KABUKI-Z (ARCADE)

In an attempt to force some culture into you philistines, today we're going to explore the fascinating world of Japanese theatre with Taito's 1988 arcade game Kabuki-Z. I hope you're ready to be thrilled by the spectacle!

Okay, it's not a very thrilling start, I'll grant you. Still, pondering the mystery of how this man's lower body came to be replaced by a big rock will hopefully be enough of a hook to draw you in.

Oh. So... not kabuki theatre, then? It's ritualised self-disembowelment instead. Okay, first things first, Taito, this makes Kabuki-Z a very misleading title. Secondly, that's quite a tone you're trying to set before the title screen has even appeared. I hope you've got the commitment to stick with it for an entire game. As for the chap performing the impromptu abdominal surgery, maybe the bloke behind holding the sword can speed things up a little.

There we go. He's killed the guy with the stone legs, his sword-swipes leaving a Z-shaped spray of blood on the wall like that "dark" and "gritty" Zorro reboot everyone's been clamouring for.

Shenron the Eternal Dragon looks on with a disinterested expression. He's probably expecting that guy to be wished back to life via the power of the Dragonballs any time now.
When I think of Taito, I tend to think of either cutesy platformers or cartoonish but relatively non-violent action games - Bubble Bobble, New Zealand Story, Chase HQ, those sorts of things. Based on the intro, I think we can safely assume that Kabuki-Z is not going to be one of those games. But what could it be? I doubt it's going to be a whole game about helping people who get stuck halfway through their attempts at seppuku. It doesn't feel like there'd be a lot of mileage in that, you know? It's my suspicion that Kabuki-Z might be a side-scrolling hack-and-slash adventure.

Well, would you look at that. Scrolling sideways, hacking and slashing at things. What a prediction, I'd better hurry and start my own astrology website. Aries: while work commitments are piling up, a chance encounter may lead to romance. Remember that Ghost Rider cosplayers are not to be trusted and you should hack and / or slash them. Your lucky colour is blue.
The first thing I noticed as I threw myself into the action is that the player character doesn't really walk. He moves around, sure, but he doesn't move his legs. He just kind of... wiggles his feet, so either his ankles have the power of a deep-sea oil drill or there's no friction at all on the floor and the slightest movement is all that's needed to send him on his way.

It looks even more ridiculous when you move around while crouching, gliding across the stone floor of the Giant Samurai Armour Storage Dimension in a pose that suggests our hero was intending to actually propose to that skeleton but somehow things got way out of control and now they're fighting to the death. Best of all, being in the crouching pose is often the best way to approach fights in Kabuki-Z, so you'll see a lot of the hero in this position but with nary a kneepad to be had, the poor bastard.

After fighting a few - and I do mean "a few," because this is a very short stage - fairly harmless skeletons, this guy and his massive Christmas trousers appears to spoil everyone's fun. He's trying to put the Kabuki in Kabuki-Z, as well as trying to put his tiny sickles into my body. Why are your sickles so tiny, kabuki man? Did you forget to convert from Imperial to Metric when you were building them? Do you have an elaborate ritual for preparing watercress when you're making a salad?
Having accepted that I'm unlikely to unravel the mystery of the kabuki man, I went in for the kill, only to find he could block my attacks. In fact, he was really good at blocking my attacks, and as I struggled to land to land a telling blow he kept spawning tiny blue demons that would cling to my bosom and presumably nuzzle around trying to find a milk-bearing nipple. Fortunately, I figured out the boss' weakness before I could be completely drained of my life essence.

Kabuki man likes to jump. He's really good at it, too, sailing high into the air and covering about two screen-widths of distance at his most energetic. However, he doesn't attack while he's jumping - too busy concentrating on his totally sweet backflips, no doubt - so as he lands you can get near him and stab him in the back at no risk to your own safety.

