Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night

Halloween draws ever nearer, and with it comes tales of Gothic horror, the most famous of which may be the tale of Dracula; and the most famous of games involving Dracula surely must be Konami's Castlevania.

To detail the history of the Castlevania series would be a feat whole webpages have been dedicated to, so this review will only showcase a single title, the mobile game Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night, released on iOS in 2010 and Windows Phone in 2011.

The game retells the story of Symphony of the Night, utilizing sprites, animation and dialog from the famous Playstation title, but revamps the gameplay to a more casual mode of play in keeping with its status as a mobile offering. Yet for a game that can be played in short bursts, there is a surprising amount of depth and longevity in the title.

Musically and graphically the game deviates little from its namesake title, but this is hardly a bad thing. Symphony of the Night had an excellent soundtrack which is fully realized in Encore, and the graphics of the original still hold up today, and look sharp on the smaller mobile screen.

Gameplay has made a drastic turn, converting from the action/RPG styling moving into a puzzle/RPG hybrid. You move Alucard through Dracula's castle room by room (the layout follows that of Symphony of the Night, including the locations of hidden areas) and battles occur as random encounters. Once engaged, combat takes place in a sequence very much like the Capcom title Puzzle Fighter: pairs of colored tiles fall from the top of the screen and you and your opponent match them up to eliminate them and set up chain reactions to inflict damage. It is a simplistic and intuitive game mechanic, but the complexity goes far deeper than its trappings: when you become familiar with it you find that you can perform complex maneuvers and even parry your enemy's attacks (and they yours) by not only setting up chains, but timing the  execution of them to the movements of your foe.

With each battle you win, you gain experience that you use to level-up Alucard.  Once you achieve a new level, you will has attribute points that you can assign as you choose to customize Alucard's power.  You can increase his defense, attack, luck and magical abilities to name a few.  You may choose to round out the character in each attribute, or specialize in just a few, creating a character who is both more powerful and more vulnerable.  Whatever decisions you make will have an impact on the game.  In addition to experience, enemies also randomly drop items, which may be one-use healing items or more robust and rare things like pieces of armor you can equip to further extend Alucard's powers.

All in all there is lots of customization, lots of items to collect and combine for different effects, and lots of areas to explore and foes to defeat.  The difficulty as you progress increases steadily, and bouts with boss enemies will test everything you've learned.  The challenge and the rewards are high, but like many RPGs, the game can lend itself to long periods of grinding to level up a character before a particularly brutal face-off.

If you're expecting the action-oriented gameplay of the rest of the Castlevania franchise, you will be disappointed with Encore of the Night, but if you are a fan of puzzle games and RPGs, it has a lot to offer even if you are unfamiliar with Castlevania in general.

Into The Dead

Released in November 2012 by PikPok (and still receiving updates and support from the developers), Into The Dead is a grand mobile game for iOS that falls within the "Endless Runner" genre, but is a far cry from the gameplay of Temple Run and its kin.  I would say a more accurate understanding of the game would be to image Call of Duty's Zombies mode translated into a casual mobile game that you can pick up and put down with ease (as opposed to the full translation of the same, which exists also).

Taking place during the zombie apocalypse, the game starts you off right in the middle of the action, having your avatar pick himself up from a helicopter crash surrounded by the undead. You're alone and unarmed, so running is your only option.  Unfortunately, you're exposed in the country, the undead are everywhere and there is no place to hide.

Gameplay takes place from a first person perspective.  The landscape is dark and foggy provides a claustrophobic feeling, especially when running through heavily wooded areas filled with zombies.  Here and there you will come across weapons lying on the ground that you can pick up and use to clear the path ahead of you.  These range from pistols to chainsaws and sub-machine guns, and all are fun to use.  Ammo can be an issue though, so conservation is generally recommended if you are going for distance.

Not that distance is the only way to play.  Into The Dead includes multiple unlockable play modes, such as Massacre where the primary objective is not to run as far as possible, but to take out as many zombies as you can.

The game is free to play, but is worth a $2.99 fee that disables ads (banners and video ads on the menu screens).  You earn money based on your performance each round which you can save to unlock additional items or purchase single-use bonuses.  If you're the impatient type you can also purchase coins to unlock things more quickly.

Games are generally quick and the gameplay is quite frantic. Zombies are everywhere, and even if you don't directly run into one, they will reach out to grab you and can knock you off-course with their swings, resulting in some hair-raising experiences as you race between large groups of ghouls.  Get too close, and you'll meet with a terrible, messy fate.

The fast-paced gameplay and the variety of weaponry keeps things entertaining, as does the atmosphere.  The game is a bit on the dark side, but makes a great choice for playing in bed at night with the lights turned out.  The game also provides you with missions, which increase in difficulty and ask you to perform tasks such as killing a set number of zombies with a given weapon.  Completing certain missions can also unlock new weapons.

