Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!im4u!ut-sally!ut-emx!juniper!mentat From: mentat@juniper.UUCP (Robert Dorsett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: Beyond Dark Castle Message-ID: <2646@juniper.UUCP> Date: 1 Apr 88 19:59:27 GMT References: <1721@byzantium.UUCP> Reply-To: mentat@juniper.UUCP (Robert Dorsett) Distribution: na Organization: Austin UNIX Users' Group, Austin, TX Lines: 194 Keywords: game beyond dark castle software In article <1721@byzantium.UUCP> garth@swatsun.UUCP (Garth Snyder) writes: > >In article 2635@auscso.UUCP Robert Dorsett writes: > > Hmmmm... I liked Dark Castle. I like BDC less so. I'll post a more > complete review later on... Garth beat me to the punch, but I'll add some comments... >This is what I see as the crux of the whole issue. If you enjoyed Dark >Castle, you will HATE Beyond Dark Castle, because you ALREADY KNOW HOW TO >SOLVE THE GAME. This is the most important point: BDC is the same game. There is better animation in some places, but it's easier overall (even the advanced levels don't have the heart-stopping effect of DC--they just provide more obstacles to plow through). >Come on, mazes have always been the very last refuge of >game designers who are out of real ideas. Not only are they mazes, but >practically identical mazes as well. Not only are the two mazes similar, but there are only two mazes from game to game. And there's no way to get REALLY lost. Just so long as you move around, you'll find an exit. There are at LEAST two exits in any given maze. It's a waste of time, not a puzzle. Once you get past "gee, how am I ever going to solve this", it becomes an irritant. They are only useful as a place to collect supplies. >The top level of the dungeon is an absolutely worthless screen, about >equivalent to the second trouble room in DC. Not only this, it's poorly drawn. It took me about an hour to find the "catacombs," which are accessible through the top dungeon. In the old Dark Castle, the absence of bricks on a wall generally implied an exit. Yet on the top-level dungeon, there are no bricks anywhere, so one is pretty much relegated to bouncing against the walls to try to find the catacombs. If it wasn't for the map (a cheat, in my opinion) and a belief that the designers would not have made such a fundamental mistake, I would never have found it. > Your character has a certain amount of health. The health of your > character is expressed by a bar graph at the bottom of the screen. > >This is a better way to do things than there was in DC, no question. I don't agree. I didn't find my "health" a major issue, unlike with other role-playing games. The "health" meter is not very noticeable, and generally becomes critical only when you're about to die. I like the "heart- beat" effects, though. The meter should have been a numerical display, since the "guage" only jumps, and doesn't move smoothly. It looks cheap. I also don't feel that it was difficult to survive. At the end of my first time around the entire game, I had three lives left. Now, I routinely have seven or eight lives in surplus. There's no "peril." >If we may call it that. Remember what fighting the whipping henchman in >DC was like? It was completely mechanical, no way for you to lose. Just >for show... >..Repeat until he dies. No sweat. No fun. It would not have >been hard to give these Satanic henchmen some rudimentary intelligence. Yes, and it wouldn't have been hard to make the game consistent. For example, you can blow up the guards with dynamite. So why can't we blow up the hench- men, too? For that matter, why, if we can blow up CERTAIN walls, can't we blow up staircases and whatnot? If we can destroy the burning eyes in the swamp/forest scenes, why can't we destroy them in the catacombs? BDC is VERY modal. They've given us more tools, but we can't use them. I'm also bugged by the torture specialist. It always disturbed me that there was nothing the user could do about the prisoners. I expected BDC to provide some mechanism to release them, or kill the specialist off altogether. Didn't happened. In this respect, I think the "story" of BDC and DC suffers. We topple the Dark Knight, but what happens later? We never know. A REAL victory would be to have the character put up on the throne, the prisoners released, or something like that. As it is, it's just a self-indulgent "Golly, I defeated the Dark Knight!" power salute. >Still, I think they could have integrated it much better with the rest of >the game, rather than making it kind of a separate interlude. The main thing that bugs me about the jet-pack scenes is the boat in the swamp. That thing SHOULD have done something. After trying to get in it a hundred different ways, it's drink the potion time. Great. Another inconsistency