garth@swatsun.uucp (Garth Snyder) (04/01/88)
In article 1020@aucs.UUCP Paul Steele writes: [ in reference to Beyond Dark Castle ] All in all, a great game! 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, but this one seems to lack innovative puzzles. The beginner level is simple. A couple of the scenes are unnecessarily harsh (such as falling back to the dungeon after going through a labyrinth). There seems to be a lack of humor throughout. I don't feel any urge to continue playing the higher levels, unlike with the first version. I agree completely. Beyond Dark Castle is a very weak effort on the part of Silicon Beach Software. How the team that turned out Dark Castle could have come up with this lemon I will never understand. By way of giving some structure to this diatribe I'm about to write, I'd like to make reference to an earlier article by Rob Jellinghaus which is a very positive review. jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU (Rob Jellinghaus) writes: Well, Beyond Dark Castle arrived today, and all I can say is: WOW. If you enjoyed Dark Castle, you will LOVE this!!! It is one of the most (if not THE most) insanely great computer games I have ever seen. 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. Much of the fun of Dark Castle was in figuring out how various tasks could be accomplished given the controls provided to you. If you are a DC fan, you can tell what needs to be done on a particular BDC screen at a glance. Although there are a few new additions to the DC repertoire (sp?) of hazards, most of them are simple variations on ideas that were already used up in DC. Not only this, but huge chunks of Dark Castle code have been stolen and integrated into BDC as if they were something new and great. Remember the prisoners in the dungeon, with the whipping henchman and the keys and how you had to get them? THIS IDENTICAL SITUATION USING IDENTICAL TECHNIQUES, SOUNDS AND BITMAPS IS IN BDC. Not only that, the tower-top scene where you get the shield in DC is almost EXACTLY THE SAME in BDC - same clouds, same post, everything. All the animation for the wizard is stolen. All the sounds are stolen. NOTHING IS NEW! The basic plotline is similar to Dark Castle: you are trying to defeat the Black Knight. In the last game, you won by knocking him off his throne, which took you to the next level. In the sequel, you actually battle him one-on-one, and (presumably) get to kill him. 'Similar' is not the word I'd use. 'Practically identical' comes closer to the mark. Just as in DC, there are several room sequences that have to be worked through. After you work through all the room sequences, you get to go into a 'Black Knight Room' where you bash it out with old BK himself. I don't want to reveal exactly how this final battle progresses (Rober Dorsett has already covered this), but suffice it to say that getting to 'actually battle him one-to-one' is not what happens. Here's a partial list (not guaranteed to be complete) of the new features: Some of the levels scroll. Vertically and/or horizontally. Very smoothly. Much more smoothly than I would have expected. Five out of BDC's fourteen rooms (well, fifteen if you count the anteroom) scroll. Two of these are the screens where you fly around with the jet copter pack and three are normal walk-around rooms. The scrolling in jet pack mode is coarse and jumpy; you can't make out the (extremely repetetive) scenery in either the swamp or the forest without stopping. The scrolling for the walking rooms is much smoother, but before the rejoicing starts let's just consider why these rooms scroll to begin with. One of them is the black knight room, and the scrolling is well-integrated into the room's 'plot'. Ok, fine, what about the others. Would you believe that they are mazes? If nothing else about this game raises a red flag in your head, this should. I mean, is this what people are really looking for in video games - the chance to do some rote memorization? 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. In light of that, let's lower that room count from fourteen to thirteen. While we're at it, let's figure out how many of BDC's screens are DIRECT rip-offs of screens in DC. First there's the Brewery scene, which is what the 'bouncing boulder' screen in DC should have been. It's too little too late, though, and there's not enough real difference to justify calling this a new screen. So we are down to twelve screens. Just as the two mazes are practically carbon copies of each other, so are the forest and the swamp identical. Eleven. The top level of the dungeon is an absolutely worthless screen, about equivalent to the second trouble room in DC. Ten. The computer room is really only half a room, since lots of space is taken up by the game-saving machinery. Nine and a half. The west wall is a merging of the floating pads found in DC's fireball 2 with vultures and sliding wall ledges. Only half original. Nine. Compare this with the full value of DC's 14 rooms and I'm sure you'll feel a little cheated. 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. It drops very slowly in the course of normal play, and you lose a certain amount whenever you run into a wall or jump a greater-than-safe distance or get hit by a shovel or mace while fighting a guard (more about this later). You can regain health by grabbing food (which looks like a little basket full of fruit, about the same size as a rock bag). When you run out of health, say good-bye to one life. This is a better way to do things than there was in DC, no question. Remember the mace used to kill the whip henchman in Dark Castle? Well, that concept is enhanced in BDC. You can grab shovels from the walls and duel henchmen with them. Mouse button swings the weapon, action key blocks his swing, and you can duck below his swings. Really quite a lot of fun, and a new dimension to combat in the game. (You knock out guards with rocks, as before.) 