Barbarian II (Psygnosis - Commodore Amiga)

Remember what I said yesterday? That Barbarian would be great if you could just run in there, hacking, chopping and leaping with a move of the joystick and the press of a fire button?

Scratch that. I was wrong.

You may well recall (you should, like I said it was only yesterday) that I quite enjoyed Hegor's adventures in Barbarian. The game wasn't without flaws, but it was quite interesting and had a nice graphic style, and I had a pretty good time with it. Seeing as I also own the sequel, I thought I'd dash the pair of them off, one after the other. And I was quite looking forward to seeing what improvements had been made in the sequel.

There are no improvements.


Yep, you keep looking the other way... I'll just nip down here...

In fact, the game seems to be a backward step in almost every way. The first problem lies with the control method. Now, I bemoaned the odd mouse-and-menu control method of the original, and wondered how much better it would be with joystick controls. Barbarian II uses joystick controls, but plays pretty horribly. It turns out that there are too many actions to comfortably fit within the constraints of the joystick and one fire button, making the game a bit confusing to play.

Also, many of the creatures attack you from positions that make them very difficult to hit, resulting in massive frustration as you take hit after hit. You'll also find yourself trying to escape, maybe up a flight of stairs, but being hit by some spitting creature and knocked, helplessly, all the way back to where it can get you more easily. Grrrrrrr!


Bit nippy in here. You'd think they'd turn the heating on.

Another problem lies with the game design. In an attempt to give the game added depth, it's been switched a little from the flick-screen original... it does stay flick-screen, but when wandering through the forests, you now have branching paths, being able to move up or down to take different routes. But this makes the game dull, like a slow-paced version of Robin of the Wood.

And finally, the game looks worse than the original. The background graphics of the forest are lovely, but the characters all look muddy and indistinct. And Hegor no longer looks like a barbarian... he looks more like a useless Viking, the one that the whole village laughs at.

I'm not sure what happened here... the ingredients were there from the original game to make something really good. It certainly hasn't panned out that way, though, and I don't expect to play this one again.

Barbarian (Psygnosis - Commodore Amiga)

The name "Barbarian" has quite a history in gaming... probably because there were two of them. I think that everyone remembers the Palace Software version... with its epic one-on-one sword combat and lopping-off-of-head coup-de-grace, it was the beat 'em up of choice for those that didn't like wearing coloured pyjamas. Then, of course, there was the sequel, which famously discarded the one-on-one aspect in favour of an adventure-type game, and Wolf from Gladiators. And Maria Whittaker.

If you had a 16-bit machine, though, there was another (although "lesser" machines did receive ports at a later date). Psygnosis had their own Barbarian game. You'd think that would be a bit confusing for the masses... surely it wouldn't have taken much effort to come up with an original name. Still, I guess they figured that if the name fit the game, that was all that mattered. And it's the Psygnosis game I'm looking at on the Amiga.


Eh? Wassat?

Psygnosis' Barbarian is an adventure-type game. You take control of Hegor the Barbarian, who must travel through a hostile land of dungeons and traps in order to confront and defeat his evil brother, Necron the Sorceror. And not only are there traps to be sprung or overcome, but also (naturally) hordes of Necron's minions to be dispatched.

Sounds straightforward, and all too easy for someone as mighty as Hegor the Barbarian. Unfortunately, he's been hamstrung by a strange and unwieldy control system. It would have been great if Hegor could have just run in there, muscles glistening, hacking, chopping and leaping with the movement of the joystick and the press of the fire button. Instead, he's controlled via a mouse-driven menu.


Hmmm. This looks too straightforward. I wouldn't trust that rock as far as I could throw it...

This seems really odd, and it feels a bit weird, too. The weirdest part is that Hegor will keep walking unless you tell him to do something different, no matter what. That wall that's blocking his way? He's under the impression that if he walks into it enough times, it'll get out of his way.

It's also quite difficult, especially with a twenty-odd year old mouse that's not as responsive as it once was. That said, the icons are laid out in such a way that you never normally want one that is too far away from the last one you used. And to be fair, you can string together a quite impressive and fluid sequence of moves, once you get used to it.


If he had a heart, he'd just let me have that bow up there...

And once you know what you need to do... there's some trial and error to be found in Barbarian. Sometimes, the way forward is obvious... just walk or run along the screen and hack the creature that's in your way to death. It usually just takes one blow. But there are other times when you'll be strolling along, golden locks flowing in the breeze, and a spiked trap will drop on your head and kill you, seemingly without warning. It's somewhat irritating, as there don't appear to be any clues as to the presence of some of the traps.

