete with it. Shmuplations comes to the rescue again with a translation of sega.jp’s meisaku interview with developer Kotaro Hayashida, where he notes that one of the most famous things about the original Alex Kidd release–that the jump and attack buttons are reversed–was done just to make it different (“when I look back on it, it’s just nonsense” he admits.)

    I mean it’s probably why you go down at first, right? Because Mario goes right, and they’re hardly going to make the game go left (for reasons. Although Alex Kidd does go left on some levels!)

    But look, it’s 2025. Let’s not get lost in our first impressions, let’s not blame a game for going out of its way to not be Super Mario Bros. and for not being cool enough to be on the Mega Drive. I mean it’s cool enough to be included in Sega Ages, getting a great Switch port with new FM soundtrack, right? So, is Alex Kidd in Miracle World any good?

    Ehhh… look, I really tried, but it’s a mess. It’s a game that absolutely feels like a group of people attempting to best Super Mario Bros. who not only didn’t understand that game, but didn’t know how to design one in the first place. Because Alex Kidd in Miracle World really feels like a completely random grab-bag of ideas outside of it featuring a wee guy who jumps around and can destroy blocks. The story is weirdly overcomplicated (The city of… Radaxian? Prince… Egle???”) and the levels don’t have any consistency.  There is some Wonder Boy DNA as you often use vehicles that work like Wonder Boy’s skateboard, and there’s even some Balloon Trip in there too, but suddenly you’ll find yourself in a somewhat non-linear castle that feels more like a Mega Man rather than a left-to-right scrolling level as usual and you’re just expected to get on with it.

    (Something that’s interesting to note, in retrospect, is how the slightly better graphics of something like Alex Kidd In Miracle World have a strange cost to them. In Super Mario Bros. you don’t mind that everything is just blocks, because there’s a consistency to the low-fidelity. In Alex Kidd, when you come to a screen with blocks designed very transparently to make you navigate them a certain way, it just looks sort of unfinished.)

    I suppose, from another perspective, you could instead see Alex Kidd as a game that’s full of surprises and variety, and I don’t think you’d be wrong. It is bright, and cheerful, and there is a charm enough to it that keeps you playing. But it never feels good to play–keeping Alex Kidd from sliding to his doom becomes unbelievably taxing in the latter stages of the game–and there are a bunch of unbelievably annoying gotchas to kill you off all over the place (I haven’t mentioned the rock-paper-sissors bosses, but they do the same thing every time, meaning you either die and redo an entire level at best, or just use save states like a person who doesn’t have time to waste.)

    So, in a weird sort of way, finally playing Alex Kidd, I have to admit that I was wrong in considering it poverty. It’s a full game that people put real effort into, not just a tossed-off pack-in, and if you’d got a Master System you’d have played the shit out of it. There was value there.

    But I’m not wrong now in thinking it isn’t very good.

    Will I ever play it again? Of course, that’s a very personal opinion! Circling back to what I was waffling on about at the start of the article, Alex Kidd is beloved enough in some cultures that it even received a full remake, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, by a Spanish team created explicitly to make it. And in the spirit of celebrating the wonderful diversity of video game cultures, I’ll probably play it. Why not? Alex Kidd isn’t that long, it’d be nice to see it from the idealising eyes of some Spanish lunatics.

    Final Thought: I should probably make it clearer–and god knows that I mean to go through all the essays and clear up some of the categorising details–that because I don’t consider North America to be the most important market, when I “date” a game I just use the earliest date unless there’s a really good reason not to. So for example here with Alex Kidd in Miracle World, the release date is November 1986, the Japanese release date. This feels absolutely necessary when covering games like, say, Star Soldier, which would get released literally three years later in North America rather than Japan, completely removing it from the context required to understand it.

    1. See my article on Zombi, from just last week! ↩︎
  • Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Zombi (Ubisoft, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Ubi Soft (it used to have a space in it…)
    Released: 1986
    Completed: 28/10/2025
    Completion: Everyone escaped!

    Man. We’ve absolutely got to get access to old games sorted. I’ve talked about this previously–most notably when discussing MULE–but I think it’s good to reflect on the fact that Zombi is the first game ever released by one of the most recognisable game publishers in the world, Ubisoft, and in order to play it I had to scrabble around online to find it–and then scrabble around even longer to find it English. And then have to fiddle around with emulators because emulating old home computers is just not as plug-and-play as emulating old consoles is.