Immediately after beating kabuki man, you're thrown straight into a battle with an armoured skeleton who learned his swordsmanship from the heaviest hitters in major league baseball. Look at the swing on that guy! He's going for a home run, no doubt. He's gonna send me out past the bleachers, a real smash drive into the fourth quadrant and look, I know nothing about baseball beyond it being American Cricket, okay?
A far more dangerous opponent than the kabuki man, the skeleton forced me to look a bit closer at Kabuki-Z's combat system, and it's more complex than it might first appear. There's one button to swing your sword, but the other button isn't jump. Pressing both buttons does make you jump, and like the kabuki man's jump it's a physically impressive but completely useless jump (unless you get pinned right in the corner, I suppose). No, the second button changes your stance, when combined with a directional input on the joystick. Down and the button puts up into the crouching state, which works on a toggle and not by holding down on the joystick, while up on the joystick raises your hands so you attack in an overhead chopping motion. Do not use this stance, because it severely reduces the range of your attacks. Does it make your hits do more damage? I haven't got a clue, I never managed to hit any of the bosses with it and all the regular grunts die in one hit.

It's an interesting system, because the bosses also have these three stances, and the aim of combat is to hit the boss while they're in a different stance to you. If you're in the same stance, such as in the screenshot above where the skeleton would be justified in accusing our hero of cheating during the squatting contest, the boss will block your attacks. So, you've got to focus on the rather difficult task of evading the boss' attacks and striking when they're out of position. Or, and this strategy works for about three-quarters of the game's bosses, stay out of their way until they jump and stab them in their undefended backs as they land. Look, if they're stupid enough to not play to their strengths - range, power, remembering to bring kneepads - then I have no hesitation in taking the easy way out.

Having emerged triumphant, it's a simple mater of lopping the boss' head off in a clean, efficient manner so I can move on to stage two. And it is surprisingly clean, for a decapitation, although I guess the presence of blood means the boss wasn't a skeleton after all. Oh well, he will be soon enough.

The first part of stage two is on fire, and I swear it was like this when I got here. The same skeletons as before scamper through the burning building, desperate to divest themselves of their leather catsuits before the sweltering heat causes them to pass out but prevented by modesty from doing so. Jets of flame occasionally burst up through the floorboards, although they present even less threat than the enemies. So zero threat, then.

Eventually you fall through the floor, and the house's basement / underground corpse pile is patrolled by these capering clowns, who provide further evidence that Kabuki-Z's artist had never seen a human walk. They move in a jaunty, sideways, high-kneed gait, like a crab at a ska gig. It's a shame you can't decapitate these guys, too. Then I could shout "pick it up, pick it up!" as their heads roll around on the ground.

Bosses in Kabuki-Z come around quicker than tasteless jokes after a major tragedy, and here's another: a samurai wearing red whom I suspect went to the same sword-fighting school as me. He was clearly a better student, mind you, and he represents a huge step up in difficulty from the first stage. If you swing and miss while fighting him, you will be punished, so if you intend on fighting him properly - that is, not by exploiting his jumps - then you're in for a rough time.

I like that when you die, your head is surrounded by the spinning blue demons from earlier, as though you've not so much died as succumbed to a hangover caused by drinking Satan's bathwater. What I don't like is that you only have one life and you're sent back to the beginning of the stage if you continue. It didn't take long to get back to the boss - whittling down his health for a second time was a different story - but I did manage to deplete his health bar.

Doing so causes a bony facehugger-looking thing to scuttle onto the screen and attach itself the boss, reviving him while also making it impossible for him to ever wear a coat again. Was the monster just biding its time? Has it been waiting for years for someone to come along and stab this guy just the right amount so it can latch on and start a new life as the world's most useless backpack? I wish I had answers for you, folks, I really do. Instead I can only pass on the information that the symbiosis allows the boss to curl up like an armadillo and roll at you, which I'm not sure is a power worth dying for.

