Those graphics really remind me of the early Ultimas. It is rather weird that the inns and whatnot don't seem to serve any purpose; I wonder if the game was released in a half-finished state.
@@msdosgamereviews I found CRPGAddict's review of the game; he wrote to the game's creator and apparently even he acknowledges it's very buggy and badly needs a rewrite.
This was the first platform game I ever saw or played. It still holds a lot of nostalgia for me. Not by Apogee though (the description mentioned how the game didn't have graphics as detailed as the ones in Apogee games).
I remember the updated Elite Plus with VGA graphics. It was also the only Edition with a secret Galaxy 9, wich is randomly reached when Galhyping from Galaxy 8 with the same change of reaching Witchspace during a normal Warp.
I was watching the health meter on the video replay, and did not see it increase. There must not be much health in a human. I guess with a little practice dodging bullets would get me less damaged.
@@msdosgamereviews I think it was because you were getting shot at at the same time, so the attacks were taking away health faster than the eating could restore it.
My dad used to play this all the time when he was a kid, I have played it with him a couple times on DOSBOX but have never finished a game. I remember completely filling my islands with armies and not thinking of using transports to expand, only to attack lol
I still get that music stuck in my head sometimes all these years later. Total ear worm. I always played with the music on. I remember it playing faster. Maybe it's one of those games that relied on the speed of the processor.
Interesting. The emulator can change the speed at which the game plays if the game play was limited by the speed of the CPU. Quite a few games of the era was written with a specific CPU in mind, and performed too fast or too slow on other CPUs. Pity that the CPU type that the game was made for was never encoded in the binaries.
The launcher sound is eerily similar to the Metroid Dread Emmi. Great vids, since this is my first comment after watching a good part of your catalogue, thought i would mention it too ^_^
It truly was a great achievement, especially when you compare it with the other games of the time. Game development back then was not really taken seriously, and the skills needed were quite rare. It was not really seen as a viable business model.
Interesting how all the important buildings need to be accessed by climbing a rope. Wonder if there's some kind of in-universe reason for that architectural quirk?
I very vaguely remember playing this on the school's PCs way back. Our computer classes were very freeform back then - most of the teachers knew less about the machines than the students did, so they mostly just let us do whatever we wanted.
I played this MS-DOS game on my old neighbor's old PC back in the early 1990's. I must have been 8 or 9 years old. Thanks for bringing back my retrospective childhood memories 😺👍🕹️. A big retrospective like 👍🕹️ from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮.
These old MS-DOS PC games are so retrospectively legendary, they even still make me want to play them again. And who remembers the legendary COMMANDER KEEN games 😺👍🕹️? At least, i still have the original hardwares of the Commodore 64 (tapes / disks / cartridges) and Amiga 500 😺👍🕹️.
@@msdosgamereviews High was twice the resolution of low 640x400 in monochrome(as compared to 16). The refresh rate was 71.5 so you had a very stable clear image on the Atari monitor. The alternative at the time for me was a portable colour TV on RF so I always tended to prefer high for the few strategy/adventure games that supported it
0:30 Isn't "best-loved underrated game" a bit of a contradiction? The moon-timer is a neat idea, though it's a bit of a logic error that the stars don't move. 12:28 I'd guess the VD stands for Vlad Dracula.
I did notice it too. Does not make it any less of a pain to learn now, though. With time you could get used to anything, but for casual gaming I sure am glad that it is now possible to remap the keys with the emulator!
I had this on Apple IIGS. I beat one of the game developer's puzzles. In the Hideout, I put the clue in the cauldron, and a blue "You Won!" appeared near the Map. At first I didn’t quite understand what happened for about 30 seconds, then the realization hit me!
Interesting tweak on the Pac-Man formula to have the enemies also consume the point-scoring dots. To score high you need to grab them before the enemy does. The hogs' movement seems to be entirely random.
Heheh. "I have no idea what that is" is probably among the things you'd least like to hear the surgeon say when you're going under in an operating room...
Being on the operating table is already an experience to avoid, and hearing that would definitely freak me out as well. Luckily, doctors get a bit more training that I had!
Pascal is an odd one. Turns the programming paradigm on its head, not really built for performance. It is amazing that it ran on that kind of hardware at all.
The game really need a time-out mechanic. The fight with the dog would have been over in a fraction of the time if it was a one-minute match and when the timer ends the win went to whoever had more energy left.
Heh, Raistlin's magic attack is probably meant to be a lightning bolt but it looks like he's throwing a white stick. Other than that the graphics are quite pretty though!
It's neat to see how the graphics get gradually better as we move to newer releases. We're already at much better-looking games than the ones from a few years earlier. Bit of trivia for this one: the original arcade version was named Guevara, and the protagonist was meant to be Che Guevara. For American and European releases and the home computer ports the name was changed to "Guerrilla War", the references to Guevara removed, and Cuba and Fulgencio Batista changed to just "the country" and "the Dictator" because the producers were worried having a Communist as the hero would hurt sales.
Thank you for the trivia! I am also enjoying the progression into nicer graphics, and right about this time is when the Adlib card came out and I am looking forward to better sounding games. The PC speaker was never intended to do what the games required of it.
Ooooh, Gauntlet! I played the ZX Spectrum version _so_ much. I'd sometimes cheat by playing the two-player mode by myself; the other player character acted as "life insurance" because as long as it was alive you could restart your main character. Game over didn't come until both were dead simultaneously. Bit of trivia: Gauntlet is the reason Nethack has a Valkyrie character class. One of the developers was a big Gauntlet fan and added several references to it.
Mindscape, Software Toolworks... I miss MS-DOS software publishers. If I remember correctly, at 182 mph on the Test Track, your car will maintain lane position when turning around a corner. The drawback is that if you're not properly aligned within a lane, another car can come up from behind and crash you.
There is no one running DOS anymore, so no market. Which is kind of the point why I started making this channel... to capture something that was for the people to come
