Storm (1987)

 

Mastertronic's Storm is essentially a Gauntlet clone. Storm is an axe-wielding warrior whose wife, Corrine, has been kidnapped by the wizard Una Cum, presumably for some nefarious experiment. Storm and his own wizard buddy, Agravain Undead (?) invade Una Cum's castle to battle through the creatures and traps to rescue Corrine before Una Cum returns from his excursion to seek a magical box known as "The Fear."

So two players can simultaneously play as Storm or Agravain. Much like Gauntlet, the action takes place from an overhead perspective and each room of the castle features a number of generators that spawn monsters that attack the heroes. Food, armor, and keys can be found, in addition to magical items that can be used to annihilate every enemy surrounding you at critical times. To actually win the game, the player must find three snake brooches that will unlock the door to Una Cum's laboratory. Walking over runes on the floor will trigger changes in the rooms, such as traps or creating openings to deeper parts of the castle. It's a game that encourages mapping things out to figure the best path through the castle.

The game lacks the voice sampling in Gauntlet, so it compensates by having a scroll of text running at the top of the screen, which in some cases replicates the voices in Gauntlet ("Save keys to open doors"), but mostly provides atmospheric descriptions of each room ("A beautifully ornamented atrium lies in slight disrepair..."), which is helpful because the graphics are ugly and don't convey much. Most of the game seems drenched in various shades of brown and orange.

The game would basically be fine if it played like Gauntlet, but for some strange reason the programmers chose to use tank controls for the movement, so you have to push forward on the joystick to go forward, while pushing left or right will turn the character. It makes it needlessly confusing just to navigate the rooms. Perhaps this was a tactic to increase the difficulty.

It must be said that the game has some very nice introductory music by David Whittaker, especially the Atari version. The C64's SID chip is renowned as possibly the greatest sound chip ever made, but skilled composers like Whittaker could get some very nice results from the Atari computer's POKEY chip as well.