I like the scenery in stage three. The decision to stick the moon in the middle of a field of flowers is an odd one, granted, but I think it gives the scene a strange, dreamlike quality - a quality that is only enhanced by Kabuki-Z's slightly wonky gameplay, which sometimes sees our hero jerking around, teleporting short distances and occasionally being unable to turn around. It was at this point I realised that Kabuki-Z has a lot in common with Taito's Gladiator, AKA Great Gurianos, which in turn owed a lot to Great Swordsman. Like Gladiator, it features very short stages that are merely warm-ups for a series of boss battles, using combat that tries for something more complex than the usual side-scrolling brawler mechanics. Kabuki-Z, then, seems to represent another attempt by Taito to refine this concept, although with not much success, I'm afraid. What was presumably intended to be flowing, dynamic swordfight is instead a dull experience in poking at enemies and exploiting the same weaknesses repeatedly. The weirdness of the setting mitigates this somewhat, mind you.

Here's another boss, a sort of hunchbacked, quadrupedal ape-man. Yet another mysterious figure in the unexplained world that is Kabuki-Z, he threw a projectile at me but I walk past it and slashed him repeatedly until he died, making this the easiest boss in the entire game and the only one where I didn't struggle to make my character stand up properly after accidentally having him crouch.

The boss isn't quite finished, however. Once you kill him, a pair of smaller and much more deadly bosses burst out of his corpse in a pleasingly gory fashion. If I'd known the ape-man was little more than a diabolical piñata, I would have just run past him.

Instead I have to fight his children, or hideous parasites, or whatever they're supposed to be. I don't know what they're meant to be, but I know what they are, and that's extremely annoying. They bounce and tumble around the screen taking potshots at you and making it very clear that Kabuki-Z is not a game that's built around the player fighting more than one opponent at a time. They kinda remind me of Wilykit and Wilykat from Thundercats. This is probably because they're annoying.

After dealing with the twins, our hero is struck by lightning and transported to the next stage. What helpful lightning! It didn't just move him through space, either...

...it gave him a whole new wardrobe, too! Seems that lightning is into some pretty kinky stuff. Maybe it swapped my clothes with someone else's, and somewhere out there the very confused patron of a bondage dungeon is wondering why he's suddenly dressed like a samurai. The new outfit comes with a shield, which is nice, but I definitely preferred my previous get-up. You'll get no judgement from me if S&M is your bag, but I hate sitting on leather sofas so the idea of having my most tender areas snugly bundled up in a leather posing pouch is very upsetting to me. Also, look at those tiny boots. So teeny!
I think it's fair to say that so far, Kabuki-Z has been a weird game. There are tiers of weirdness, though. There's "murderous twin children hatching from a monster's back" weird, there's "sudden leather daddy transformation" weird...

...and then there's "attacked by rocket-propelled chess pieces" weird, which is a whole new level of strangeness and one that I'm fully on-board with. I went into this game expecting to be fighting demons and malformed creatures of darkness, but not expecting an assault by Garry Kasparov's elite ground forces, and in this instance it's nice to be taken by surprise.

The boss is a knight, but sadly not the chess piece of the same name. No, it's just a bloke in armour. Well, his top half's in armour, at least. I've detected a promising area of attack, let's put it that way. But where is our hero? He's jumping around, off the top of the screen. You can just about see his sword poking downwards near that pillar, which is new: the change in costume means that he now thrusts downwards with his sword during his jumps although, much like with the overhand attacks, I never managed to hit anything with it and I think it might just be a cosmetic change. That's not to say he's the same warrior as before, oh no - the addition of the shield means some of his moves have changed, and more interestingly you can now properly block enemy attacks with your shield. If you manage to do so, you opponent is momentarily stunned - represented in-game by their sprite rapidly vibrating, as though they recently licked a plug socket - and if you're very lucky you might even be able to land a free hit while they're recovering. It's an odd decision on Taito's part to suddenly change the basic combat at this late stage of the game, and not a wholly successful one. This fighting style is more interesting - more involved, certainly - than the first, and if it had been present from the start of the game then Kabuki-Z probably would have been better for it.

The end of the stage is guarded by another knight. This one is significantly larger, he remembered to put all of his armour on, his shield could double as a surfboard and he's using a lance. This means he spends most of the fight charging at you, so there's finally a reason to jump. Other than that, he's not very interesting, and soon you'll arrive at the final stage.

