C64 Barbarian

For some games it can be hard to tell whether it's a blatant rip of a franchise or other Intellectual Property, a parody of the source material or if it's a genuine attempt to reproduce the source in an alternative form of entertainment. Beyond that, it is done for money, for the challenge or simply to advertise themselves and their talents.

It's almost always for the money, a company that sets up to not make money, isn't a company. It's a charity.

Barbarian, on the C64, is harder to categorise as to whether it's a blatant rip or an actual genuine attempt to honour the Conan films. It's certainly not what one would call or describe as a parody of the films. Given the lack of plot beyond "Beat the warriors, kill the warlock, save the scantily clad cluster of pixels" the game itself is an interest blend of homage and beat-em-up.

The premise is simple enough; each warrior enters from their respective side, armed with a sword. They each get 6 life spots and lose a half per hit they receive while a timer counts down. The first one to lose all their life spots is dead and the green goblin creature drags the dead body away. Failure to kill the opponent results in a draw and rematch, back at full health, as opposed to the "one with lowest health, loses" rule we see in more cash-based franchises, especially in arcades.

Depending upon the opponent, whether in single player or vs. mode, the background changes after each battle from one to another, given the complexity of the combat, one could forgive the lack of choice in backgrounds. But the game's main focus is the combat and there's a lot of it there in the arsenal of moves the characters each have. Graphically there's no differentiation from one enemy and another save for the colour of shirt they're wearing and the specification of which level you happen to be on (Save for the Warlock but more later). Each combatant has the same moves, mirrored depending upon whether they're on the left or right side of the fight.

While on the subject of graphics, the combatants are fairly recognisable as Barbarians, while the goblin looks green enough to be a goblin, the backgrounds form enough of the artwork to be recognisable as a dungeon, throne room etc. Blood spots in the soft red shade, the snakes hiss and animate each time a wound is scored on the opponent, serving as borders to the screen and the play area.

One would be forgiven for thinking the combat would be limited if each player has a simple joystick and just one button as a control system, but borrowing heavily from International Karate, the control system works well on the C64 to provide a suitable selection of moves and abilities. Each character responds to the 8 directions of the joystick by ducking, rolling, walking, jumping up or holding a block stance to cover the body or the head from attack. Each direction used with the fire button depressed, permits the character to attack in one of 8 different ways, from kicks to leg chops, body attacks, head butts, twirling the sword and the infamous, "flying head chop".

While all this is going on, the characters are duking it out to a fairly solid rendition of the main theme music to Conan the Barbarian and reproducing faithfully with the SID chip, even taking the full length of the piece of music into account that many viewers of the films would likely miss save for the longest fight scene, the composer having really done their research on this one and it shows. Thankfully it can be switched off too to listen to the sounds of swords being twirled, flesh being chopped and laughing little goblins when they collect the corpses.

The complexity of the game permits a level of depth that one wouldn't normally associate with a game of this time. For each move there is a counter, be it ducking a high attack, blocking a mid, rolling or jumping around moves and such, for there's one move you WANT to avoid at all costs, the flying-head-chop, an easily accessible, long build up move that if it connects, decapitates your opponent and sends their bonce sailing away from their neck. Instant win, goblin collects body, kicks head off stage, next level. But thanks to the large run up time to the move, it can be easily avoided and even if barely avoided, takes half a life spot if it hits anywhere other than the critical area.

In single player, the game progresses from one opponent to another for 8 levels, each opponent getting tougher in difficulty as the player completes each one, later opponents will also attempt the flying head chop and shocking, can achieve it. If the player loses, game over, thanks for playing. However, should they progress far enough to the Warlock, the game play changes to either jumping or ducking magical attacks while trying to progress across the stage to the opponent. One hit from a magical attack spells death while just touching the Warlock, beats the game. The shift in game play and objective usually is so jarring, and without warning, too often kill the player before they realise what is going on. After beating 8 opponents in sword-combat, to suddenly play a game of fatal dodge ball, is a huge dick move on the part of the designers.

It's on the same lines as playing a game for 20 hours, you're well versed and practised in how to play the game, and you know the moves and have come to learn several combos and specials. Then in the last five minutes, you have to play a version of Tetris where the colours have to link up rather than beating lines, you learn it quickly but the final boss already has 20 specials performed on you before you do the first piece.

