Dark Castle - Beat the game on Beginner and Intermediate

The Mac was never a gaming platform. It never had a large userbase and Apple was uniformly awful at courting game developers (and sometimes the developers themselves are a little unreasonable). But, despite having far fewer games than its early Commodore 64 and Apple ][ brethren and later the industry juggernaut PC, it did have some gems.

One of those gems was released early in the Mac's life in 1986 and was called Dark Castle. This game, like many early Mac games was fairly revolutionary for its time.

First, the animation was incredibly smooth and life-like. It was a pleasure to watch the protagonist, Duncan, run, jump, and fall. This was three years before Prince of Persia with its rotoscoped animation (but after Karateka which had similar animation principles). Duncan's walking, running and jumping animations were quite realistic, but the game also had a good sense of humor by adding cartoon-like "hovering over a pit, then looking down and falling" and "banging your head and getting dizzy and
spinning around" animations.

The second major innovation to this game was its control scheme. The game is a platformer and the character is moved around using the keyboard (with WASD as the default keys). The character's main attack is throwing rocks and this is accomplished by aiming with the mouse. Yes, that's right - moving with the keyboard and aiming with the mouse, the same control scheme used by all PC-based first-person shooters today was pioneered by this game back in 1986, almost ten years before the system was first used in a first person shooter (Marathon, which probably not coincidentally was also for the Mac).

So, the announcement that the third Dark Castle game, Return to Dark Castle is finally coming out (it has spent 7-8 years in development) inspired me to go back and replay this game.



It is still a lot of fun, but like many games of my youth, it is a lot harder than I remembered it. I seem to recall being very good at this game and having no problem beating it, but I must have only been playing it on Beginner difficulty. I jumped right back into this game on Advanced difficulty and got my ass-kicked hard. Humbled, I started back at Beginner and relearned the game. I was able to beat Beginner and then Intermediate modes without much difficulty. Advanced is still insane. It took me luck, using all of my ammunition and about 16 tries to finally get the shield. I then died while attempting to get the fireball.

Still, this game brings back great memories. The sound effects are ingrained in my brain - Duncan's grunt as he jumps, his "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wrmmmbrblblblblblb" when he smacks his head, the mutant's taunting, the raven's caw, and the wizard's mumble. Despite not having many games, the early Mac had some good and unique ones.

3 in Three - Review

I've joined a motley crew over at gamespite.net, the website of 1up.com's Jeremy Parish. He has a vision to make the site a game encyclopedia. My first piece that I wrote for it was a review/retrospective of the Mac game 3 in Three. Anyway, I'll be linking from here to any piece I do there, so here goes:

3 In Three

For those who like numbers, I probably would have given it a 9 out of 10.

Marathon - Sunbathing

Another first (or at least one of the first) for Marthon was dual-wielding. And baby, let me tell you that it is fun.

I generally don't go in for first person shooters. It isn't that I dislike the genre totally, it is just that they all feel the same to me after awhile, so I don't want to play too many. Granted, I haven't played many (any?) of the top-tier such as Half-Life, System Shock, or Deus Ex. Still, I enjoy tooling around in well-built first person shooters and can definitely lose myself in them. It is just that the experience can become - unfulfilling. I think it may be something about never seeing my character.

Anyway, I definitely like that Marathon has a sense of exploration and cleverness to it. Doom is great mindless fun, but the level designs are nothing to write home about the and the key/switch puzzles feel perfunctory. Marathon has some great level design. You end up going up and down on various levels and crossing over where you were and looping back on yourself. The automap isn't strictly necessary, but can help a lot. Fortunately, the different areas in a level are noticably different and logically make some sort of sense for the level you are in. Really, I wonder where all this great level design skill went when Bungie made Halo.

The feeling of cleverness (or perhaps more accurately cerebralness) comes from two factors. One is that there are some decent puzzles in the game. Most have to do with switches, but the switches are so much more than door openers. They can activate elevators and other moving platforms and often have to be used in tandem or in the right order to reach the next area. The other aspect comes from the attack and fall back tactics that the game uses. There are no health packs to restore your health. Instead, health is restored at terminals placed on the wall (I guess it recharges the shield energy of your cyber-suit). Because of this, you often find yourself moving forward, defeating a group of enemies, then retreating back to the health terminal. Saving your game is also done at terminals and also encourages that type of gameplay.

