Classic genre video games #4 - Golden Axe 2

Ah, Golden Axe 2 - one of the finest hack n' slash games ever made. Button-mashing at its finest. Not big, not clever, but plenty of fun. Especially when played with a friend that was as enthusiastic for battling hordes of enemies with big choppers (ahem) as you were.

This was how many of my Saturday afternoons as a youngster were spent: embarking on a perilous quest with my friend to defeat the EVIL DARK GUILD and save the land. Which had been saved in the first game, but apparently needed saving again.

There was no fighting over who got to play as which character; our choices were well defined. I always played as the male barbarian Ax Battler (who, despite his name, wielded a sword - go figure) while my friend always plumped for the dwarf Gilius Thunderhead (who, according to the box art, is possibly the buffest dwarf ever). We rarely played as Tyris Flare, though now and again one of us would pick her "because she has the best magic." The other player would nod sagely, knowing full well that the real reason the other had chosen her was because she was a hot amazonian. Come on, she is. Look at the box. In fact, is it just me or is the way she's riding that dragon rather...actually, let's just move on.

The gameplay was basic and had barely changed from the first game: mash buttons to kill enemies, repeat until no enemies left. Progress onwards, repeat process. Goggle at Tyris Flare. Mash buttons...

But for two young teenagers who had yet to discover girls (who needed a girl when you had Tyris Flare?), it was remarkably good fun. Gameplay was punctuated with squeals of geeky delight such as "Omg dude, a purple lizardman" and "Omg, look at how smashed up that portcullis is...OMG HUGE MONSTER. Quick, wind magic!" And so on.

Golden Axe 2 was far from the best game to appear on the Sega Megadrive, and certainly had plenty of flaws, such as the crap sound effects (the enemies' death groan sounded like a kid puking) and the lack of variety in the enemies (changing the colour of the sprite doesn't really count...). Yet there was something very appealing about making a ripped barbarian kick countless enemies' asses with a huge sword.

Good times. :)

Classic genre video games #3 - Barbarian II

Another golden oldie from my C64 days, Barbarian II: The Dungeons of Drax was the sequel to the surprise success that was Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior (a game that amusingly caused outrage over its cover artwork, which featured a scantily-clad tabloid model by the name of Maria Whittaker - a cover that by today's standards is utterly tame).

Barbarian II, like most games at the time, had a highly-complex storyline: the player, as either a buff barbarian or a lithe princess, had to trek through three levels (a desert region, a cave network, and a dungeon), battling various critters along the way, before confronting the evil wizard Drax in his lair and giving his sorry ass a good kicking.

When you're a six-year-old kid though, you don't much care for storylines - you're far more interested in killing things. And in Barbarian II, you got to do that quite a lot. Every level had different enemies to face, ranging from mere critters to larger, tougher opponents. Some of these enemies were fairly conventional, while others were...rather odd. The first level, for example, had hulking neanderthals wielding clubs, as well as apes and dragon-like creatures. But it also had EVIL CHICKENS (Terry Goodkind, eat your heart out) and these bizarre things that looked like giant peas on legs, which attacked you with what appeared to be a large, yellow penis. Hmm.

On a more serious note, the animation of the barbarian sprite was actually pretty advanced for the time, and you could pull of various moves - including a dramatic spinning axe slash, which if you timed just right would decapitate your enemy, and their head would fly through the air and then bounce off the screen. Naturally, to a six-year-old boy, this was the COOLEST THING EVER. Interestingly, the Kung-Fu masters on the last level were so huge that your axe only hit them in the chest rather than the head, so their heart would fly out and flop around instead. Almost as cool was the fact that enemies could decapitate you as well - the dragon-creatures had a nasty tendency to bite off your head and swallow it.

A Kung-Fu master, shortly before having his heart CHOPPED OUT

Sadly I never managed to finish the game (this was an age where computer games were a couple of quid, so you could buy a new one every week, leading to short attention spans) but nonetheless the experience of battling mutant apes and evil chickens - and squealing when I managed to pull off a successful decapitation - are still very clear in my mind...

Classic genre video games #2 - Gargoyles Quest

There's no doubt that video games have come a long way in the last ten years - in many ways, games these days are more of an experience than a game. In terms of gameplay and visuals, modern games are generally superior to their older counterparts. Yet there's one trump card that older games often still retain: the fact that many of them are very hard to finish. This is an element that I've found lacking in many modern games - the fact that they're over too quickly and too easily.

Video games used to be hard - some of them really hard.

Gargoyles Quest on the original Nintendo Gameboy was one such game. In fact, it was so tough that one magazine actually begged readers to send in a walkthrough, as none of the magazine staff could finish the game (this was in the days before the interwebs, where if you got stuck on a computer game you were pretty much screwed).

Me being a hardcore little gamer, I finished Gargoyles Quest without any help.

