From Visionary, Ltd. we get the sequel to Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair (ReadySoft). Many of you remember the game of Dragon's Lair, which first appeared some years ago as the popular laser disk based arcade game. When I reviewed the Amiga version, I found it to be a good visual adaptation of the original game. But it had problems, so many that my reservations with Dragon's Lair keep me from recommending the game. Evidently the designers of Singe's Castle took my (and other users) complaints to heart, because essentially all the problems I found in the first game have been eliminated.
Just like Dragon's Lair, Singe's Castle is a wonderful series of animations that very closely match the original graphics found on the laser disk. The goal is to rescue Princess Daphne from the evil Shapeshifter who has kidnaped and hidden her away in Singe's Castle. As Dirk the Daring your task is to defeat all the monsters and puzzle's placed in your path as you explore the castle, searching for the Princess.
Overall the gameplay is fairly simple to master. Each sequence requires the player to move Dirk in one or more directions at exactly the right time. React too soon or too late and Dirk dies, usually in some graphically gruesome manner. Since the player has very little flexibility in his or her choice of moves, timing is the key element in the game. Once one sequence has been mastered you move on to another until you rescue Daphne or run out of lives.
One of the nicest features about Singe (when compared to Dragon's Lair) is the fact it has a REAL USER INTERFACE! It offers a number of features not available in Dragon's Lair in a generally user friendly manner. It is obvious that Visionary went the extra mile in porting Singe's Castle to the Amiga, and the effort was well worth it.
As I said, there have been vast improvements in generally playability over Dragon's Lair. One complaint I had with Dragon's Lair was the fact that you could not save a game in progress, and once you ran out of lives you had to start completely over, a task that quickly became tedious and boring. Singe's Castle allows you to save not one, but five games in progress. When you make it to an interesting stopping point you can save your position, then continue on while you try and make it a little farther. Run out of lives and it is a simple matter to restart from where you last saved.
Another set of options allow you to select the number of lives and difficulty level you want to play. Starting out at the easiest level you only get the first few sequences, harder levels move you randomly through the entire castle. You can also select a special cheat mode where little signs appear telling you when to make your move and which direction or action you need take. When you're first starting out that option will get you fairly far into the game. Later, when you have a good feel for things you can play without it, relying on your own superbly trained responses to get you by.
While Dragon's Lair could be installed on a hard disk, it required a special partition set aside for it and only supported a couple of specific systems. Singe's Castle has no such restrictions, in fact I test installed it on several different hard drive systems without a hitch. And there was no need to make a special partition, it operated very nicely from a standard subdirectory.
According to the documentation Singe's Castle will run on a 512K machine, but they do recommend a meg or more of ram, especially if you plan on multitasking it with other applications. (Yes, it does support multitasking on machines with 1 meg or more ram.) If memory is short it will disable certain features like Dirk's death scene, and at the users option (there they go again giving you a choice!) disabling sound. If you choose to use sound anyway on a machine with limited memory there are more disk accesses during the sequence, but the game will still play. And if you have more than a meg you will find that everything generally loads into memory at once, giving you uninterrupted playing for each sequence.
One of the best optional features of Singe's Castle is actually Dragon's Lair. If you already have Dragon's Lair it is possible to link the two games together into one game, giving you a game that is equal to the original laser disk version! In fact, once I linked the two games together and installed them on the hard disk (with the built in hard disk installation option) I found myself playing and enjoying Dragon's Lair, something I never thought would happen.
Singe's Castle works with a 68000, 68010, 68020 (and presumably 68030) equipped Amiga. And it is not copyprotected. It's protection is paper based, requiring you to identify a graphic from a supplied black and red sheet of paper, all in all an acceptable method of protection.
Singe's Castle is a visual delight, offering full motion animated video in an arcade game setting. I highly recommend it, and if you already have Dragon's Lair you need Singe's Castle. It makes all the difference in the game. If you don't have either, you should consider getting them both as the combination is excellent!