on this level is that it's not possible to fly back. If you try to leave the swamp or the forest, you crash. >Yeah, except that mosquitoes and birds are identical except in form, >snakes are just like rats except they move slower on ropes and can't be >warded off with elixir, big birds are just like gargoyles, and the dragon >does NOT make a reappearance. In other words, NO NEW MONSTERS. The snakes are much deadlier than rats. The rats are less deadly than they were in DC. The birds are mellow. They were a REAL nuisance in DC; in BDC, you can barely tell that they're there. Kill 'em and move on. No skill in- volved. You know that they'll always reappear after a certain time interval. In DC, they seemed to return randomly. > And Silicon Beach listens to its customers! Yes, Virginia, you CAN > SAVE GAMES in Beyond Dark Castle!! I think this detracts from the game. It makes it easier to learn (I mastered BDC in two days, as opposed to three weeks for DC), and turns it, well, into a "computer game." Not being able to save one's game added a "personal peril" to DC. You get tired, you make dumb mistakes--that's all part of the game. Putting the user in a higher level of control just makes it less of a challenge. With BDC, you just get through a maze and save it, then move on. Where's the fun if you die, and restore an earlier game? >Well isn't that special. Why would anyone want to plow through the >dungeon back up to the anteroom when they can just quit and restore. I >wouldn't and don't, and I think that most people would/will behave >similarly. This just makes falling into the dungeon completely >superfluous, so why has it been retained. It takes longer to quit and restore on a Mac Plus than it does to fight out of the dungeon again. > It's not copy-protected, and it runs beautifully off a hard drive. > >However, it is MUCH MUCH MUCH slower in going from room to room than DC >was. It often takes five seconds or so, even off of my (normally quite >zippy) hard disk. And the ending takes forever as well. At least two minutes to grind through the "celebration" animation. I normally ctrl-Q right after the Dark Knight dies. I like the comment about "running beautifully off a hard drive." The program is nearly 1.6 megs. How ELSE would you run it? BDC can't be run (convenient- ly) EXCEPT on a hard drive. It would be as hellish as "Falcon" trying to run it from floppies. >Even more aggravating is the habit BDC has of freezing up after returning >to the opening screen for a long time during which the cursor is not >visible. Completely galling. You just have to sit there while it >decides whether or not to let you see the cursor. I consider this a bona fide bug. If the fireplace animation is such that the cursor can't be displayed, then there shouldn't be any fireplace animation. From a programming perspective, it's almost as if the programmer is using copybits with a large bitmap, refreshing many times a second, and pre- venting/overwriting the normal cursor display. One last BIG complaint about BDC is the lack of continuity. I've already mentioned the mode problems, but there are also problems in how you move from scene to scene. For example, when you enter the catacombs, you move off the top-level dungeon to the right. You enter the catacombs from the right. When you leave the brewery and enter the east labyrinth, you leave from the left. Yet you enter from a door. You leave the labyrinth from a door, yet you enter with a ladder. This strikes me as poor design, almost as if the individual scenes were designed independently (the training mode supports this contention), then just linked together in any old way. I do not remember this being an issue with DC. >Don't let all of this prevent you from buying the game if you think you >might like it. The only people that need to beware are the really >hard-core Dark Castle fans, who I think will find the game disappointing. I would recommend this game for people who can't play DC very well. I know many people who claim a "lack of coordination," who won't even try to play DC. BDC is much more user-friendly, easier, and has the same excellent pro- gramming and (somewhat austere) design. I get a continuous impression that the designers deliberately downscoped the difficulty of the game, which, of course, would irritate those who actually completed Dark Castle, but would appeal to the users who are buying the "sequel" to the "legendary" Dark Castle as their first installment. I wouldn't be surprised if BDC sold more units than DC. BDC is really "Dark Castle Part II." It's a continuation of Dark Castle, not BEYOND Dark Castle... -- Robert Dorsett {allegra,ihnp4}!ut-emx!walt.cc.utexas.edu!mentat University of Texas mentat@walt.cc.utexas.edu at Austin {allegra, ihnp4}!ut-emx!juniper!mentat