It's a curious game, is Psygnosis' Barbarian, and one that's nowhere near as immediate or satisfying as the Palace game. It's quite slow, and when you're playing as a barbarian the last thing you want is to be ponderous. Still, it does have its charm, and I found myself plodding on and coming back to it, just to see if I could get a few screens further. Not what I'd call a classic, but enjoyable enough.

Colony Wars (PS1)

The PS1 is yet another platform I pretty much missed out on. I owned one, but only very briefly indeed, and of the few games I owned for it, I only really got to play a couple at any length. So this is a system that's prime for blogging...

One of the games I can remember owning but not playing was Colony Wars: Red Sun. I only bought it a couple of days before I had to get rid of the PS1, so never really got to find out what it was like. I saw it in Cash Converters (where else) and it rang a bell, but before I bought it I looked it up online and discovered that Red Sun is actually the third in a trilogy. So I decided to buy and play all three for the blog... eventually. I've got the original and Red Sun - Vengeance will follow courtesy of eBay.


Your sights are locked, but I wouldn't go attacking something that size...

The first thing I spotted was that this game was produced by Psygnosis. I was a touch surprised... they're well-renowned for their 16-bit classics, but I'd thought they were defunct before the Playstation era. Shows what I know. Anyway, it gave me a little extra edge of anticipation prior to loading it.

Colony Wars starts with a sweeping narrative, which anyone would swear is by James Earl Jones, adding an amount of grandeur to proceedings. Research suggests that nobody is clear as to whether this is James Earl Jones or just a very good impostor. Let's pretend it is. It just feels better that way.


In space, everything except you is enormous.

The game is a massive space-opera, where you play a single lone starfighter pilot, battling against a gigantic evil Empire. Of course! Your ship, thankfully, is simple to control. You can accelerate and decelerate with the shoulder buttons, and switching between different weapons is easy. I can be put off from space games very easily if the controls are too convoluted, but this is nice and simple.

It's difficult to judge how good this game is from my time with it. It's absolutely epic, and huge, and I haven't even scratched the surface. What I can say is that the ship handles pretty well, blasting things feels satisfying, and there's a genuine sense that you're part of a grand quest of righteousness... in spaaaaaaaaace! I imagine this impressed the hell out of people when it was released... I don't know if I'll be able to play the trilogy enough to do the games justice, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Baal (Commodore Amiga)

I think that anyone who's played games for more than twenty years remembers the Psygnosis name with a degree of fondness. Whether it was for Shadow of the Beast, or maybe Lemmings, or just their awesome box art, everyone has a happy Psygnosis memory.

Baal is unlikely to be one of them.

I suppose it's not technically a Psygnosis game, being released on their offshoot Psyclapse label, so your memories can remain preserved. There's nothing wrong with the basic idea - space warrior searches caves for a demon that will destroy the world - but it's just done wrong.

The main thing that's wrong with Baal is that it's probably one of the most frustrating games ever released. At a glance, it looks like a typical-but-pretty Amiga run-and-gun platform game. The animation on the main character is really nice, huge gun swinging as he walks. And it has effectively creepy backgrounds, given the subject matter. It's when you start playing that the nightmares begin.


Baal? Bah, more like.

Controlling your character is an exercise in frustration. All you need to do is walk, climb, jump and shoot. Easy. And the walking is indeed easy, as is the climbing. The shooting is OK... with occasional struggles. The jumping, though... the jumping...

Pixel-perfect jumps kind of went out of fashion before the Amiga was popular. But you didn't mind them, as long as you knew what the parameters were and the game stuck to them. As soon as anything dodgy was thrown in, there would be anger. Baal has dodgy pixel-perfect jumping.

You'll come to a gap that you need to jump, take off early and fall short, plummeting a few feet and exploding. The game will then throw you back to a pre-specified point, and you'll have to work your way back to where you were. You know that you need to jump from closer to the edge, so you'll take it easy, inching towards the gap... and the game will decide you've gone over the edge, and you'll plummet a few feet and explode.

So that's the game ruined. It doesn't matter what else it might have going for it, it's knackered by the fact you can't trust it to play nice. And to compound your misery, if you do feel like giving it another shot, you have to press the space bar to start a new game, when the space bar is not used for anything else in the entire game. Graaaaarrrrrgghhhhhh!