    Now, you could argue that Ubisoft might prefer that Zombi not be accessible, because one of the first things that you’ll learn about it is that it’s a completely blatant rip-off of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, to the point where–and I’ll go into more detail on this later–you actively need to know the plot of the film to understand how to progress in the game. Which makes sense, considering the game is called “Zombi”, the literal title of Dario Argento’s cut (released, fact fans, nine months before George Romero’s definitive version in non-English speaking countries.) The game was, at best, on some shaky legal ground (you’d think they’d just have ripped off Night of The Living Dead instead–no copyright issues there). For their part, Ubisoft haven’t tried to paint it out of their history–they do mention it right on their website–but its 2012 Wii U title ZombiU has absolutely no connection to it, and then re-releasing that as Zombi on Steam and elsewhere does go some to making finding their first game absolutely more of a ballache, whether that’s intentional or not.

    (It could be worse, I suppose–most of Ubisoft’s other earliest titles, such as Fer &  Flamme (“Iron & Flame”) weren’t even released in English, leaving the likes of the poor old CRPG Addict absolutely flailing.)

    As Ubisoft’s first game, it would probably serve us to dig into the founding of Ubisoft a bit, because it explains quite a lot. Ubisoft began as the Guillemot’s family business (though the family, in effect, does still control it) selling, uh, the things farmers need to farmers. The five sons of the family, however, had bigger ideas: first selling audio CDs (then a brand new technology), then computers and software, before realising that they could buy hardware and software from the UK–where it was half the price of a French distributor–and resell it on to French consumers undercutting competitors and still making a tidy profit. Before long they were engaging in a roaring trade of computer games, and so obviously decided they had to take the next step in (ahem) vertical integration: making the games themselves.

    Well, not exactly themselves, obviously. It’s not like the brothers got their hands dirty with that. As was usual for the time, they got school children to do it for them. Yannick Cadin–still a high school student, though eighteen so I am being a bit hyperbolic by calling him a child–would code the game despite having (in his own words) “never written a program of more than 100 lines in assembler”, along with graphic designer Patrick Daher and screenwriter Alexandre Bonan under Sylvie Hugonnier1, all of whom appear in Zombi as the main characters (though if Cadin looks like his video game equivalent, he’s a terrifying fellow.)

    What makes this even more interesting is that as a French company, the games that Ubisoft will have been importing will almost certainly have been for the Amstrad CPC, because the system was uniquely popular there, meaning that Ubisoft’s first game would be a CPC exclusive for several years until it’s ported to the usual suspects (Spectrum, C64, Amiga, ST, and PC.)

    As a result, I really wanted to play this through on CPC, as it was, after all, my first computer, and I so rarely have a decent excuse to play anything on it. Zombi on Amstrad CPC looks like this:

    At least, this is the version that everyone seems to have online. Intriguingly, in Retro Gamer Issue 204 there’s a claim that there were “separate versions for 64k and 128k machines (the latter benefited from more detailed graphics)” though it’s completely unsourced and I can’t find any other reference to it or difference in versions online. What’s important either way is that Zombi is an absolutely fascinating example of one of my favourite things about this era of game development, something I’ve talked about many times–the fact that genre has not ossified. There are no expectations.

    Zombi is, sort of, a dungeon crawler, with the dungeon here a shopping mall. It’s also sort of a graphic adventure, because most of the game is about collecting objects and then using them in particular ways. But, there are zombies roaming, and you have to fight them in real time, so it’s sort of an action game–maybe the first survival horror! On top of that, characters have to eat, and sleep, so it’s also sort of a pure survival game. And at the same time, it isn’t even that simple, because you have four characters, and you can use them all separately, switching between them whenever you like!

    It is a lot, an astoundingly broad game design for a teenager at a completely inexperienced company to pull off, and apparently it only took about six months (Cadin, modestly, claims it could have been done a lot faster.) What gets so interesting about it is that there seems to have been absolutely no thought taken to make anything about the way Zombi tries to pull its disparate genre ideas together match anything gamers of 1986 might have already seen.

    Now, to be fair, it is France, it is 1986, and it is the Amstrad CPC. Games such as The Bard’s Tale wouldn’t hit that system for a couple of years, so I really can’t say if the Zombi team had ever seen a first-person dungeon crawler. But if they had, they apparently rejected samey corridors to instead prioritise making each location visually unique over every other consideration, because the interface is completely bonkers.

