Previous Next

Picture Ultimate's Jet Pac set in Camelot, take away the splendid graphics and variety, and this is what you've got.

You are Merlin the Wizard who must destroy the evil creatures sent to destroy you. As despatching monsters is a drain on your supply of magic, you can top it up by dropping nasty ingredients into a cooking pot.

The first thing to strike you as the demo cycles through the four game screens is the unpromising graphics. Each screen, merely a background against which the battle is to take place, is nothing much more exciting than some hills, a castle and some trees. The latter, all of the same appearance and size, making a nonsense of any perspective the game might have had. They are all simply depicted and serve only as a backdrop, playing no part in the game.

At the start, the wizard materialises from thin air. Since the monsters simultaneously appear in random positions around the screen, it's all too possible to lose a life before you've barely begun.

The game plays very fast from the off, so much so that it almost seems the speed is there to enliven what is otherwise a fairly ordinary game. Really, it is almost too fast to be playable - even for the quickest 'fingerhappy' keyboard player.

The creatures are no great shakes, graphically speaking: a green ghost resembling a dishcloth, an overgrown asterisk passing itself off as a blue Hellswasp and some skeletal faces.

The cookpot ingredients are no better. Merlin himself, however, is not too bad, and performs rather like an Arthurian with a rocket pack.

Although the figure itself is not animated, Merlin zooms around the heavens, a puff of smoke at his feet indicating his self-propelling capabilities. The idea is to shoot all the enemy before they shoot you. A press of the Fire button causes a fireball to shoot from Merlin's outstretched hand.

Meanwhile, the baddies are chucking their own brand of missile around. Occasionally, a parachute floats down, heading for the cauldron. Unless Merlin shoots it down, it will destroy any magical stew he is in the process of concocting.

Sound effects, of the fizzbang variety, are minimal. They don't exploit the C64's sound to anything like its full potential.

Not a bad idea, but the implementation is weak by today's standards. Merlin held no magic for me.