And here it is - a vaguely Egyptian land with strange geometric buildings and scimitar-wielding bandits. There are also a couple of instant-death pits knocking around. If there's one thing this game really did not need it was the sudden introduction of platforming elements, so it's a relief that there are only two or three holes total. The most interesting thing here is that the enemies appear to be wearing rubber gloves. Given the general slimy unpleasantness of Kabuki-Z's environments, I'd say that's a good call.

The mid-boss is a big man with a hammer, and ever since I was ambushed by the drag-racin' chess squad the villains of Kabuki-Z are rapidly becoming less and less interesting. Okay, so this guy can summon flaming devil heads to get in my way and I think anyone would have a hard time putting such a feat into the "not interesting" category, but other than that he is just a big man with a hammer.

After a long and arduous struggle - the struggle to find a decent range to attack from, mostly - Kabuki-Z reaches its dénouement with this final boss. Let's call him Johnny Four-Swords. I'd be more enthused about the fight if there'd been any indication of who this guy is, what his goals are and why he's got dinosaur feet. None of that is offered by the game, so we'll just have to accept the usual boilerplate answer of "he's a demon lord who wants to enslave the world." He's not even an interesting opponent to fight against, because he's little more than a whirling blender of swords that will strip your health bar if you get too close to him. I'll be honest, I cheated to beat him. Not because I couldn't beat him, but because it was taking forever to do legitimately and it wasn't any fun. That's the sad thing about Kabuki-Z: there's the basics of a decent game in here somewhere. The setting, especially early on, is bizarre and gory enough to stand out, and with more refinement the block / parry / slash flow of the combat could have made for an exciting, tense action game. As it stands, Kabuki-Z feels unfinished, or at the very least incredibly rushed, and missing the vital extra polish that could have made a sub-par game an engaging one.

There goes Johnny Four-Swords. He died as he lived: in a gushing torrent of blood. Well, now that I've completed Kabuki-Z, maybe the ending will fill me in on some of the story, or at least present some reward for our hero?

Or not. You know when I said this game feels unfinished? Yeah.

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SWORD MASTER (NES)

Today's game is Athena's 1992 NES poke-em-up Sword Master, and I'll tell you now that the title does not refer to the game's hero. He can stab his sword straight forward and swing it in an overhead chop, and that doesn't seem like it should be enough for mastery. No, he's more of a Sword Journeyman. A Sword Enthusiastic Amateur, if you will. Let's hope basic proficiency is enough to see him through this adventure.

Not much razzle-dazzle in evidence on the title screen - the logo's a little art nouveau and it's on fire, but it's not doing much to capture my interest. Here's hoping that the plot is a little less generic.

It's an evil wizard, communing with a magic mirror. I don't think I'm making too much of an assumption on this wizard's morality, he's wearing a robe made from scorpion parts and my nan's old curtains. You wouldn't see Gandalf in something like that.

Here's the wizard up close. He's grumpy because he ordered his hoodie online without properly checking the sizing chart. He looks like he's performing his dark enchantments from inside a swing bin, and not even wearing his favourite Ninja Turtles bandanna can cheer him up.

Then a young lady, who is has a ninety-five percent chance of being a princess, is abducted so I guess my hopes for a non-clichéd plot are cruelly dashed. Oh well, it's not that important. Super Mario Bros. 3 has the same plot as Super Mario Bros. 1, and it's one of the best games ever made. Warning: Sword Master is not as good as SMB3. I'm sure you'd already guessed that, but I didn't want to get your hopes up by accident.

Our hero stands atop a cliff, pointing his sword at a distant castle. "I am going to that castle," his posture seems to say, "and I will stab every single thing that I find there, be it man, beast or hideous man-beast." He's a real go-getter, so he is. I hope he brought some comfortable shoes for his upcoming hike through the forest, though. Maybe a cereal bar or something to keep his energy levels up.

