C&VG
1st March 1987Dunjunz
Shock horror! Mackscrane, the Great Demon of Supreme Evilness (a pretty comprehensive title) has stolen the Chalice of Binding, and stashed it away in the Dunjunz complex.
Four heroes have been appointed to penetrate this vastness and win it back, collecting whatever treasure they can along the way.
Features to add interest include teleporters, food to increase a character's health rating, magic swords and helmets, boots to make you move at twice the speed, healing potions, keys, trapdoors and more.
This is a vast game, a very meaty package for the price, which is really too vast to score conveniently on tape. Loading and playing it each time is a drag. You first have to load the opening screen, a very flashy digitized portrait of a sinister character one assumes to be Machscrane himself.
Then you go on loading the very lengthy tape until you are asked for the number of players. You can have up to four, taking the parts of the Ranger, the Magic-User, the Barbarian or the Warrior.
They all have different attributes - some can use magic, some have better armour than others and so on.
Then you turn the tape over, rewind, and load again until level one (of 25) is in. If you succeed in level two, you run the tape on until level two is loaded, and so on. Fail and you have to run the tape back and reload level one. Phew!
The game itself is ingenious. Each character has a quarter of the screen to himself in which he always appears as he moves around the complex. Naturally you frequently bump into the characters controlled by your fellow players. This does mean, however, that your playing area is uncomfortably small and it's sometimes hard to make out what's going on.
With four players, it's also a fight for possession of the keyboard - you each have a block of keys for your own use, but you inevitably get in each other's way.
But once you've got used to these constraints, it's all good clean fun. The graphics are Bug-Byte's favourite Mode two-type, rather blocky and crude, but the action is reasonably smooth and fast.