Like most RPGs from this time period, Gargoyles Quest had a delightfully clichéd storyline:

A long time ago, the Ghoul Realm barely escaped great peril. A large army of Destroyers came from a neighboring universe. The creatures of the Ghoul Realm were no match for the powerful Destroyers. Just when everyone had given up hope, a great fire swept over the Realm, wiping out the Destroyers' army.

Several hundred years have passed and the Realm is threatened once again...

The game itself mixed side-scrolling 'platform' action (used for dungeons) with a top-down 'world-map' view (which was employed as you travelled from location to location). The RPG elements were pretty thin on the ground, yet they did add a little bit of depth to what otherwise would have been a rather straightforward platformer. As mentioned, the game was notable for its difficulty level (if you died during any of the dungeon sections, you'd often have to start the level over). Difficulty aside, the game also boasted a decent, atmospheric soundtrack and suitably dark visuals.

One of the best elements - as was often the case with such games - were the 'bosses' that had to be defeated at the end of each major dungeon section, mainly because of their obscure names. For example, the demonic fish that guarded the end of the first level (see left) is called 'Zundo Druer' (wtf?) while the similarly demonic snail (yep, a snail) that lurks in the 'Desert of Destitution' (cheesy name 4tw!) is called 'Zakku Druzer'. Obscure.

Anyway, great fun. Great hard fun.

Classic genre video games #1 - Rastan

I was massively into video games when I was younger, particularly games in which you got to shoot aliens or kill things with big swords. I therefore thought it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane and look at some of the games I played in my younger days...I like nothing more than the smell of nostalgia in the morning.

First up, Rastan.

Rastan is far from the best game I've ever played, but I retain a large degree of affection for it because it is the first genre video game I can recall playing.

My parents had (still have, actually) a cottage down in Boscastle, Cornwall, and whenever we went down to stay there, we'd always go along to one of the local pubs called The Cobweb. When I was last down in November 2009, I went to The Cobweb for the first time in probably fifteen years and was pleased to find a proper folky pub, populated by friendly locals that looked like Gandalf (well, the blokes did at least - fortunately the women didn't). I can't remember what the place was like back when I was younger, but the one thing I do recall was that the pub had an old coin-operated arcade game called Rastan.

Now, as I've mentioned, Rastan wasn't exactly a great game. It wasn't that innovative (collect weapons, kill enemies and jump over water/lava) and it didn't have particularly stunning visuals (though they were pretty decent for the time). But to me - an excited 5-year-old - this game where you played some muscle-bound warrior with a sword and got to swing it at all kinds of nasty critters was the COOLEST THING EVER. Every time we went to Cornwall (which wasn't often) I'd get excited at the prospect of playing Rastan.

The coin-op arcade version of Rastan, where Conan Rastan faces off against two giant bogies (or boogers, if you're in the US)

I wasn't particularly good at it - in fact I sucked at the game - but that didn't seem to matter. It was all about the experience, the excitement of doing something you didn't normally get the chance to do (playing video games I mean, not swinging a big sword at monsters, though I guess the latter was technically true as well. I'd swung a plastic sword at my brother a few times, but he was a pretty poor substitute monster). I seem to recall squealing with excitement when I finally got past the first act of the first level and onto the second, which took place inside some sort of castle and involved pesky swinging ropes over a pool of lava. Never managed to get far beyond that point, but I'd always return undaunted, eager for another go, hopping from foot to foot impatiently while my dad - his eagerness not quite matching mine, it much be said - shoved another pound into the slot.

All good things come to an end though, and I remember the serious disappointment of running into The Cobweb on another infrequent visit, only to find a shitty Robocop arcade game in place of Rastan. It genuinely felt at the time like the end of an era.

Except it wasn't the end. As fate would have it, I randomly found a copy of Rastan for the legendary Commodore 64 a few years later (in Toys R Us, of all places), which I snapped up with some delight. Of course, that system's specs were far lower than the arcade machine, so the visuals and sound were grossly inferior, but the gameplay was more or less the same. Cue many happy hours of sword-swinging, despite the fact that Rastan looked like a walking turd. Being a little older and more experienced in the holy art of video gaming, I managed to get further in the game than ever before.

And then it all went pear-shaped.

Ultimately, two factors wrecked my Rastan experience. Firstly, the Commodore 64 version was pretty buggy - it would crash quite frequently, and since there was of course no save game option, if it crashed you were screwed. But secondly, and more importantly, there was a total FAIL of a glitch in the second level of the game. At one stage fairly early on in the level there was another rope-swinging section. Unbelievably, the developers put one of the ropes too far away from another, meaning it was physically impossible to make the jump - clearly no one had bothered playing the C64 version all the way through to check it worked alright. Doh.

The C64 version of Rastan - spot the difference? God, looking back now it really does look utterly shit.

This glitch brought a rather disappointing end to my Rastan experience, yet I still remember the game with a lot of fondness because I can recall how it excited me so much when I was a kid, and helped nurture both my love of video games and of fantasy.

For a look at the arcade version of Rastan in action, check out this short video.