🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

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Garth Snyder            UUCP: {seismo!bpa,rutgers!liberty}!swatsun!garth
Swarthmore College      ARPA: garth@boulder.colorado.edu
Swarthmore, PA 19081    ALSO: {hao,nbires}!boulder!garth
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