The game play however does suffer from the clunky movements of the walking-meat-sacks, moves take a short time to perform, while this gives an opponent a chance to dodge, also allows the pixel perfect reactions of the AI to slaughter someone before they realise what they're doing. Rolling is BEYOND annoying, the animation is jerky, movement unrealistic and it knocks the opponent down if it connects with them. Holding down the attack just after, raises into a kick move that most opponents cannot avoid, giving you a hard and fast method of beating EVERY opponent (AI at least), for another amazing flaw in AI routines and exploitation methods.

Barbarian is an interesting piece, while it might appeal to fans of the source material, the stories, the films, the comics, there isn't enough here for the average player to want to come back to it, though playing it with another player and trying to fake each other out for the decapitation moves, is worth a chuckle at least. Nowadays there's less substance within the game than one could expect from games like Street Fighter 2 and onwards, Mortal Kombat and such but there is a level of charm, lightly glistening upon the surface of the game which shines through as a mark of dedication by the programmers.

Mortal Kombat (Original)

Sometimes a genre needs something that makes people sit up and take notice. Sometimes a classification of games needs some innovation, or a means in which it can stand tall and say "we're not like those other games" despite it being exactly the same with just some new characters. In the realm of beat-em-ups (not brawlers like Final Fight and Double Dragon) games like Street Fighter 2 tended to rule the arcades with its bright colourful graphics, its following of loyal fans watching as someone in a karate gi smacks a large fireball into another different coloured gi wearing karate man's face.

Of course Street Fighter 2 didn't start the beat-em-up craze, before that obviously was Street Fighter the original, other older games included Yie Ar Kung-fu, Karateka, Barbarian and such on home machines and older arcade games. But what Street Fighter 2 did do was to make the genre more appealing and more accessible with the special moves easier to do, (most of them were quarter circles with a button, charge moves or just hit a button REALLY fast). It went largely unchallenged until the arrival of something that popped up and caused international controversy with its excessive (at the time, nowadays tame) violence, gore and above all else, Fatalities.

Yes I'm talking about My Little Pony. (Like hell I am... I'll make people suffer that later) Mortal Kombat hit the scenes around 1992 depending upon your location in arcades and was quickly followed with a series of complaints and abuse hurled at it for some of the more violent aspects of the game.

At release, it was a game with 7 characters having been made initially by just a team of 4 people. 2 Colour Swap ninja characters (Sub Zero, Scorpion), token female (Sonya), lightning god (Raiden seemingly based on Big Trouble In Little China characters), Kano (Semi cyborg crime lord... any more clichés to add there?) and Johnny Cage (Jean Claude Van Dam rip off, but seeing as the game was originally an idea to movie->game Universal Soldier, you can see where that originates).

Each character had a standard series of moves from low and high punches, low and high kicks, sweeps, roundhouses and uppercuts. Blocking was implemented by not holding away from the target, but by pressing another button entirely and would result in a lot of Street Fighter fans being slaughtered at first by trying to 'block' incorrectly. Special moves were almost entirely unique to every character and required combinations of buttons rarely seen in fighters, from holding an attack button and pressing various directions, holding block and tapping directions, double tapping directions and then attacking with just a few using similar quarter circle moves from the aforementioned Street Fighter series.

What was more immediately obvious was that there was no cartoony approach to the game, the graphics were entirely digitised from photographs of actors dressed up to perform/pose for the moves and then placed into the game directly, rather than the designed and drawn out images of virtually every other fighter game out there.

The plot was almost entirely ripped from Enter The Dragon (cited as being inspirational) in which a group of people are called to an island to fight to the death against each other and then fight the main guy who has been a shitbag for quite a while, in a plot to take over the world if he wins 10 contests, he's already won 9. Shang Tsung being the final boss but not before having to fight your way through every other opponent (6 fights) your mirror self (another fight) 3 endurance fights (you vs 2 people on one life bar) and the "not quite lass boss" Goro, a 4 armed monstrosity that did far more damage than you ever could with a nuke. Only then could you fight the last boss, a wisened old man that could morph (Terminator 2 made it popular) into other characters, including Goro.

