With the gaming world full of interactive games there are hundreds of games that are released every year. You have Online Casinos Indonesia and online casinos that are also developing every year allowing this industry to grow even more. We now have Castlequest (NES) which is a really good and fun game that you can try.
Overall Rating: 1.5/5 Stars
Produced by the team of ASCII Entertainment and Nexoft for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home video game console in 1989, Castlequest has an astoundingly in-depth storyline detailed in its instruction manual concerning the usually captured princess in an intricate castle owned by an evil overlord that our heroic white male protagonist must save through a seemingly endless series of foe-vanquishing, key-searching, door-unlocking, trap-avoiding, problem-solving, and general puzzle-platformer hybrid action.
Gameplay
The player controls Prince Rafael, a small but cutesily animated sprite entering an enormous black-background castle of many puzzling rooms. The A button jumps, the B button holds a dagger out that can kill certain enemies that run into it, and the directional pad determines which way he walks. There are dozens upon dozens of rooms to explore, most spanning more than a screen-wide, and actually allowing the player to look back and forth across the room before beginning to actually enter it. Through a long series of getting colored keys, unlocking matching doors, avoiding enemies, using lifts, pushing blocks, making precision jumps, and other classic platforming challenges, Rafael must reach the Fairies and Princess Margarita.
The playstyle is similar to Solomon’s Key, though more expansive and not confined to a single screen at a time per challenge. The player is given 50 lives to start out with, which is never a good sign. Also, certain commands entered on the second controller allow the player to restart a room or go back a room entirely since it is very possible to get stuck. Using a key at the wrong time can actually make the game impossible to continue. Even the instruction booklet says that this can be a “very difficult game.” In some ways, this is a simple title: There is no time limit, so you can take your time, and tackle everything as you see fit and ready to. You are also encouraged to create your own map for your progress. On the other side of the coin, though, this truly is a tedious, arduous, monumental task, if the goal is true completion.
Graphics
The laterally oriented tile-based graphics look nice enough, somewhat like a harmless old shareware PC game like F. Godmom or similar. The animations are simple, clean-cut, though a little stilted in the case of some of the lifts, which actually affects gameplay as the player must wait, patiently, slowly, for a while before being able to board or exit. The keys and doors certainly are different colors, and at least there are no flickering or slowdown issues to be found in the abyss of the Castlequest.
Sound
The sound effects are quick, basic, one-channel, little buzzes and beeps and things. The background music is a somewhat watered-down, repetitive ditty that grows old quickly and can be annoying. While it does utilize a couple of channels of synth, it is not a skillfully composed track and does not do much for the inspiration.
Originality
Castlequest, in a sense, can be thought of as a conglomeration of other platformers but without retaining any true sense of provocative identity. It evokes the era and grueling quest of Gauntlet, but without the frenzied action and tense survival. It presents the side-view platformer level-by-level puzzling of Fire ‘n’ Ice, but without the carefully crafted, well-planned challenge of each room, being seemingly much more haphazard in nature. It has the back-and-forth, multi-level traveling of Mighty Bomb Jack or Mappy-Land, but without the more imaginative combat or stage objectives. It has some of the feels of a dungeon crawler, but completely devoid of any developing RPG elements or otherwise. This is a flat, overworked, treadmill of a game, that finds the matching key for a star and a half out of five.
