Dark Castle has to be the first adventure game I ever had a chance to play. You start out your hero with a rag-tag bag of rocks which may be hurled in any direction. There is also a lot of platform jumping and exploring between rooms as you wander around drinking to find the dark night. Playing it on a black and white Mac, I recall everything looking dark (is that a knight or a torch...
While most action/adventure games rely on quick actions, this game requires a lot more planning than others in the genre.
Dark Castle has to be the first adventure game I ever had a chance to play. You start out your hero with a rag-tag bag of rocks which may be hurled in any direction. There is also a lot of platform jumping and exploring between rooms as you wander around drinking to find the dark night. Playing it on a black and white Mac, I recall everything looking dark (is that a knight or a torch...
While most action/adventure games rely on quick actions, this game requires a lot more planning than others in the genre. This is really due to the ability to toss projectiles in all directions, rather than just the classic left, right, up, down you might find in Contra. Bats and Dungeon
Torturers move quickly and it's unbelievably difficult to hit things with such free motion. The hero's arm swings as though it's somehow a robot arm moving free from the body. You also have a finite number of rocks in hand, which makes life all the more difficult. You can get restock on them, providing you decide to drop into harder levels, known as the "dungeon". There you'll see lots of S&M style torture full of people in chuckles and mean masked fellows toting around their whips. Whenever I found myself in these situations it often mean a scrambling death, with only the occasional escape to the regular "castle".
This game, thinking about it from when I was just four years old, was far ahead of it’s' time. Prince of Persia definitely took some notes from this game. Despite its advanced style of game-play, it's an incredibly difficult walk through the castle. Expect lots of slips and deaths for your poor avatar as you hurl your pebbles with a manic force. I believe this game is better suited for the fan playing it out of nostalgia than a new gamer looking to have a good time. In the same sense as Prince of Persia, you'll laugh about as much as you'll get frustrated with each new stumble. You may even find yourself wishing for something horrible to happen to your character, because as he's such an underdog you'll start thinking he has something coming to him by being in such a place.
I never even had a chance to sneak a peak at the black knight, though upon a few retries I'll see what I can do about that.
