Barbarian

Authors

Stanley Schembri and Steve Brown

Publisher

Palace Software (Superior Software on BBC)

Year of Release

1987

Format

Commodore 64 (version reviewed), Spectrum 48k, Amstrad CPC, BBC

Wub Rating

Arousing. In more ways than one.

Whoever was running Palace Software in 1987 must have been some kind of marketing genius. Realising that the vast majority of gamers were men, or rather boys, in their early teens then what better way to guarantee a hit than to publish a game with the perfect excuse for a marketing campaign featuring a scantily clad Maria Whittaker (oh and that guy from Gladiators but really who cares). As I said: a genius.

Full page full colour adverts showing the aforementioned Ms. Whittaker and her ample assets tempted gamers to part with their cash and once purchased similar imagery could be found on the tape inlay in place of more traditional box art. Handy as there's only so many times a young man can fumble through the lingerie pages of the Littlewoods catalogue - after all that had to be shared with dad!

Fortunately as well as pandering to adolescent desires Barbarian was an entertaining game in its own right. You play the titular barbarian who has to defeat the evil sorceror Drax and his henchmen. If you don't he'll get to have his wicked way with Maria. To get to Drax you have to fight your way past a series of increasingly difficult opponents and then take on Drax himself. To emerge victorious involves much joystick wiggling. There is a move assigned to each of the eight directions which lets you move around and perform knock downs of your opponent. If the fire button is pressed at the same time then the actions become offensive letting you swing your sword at your opponent in a variety of ways giving a total of 16 possible moves. As well as a single player mode you could also go up against one of your friends in a two player game.

So far so standard but Barbarian set itself aside from the crowd in its brutality. It actually felt fierce and weighty with swords swinging and blood being shown when you land a blow. And your opponents aren't just knocked out only to get back to there feet for a dignified bow but instead they are killed. After defeating your opponent you'd be rewarded by a hunchbacked little goblin shuffling onto the screen, snickering and dragging the corpse away. Barbarian also featured a "killer move": the decapitation. Land this strike and your opponents head would be sliced clean off tumbling to the floor and to add further insult to injury the goblin would kick the head off the screen like a football. As you might have gathered if released today the game would probably be subject to an age restriction but in the 80s the rating of games hadn't yet been introduced.

On the Commodore 64 this is all delivered with large detailed sprites and lots of animation. To the modern beat'em'up fan controls will feel a little sluggish and unresponsive but be fair to the Barbarian you can't be nimble when you're packing that much muscle. Its still worth checking out today but more as an example of a good 8-bit fighter than as a game that has aged well.