Overall it's a very well-designed, difficult yet addictive game that you can pick up and put down quickly.  If you want a zombie-killing fix and don't have a lot of time, it's a top-of-the-line choice.

Baron Baldric: A Grave Adventure and Mystic Towers

Baron Baldric: A Grave Adventure is an oft overlooked game developed by Animation F/X in 1992 Amiga and PC.  Overlooked, perhaps, because it was sold only in Australia, but the game’s primary character became more widely known owing to a much more prominent sequel published by Apogee in 1994.

Possessing a decided whimsical quality that sets it apart from other titles, you do not play as a muscle-bound hero or a scantly-clad amazon, but rather a peculiar, somewhat uncouth but very humorous old man with a walking stick.  Baron Baldric is hardly the stuff gaming mascots are made out of, but he’s so amusing that he makes for an entertaining experience all on his own.  He has a variety of odd mannerisms that he displays during gameplay that make him more than just an old-looking avatar and give him a very distinct personality.

A Grave Adventure is a side-scrolling arcade/puzzle style adventure game.  The storyline has Baldric facing one of his ancestries, the evil Baron Lazarus, whose lust for wealth and power let him to experiment with dark magic, ultimately transforming himself into a werewolf.  After kidnapping a village milkmaid named Rosie, however, people had enough and did him in.  Now his werewolf spirit haunts his castle, protecting his wealth and entrapping the soul of poor lil’ Rosie.

Enter Baron Baldric.  You take off through the maze-like castle levels, seeking riches and  avoiding the spirit of Lazarus who roams them as well.  Rosie’s spirit also flits about the levels as a stark-naked angel, perhaps providing Baldric with some extra incentive to defeat Lazarus and set her free.

Ultimately it’s a charming, humorous game, but it is the sequel where Baron Baldric really shines.  Providing much more spit and polish, the second game, Mystic Towers, was published by Apogee in 1994.  The game features beautiful VGA graphics that still hold up today, and an atmospheric soundtrack.  The gameplay went off in a radically different direction.  The game begins like an old Disney movie, with a shot of an old storybook opening up to reveal the plot.  Spread across Baldric’s land are several old towers associated with Baron’s ancestor Lazarus, and these are cursed and crawling with monsters.  The locals plead with our good baron to use his magic to neutralize them.  Baldric, not a man to shun adventure, takes up his staff and sets out to clean house.

The game takes place in an isometric perspective.  The various towers have multiple levels filled with traps, magic and monsters.  Genre-wise the game could be classified as an action-adventure, but exploring the towers often has more of an RPG feel.  The goal in each tower is to destroy all monsters living within it, along with a “monster generator”, a stone alter that will cause them to re-spawn until it has been destroyed.  The Baron has multiple spells at his disposal, attack spells for slaying monsters and more practical spells for surviving traps and solving puzzles.  The game has a slower, more deliberate pace and is both challenging and filled with adventure.

It really is a shame that more people aren’t aware of Baron Baldric, but for those interested in taking a look, I would highly recommend Mystic Towers.  The title stands on its own feet without a prior knowledge of A Grave Adventure and the gameplay is as compelling today as it was when it was first released.

Halloween Harry / Alien Carnage

A favorite title of mine that I was introduced to early in my PC gaming days, Alien Carnage (known at the time I first played it as Halloween Harry) is a story of a good game that met an untimely end.

Developed by Interactive Binary Illusions and SubZero Software and published by Apogee, the game had all the hallmarks of a great 90s action platformer: muscle-bound hero, lots of weapons and a crazy alien plot to take over the world.  It fit perfectly in line with other Apogee titles like Duke Nukem and Bio Menace, but with beautiful VGA graphics, a rocking soundtrack and a plot that involves aliens transforming people into zombies.

Originally released in October 1993 under the title Halloween Harry and then re-released in 1994 as Alien Carnage, the game has a somewhat colorful past.  After the initial release, Apogee grew concerned that the game’s title would lead people to believe it was a seasonal game connected to Halloween, when in fact the title was simply a fun reference to the protagonist saving humankind from enslavement as zombies.  To counter this, Apogee convinced the creators to change the title to the far-more generic “Alien Carnage”.  In addition, they also slightly adjusted the plot and level order.  In the original release, the story states that an alien ship burrows underneath the city, and the episode layout has you first infiltrating a high-rise office building, then gradually making your way into the city sewer system to the alien ship.  Perhaps to create a more natural progression, the Alien Carnage release changed the story so that the ship attached itself to the top of the same high-rise, and Harry begins by clearing aliens from the sewers and then ascending the building.

