Name
Deadly Castles of Death
Author
Bugspray
Category
Game
Release Date
1998-11-29
Rating
(2/5)
Tags
Version
3.0
Requires MegaZeux 2.02 to 2.51 or newer.
Downloads
Deadly Castles of Death
No summary available.
Maxim  said:
Link
Last modified 2011-09-23 09:37:39
This is an awful game that could have been a good game with some planning. It's classic-style Megazeux combat done wrong.

The game is based on an overworld where you must enter castles and defeat bosses to progress to new areas. It's kind of like my game, Fallen, in that way. This game is like a crude version of Fallen in a few ways, though.

The first enemies you'll encounter just fire a constant stream of bullets in the player's direction. You'll waste a lot of your limited ammo trying to hit them.

Then you realize you have 100 lives and can just dodge most enemy attacks. It's best to do this, because defeating the bosses is mandatory and you need ammo for it. The game is easy enough that I had 15 lives left at the end, even though I got annoyed and just crossed a few lava fields.

Then there are the enemies that fire exploding seekers. Hey, I used those in Fallen too! However, this implementation explodes them TOO SOON, meaning you need to get up close to enemies to have any hope of hitting them. Fortunately you have 100 lives and can afford to do things like that.

There's a pretty serious bug in the third dungeon: sometimes the boss doesn't put down the key you need! Aspiring Megazeux programmers, remember to have your bosses use the command "givekey <color>" because "put <color> key <direction>" often fails and can break your game...

Graphics are crude. Real crude. If they looked any worse you wouldn't be able to tell what things are.

The game has custom PC speaker sound effects, also like Fallen! However, the ones in here aren't quite as good as mine. Also, the music in Deadly Castles is not appropriately chosen. Like this one song that has a sample of Beavis and Butthead laughing. It's pretty damn funny, but doesn't fit the game at all!

This game gets two stars because the overworld and castles actually have nice designs! That, and there's a lot of them. This game is pretty long. Ugly as the levels look, they make good use of screen space and could have made for some good fights.

If there were ANY thought put into the combat, then it'd be a three star game. However, instead you're surrounded by hordes of enemies, all of which you couldn't possibly defeat with limited ammo and NO BOMBS, and have 100 lives to compensate. This is a really poor design decision, and it really did make the game a lot less fun.

Hell, even giving the player a bunch of bombs and only sligtly lowering the enemy density would have helped. Maybe then this game would take 10 lives to beat instead of 85. I see this game's kind of imprecision as the author taking the lazy route.

Skip it, unless you're looking for ideas about level design.