    Most apparent will be the menu at the bottom of the screen. The Amstrad CPC didn’t have mouse as a default input, so they had to get creative, meaning that you have to scroll back and forth through a list of everything you might want to do (bafflingly, the scroll direction was backward from my input, which I imagine must be how they intended it.) That already makes doing really anything awkward. But navigating is even more insane. Rather than a “dungeon” it’s better to imagine the world of Zombi the same way as a text adventure–each screen you see is a series of rooms with distinct entrances and exits. However, the game doesn’t tell you what exits there are. While you can work some of them out by what you can see, in many cases (for example, things behind you) you have to blindly attempt moving there–and the game on CPC has absolutely no feedback when you do anything wrong. You almost can’t be sure you’ve even done anything in many cases.

    (Well, unless you’re outside, in which case you stumble into a horde of zombies and immediately die. Or if you move backwards off the mall’s balcony without a rope, and fall to your death.)

    You don’t navigate the world by doing anything sensible like moving with the arrow keys, however. Instead on screen a tiny wireframe representation of the space appears, and then you have to select what direction you go (for example, selecting the outer frame to move backwards.) It is completely inelegant in a way that somehow also feels like a stroke of genius, in that it’s arguably far clearer than movement in an early first-person dungeon crawler (think how many times you could move in those wireframes and not actually be sure you moved) but is also unbelievably clunky and frustrating.

    You can see the wireframe representation in the middle here. I’m trying to move right.

    The game has some other quirks–similarly stylistic, similarly related to developer immaturity. The game honestly looks good for the system, with a stark grey and black palette (that again makes me wonder why they didn’t go for Night of the Living Dead) and the clever decision to make anything on screen you can interact with pop with a bright blue colour. The game feels genuinely atmospheric and lonely as you creep around the dead mall, scavenging for what you need, but it does seem that they didn’t quite know how to get the zombies into the game in an exciting way. When you’re in a room with a zombie, they’re just given a portrait on the same line as your heroes portraits, and after a number of seconds you’re officially attacked. What this means is that you have to bash keys rhythmically (boo!) to beat them to death with your hands, taking damage the whole time. You can avoid this if you have a ranged weapon–you can use the gun before you’re attacked, and take part in a simple, almost golf swing-meter like system where you just have to hit the button at the right time to kill them.

    Unfortunately, navigating the menu to get to the gun in time was, for me, like trying to solve a Rubik’s cube behind my back, and so, unfortunately (and I’m not proud of it) I had to give up on the Amstrad CPC version for my own sanity. Thankfully, when the game was ported to Atari ST and Amiga four years later, Alexander Yarmitsky took over porting duties and changed the interface to something more contemporary, so I pulled up the Amiga version to try it there.

    In the ported version2 all the weird controls are replaced with, thankfully, a cursor-based system and direction arrows around the screen so movement makes more sense (well, there’s some double duty taken where “forward” and “back” also mean “up” and “down” but I’ll take it.) You can also see zombies now, who sort of… toddle across the screen so you can headshot them with the cursor before they attack you. It’s maybe too easy, but it’s certainly more engaging.

    I’d love to say that makes the Atari ST or Amiga version definitive, but… it’s in full colour! Not only does this remove all of the atmosphere, it means that you literally can’t tell where any of the interactibles are on the screen, turning what was a perfectly understandable adventure game into a baffling pixel hunt. It is… ruinous, and it really means that if you want to make sense of the game you have to use a walkthrough (and probably a map).

    This is something you’ll want to do after a while, because you’re eventually going to need something to do. If there’s one truly disappointing thing about Zombi–outside of there not being the perfect mama bear option for me, our retro game Goldilocks–it’s that as just a survival game it’s not that interesting. It’s neat to wander the level, kill the zombies, and have to eat and sleep, but there’s no incident. I think as a kid it could have been something I loved to noodle around in–there’s a lot of space for your imagination–but the CPC’s controls just kill any thought that I would have.

    When you actually intend to beat the game, it’s weirdly trivial (when it’s not tedious) as long as you can actually spot where the things you need are and know the plot of the movie. First you have to block all the entrances to the mall; then you have to kill all the zombies and put them in cold storage so they don’t reanimate (I’m not sure if you have to turn the electricity on in the basement to do this, but I did.) Once you’ve done that, the mall is immediately attacked by Hells Angels, and you just need to steal petrol from their truck for your helicopter, get in and escape. 