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. Well, that's what all of this shovel and mace fighting is like. Here's how you do it. First, you pick up your weapon; this immediately makes your opponent take a swing or two. After he swings, just go in close and parry. After he swings, hit him and go into parry mode again. Repeat until he dies. No sweat. No fun. It would not have been hard to give these Satanic henchmen some rudimentary intelligence. The scenes are not limited to running/climbing/jumping anymore. There are a couple of screens where you get to fly around! Yes, there is a one-man chopper which you can put on with the action key. You steer it with the movement keys, as you would expect, and you go flying over swamp and forest. The horizontal scrolling is wonderful; you have to avoid large trees and other such obstacles to get to the end of the screen. Be sure you've picked up enough gas cans, though, or else you will run out of fuel and crash! I have mixed feelings about this part of the game. It really bugs me that the forest and swamp are so similar, for one thing. For another, there should be a real room waiting for you at the end of your flight, not just one dinky henchman to fight. I think the sound here is superb, and all the animation associated with the jet packs is quite good. 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. All the old enemies are back; there are still rats, bats, regular arrow-shooting guards, rock-throwing guards, vultures, mutants, and the Flaming Eye. Now, however, there are also snakes (like rats, but deadlier), mosquitoes, birds, and Big Birds (in the flying screens), and Brewery Henchmen. I assume dragons show up somewhere, too. And of course there's always the Black Knight.... 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. Not only are there more creatures, but there are more types of obstacles, too. I have seen conveyor belts (which move you along if you stand on them), laser beams (which fry you), swinging pendulum blades (right out of Poe!), chains which raise and lower ropes (timing is everything), platforms which fold into and out of the wall (timing is REALLY everything), and I'm sure I've only seen the half of it. Awesome. Uh, well, actually you've seen all there is to see, I think (except for half-size tunnels in the upper level mazes). Some of these things are neat, and some are not so neat. The pendulum, for example, is mostly just for decoration. You do need to get around it, but you don't have to deal with it directly. And Silicon Beach listens to its customers! Yes, Virginia, you CAN SAVE GAMES in Beyond Dark Castle!! You can go into the Computer Room, where there are five pairs of throw switches. Go to the "save" switch for the position you want to save to, and hit it. If you want to restore a particular position, go to the matching "restore" switch. There are five save positions for each level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) of the game, making 15 save positions in all. Damned impressive. This is nice, but what I think is more significant in the long run is that the game has an ending. This is MUCH better than just leaving the game open-ended like DC. I'm very pleased that SBS did this. You still fall back into the dungeon whenever you fall off of another screen. 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'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. The fact that this delay doesn't seem to be present on Mac II's I've played on suggests that something computational is being done, like uncompressing sounds, during this time. This is completely annoying. Between screens you can see or hear that your drive is not being accessed, yet you are faced with this completely black screen. 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. 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. -------------------- Garth Snyder UUCP: {seismo!bpa,rutgers!liberty}!swatsun!garth Swarthmore College ARPA: garth@boulder.colorado.edu Swarthmore, PA 19081 ALSO: {hao,nbires}!boulder!garth --------------------
mentat@juniper.UUCP (Robert Dorsett) (04/02/88)
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
gillies@uiucdcsp.cs.uiuc.edu (04/04/88)
Well.. I'm sorry people dislike BDC. As a first time macintosh (II)
owner, I can only play BDC, and it's impressive. The animation is
beautiful, and the puzzles are hard (I've solved only the computer room
after a few hours of play).
Maybe some veterans tire of BDC because of their familiarity with Dark
Castle. Perhaps the disappointment is the same kind that everyone
goes through after reading many sci-fi books by one author, or after
reading 500 Calvin & Hobbes or FAR SIDE comic strips. The new work is
still interesting, but the initial thrill is gone forever.
I am terribly impressed by the animation, which easily overwhelms the
best donkey-kong type game I ever played previously (a classic
ATARI-400 game with 12 wildly different screens, in color). I can't
help cracking up whenever I hit a wall (whoaaa.. whoaaa!!
brbrbrrbrbrbrb!!!), or marvelling at the beautiful animation when you
turn the heli-pack around, in practice mode.
Don Gillies {ihnp4!uiucdcs!gillies} U of Illinois
{gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu}