As mentioned earlier, Ultimate Play The Game became Rare, famous for SNES and N64 games. They started life in the UK as Ashby Computer Graphics, creating arcade games. They then moved to creating games for the ZX Spectrum, and they coaxed a lot from it. Famously publicity-shy, their game packaging usually told you very little about the game. Their C64 games were actually not programmed by them, and it really does show. I bought this hoping it would be as good as their Spectrum games were reckoned to be, and just found it a frustrating, unplayable mess. Definitely not worth the premium price that Ultimate began a trend for charging. You found more out about it than I did, so well done.
The Staff of Karnath was a game I had as a kid without owning the manual. I drew a complete map of the place and even figured out what some of the spells did. For example, one spell makes the carpet in front of the bed levitate. I must've played this game a lot but I never managed to complete it. Just goes to show how much more patience I had back then... and way fewer games to choose from ;)
@@Pixelmusement Ok, I had to check: It's the THROBIN spell. You need to shoot the carpet while standing next to it. Then it starts wiggling and you can walk onto it and make it levitate.
9:42 -- the clock advances quickly while you are in the bedroom. Maybe it is possible to rest to regain energy? Maybe some enemies are weaker at certain time of day? Maybe spells depend on specific time of day? With barely a word written in the manual concerning the gameplay itself, we really gotta appreciate the Shakespearian volume of backstory someone vomited out. Maybe it was the whole point of releasing the game?
I looked through my footage again and noticed that bedroom is called "The Timeless Room" so yeah, I think it's just supposed to be a trap to burn your time or something; I wasn't regaining energy in there at all. :P
Apparently the term "isometric" has been misused so often for video game graphics, that in that context it's now an acceptable term for other projections.
Yeah, I know, but how many people are going to understand me if I say "oblique 3D" or go even MORE accurate and say "cavalier 3D"? Also, I don't have all the projection names memorized, there's a lot of them; I had to look up the name for the specific kind of projection used here. :P
@@Pixelmusement Sorry, re-reading this I see that it might come off very snarky. I had to lookup the projection name as well and that's when I discovered that for game graphics isometric has pretty much come to mean any fixed perspective projection. One of those language things like how "literally" means both things now.
@@lupinzar No worries. I didn't think you were trying to be overly snarky or anything but I wanted to make sure I gave my actual reasons for saying what I said in my response. :B
Yeah most isometric games are actually dimetric, which has the camera set at a slightly more shallow angle (example Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2). A notable example of an actual isometric game is the OG Ultima online
@@Gameprojordan I mean... that's TECHNICALLY accurate, but it's such a tiny difference. Because of how pixels work, a typical "isometric" game is using 22.5 degree angles from the horizontal as a result of simply using two pixels horizontal per one pixel vertical, resulting in two 112.5 degree angles and a 135 degree angle, so yes, those games ARE dimetric, but its so close to a triple-120-degree isometric it's not really worth the semantics argument. :P
~notices that Ultimate Play the Game, AKA Early Rare, made this~ :3 ~notices that this game is one in which pattern memorization and knowing EXACTLY what you need to do combined with perfect execution is the only way to reasonably progress~ :3 ... :3 ...huh, so THAT'S why they named the snakes in Battletoads as they did :3
Hm. Is the instant enemy respawn due to a high emulation cycle speed? It feels like a turbo problem. Perhaps running it slower would help. It also feels like the keyboard buffer is involved with the wacky sometimes-you-have-to-hold-the-key-down issue. Might not be worth checking.
The only reason I even knew about this game at all before the video was because of falling into a Sea of Thieves lore hole. It's really neat seeing stuff from proto-Rare though.
As mentioned earlier, Ultimate Play The Game became Rare, famous for SNES and N64 games. They started life in the UK as Ashby Computer Graphics, creating arcade games. They then moved to creating games for the ZX Spectrum, and they coaxed a lot from it. Famously publicity-shy, their game packaging usually told you very little about the game. Their C64 games were actually not programmed by them, and it really does show. I bought this hoping it would be as good as their Spectrum games were reckoned to be, and just found it a frustrating, unplayable mess. Definitely not worth the premium price that Ultimate began a trend for charging. You found more out about it than I did, so well done.
The Staff of Karnath was a game I had as a kid without owning the manual. I drew a complete map of the place and even figured out what some of the spells did. For example, one spell makes the carpet in front of the bed levitate. I must've played this game a lot but I never managed to complete it. Just goes to show how much more patience I had back then... and way fewer games to choose from ;)
This was cut from the video but I tried EVERY spell and couldn't get that carpet to do anything! D:
@@Pixelmusement Ok, I had to check: It's the THROBIN spell. You need to shoot the carpet while standing next to it. Then it starts wiggling and you can walk onto it and make it levitate.
@@Eshaktaar OK. I tried casting the spells while STANDING on it, so i guess that wasn't it. :P
Ooh, Staff of Karnath finally makes it onto the show! Well worth the wait!
The wait at the beginning was it decompressing the intro (and maybe the rest of the game too, idk if HF cracks compress them separately or not)
9:42 -- the clock advances quickly while you are in the bedroom. Maybe it is possible to rest to regain energy? Maybe some enemies are weaker at certain time of day? Maybe spells depend on specific time of day? With barely a word written in the manual concerning the gameplay itself, we really gotta appreciate the Shakespearian volume of backstory someone vomited out. Maybe it was the whole point of releasing the game?
I looked through my footage again and noticed that bedroom is called "The Timeless Room" so yeah, I think it's just supposed to be a trap to burn your time or something; I wasn't regaining energy in there at all. :P
Apparently the term "isometric" has been misused so often for video game graphics, that in that context it's now an acceptable term for other projections.
Yeah, I know, but how many people are going to understand me if I say "oblique 3D" or go even MORE accurate and say "cavalier 3D"? Also, I don't have all the projection names memorized, there's a lot of them; I had to look up the name for the specific kind of projection used here. :P
@@Pixelmusement Sorry, re-reading this I see that it might come off very snarky. I had to lookup the projection name as well and that's when I discovered that for game graphics isometric has pretty much come to mean any fixed perspective projection. One of those language things like how "literally" means both things now.
@@lupinzar No worries. I didn't think you were trying to be overly snarky or anything but I wanted to make sure I gave my actual reasons for saying what I said in my response. :B
Yeah most isometric games are actually dimetric, which has the camera set at a slightly more shallow angle (example Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2). A notable example of an actual isometric game is the OG Ultima online
@@Gameprojordan I mean... that's TECHNICALLY accurate, but it's such a tiny difference. Because of how pixels work, a typical "isometric" game is using 22.5 degree angles from the horizontal as a result of simply using two pixels horizontal per one pixel vertical, resulting in two 112.5 degree angles and a 135 degree angle, so yes, those games ARE dimetric, but its so close to a triple-120-degree isometric it's not really worth the semantics argument. :P
~notices that Ultimate Play the Game, AKA Early Rare, made this~ :3
~notices that this game is one in which pattern memorization and knowing EXACTLY what you need to do combined with perfect execution is the only way to reasonably progress~ :3
... :3
...huh, so THAT'S why they named the snakes in Battletoads as they did :3
The One at the beginning was a cracktro, made by pirates
Hm. Is the instant enemy respawn due to a high emulation cycle speed? It feels like a turbo problem. Perhaps running it slower would help. It also feels like the keyboard buffer is involved with the wacky sometimes-you-have-to-hold-the-key-down issue.
Might not be worth checking.
This isn't a PC, it's a C64. If the emulation cycles were too high the game itself would be running way too fast. :P
I loved it but never got far. Hard as hell.
The only reason I even knew about this game at all before the video was because of falling into a Sea of Thieves lore hole. It's really neat seeing stuff from proto-Rare though.
oh a early Rare game - ultimate play the game evolved in to rare.
What a frustrating game! :)