    If it wasn’t for having to trawl the whole map for every zombie–don’t forget you can move backwards, because I missed one and had to cover the map about three times–and then lug them down to the cold storage, only being able to carry about three at a time, this would be over in about ten minutes. But I don’t even think they made you kill and store all the zombies to pad the game out–I think it’s just because, well, that’s what happens in Dawn of the Dead, isn’t it?

    I’m not quite entirely sure how to explain it, but a raw enthusiasm for the source material shines through via touches like that, and even if functionally they’re not good game design, something about Zombi is charming. I don’t know if I recommend it as such, but I think if there was a monochrome “can see objects” version with the updated controls I actually think I would.

    At the very least, more people should know about it. I guess I’ve done my bit!

    Will I ever play it again? Come on Ubisoft, release a 40th anniversary ultimate version with the proper colours. I dare you. 

    Final Thought: If you want to play through this, the best help is (surprisingly) Amiga Action’s walkthrough, even though as an Amiga Power boy I’d never admit it. They do screw up the map a bit–they don’t distinguish between inside and outside on the first level so it’s confusing, so you might want to use it in conjunction with this other map which is, sadly, unsourced (but I assume from one of the many French CPC mags.) Or just draw around the mall interior with a pen or something. But as usual, I recommend not just jumping straight to the walkthrough–it’s more fun to noodle around first, even just the big beats I gave you above should be enough to get you through the game really if you’re willing to map it yourself.

    (Actually, that’s a lie. Even with the map and solution I usually couldn’t find where to click on most of the screens to use buttons and things without basically clicking everywhere. Sigh.)

    1. This is a bit of an assumption. Most sites explicitly state Hugonnier was director of marketing/PR, but Cadin refers to a “certain Sylvie” who “explain[d] that she was approached to set up a video game publishing house and, as she ha[d] some experience in this field, she [was to be] the director of this new company.” Surely the same person. ↩︎
    2. Well, in the ported version for Atari ST, Amiga and the ZX Spectrum. Cadin ported the PC version and doggedly stuck to his original control scheme and the Commodore 64 porting team followed his lead. Unfortunate. ↩︎

  • Castlevania (Konami, 1986)

    Castlevania (Konami, 1986)

    Developed/Published by: Konami
    Released: 26/09/1986
    Completed: 09/09/2025
    Completion: Finished it. I did do a save state before Dracula though, to avoid repeating an exploit.

    Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!

    I’ve been in the trenches of 1986 for such a long time by this point that I feel like, sometimes, I lose a bit of perspective, so as I reach Castlevania, released within two months of Metroid (and also on the Famicom Disk System) it’s good to take a minute to reflect again on the strength of the release calendar for the Famicom. It’s not just Nintendo’s groundbreaking output, for example, it’s also incredible arcade hits such as Gradius and Ghosts n’ Goblins coming home in solid ports.

    And with the influence of The Legend of Zelda and especially Metroid going to take more time to disseminate, I think it’s important to consider Castlevania within the post-Super Mario Bros. milieu where the arcade still reigns supreme as the state of the art. You went to the arcade and wanted to play games that good at home, and developers wanted to sell people on their “arcade quality” experiences, even if there was no arcade title attached.

    I’m assuming you can see where I’m going with this, but the interesting thing about Castlevania is as much as it is tied to the Metroidvania genre–and would begin dipping its toes into that within a month–the first game is no more attempting to create an expansive, “home” experience than Konami’s earlier port of Gradius is. If you’re being generous, you could claim that Castlevania is Konami’s attempt to make the style that’s already worked so well for them in the scrolling shooter for the arcade–short, hard games with impactful, unique levels and standout bosses–translate to the side-scrolling action game/platformer for the home. If you’re not being so generous, you could say this is Konami’s rip-off of Ghosts n’ Goblins.

    That one probably works better.

    I don’t think it’s unfair, really! Ghosts n’ Goblins is a good port, but it looks weedy. It’s hard not to imagine Konami, given the extra power of the Famicom Disk System, thinking that they could simply do something better, and the hallmarks are all there. A spooky setting. A stiff, inflexible hero who struggles with platforming. Limited power increases and different weapons to collect, which all have important situational uses. When you look at the original Japanese titles it looks even more sus. Ghosts n’ Goblins is “Demon World Village” Castlevania is “Demon Castle Dracula” (to not get too into the weeds on this, Demon isn’t spelled exactly the same, but they do both use the kanji 魔.) And if you don’t consider that case closed? Well, there’s also the difficulty.