However, since Apogee’s shareware model makes the first episode of a game available for free, whereas in Halloween Harry you could download and play the high-rise segment, for Alien Carnage you could download and play the sewer segment.  This meant that fully half of the game was available for free.  Of course, Apogee did not broadcast this, and even including a note with the re-release that apart from minor plot adjustments and the name change the game was the same, so there was no need to download it again.  Of course, it didn’t take much effort to realize that the change meant the shareware episode being offered as Alien Carnage was completely different.

One of the elements that made Alien Carnage really stand out from a gameplay perspective is that, despite being a platform game, Harry cannot jump.  Instead, he has a jetback he can use to fly from platform to platform, or just sail around the level if you like.  Also, your primary weapon is a flame-thrower, which throws out a continuous, short-range stream of flame in from of your character that can pass through multiple enemies at a time.  The trade-off is that the flame thrower and your jet-pack share a fuel gauge.  The gauge is reasonably generous, but you won’t want it running down.  Fortunately, there are refueling stations throughout the levels you can return to if you run out.

In addition to your primary weapon, there are also vending machines that dispense additional firepower (money for them is acquired by slaying enemies), such as a photon gun that does about the same damage as the flame thrower, but fires the length of the screen, or a grenade launcher that tosses small explosive canisters.  In addition to the cool-factor of a game that makes your primary weapon a flame-thrower, this is also the only game of which I am aware wherein the grenade launcher is an indispensable weapon.  Harry can only toss the canisters about as far as his flame-thrower travels, but they do significantly more damage, and when paired with a jet-pack, it means you can fly above your foes and rain down death from above, and that never gets old.

Each episode ends with a confrontation with a large boss enemy.  During these confrontations you are limited to the use of your flame-thrower, but the game does away with fuel consumption making this less of a frustration and more of an interesting challenge.  Overall, the game just shines and really deserved to be the start of a franchise.

Unfortunately, the developers tried just that.  In 1996, a sequel was released, titled Zombie Wars (apparently picking up where Apogee’s generic title-change took off).  Although somewhat more ambitious, introducing NPC characters and allowing you to play as both Harry and Diane (present in Harry as your mission control officer), the game was not released by Apogee and lacked polish.  The developers had plans to further the series after Zombie Wars, intending to create a third title and even planning out a children’s cartoon series (which, by the way, would have been awesome) but the series never progressed beyond its frail sophomore offering.  However, Alien Carnage was released as freeware in 2007, so now everyone can enjoy the zombie-slaying goodness of the original title.

Forbidden Forest

As the Halloween season draws ever nearer, I’d like to present one of the first games that I ever found truly terrifying (of course, I was four years old at the time).  No, it’s not a survival horror…it’s an old Commodore 64 action classic called Forbidden Forest.

The work of a single programmer, Paul Norman, the game was being programed as a means of learning 6502 programming.  At the time Paul worked for a small software company which was going out of business, and representatives from another company, Cosmi, were visiting for the purpose of buying office furniture, saw Paul at his desk working on the game, and hired him on the spot.  The game was released in 1983 under the Cosmi label and became one of the more well-known and highly-regarded Commodore 64 games released.

The plot of the game is simple: you are an archer journeying into a haunted forest to find and slay the Demogorgon, an immense beast terrorizing the land.  During your hunt you will have to fend off giant spiders, dragons, snakes, skeletal warriors and eerie phantoms.  Each level was unique, with a new foe to face before you could progress.  Some levels required simple action tactics as you fought off waves of spiders creeping out of the trees.  In others, you yourself were the hunted as a dragon would stalk you through the woods, giving you little time to react before roasting you alive.

The game is notable as an early example of parallax scrolling (multiple background layers moving at different speeds to create the illusion of depth) as well as being one of the first games to feature animated blood and gore.  The latter is perhaps one of the title’s most defining aspects.  Rather than just a simple graphical representation of blood, the game contained fairly brutal death scenes.  Capture by a giant spider would result in an extended scene of the player writhing back and forth as the spider attacked, spraying animated blood in increasing amounts as the brief scene played out.  The game also had a day-night transition, complete with a moon that slowly crept across the sky from left to right as the forest grew darker and darker as one progressed.  By the time one reached the Demogorgon, the forest would be pitch-black and one’s foe could be seen only during flashes of lightning that revealed his location as he crept ever closer, stalking the player in the dark.

The game was popular enough to result in a sequel, released in 1985 under the title Beyond the Forbidden Forest.  An even more ambitious title, it was advertised as being in “OmniDimensional 4-D”, meaning that the player could walk and shoot into and out of the foreground, in addition to just left and right.  An aiming mechanic was also added, as two bars appears at the side of the screen to show the up and down angle one’s arrows would travel, which could be adjusted according to where one wanted to shoot.

Unfortunately this mechanic over-complicated the control scheme and resulted in gameplay that was clunky and inelegant.  Despite its ambition the sequel just wasn’t as much fun and isn’t as well-remembered today.

