Knightmare Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]

Developed by MD Software and published by Activision in 1987

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Enter, Stranger!

Such were the immortal words spoken by Treguard, the dungeon master who presided over each episode of the utterly brilliant children's TV show, Knightmare. The show was revolutionary for it's use of chroma key blue screen (precursor to green-screen CGI) where live actors were overlayed on top of a mix of hand-drawn backgrounds (by David Rowe) and, in later series, true CGI. It was undoubtedly my favourite kids TV show growing up and still has a cult following among those who remember it.

Casting the player in the role of dungeoneer, the objective of the game is to solve a series of puzzles and to defeat a dragon in order to secure both your freedom, as well as the silver spurs of squiredom. To the game's credit, the developers definitely tried to stick to the themes and concepts used in the TV show as closely as possible. The dungeon contains many different rooms, some of which contain items that must be collected in order to solve the game's puzzles.

Certain rooms within the castle dungeon contain characters that you can interact with, some of which fans of the show will recognise. Most famous of all these is the appearance of the wall monsters that threaten to devour the dungeoneer if they are unable to answer three questions successfully. Each monster has a stock set of three questions that never changes, so it's quite easy to pass these rooms once you work out the correct answer. Giving an incorrect answer will cause all doors in the room to lock and a host of demons erupts from the floor, draining the player's life force and ending the game.

Although I love the fact that the designers tried to emulate the show's format, many of the game's features don't work as well as they should, and there appears to be content either missing or unfinished.

Perhaps one of the main issues is the verb-noun system with which the player must interact with items and people within the dungeon. First, the player cycles through a list of verbs (take, eat, drop and so on) and then pairs the action with the desired object or item. The control scheme attempts to mesh with the real-time gameplay by removing the randomness of a text entry parser seen in most adventure games of the time, but lacks the finesse and simplicity of a mouse-driven inventory/scheme that rose to prevalence in point-and-click adventures. The end result is something that just about works, but it's very cumbersome to use and does not lend itself well to certain occasions demanding quick reactions; the only solution is to anticipate the actions you need to take in the next room and to have your chosen action pre-prepared, ready for execution the moment the next room loads. Had the game been designed more like a traditional adventure game that didn't require the player to move about in real-time to avoid enemies then the inventory system would have been a lot easier to manage.

The second issue with the system is that it's not contextual. Every action and every item can be selected at any time, even if the selected item isn't present on the current screen. What also becomes apparent is that there are a number of actions and items that serve no purpose, or don't even appear in the game. I suspect that the game was intended to be much bigger than the final product and the items in question had to be removed, but the inventory list wasn't adjusted to take account of this.

Another big oversight is the use of the iconic knapsack from the TV show. The dungeoneer had a limited amount of life force that would deplete as the show went on and had to be replenished by putting items of food into the knapsack. Although I failed to collect the knapsack in the video, I went back after I beat the game and tried eating food with it equipped and it didn't restore any life force (represented by the candle); whether I was doing something wrong or whether the feature was broken/not implemented wasn't clear.

It doesn't help that some of the puzzles are very obscure and working out the solution isn't easy. I wonder just how many players got stuck in the first two rooms until they figured out that they had to get the magic spade from the old man by giving him food and water, then digging through the floor of the cell...

Ultimately, the game collapses under the weight of it's own ambition and trying to implement systems that worked well on TV, but that don't lend themselves well to a keyboard/joystick control scheme.

I think that if you're a fan of the show then this is definitely worth playing out of curiosity; just don't expect too much from it.

Spellcasting...D I S M I S S!
#retrogaming

Видео Knightmare Longplay (C64) [50 FPS] канала AL82 Retrogaming Longplays