    The bloody difficulty.

    Unlike Ghosts n’ Goblins, Castlevania absolutely lulled me into a false sense of security at the start. There’s no Red Arremer here as a harsh wakeup call, and the first boss, a bat (which does have a bit of the Red Arremer about them) is easily dealt with if you have the axe subweapon, which is literally in a candle right before them.

    Once you’re in the second level, however, all bets are off, as you’re suddenly facing the dreaded medusa heads paired with the fact that you lose a life if you fall into a pit (easy to do as you get stunned and knocked back on getting hit) and it only gets worse from there. There are some absolutely hair pulling moments.

    Really, Castlevania feels like a game that shouldn’t work, because hero Simon Belmont is so slow and it’s such a challenge to react to anything. But the game has a weird sort of pleasure in its heavy, exacting feel. Simon slowly moves forward and really feels like he’s absolutely thumping the enemies in front of him, and a bit like a shooter it’s all about finding your racing line through the game, collecting the right subweapon at the right time and learning where the meat Dracula has stuffed in his walls are for safety (good poll if they ever add polls to Bluesky: would you eat Dracula’s wall meat? Yes / No / If I was really hungry, I guess). 

    There’s also an intriguingly vestigial sort of hidden, sort of experience system–if you use subweapons a lot enemies eventually drop upgrades that let you have up to three on screen–but it’s foiled by the fact you want to switch subweapons a lot and you lose the upgrades when you do (why!!!) but if you can master it you can absolutely cheese some of the bosses–I mean, it’s how I saw the end of this…

    I even like that Dracula’s Castle sort of makes sense as a layout. I mean, it doesn’t really, but I like that they made the drop that happens after you fight the mummies sort of the correct length, and then you might be surprised that the “clock tower” section of this game is so short, but it’s tall and thin… like a clock tower!

    The brutal difficulty of Castlevania makes some sense on the Famicom Disk System because you could save at any stage(!) and when the game was re-released on cartridge in Japan it got an easy mode–although it removes knockback on hit, which just seems weird (if you’re interested, it’s included in the Rumbleminz SNES port, the method by which I played this.)

    Ultimately, if Konami set out to best Ghosts n’ Goblins… well… they did!

    Will I ever play it again? I will play its many, many remakes and… side-makes?

    Final Thought: Yeah, so, the weird thing about Castlevania is that it came out on Famicom Disk System just a month before it came out on MSX2 (a version generally known as Vampire Killer, as it was titled that in Europe.) Although Vampire Killer shares graphics, enemies, and is still a trudge through Dracula’s castle, individual level design differs completely, as levels are non-linear and you’re expected to search them for a wider range of items, upgrades and keys to unlock doors to the next level!

    Annoyingly, I can’t find good information on why the games are so different, outside of pretty generic speculation (“now, PC games drive like this [mimes driving like a huge nerd] and Famicom games drive like this…”) so it’s really hard to say what concept “came first.” if the MSX version was the original idea, then my Ghosts n’ Goblins hypothesis–my Ghosts n’ Goblothesis–is incorrect. 

    I do feel like it would be a bit unusual if both games weren’t directed by the same man, elusive series creator Hitoshi Akamatsu, and Castlevania II would go on to be much more of an adventure, which would be a mark against my goblothesis, but weirdly according to an amazing shmuplations translation, Akamatsu was inspired by The Maze of Galious, which is itself a post-Vampire Killer design, so who knows. I guess I can get closer to finding out if I play it, so let’s see how long I can avoid that for.

    Update 2025/10/01: Actual game historian Kate Willaert got in touch over on Bluesky with some critical context:

    “My understanding, from delving into this era of Konami, is that the two versions of Castlevania were developed in parallel, with the teams possibly sharing ideas with each other, and so neither game is “first” nor the “real” one. See also MSX vs. FC Goonies, which laid the groundwork for this game … While it’s possible that Ghosts N Goblins inspired some surface elements, my personal theory is that the foundation of Castlevania can be found in the computer game Aztec, which was fairly popular among a particular generation of Japanese game devs.”