63 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
63 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
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ANCIENT LAND OF YS
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Here's something a bit different from Kyodai/Broderbund Software:
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an action/fantasy game that incorporates an almost complete
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arcade-style interface. What's different about ANCIENT LAND OF YS is
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that it comes from Japan, courtesy of a company that's dedicated to
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bringing Japan's greatest hits to North America. (This review is
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based on the IBM-PC version.)
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Most segments of YS are handled in an arcade style. For example, to
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fight an enemy, you run into him. There are no swing, parry, or
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defend commands; you just bump the enemy. Because the game depends
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mostly on action, there isn't much problem-solving to do, which
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quickly leads to boredom. The unoriginal plot involves going out,
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hunting down the evil wizard, and getting rid of the evil wizard.
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Basically, this is accomplished by building your character's stats,
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finding items that are necessary to your quest, and killing the bad
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guys.
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Your character is a warrior named Arick who must defeat Malificus.
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Malificus has stolen the six Books of Ys and is now using their
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powers to wreak havoc among the natives. You start out in the town
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of Minea. From here you journey across the land exploring temples,
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mines, villages, and towers. Oh, yes...fighting: There's quite a bit
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of that. (Maybe Japanese game players need more evil wizards, but we
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sure don't.)
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The graphics are fair. The people are small, so you can't really
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make out any detail. Some of the monsters are drawn very poorly: The
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Kaenine, which is supposed to be a dog-wolf, looks like a stick
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horse. However, the scenic graphics -- trees, landscape, water, and
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mountains -- look good. VGA/EGA mode is quite satisfactory, but CGA
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is not. On the back of the package, there is a small note regarding
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the "award-winning musical score." Obviously, Kyodai doesn't
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understand the limits of the IBM's sound capability. The sound that
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crawls out of the small speaker is certainly not what I'd call
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"award-winning." Since YS does not support any of the new sound
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cards, the noise won't get any better than this.
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ANCIENT LAND OF YS comes with disks in both 5-1/4" and 3-1/2"
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formats. It runs on IBM or 100% compatibles, and supports CGA, EGA,
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VGA, Tandy 16-color, and Hercules graphics modes. MS-DOS or PC-DOS
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2.1 or higher is required, along with 384K of free RAM. YS uses both
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the keyboard and joystick for control. The joystick works much
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better than the keyboard for navigating within the game. YS relies
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on key-disk copy protection, and can be installed on a hard drive.
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YS is entertaining for a brief period of time, but I quickly became
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bored with it. The graphics are unimpressive (although you won't go
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blind), and the sound is terrible. If you like arcade/fantasy
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games, you might enjoy YS. But if you're a hardcore CRPG player who
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wants an interesting game that'll last for months, look elsewhere.
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ANCIENT LAND OF YS is published by Kyodai and distributed by
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Broderbund.
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*****DOWNLOADED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253
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