And we're off, with our mighty tangerine-coloured warrior hacking his way through a flock of bats. I know a lot of NES games can be described as walking from left to right and hitting things, but that's an even more accurate description than usual in Sword Master's case because you can't turn around. Always facing his goals with unshakeable conviction, that's our hero. As for the hitting things part, unsurprisingly you use a sword. There's a normal forwards stab, a crouching poke for all your hamstring-severing needs and holding up on the D-pad while you attack performs an overhead swing that does slightly more damage but leaves you a little more vulnerable. You've also got a shield, so often overlooked by videogame knights on a righteous quest, and you can hold it high or low to block projectiles. For now, though, I'm simply using a lot of jumping overhand slashes to kill these bats, bats that don't seem particularly invested in attacking the player. If you ignore them they'll fly right past you, but I didn't start playing a game called Sword Master to not hit things with a sword. Anyway, they're bats and this is a videogame so they're obviously evil, demonic bats and they'll surely be up to no good when they get where they're going. I'm just saving some other poor adventurer from having to deal with them later

A skeleton approaches! It approaches quite slowly, the illusory musculature provided by whatever foul necromancer is animating it being no match for being alive, but here it comes and it's determined to run me through with the breadstick it's carrying. This is something of a mini-boss battle, as the screen stops scrolling once the skeleton appears and won't start moving again until you emerge triumphant. This is the general pattern of Sword Master, then: short sections spent chopping up minor enemies and negotiating some light platforming action, interspersed with a large number of one-on-one fights with tougher foes. Not that the skeleton is much of a challenge. Just bait out his stabs and then bonk him on the head. It's the only way a skeleton will learn.

As our lone warrior makes his way through a dark forest on his way to a castle, while being attacked by bats and skeletons, it's very difficult not to make a comparison between Sword Master and Castlevania. Clearly Athena took some inspiration from Konami's classic when they were putting Sword Master together, and that's fine by me because Castlevania is great and I love a horror-themed videogame. However, where Castlevania's stages are tight, expertly-assembled areas that require players to find a certain aggressive rhythm in order to progress, the constant miniboss encounters of Sword Master make it a much more stop-start affair, and thus the Castlevania influence doesn't extend far beyond the aesthetic. It's a nice aesthetic, though.

Now it's time to fight a big blue chap. I was going to call him a Cyclops, but I can't tell how many eyes he has. He doesn't seem big enough to be a giant, and he's a bit too monsterish to be a barbarian, so I don't know what he is. Apart from "angry," I mean. Fighting him is very similar to fighting the skeleton, although this battle is much tougher because the collision detection on his club is not very good, and you'll keep getting tagged by it even though you're sure you're far enough away. Weirdly, it was only this creature's club that I had problems with on that front, and almost all the other attacks in the game have solid, predictable hitboxes. Let's just pretend his club is surrounded by a foetid aura of corruption. Given that the only place he has to store his club when he's not using it is inside his loincloth, I don't think that's too much of a stretch.

The end of the stage is guarded by a wizard, and his purpose is to teach you how to block projectiles with your shield. He loves projectiles, does the wizard. Horizontal projectiles, projectiles fired diagonally upwards, a rain of projectiles that assault you from above, he's a regular Projectile Master. I'd want to keep the man with the sword as far away from me as possible if I was an old man in a robe, too, and while it was working well for the wizard at first I soon learned that I can crouch-walk forwards with my shield raised and that was the end of the wizard.

Stage two is a village on the castle's outskirts, inhabited by zombies, zombies with no legs that have adapted the breaststroke for non-aquatic purposes and the Lost Souls from Doom, although thankfully they're much less aggressive than Doom's flaming skull-monsters.

There's also some platforming. The village's potholes are running out of control, and to top it off they're being patrolled by these indestructible floating eyeballs because gravity alone apparently wasn't enough of a challenge for a man in full plate armour. It's a little aggravating that these eyeballs are indestructible, mind you. Of all the body parts you'd think could be dealt with by the decisive thrust of a blade, eyeballs would be near the top of the list. They should have been hovering thighs, something with a bit of substance to them.