In 2003, the series was revived somewhat with a release in 2003.  Titled simply Forbidden Forest, it was a budget title co-developed with Webfoot Technologies.  The gameplay was brought into the third dimension, but although the theme of the original could have translated into an excellent survival-horror game, the resulting budget-priced title boasted lackluster graphics, a “forest” that felt more like a pleasant woodland resort and enemies who were far too generic to be frightening.  The best thing about the title was the re-orchestrated main theme and the fact that the CD contained a Commodore 64 emulator and copies of the original two titles.

Dark Ages

The influence of Apogee (later 3D Realms) was significant in its time.  Credited with developing the common Shareware method of game distribution in 1987, wherein titles were released in episodes with only the first released for free (known at its beginning as the "Apogee Model"), they also developed a string of hit titles, some of which continue to the present day (Duke Nukem).  They also had the distinction of publishing ID Software's Wolfenstein 3D, which, although not the first First-Person Shooter, often regarded as the granddaddy of them, bringing the genre great, widespread fame and leading the way for ID's runaway hit Doom.

Amongst their smaller achievements, Apogee is also credited with released the first shareware game to utilize soundcard support.  It might be easy to take this sort of thing for granted nowadays, but prior to this point in time, when otherwise excellent games were tied down to sharp auditory bleeps and blips from the extremely low-fi built in PC speaker.  Soundcard support was a huge deal.

Unfortunately, Dark Ages, although grandfathering this support on the shareware scene, was not otherwise a stand-out title.  Graphically flat and not particularly interesting, it was by no means a bad game, just not a very good one in a time when titles like Commander Keen, lacking soundcard support but trumping Dark Ages on gameplay, were already out on the scene.  It is a title that has largely been forgotten and is rarely mentioned, but nevertheless it deserves a small place in the spotlight if only as a milestone on the gaming timeline.  It also bears the distinction of being designed by Todd Replogle, who later that same year would release Duke Nukem.

That said, the game can be entertaining in its own right, even if it is weak when held against its compatriots.  Apart from its technologically advanced (for its time) music and sound, the game had a "high-fantasy" setting that brings to mind arcade games like Rastan.  You control a magic-wielding warrior prince who fights to free his kingdom from the evil wizard Garth, who has plagued the land with hordes of undead minions.  Gameplay and level-design are very straight forward, and basically you fight your way back and forth across fairly simplistic landscapes until you finally reach your journey's end.  Nothing special, but fun if you're in the mood for something simple.  Apogee would revisit this high-fantasy "babes and barbarians" style setting with much greater effect in 1995 with Realms of Chaos.  3D Realms released Dark Ages as freeware in 2009.

Monster Bash

Growing up, I was drawn to macabre tales of horror, and my imagination ran wild to think of ghosts and ghouls prowling the night.  The fact that I was afraid of the dark did little to dissuade this pursuit.  I was only afraid of the dark, because I knew what dwelled there...

That history doubtless set the stage for an imagination that was all too ready to leap upon the classical macabre stylings of games like Hugo's House of Horrors and, a personal platforming favorite, Monster Bash.

Monster Bash was released by Apogee in 1993.  Apogee, one of the early pioneers shareware gaming, had a string of excellent platform games in the 90s.  Most people immediately recognize the name Duke Nukem, which continued into the 3D era, and many remember with fondness Commander Keen, but there was more to the Apogee story, and some titles that never resulted in a franchise have sadly fallen into the void, which is a shame.  Among these is Monster Bash, a tale of a young, pajama-clad, sling-shot wielding Johnny Dash who, on a dark and stormy night, uncovers a plot by villainous vampire Count Chuck to steel the dogs and cats of the world and transform them into monsters.  Johnny sets out to free his own kidnapped pooch and the other stolen dogs and cats of the world, and his quest takes him running through zombie-filled graveyards, twisted sawmills, haunted houses and bizarre laboratories.

The gameplay was solid.  Each level had a largely open environment, with Johnny hunting down the location of the cages dogs and cats.  Once they were all set free, one could move on to the next.  Controls were tight, and the music was exciting.  I always felt that Johnny Dash would have made a fitting cousin for Billy Blaze of Commander Keen fame, and was disappointed that the game didn't produce more titles.

The real standout aspect of the game is the presentation.  The graphics are beautiful for their time, a mix of bright, colorful locations melded with what are probably some of the goriest elements you'll ever find in what is otherwise a kid-friendly platformer.  Bloody spears, some covered in unidentifiable entrails, jut out of the ground.  Zombies explode into bloody chunks upon death, and sometimes their heads will continue to roll along the ground and attack the player until squashed.  It's all in good fun and contrasts spectacularly with the otherwise kiddish presentation, making it a joyful romp through a nightmarish world.  To any fans of classical PC platform games, I highly recommend it.