Con-Quest Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]

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Developed by Derek Brewster (conversion by Tranz-Form) and published by Mastertronic in 1987.

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I've published a solution here: http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51868

Originally written for the Spectrum by Derek Brewster, Con-Quest is a puzzle/maze game converted to the C64 by Tranz-Form. I owned the game as a child, but the game was far too difficult for me to work out and so it languished at the bottom of my game pile and was rarely played. Over a quarter of a century later, I've gone back and finally beaten it!

Oscar's mansion has been overrun by a demon called Grell, who happens to have flooded the place with all manner of monstrous apparitions. The objective of the game is to aid Oscar in removing the demons from his home and banishing Grell back to the netherworld.

The mansion itself is a huge place with many rooms to explore. The rooms often contain items of interest such as locked chests, barred doors and, lest we forget, large numbers of phantoms and ghosts.

The game's manual gives the impression that the objective is to simply destroy things, but this is not the case. The real objective is to locate the items necessary to reach the room where Grell resides and to banish him; unfortunately, none of this is explained and the player is simply left to figure things out.

The game features an innovative by hellishly cumbersome and fiddly inventory system. The player must select the appropriate action by pressing the Shift/Z keys and select one of five item slots by using the A\S keys. Combine this with using a joystick to move around and you have one seriously clumsy control scheme (which is evident by then number of times I miss the desired action/item).

The game involves an horrendous amount of wandering, item management and back-tracking and will surely put off all but the most dedicated of players. It's also unclear as to which parts of the scenery are things that the player can interact with and those that are there for decoration.

As well as solving puzzles, the player must fend off a number of enemies using different weapons that can be found within the mansion. The only problem is that certain enemies can only be killed by specific weapons, so you will need to carry two if you want to be able to defeat anything you come across; this makes inventory management even tougher. The most deadly enemy you'll encounter is the snake as colliding with it can result in being poisoned; poison will eat away at your health unless you can find a healing potion in time.

Despite all the problems the game has, it's certainly very detailed and Derek Brewster should be commended for actually producing an intricate set of locations, items and actually have the game beatable; it would have been all to easy for the programmer to lose track of the solution and simply result in a dead end if not careful. There is also something oddly compelling about the game that drives you on when you make progress and is the only reason why I bothered to see the game through to completion.

It took me a good ten hours and at least two attempts to solve the game, but I've finally managed to do it and, as I don't expect you viewers to watch over two hours of me wandering through identical rooms, I will post a guide once I've written it up.

Con-Quest is certainly not a game for the faint of heart. If you can look past the terrible inventory system and steep learning curve then here is a very complex game that would definitely have given value for money in terms of content.
#retrogaming







Tags:
Con-Quest
Commodore 64 (Computer)
C64
Longplay
Playthrough
Solution
Ending
HD
Conquest