Knightmare

Copyright : Activision | Reviewed by : Novus

Welcome, watchers of illusion, to the castle of confusion!

MD Software\'s CPC adaptation of the 1987-1994 ITV game show/adventure game/live action role-playing game kicks off with Dungeon Master Treguard\'s familiar greeting and a passable rendition of the classic theme tune... for a Spectrum. There have been Spectrum ports before, but few so faithful to the original as to emulate the rubber-keyed rival\'s one-channel beeping. Similarly, the graphics are, apart from some changes in colour, identical to the Spectrum version on the other side of the tape.

Your quest to seek knighthood begins here. So, let us turn a page in time and see what lies within...

After reading the (quite detailed) instructions carefully to find out how to start the game (hold the fire key), you will find your dungeoneer, not unexpectedly, locked in a dungeon. You (as one of his advisors) will probably spend quite a while tearing your hair out at the first puzzle, where you\'re stuck in a two-room cell with a pessimistic old man. This is where you\'ll find that the game provides (unlike the chatty dungeon inhabitants seen on TV) very little feedback on what you\'re doing, so you spend a lot of time wondering whether what you just did was good, bad or a waste of time. You select a command by cycling through a list of verbs and a list of nouns, which is actually quite a good compromise between playing \"hunt the synonym\" with a parser and the take/use/drop mechanic of simpler games. Most of the time, this merely results in snide remarks from Treguard or the other two advisors. The advisors mostly just repeat the same cryptic but critical hint over and over, much like the rest of the friendlier denizens of the dungeon.

Instead of politely asking your dungeoneer to turn left, walk forward, and sidestep to his doom as in the TV series, you have direct control by cursor key. This, of course, means that you actually have a decent chance of fighting monsters without magic.

Ooh, nasty!

The unfriendlier denizens come in two sorts: the monstrous ones who\'ll drain your life force on contact and the classic riddle-posing wall monsters and suchlike. The former appear out of the ground if you waste too much time running back and forth and are mostly just an annoyance, since they tend to run straight at you and die from a single hit from whatever weapon you\'re carrying. However, since food does not recharge life force like on TV, the few monsters that do manage to get at you (mostly flying creatures that are hard to hit due to the pseudo-3D view) will make it hard for you to continue your quest.

One riddle, one answer. Name it!

One of the biggest weaknesses in Knightmare is the riddles. Not only are they mostly anachronistic trivia questions like \"Who wrote Hitchhiker\'s Guide to the Galaxy?\" instead of brainteasers appropriate to the setting, they are also exactly the same every time you enter a room with a guardian, so you\'ll quickly end up annotating your map with the right choices for each room. Luckily, there are a few exceptions to this rule, but a larger selection of riddles in the style of the TV series would have been nice. Even more annoyingly, one single wrong answer (or delaying too long in answering) results in unavoidable (but not instant) death.

... this is no game of numerous lives. Here, you have only one.

As you can expect from the above, you will make many fatal mistakes while playing Knightmare. Luckily, there\'s a RAM save feature that allows you to undo most bad moves (as long as you don\'t survive long enough to overwrite the single save with a bad one). The RAM save does not seem to store monster generation state; if you don\'t quit to the title screen, monsters will continue to appear as before RAM load.

Where am I? You\'re in a room..

The dungeon is presented graphically in quite detailed pseudo-3D monochrome, with reasonably large character and object sprites and decent enough animation. While the graphics are all monochrome Spectrum stuff, the CPC version gives objects a different colour than the background, making them stand out clearly. The colours could probably have been chosen better, though.

The sound effects are minimal; apart from some clanking doors and flying rocks, most of the time all you hear is the Spectrum-style keyboard click from the menus (and the infernal screeching of the title theme every time you hit the pause key!).

Spellcasting: D I S M I S S

All in all, Knightmare is an arcade adventure game that captures a little bit of the TV original\'s spirit. However, it hides its lack of content under a veil of frustrating and repetitive puzzles combined with minimal feedback, making it quite a frustrating experience that easily becomes tedious. After completing the game, there is little reason to come back to it.