Spellbound - or the perils of the perfect rice pudding.
The year is 1985 and it's time for me to meet up again with another favourite buddy of mine, Magic Knight. Fresh from his adventures in Finders Keepers where I failed dismally to get him a seat on the polygon table. But not to worry , this time it's a rescue mission caused by Gimbal the wizard and his dodgy recipes for rice pudding. Yep, that really is the plot!
Even as a youngster I loved this type of game, because I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books. What was unique with the game was that it was a hybrid between a text adventure and an arcade adventure. Oracle's Cave had attempted something similar a few years before but with no real arcade action. This was a whole step up, control the character and when you come to an item activate the menu to see your options and then execute your commands. You can read, pick, drop , examine and even blow things.
There's a whole cast of characters to meet, examine, take objects from and give objects to. Lots of objects scattered around on the floor as well. Certain rooms need certain objects before you can enter or it's instant death. Plus there's a lift, so more floors to explore ( and in my case somewhere to store lots of objects in case I need them) and, wait, there's still more. There's a teleport pad , that once you have the key you can teleport back to the pad, it sure beats walking!
Playing this back in 1985 , the first thing that struck me were the graphics. They are so clear and mostly uncluttered ( until I started dropping objects everywhere.) I found the menu system really helped in the game play ( although coming back to it as an adult , I'm not as impressed with it .) Where as with text adventures you had to type in the commands, try to guess which words worked, or get continually ignored for spelling errors - Thorin does not know how to rodp - that's because Thorin can type better than me I expect! In this game the commands were there for you. If you found a saxophone, you knew you could blow it !
One thing I do like to do in computer games is to collect objects , in Atic Atac , I loved collecting those objects and bringing them into the first room and and in this game I was in heaven. Lots of objects to collect , a convenient lift to pop them all into and I had my own mobile cupboard! The added bonus of being able to hand the objects to different characters and you had little walking cupboards as well. So did I follow the plot of this game, well, no, not at all. I was having far too much fun exploring and trying to force a dusty saxophone on people.
Mentally I renamed a few of the characters, certain teachers I didn't really like found themselves represented in the game, a certain maths teacher is represented above! Eventually I gave in and looked at the Crash Magazine hints page to get some distance in this game, but I think that took some of the fun out of it. I was much happier wandering around offering objects to characters and trying to work out what was needed to be done.
It wasn't really a game that I re-visited much until recently , preferring Finders Keepers. But one wet Sunday afternoon I remembered this gem and loaded it up and lost the entire afternoon. Wonderfully I had forgotten those tips I had learnt many years ago and again spent the afternoon wandering around the grounds with Magic Knight and that dusty saxophone. I filled up the lift once more with piles of useless junk , teleported myself back to the lift from the depths of the castle. Thor never got his hammer , Samsun stayed stupid and I gassed myself many times ...( in the game...IN THE game!)
Sometimes it really is better not to be told the solution or given hints , sometimes it is better just to wander , lost, in a magical haze with an old buddy around a strange castle.
And never, ever try to tamper with the rice pudding recipe!
Sometimes it really is better not to be told the solution or given hints , sometimes it is better just to wander , lost, in a magical haze with an old buddy around a strange castle.
And never, ever try to tamper with the rice pudding recipe!