The village exit is patrolled by a knight, and I'm annoyed that he looks cooler than my knight. I think it's the red plume sticking out of his helmet, it gives him a certain je ne sais quoi that my "medieval advertisement for Tango" look does not possess.
The knight has the same reach as you and is a bit more intelligent than the skeletons, so here's where you need to start paying attention if you want to progress in Sword Master. The one-on-one fights make up the bulk of the game, and they quickly become very challenging - but crucially they (mostly) don't feel too horrendously cheap. There are patterns to be learned and movements to be exploited, and if you're looking for a retro game that demands you take the time to learn you opponent's moves, then Sword Master might just be a good bet for you. As for the knight, I had a lot of success with jumping at him and doing the overhead slash while moving backwards in mid-air, which most of the time put me just outside of stabbing range when I landed.

The knight dropped an icon of a shepherd's crook when I defeated him. Have I condemned a flock of sheep to a lingering death on some distant hillside, uncared for and forgotten now that their owner is dead?

Never mind, it was actually a magic wand that allows our hero to transform into a wizard by pressing the select button. The comparisons between Sword Master and Castlevania grow even stronger, because you can also switch to a white-robed mage by pressing select in Castlevania 3, assuming you recruited Sypha on your travels.
Becoming a master of magic allows for an extra revenue stream when you hire yourself out for kid's birthday parties, as well as letting you launch short-range magical bolts from you hands. You can charge the bolts up by holding down the button, too, although your magic is limited: bafflingly, the amount of magic you have is determined by how full your experience bar is. Defeating the lesser enemies between the one-on-one fights slowly fills your experience bar, which is maddeningly not called you magic bar or mana bar or anything having to do with wizardy. If I didn't have the compulsion to press every button on the pad now and then I might never have realised I even had magic powers, and someone playing Sword Master without the manual to hand could easily go through the whole game without ever realising their hidden power. But what can I use my hidden power on?

Ah, Godzilla, you'll do. He shoots fire out of his mouth, I shoot fire out of my hands, that seems like a fair contest... although I think I would have been better off using the sword. The sword doesn't cost magic - sorry, experience - points and has about the same range as the My First Conjuration projectiles the staff provides you with.

The sword is definitely the better option for fighting this lizardman, because he just kept jumping over my projectiles and kicking me in the head like he'd learned all his moves by playing the Ninja Turtles arcade game. Switching between Knight and Wizard modes is fast, but it's a shame it's not slightly faster: it would have been very satisfying to bait the lizardman into jumping over my projectile, only to find that I'd switched to the sword while he was in mid-air and he's suddenly jumping towards an experiment in determining just how good lizards really are at regrowing severed body parts.

Sword Master is not shy about throwing the same monsters at you over and over again, and in this stage you must re-triumph over the knight and the wizard before reaching the end-of-stage guardian. It's the wizard again, but he's supplement his magical attack with a bloody great axe. An axe that he can shoot magic out of. He's a traitor to every set of fantasy game tropes imaginable. Wizards can't use axes, that's not fair. Was he listening to the the blasphemous tome of the ancient sorcerers on audiobook while he did the strength training necessary to build an axe-wielding physique? I think not.
Complaints aside, I rather like the design of the axe-wizard, and of all the enemies in general. They're clean, bold sprites that have a pleasing fantasy look to them, almost like they're based on action figures from a non-existent "Dungeon Fighters!" toyline. Sword Master is a very competently designed, solidly-built game in many regards - graphically it's very impressive, sprite flicker aside, and it's even got parallax scrolling, a rarity for a NES game. The music is above average, with plenty of high-tempo, driving tracks that are a perfect accompaniment to cracking skeleton skulls, even if they never quite approach the quality of Konami or Capcom's action game soundtracks. There's even a voice clip of your character shouting "Huuh!" when you swing your sword, and it takes a surprisingly long to for it to become irritating.

