Barbarian II: The Dungeon of Drax Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]

Developed and published by Palace Software in 1988.

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This video was requested by rego023.

The original Barbarian is a genuine classic and favourite of many gamers. Palace saw fit to develop a sequel, but instead of expanding on the gameplay of the original, they decided to turn it into a horrid flip-screen affair, full of some of the most annoying enemies ever devised, as well as some extremely annoying controls.

The story follows on from the original game, which finds the titular Barbarian and Princess Mariana on a hunt for the evil wizard, Drax, in a bid to stop his reign of terror once and for all. The player can select to play as the Barbarian or Mariana, but the difference is purely cosmetic.

The game is set across four levels, each consisting of many interconnected screens. Each screen contains a number of exists, including doorways set into the background that can be entered. Each level contains two objects that must be collected in order to finish the game, but these are hidden randomly at the start of each play session. The maze-like nature of the game makes finding your way around one of the biggest challenges in the game and it's very easy to get lost.

To confound matters, enemies constantly spawn to block your path. The design of the creatures is quite good and they're nicely drawn, but they are all extremely aggravating to fight. The principle reason for frustration comes from the fact that their combat animations only contain two frames of animation (on average) and are executed far quicker than the player's animations. This makes the combat more about timing than any real need for tactics.

The biggest issue I had with the game was the sluggish, poorly considered controls. Firstly, the number of combat moves in this sequel has been reduced in a bid to make way for running, jumping and turning around. Depressing the fire button and moving the joystick in a direction will execute a combat move, whilst moving the stick and then pressing fire will do something completely different. For example, pressing fire and down will execute a crouching attack, while pressing down by itself with cause the character to turn around. This means that it's very common to do things that you didn't want right in the middle of combat, the most frequent of which is trying to crouch and attack, but ending up turning around to face away from your opponent and getting hit from behind as a result.

Further frustration abounds from the existence of screens that contain bottomless pits that must be jumped across. The jumping is not the issue, so much as the fact that enemies will typically appear and walk right up to the edge of the pit, preventing you from ever reaching the other side. Should you try to jump over, the creature will hit you immediately on landing, forcing you backwards into the pit and losing a life. I had to concede a life in this fashion at least once so that I could play the rest of the game since the monster simply wouldn't leave the edge of the pit.

The game graphics and artwork are reasonable and the monsters are nicely drawn, but there's nothing breathtaking here. Similarly, the game's audio is fairly basic and uninspired, especially when the original contained the fantastic and dramatic score in the style of Conan the Barbarian.

The fact that Palace took everything that made the original game great and threw it away is bad enough, but Zzap! 64 mgazine awarded it a ridiculous 96%. They clearly didn't play the tape version with it's spirit-crushing multi-load.

I didn't like it back then and I like it even less now. Those who want to swing big swords and pretend that they're Conan should play the original as it's a far better game.
#retrogaming