Each character has their own reason for joining the fray. Ranging from on-the-run criminal, to chasing-said-on-the-run-criminal cop, death seeking, thrill seeking, honour seeking, wanting to stop the bad guy, wanting to stop elder gods taking over Earth and getting some more recognition beyond shitty-film-star, the value added to each character ranges rather wildly for those trying to find purpose. "I need more cash" vs. "Saving the planet" firmly sorts out the pricks from the chivalrous ones.

The real "fun", if remembering button combinations like a surprise test-paper answer sheet is fun, was the option after the fight, to "Finish Him/Her" with a special move that simply killed the opponent. From burning them alive, to blowing their head off with lightning, punching the head off, ripping out the beating heart, pulling the head off with the spine attached and so on. It was this that would cause the greatest controversy. Not only would the fight have been over but unlike any other game at time, you could visit horrific and graphic violence upon people by pulling their heads off and letting the spine dangle freely, uppercut them off bridges and send them hurtling to their deaths in a pit of spikes which, unsurprisingly, were populated by a few decomposing bodies and heads.

Moral guardians went apeshit, the game's popularity soared and it became a standard to set other games to. That's not the say the game was any good. As with anything controversial, just because it IS controversial does not mean to say it's any good. Mortal Kombat was a mixture of hits and misses as a result.

With most of the memory of the game focused on digitised graphics, the character roster wasn't as large as that of other games (SF2...), the enemy AI could absolutely cakewalk any player when it chose to unless some severe AI exploits were utilised, computer characters were able to perfectly time attacks to dodge and counter with inhuman speed. Not to say that humans could do it at all, the reaction times and speeds of the computer could be set in such a way that no human alive would be able to do those moves because of the very nature of the moves. As such it was possible to be ludicrously punished by an AI looping a perfect series of moves.

The most fun however was rarely found in beating the AI, but in taking on other people and THAT is where the game found a loyal and eager fan base. Now could you not only fight someone one-on-one but unlike other games, you could choose to punish them at the end of the fight with a killer button combination that would humiliate the other player, and likely leave their character with fewer body parts than they had begun the game. There were however flaws in even this.

The game engine, had allowed for various impossible to escape from situations, akin to being constantly hit with the sweep move. If the other person didn't try to jump out of the attack, or didn't know to block and hold to crouch at the same time, there was nothing else to do but being butchered by a repeated series of hits that would end the game shortly after it had begun. Likely wise with punching, a series of punching could stagger an enemy and hold them into a combo unless they hit the block. Muscle memory from playing other games could leave them defenceless while they tried to block by holding backwards.

Characters were a little unbalanced in that some only had two special moves while some had three. Some of the moves could freeze or stun an opponent for a more powerful move (usually an uppercut) to boost the damage output of a move; some moves could be repeated ad inifinitum similarly to the sweeping exploits mentioned above.

Graphically the game looked impressive for using digitised images of real actors, sounds from real actors mimicking moves and pains, though the sample rate of the audio left a lot of arcade machines lightly muffled by the audio being exhibited. The music was barely recognisable aside from the attract audio that had almost everyone humming it as the arcades usually upped the volume for the new machine and it became its own ear-worm for anyone nearby. Even now, I can still remember the attract music theme but I'll be damned if I at any point, could remember any of the stage music, so vague are they that I'm not entirely sure they're not just the attract music again. Having said that, I can clearly remember various music from stages in street fighter 2.

The actual engine of the game always seemed unpolished and incomplete as a fighter. The moves and timing of the game seems to be clunky and awkward, which is not something often found in the later games of the series, though it was designed and coded by very few people, one could forgive that on a man-power basis, it still doesn't get around the fact that the control system in the game is finicky at best and frustratingly awkward at its worst when control is wrested away by others performing moves and combinations of attacks that can't be escaped from.

But then, what are controversies for. Were it not for the excessive violence of the game, the fountains of blood and claret being spilt and a huge moral outcry causing the birth of a games industry age rating system, it is unlikely that this game would have ever been anything more than a quick flash in the pan of unpopular gaming. However, with such high levels of public focus and attention, raising the name from an arcade discussion to international recognition which caused more people to go out and actually try to Sub Zero rip off someone's skull, this game became one of the most established franchises in the gaming industry for fighting games.

Not bad for some photos of cos-players and a few extra red pixels here and there, but as a game, I'd move on and look at the later instalments of the series. Particularly the #2 and #3 games. It has its place in history but it really should be left there to serve as a firm but flawed starting point.