Previous Next

Conquestador is the game with everything. Attribute problems, naff unoriginal plot, boring design, it's dated, cliched, tedious, vastly overpriced and it has a terrible name.

If Mastertronic or Firebird had released this one it might just crack it as a nothing-special £1.99 cheapie.

Melbourne House is trying to get £7.95 for the stupid thing. Things must be bad.

What is it? Well it has this comic knight trying to collect three magic star stones. These are hidden among some forty caskets - each of which looks exactly the same.

Your little knight wanders around a vaguely Spellboundish world (except that the sprites are very inferior, more flickery and less inventive). The main obstacle in this game is continuous assault by bow-wielding knights. These are all exactly the same as well, although they vary in colour.

I always think the mark of a really bad game is the size of the bounce when the jump button is used - games with really enormous bounces that have you zipping right over the screen are always bad. Guess what happens here.

Exciting things you can do in this game include, replenishing arrows, replenishing lives and finding keys. Even more exciting things include turning into a dragon (the game itself gets half a star for that) and transporting (this features an opening and closing giant mouth and wins the game the other half star it deserves.

Actually the best thing about the game was the press release which actually made the game sound pretty good until you realise it resorts to that old PR standby - not telling the whole truth. Thus the game we are told has "solid, finely detailed perspective graphics". It doesn't. And we are told the game will "have you reacting faster than you can think". Does that seem to mean that the game is not as as slow as it seems, or am I going mad?

Label: Melbourne House Author: ERBE Price: £7.95 Joystick: Kempston Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Graham Taylor

*

Utterly awful in every way. It's the kind of thing that loses good software houses hard-won representations for quality.