The next stage is all about jumping, and jumping is something that Sword Master has a strange relationship with. For starters, you sometimes jump higher than usual, and I couldn't figure out why. Apparently there's a line in the manual that states "hitting the jump button consecutively allows you to extend your jumps," but doesn't explain what it means by "consecutively." I tried timing my jumps just as I landed from a previous jump, a la Super Mario 64, and I also tried franticly hammering the button at random intervals, neither of which produced consistent results. In the end I put it down to certain parts of the castle's stone floor being springier than others. Luckily you're never forced to use the high jump.
The other odd quirk is that, especially in the later stages, it's rare that you'll make a jump and land solidly on the other platform. Instead you'll hit the edge and spend a moment or two falling off (and kinda through) the platform, but if you press jump again while this is happening you can become airborne once more and nail the landing. At first it seems that Sword Master simply demands pixel-perfect jumping skills, but scrabbling for purchase on the edges of platforms happened so often - and was so consistent - that I've come to believe it was an intentional gameplay mechanic, a sort of half-hearted effort to include Ninja Gaiden-style wall-jumps into the game, and as such it's much less frustrating that it seems like it's going to be the first time you slide into oblivion despite clearly getting your toes on the platform.

The jumping in Sword Master isn't all peaches and rainbows, however. I was stumped for quite a while on this jump, where every attempt I made ended with me hitting the eyeball and either falling to my death or being knocked back onto the platform I just came from. In the end, I had to look it up. Turns out the solution is that you have to walk off the platform, underneath the ball, and then simply jump up off the thin air you're standing on to make it to the next platform. Of course, why didn't I think of that?! I'm really glad this opaque bullshit is the solution, I'd have felt bad if there was a glaringly obvious way past the eyeball that I just wasn't getting.

Ah, I see it was Satan himself who arranged these accursed platforms! Slow day in Hell, was it? Honestly, I don't think this is the Prince of Lies. All he does is hover around the top of the screen dropping three easily-avoided projectiles at a time. It's more impish than Satanic, and it makes this boss considerably easier than most of the previous creatures I've faced. I'm not complaining: I saw I was about to fight a flying red devil-monster and I had a sudden traumatic flashback to Ghosts 'n Goblins, so the fight ended up being a huge relief.

Things have calmed down a little now our hero has reached the castle itself, and it's back to the usual slaying of bats and mini-boss battles on a flat, open level. This is a good time to mention that I've picked up another couple of spells on my travels, which can be switched between when the game is paused. Their uncharged versions are still projectiles, but the "explosion" power has the notable effect of making a bunch of explosions appear if you charge it up. You'll, erm, just have to trust me that there are multiple explosions.

There's not much to say about this knight with a spiked flail. He's red, he's fast and he loves to merrily gad around the castle like the Prince of the Elven Folk. I was so taken by his rambunctious energy that I too leapt into the air, hoping for a graceful aerial battle between two honourable combatants, but he's a cheating git whose armour is apparently much better than mine, so I ended up waiting on the round and stabbing him pettily in the ankles.

There's also a dragon. It's hard to summon up any enthusiasm for this dragon, because earlier I fought a dragon that looked much more like Godzilla and less like a regular dragon that's learned to walk unconvincingly on its hind legs.

As I entered the next stage and crept past the castle's spike traps and roaming slimes, (do slimes roam? Ooze, perhaps,) I was reminded less of Castlevania and more of the NES port of Dragon's Lair - but a NES Dragon's Lair that isn't a hateful exercise in frustration orchestrated by people who wouldn't recognise the concept of fun if it came up to them, grabbed them firmly by their pubic hair and said "hi, I'm the concept of fun and you have wronged me." I think it's the purple brickwork that does it.

The boss is a barbarian, certainly more of a barbarian than the blue troll from the first stage. Why, he's got an axe and everything! He's also got the power to completely ignore the wall of lightning I sent towards him using my new lightning spell. I'm not even sure it hurt him. He didn't act like it hurt, but I confess I don't know how people usually react when they're stuck by lightning. Say "ouch," fall over, sizzle a bit, not necessarily in that order? Whatever the case, the boss did none of these thing, opting instead to embed his axe into my skull as though he's mistaken me for a good source of winter firewood. It's a difficult battle, as are all the battles by this point in the game, mostly because the bosses now have much larger health bars and you have to concentrate for longer when one lapse will see you lose half your health. Did I mention that he can throw his axe like a boomerang? Because he can. We're going to have to stop using the word "barbarian" to describe thoughtless killers, because the level of aerodynamic engineering needed to produce a boomerang axe is the very opposite of thoughtless.

