RETROspectives: Dark Castle
One of the greatest arcade games ever made? Really? This game is definitely in the running for the worst game ever made! Especially the port on the SEGA Mega Drive and Philips CD-i!
The game opens with, as you can guess, a castle, and it's quite dark outside. The theme playing is instatntly recognisable as a classic horror tune: Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. What tune is that I hear you ask: the theme most commonly associated with Dracula. This music has become by far the most generic horror theme of all time! It loops the famous part again and again and again, the loop lasts about 5 seconds before it plays again! Every 5 seconds you go back to the start of the loop! You can, however, stop the music, but it doesn't actually stop the music it justs holds the note which is worse! There is a brief moment where no music plays, to stop the music you have to make sure it holds the note when the music isn't playing! Why can't the stop button stop the music? But this is just the start of the problems!
Shaggy from Scooby Doo, no sorry, "Prince Duncan" decides to topple the throne of the evil Black Knight who has terrorised the land. Prince Duncan must make it through the four sections of the castle: Fireball, Shield, Trouble and Black Knight. The game is a generic side scrolling platformer but is plagued with the worst controls of all time! The controls are so stiff and awkward! To duck, you must press down and B but that only lets you duck for a second, to stay ducking you have to then press up and B! Pressing up to duck? Want to try your chances at jumping? Jumping from almost any height you get disorientated and go dizzy! You will fall over if you fall down or even, sometimes, when running! You can fall over by running! Running and jumping are the fundemental basics of a platformer!
The castle is full of enemies, generic ones of course, and taking them down is just as bad as the rest of the game! The only weapon you can find, at least in the early part of the game, is rocks. Rocks! That's all you get! Don't worry about that fire breathing dragon, just throw a rock at it! But even throwing the rocks is frustrating! You can't use the D-pad to point your arm in the direction you want to throw the rock you have to painstakingly turn your arm clockwise or anti clockwise! The movement is slow and tedious! Bats raining down on you like they do for most of the game? You're dead before they hit you! You won't hit them all! If they hit you you will get dizzy and fall over! Throwing a rock at a zombie will do practically nothing! It will fall done, sure, but two seconds later it will be standing up again!
The stairs are dangerous! It's hard getting on them, it's hard getting off them! When on the stairs you're vunerable to attack and you walk on the stairs so slowly! There are parts where you have to jump from rope to rope, Prince Duncan hardly makes it onto the ropes! You'll fly through the ropes! If you plunge into the holes in the floor you'll wind up in the dungeon. This room is hard to escape from, the game gives you no ideas of what to do and there is a lot of stairs. You will land in the dungeon constantly! All of this just on the SEGA Mega Drive version but I kid you not it gets much worse as we look to the Philips CD-i! In the CD-i version you trip over with almost every step! Your first step, or rather trip, will rain a swarm of bats on your head! The game gives you no chance to learn the controls or even get a weapon, rocks, to defend yourself!
However, other ports of the game are supposedly better, the game was a huge hit in the arcades and on the MS-DOS, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and other classic computers. The Mega Drive and CD-i ports were panned for doing the game a huge injustice. Looking at the core game aspects separately the game just feels like the most stereotypical horror game imaginable: castle, thunder and lightning, generic enemies, dungeons and , of course, the dark! All of this finished nicely with the stereotypical horror music composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in the 18th century and found fame in Dracula and the Walt Disney film Fantasia.