This was one tough little cookie. The characters we’re brilliantly animated & the maps huge & took ages to traverse.
While some people found the control system too unforgiving. Especially in a time when Super Mario 2 was defining how platform games we’re going to feel.
This game itself offered a open ended world to explore, with a great variety of well designed bad guys in it to destroy.
The game was released by a company called Firebird, which was actually a software division of BT (British Telecom), I bet you didn’t know that!
Oh man, I actually hated this game… but my brother loved it for some reason. Loaded it up on an emulator recently as an example for an emulator or something (can’t even remember why that exactly) and it hasn’t got any easier to play in the intervening 20 years or so. Could hardly even convince the guy to climb the stairs.
Firebird, though… they made some of the weirdest and most interesting games, the sort of thing you only see from indies and on XBLA and the like these days, rather than from relatively big name publishers. One of these days I hope to have time to figure out how to actually play their game of the journeys of the young buddha on the road to enlightenment, “Golden Path”… was just a bit too impatient back in the day.
*just as a random example game, I mean.
Black Lamp was really a love it or hate it game.
From back in the days where we only got a tiny number of games per year. I think some games got a little more time & devotion than they would these days..