Conan (1991)

Cover credited to Greg Winters.

Similar to the Conan game released by Datasoft, Mindscape's Conan for the NES was actually a different game to which they made some modest changes before they slapped the Conan branding on it. At least Datasoft's game was just a game they picked up before completion and publication, whereas Mindscape's was published under a different title on other platforms: Myth: History in the Making. 

Myth is another minor classic of old school PC gaming, mainly for the C64 and ZX Spectrum, although the Amiga version has a solid following as well. The 8-bit versions of Myth have some modest differences, but the gist is that a bored high school kid is suddenly called by the gods to battle evil in several time periods, facing enemies drawn from various mythologies such as the Greek, Egyptian, and Norse. The Amiga version altered the concept slightly so the hero is instead a more traditionally muscular, long-haired warrior. The NES version...uses Conan as the protagonist.

The gameplay is a mixture of action and puzzle-solving. You run and jump like in a regular platforming game, fending off attacks from randomly spawning monsters (like many old European games, the emphasis is more on managing your health as you absorb numerous unavoidable attacks from all sides, rather than avoiding hits entirely as tends to be the case in American and Japanese games). In the opening level, for instance, you have use magical attacks to slay monsters (those sword-wielding skeletons again) in the underworld until one drops a sword you can pick up, then you carry the sword to a particular place where a body is suspended from the ceiling by chains. You breaks the chains with the sword, causing the body to fall next to a sea of fire. After slaying this new enemy and causing its head to fall into the fire, a trident-wielding demon rises from the fire. After dispatching this demon, you pick up its trident, carry it until you meet a fire-breathing griffon, which you kill with a throw of the trident. This opens the way to the exit, and you're whisked off toe ancient Greece. It's a bit obtuse, but since your gameplay options are fairly limited you can persevere by simply blundering around until you accidentally hit on the right sequence of actions to take.

Conan of course makes no sense at all as a hero in these kinds of situations. Yeah, he's a man of action,  but he doesn't throw magic missiles around, he doesn't time travel, he isn't a pawn of gods. Even so, games can still be fun even if there's something weird about the concept, but the NES version isn't at all fun. The original computer versions have quirky gameplay (e.g., floaty jumping) but it's something that can be quickly acclimated to, but the NES version has horrific controls that make simply picking up the items you need more of a chore than it needs to be. You'd think pressing down on the controller would work well enough, but pushing down actually causes you to jump (pushing up also causes you to jump), so you have to hold down one of the attack buttons and then push down. The collision detection is lousy, so it's hard to get a sense of how close you need to be to enemies to fight them and the sword somehow seems to do even less damage to enemies than punching or kicking them. The imps that release health pick-ups, so crucial since you're under constant assault, are frustratingly elusive. That's just the first level, too. The graphics are poor, too, with the NES version looking even rougher than the Spectrum's despite the Spectrum's limited color palette. About the only positive is that there's music that could be worse. It's a port that shows many signs of laziness and sloppiness. Kind of like how Conan was treated in general in the media around that time.