I couldn't help it. It happened by instinct, instinct honed by years spent trying to beat Dracula to death with a whip. I tried to hit the candle, to see if there was a power-up inside. Never have I felt so completely beholden to the media I consume, so thanks for this grim psychological awakening, Sword Master.

This guy is definitely the Sword Master of the title. His sword's made of fire! He can even turn it on and off like a lightsaber. Which he does, repeatedly, the big show-off. Of course, you don't get the title of Sword Master just for carrying around an oversized sparkler: you've got to have the moves, too, which this boss does. Specifically, he has the move where he ignores all my attacks and attempts to char-grill me from the inside. The old Texas BBQ Enema, that's his MO.

Then there's another knight. This one eschews the golden fripperies and flaming swords of his confederate and instead batters you to death with a chunk of metal on a stick in a manner you'd describe as "workmanlike," if relentless unscheduled trepanation is a kind of work. I tried keeping my distance from the nice man with the whacking stick, hoping maybe we could talk our way through his anger issues, but his mace is spring-loaded and will fire spikes at you if you try to give him some space.

And then there's this prick. Goddamn wizards, man. All I wanted to do was hack at him with my sword but no, he kept creating his own walls of electricity that - guess what - knocked me back when they hit me, a property that my lightning walls most certainly did not possess. If only I had some way to hit him from a distance...

Oh, you like magic, do you? Well then, have all the magic you can eat! I know it looks like I'm throwing spaghetti at you but this is pure magical pain, you old bastard! Sword Master? More like Problem-Solving Master!

Oh hey, it's the wizard from the intro. Overall I've been complimentary about the enemy design in this game, but that's not really good look, is it? Like he graduated from Wizard College only to be immediately crushed by a steamroller. A forlorn Christmas ornament. A bootleg Harry Potter bookmark from a Hong Kong market stall. Not threatening, is what I'm saying, and he's not all that good at fighting. Weirdly enough, when an enemy is flying in Sword Master it puts you at an advantage, because you can walk under them rather than being pinned in the corner by the likes of the knights. Sure, the wizard produces more fireballs than a dragon with hiccups, but you can block them all fairly easily and hit him with a jumping slash when there's a break in the bombardment. What a disappointing way to end the game.

Except it's not the end of the game, and I'm forced to eat my words as the real final boss appears and proceeds to initiate me into an endless maelstrom of death. This demon likes projectiles. Really likes them, and all manner of lightning bolts and fireballs constantly spew from every part of his anatomy that we can see. Presumably they also spew from the parts we can't see and his demonic wang is like a literal fire hose, so I'm counting my blessings that I just have to deal with his head and hands. To damage him, you must attack the mirror on the right of the screen, but you can't get near the mirror when you're constantly being slammed by a wall of dark magic. In the end I had to cheat, which was a shame because up until this point Sword Master had been a tough game but generally a fair one, where learning enemy patterns and adapting your tactics would eventually, with practise, lead to victory. This just feels like a big "screw you," though. Is it doable? I'm sure it is, but only doable by people with far more time and patience than me. So, with Game Genie to the rescue and evil mirror smashed, Sword Master can draw to a close.

Maiden status: rescued, presumed grateful. Time to take her back to wherever she was kidnapped from and eschew any offered reward, for a Sword Master yearns only for the clash of steel in chivalrous combat, preferably in a distant land where people haven't figured out how to throw fireballs. Oh, and maybe some new armour that makes him look less like a mechanical carrot.

Sword Master is a game that demands patience and dedication if you want to make much progress, but is it worth it? I'd say it just about is, final boss excluded. It's a well-made example of the genre, with solid gameplay and a nice look to it. It's not a great game - it's too derivative and stop-start for that - but it can be a fun game, so if you're looking for a retro game to sink your teeth into then that's definitely on offer here. Just try not to think too hard about the Sword Master's relationship with gravity.

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