Taste the Power of My Sword (Golden Axe)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Golden Axe
Date:	01/10/05 (278 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun, excellent soundtrack, long-lasting

Disadvantages: Repetitive and limited

In the golden age of video game arcades, scrolling beat-em-ups loosely based on Masters of the Universe archetypes and Tolkienian fantasy lands earned companies like Konami millions from impressionable eighties youths’ pocket money. Perhaps the lord of all these ridiculously similar semi-violent offerings was Sega’s ‘Golden Axe,’ flawlessly converted to home computer format for Commodore’s Amiga 600.


PREMISE


Golden Axe is the story of three heroes, seeking out the evil knight Death Adder for revenge and plunder. One or two players rely on the characters’ brute strength, fighting tactics, magic powers and helpful monster transport as they charge through Death Adder’s evil, endlessly repeated minions in search for his castle.

Players can choose which of the three heroes suits their playing style and/or aesthetic preference. The characters are:

Ax-Battler – sword-wielding barbarian warrior in tight blue underwear
Tyrus Flare – busty valkyrie fighter, very sexy (if you are a bit strange)
Gilius Thunderhead – armed with the Golden Axe, this diminutive dwarf can execute deadly sweep attacks

Each character is master of elemental magic, obtained and improved by collecting potions looted from thieves. Most basic attack moves are as effective with all characters, meaning the difference between characters is more down to imagination than having any effect on the difficulty of the game, but crazily there was a time when details like that didn’t really matter and people would pump in the arcade tokens.


GAMEPLAY


The Amiga joystick controls the characters’ movements, the customary ‘up/forward’ action making the character jump and the fire triggers controlling physical attacks. The only additional, non-joystick commands are the keyboard’s ‘Enter’ and ‘P’ keys, unleashing magic and pausing the game respectively. Player 2 can be controlled by a joystick in the second port or, if you are enjoy an impossible challenge or are mad, the mouse can be used. The Amiga game came on one purple-labelled floppy disc and operated on the Amiga 500, 500+, 600, 1200 and 4000 desktop machines.

Presented as a sideways-scrolling, two-dimensional fighting adventure game, players move from left to right across varying terrain. Gameplay is centred on the area the characters inhabit, and progress can only be made once all the enemies of that screen have been destroyed, indicated by a klaxon and flashing arrow labelled ‘Go.’

Although there are occasional platforms and raised or lowered areas that players can choose between, the primary movements are left and right across the screen and up or down the ‘depth’ of the terrain to run around enemies. Novel aspects of the game include riding on wild, magical beats and using their natural fighting abilities in addition to your own, and striking the light-footed thieves to obtain food (health) and extra magic. Aside from these features, this plays as an average scrolling beat-em-up in the style of ‘Streets of Rage’ and Komani’s ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ offerings.


GRAPHICS & SOUND


This looks every bit the colourful 16-bit arcade game, each level roughly based on a different colour scheme in terms of the landscape and enemy characters but the brightness of the main characters and their magic attacks going more for a cartoon-like feel than the attempts at realistic shading in the sequels. Each character’s face is something of a shadowy blur due to the limited pixels, but the anatomy and size of the enemies in proportion is fairly accurate, excluding the occasional pint-sized runaway villager. Despite the repetition, enemies range from warriors of different types to clobbering giants, sinister skeletons and dragon riders. The text, used only sparingly and mainly in the interludes, is written clearly and precisely in what appears to be a blocky size 8 font.

A side of the game that deserves to be mentioned is the excellent soundtrack: synthesised at low quality, the melodies nevertheless manage to sound memorable, catchy and entirely relevant. As someone who owns the soundtrack on CD I may be taking this nostalgia thing a little too far, but the quasi-epic background music alternates between two excellent compositions, repeating over and over after lasting for somewhere in the region of one and a half minutes but never growing old. Of course other tracks are less impressive and border on frustratingly piercing, especially when high notes are attempted.

The in-game effects aren’t so impressive, play dominated by weapon swipes and the thuds of falling bodies but occasionally broken through with a badly recorded dying yelp. Basic sound effects are necessary for the enjoyment of a game like this, and Golden Axe performs adequately.


LONGEVITY


Golden Axe has passed the test of time, remaining as fun and addictive as it presumably was in 1989. Limitations of the time and format, such as the tiny playable area and repetition of the same four or five enemies in different coloured shirts throughout, now seem forgivably cute and nostalgic, not to mention the fact that this game can be obtained second-hand for next to no money at all from eBay or private sellers, or emulated for free.

The recent obsession with nostalgia on consoles such as Microsoft’s XBox makes a contemporary Golden Axe release plausible and even a little inevitable (seeing as they released ‘Gauntlet’), but a jazzy three-dimensional version would steal none of the original game’s charm. There's also no way it would be anywhere near as enjoyable.

A relic from a time when video games were just as expensive but simplistically addictive, and when men with huge torsos could be drawn in bright thongs and labelled ‘barbarians,’ Golden Axe is just as fun and frustrating for people of all ages today.

And axe-wielding dwarf Gilius Thunderhead is clearly best.

Summary: 'Streets of Rage' for He-Man, Conan and Manowar fans