Reader Reviews

Star Review: Dragontorc (Spectrum 48k)

by Mustardkid

It was 1985 and playgrounds up and down the country were alive with the rustling of satchels as kids frantically exchanged C90 tapes crammed with the latest spectrum and C64 games. This was the golden age of gaming, three billion games were released every day, all of them great, and you could even buy them at Boots the chemist! Anyway, during one such playground exchange a C90 tape was pressed into my hand, there then followed a prolonged bout of satchel rummaging before a sheaf of papers appeared, "you'll need this for Dragontorc". The papers were on first glance a collection of random numbers, and the second glance confirmed this, 6 sheets of A4 covered both sides in neatly written numerals, it was a copy protection code sheet, some loon had copied it by hand.

The word on the playground was that Dragontorc was shit. I thought I'd give it a try anyway.

Fast-forward 2 days, it was the first day of half term holiday, my parents had decided to decorate the downstairs and had crammed all of the furniture into the dining room. Perhaps it was because they were so busy arguing about wallpaper, or maybe it was because you had to crawl under a table to reach the corner where the telly was, but for whatever reason they failed to notice that their 14-year-old son was spending entire days hunched at a dangerously overheating Spectrum 48k.

Dragontorc had turned out to be very far from "shit". Using a walkthrough from Crash to guide me through the first few areas I had become totally immersed in what was the most involving game I had ever played. This was one of the proto arcade adventures, and considering the machine it was running on it was surprisingly advanced. It introduced a three dimensional world in which you guided the astral projection of a wizard, collecting spells, solving puzzles, and getting up to all sorts of pointy-hatted mischief. It was also pretty innovative, for instance there were the elves. Now bearing in mind that this was before the days of fancy AI, the elves were great, if you attacked them they'd fight you, but if you befriended them by giving the correct item, then they'd follow you about duffing up the other baddies. How cool is that for a Speccy game? The locations, although sparse, were somehow steeped in atmosphere and never before had the spites seemed so alive. I was obsessed with it, it owned me, I was most definitely Dragontorcs' bitch.