I must say, I felt really bad when I got the "bad" ending to The Rose level because too many civilians had died. If I had been more judicious with my saves, I would have attempted it over again. Sadly, my first save from the level was already after a good number had died. Sorry, Bob.

Marathon - Couch Fishing

My father was an early adopter of the Macintosh. He got one in 1985 or so as a gift for some work he had done. Thanks to him, we became a Macintosh household. This meant that the computer games I played when growing up were generally a bit different from a lot of the other kids. The Mac had some fun games, but there were nowhere near as many as on the PC, and several gems from the PC just never made it onto the Mac. This was particularly true for first-person shooters. Wolfenstein 3D eventually made it over, but the computer required to run it was much more than the equivalent PC, so it wasn't an option for me. Doom was not ported over until after Doom II was (which was again quite some time after its PC release). What was a Mac user who wanted to play this new, burgeoning genre to do?

Enter Bungie Software.

You may recognize their name as being the developers of that Halo game, but that came later. In the 90s, they were crazy about the Mac and developed games for it. They also saw this new-fangled first person shooter thing and decided the Mac needed one. Their first creation was Pathways Into Darkness. That game was a first person shooter, but also included many adventure and exploration aspects. Inventory management and using the proper items at the proper time and conversations (with dead people) were all very important to advancing through the game. Jealous of my friend Max with Wolfenstein 3D, I begged my parents for that game and received it. It is a pretty good game and I definitely enjoyed it, but I also found it quite difficult.

Their next game, another first person shooter, this one clearly made to compete with Doom, was Marathon. Marathon was either first or one of the first games to do many things including operate on the Y-axis (you must aim your gun vertically as well as horizontally), mouse look (introduced in the sequel, but later retrofitted into the original), objective-based levels and levels with different physics or other game-changing characteristics, friendly non-player characters, and networked multiplayer. It is also known for its intricate story that is revealed through a series of computer terminals the player interacts with throughout the game.

Sadly, I had never played Marathon, despite being a Mac user. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I wasn't as bowled over with Pathways Into Darkness as I thought I might be. Maybe because I realized that first person shooters weren't my favorite genre, or maybe I thought Pathways Into Darkness ran a tad slowly on my LC III and couldn't imagine Marathon would run acceptably. Whatever the reason, I passed up this gem and had always intended to get around to playing it. Bungie had released the source code and eventually all the games in the trilogy for free online distribution. I actually toyed around with it two years ago, but I was on vacation, so having to play on my laptop without full-sized keyboard and mouse was a bit restrictive.

Last week's retronauts's podcast was about Marathon and really got me jonesing to give the game a go. I'm glad they did because I'm having a blast.

The game is very atmospheric, taking place in a space ship (the U.E.S.C. Marathon) boarded by aliens. Systems are damaged and power is not at full so many corridors are dark and lights are flickering. Your cybernetic suit is equipped with a motion detector so you can see when enemies are moving near (similarly, the aliens have motion detectors and will attempt to come toward you if you are moving near them). It borrows liberally from the Alien movies for its feel and it just totally works.

I'm also very much enjoying seeing the plot gradually unfold. Besides the aliens that have boarded the ship, one of the Marathon's artificial intelligence programs has "gone rampant". This means that it has become self aware basically and is affecting other systems because it has reached the anger portion of rampancy. I know that this AI, Durandal, plays a key role in the story (and sequels) and look forward to seeing it.

The levels also have "colorful" names, hence the level I am currently on is named "Couch Fishing".

Also, though originally released on the Macintosh and though I am playing it on a Macintosh, I am actually playing the Aleph One (Marathon open source) remake of the original Marathon, which is available for Windows and Linux as well. As long as I'm not just playing a game in an emulator, I'll put the actual platform I'm playing it on and not the original one.