Death Stalker Walkthrough, ZX Spectrum

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RZX Archive

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Published on August 1, 2016 5:31:41 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAQYpW2CHFY

Game:

Treasure Island Dizzy (1987)

Category:

Walkthrough

Duration: 34:23

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A walkthrough of the ZX Spectrum game, Death Stalker. From the recording originally sent to http://www.rzxarchive.co.uk/ . Some notes from the submitter:

Death Stalker
RZX by Jim Waterman, 31 July 2016
Recorded using Spectaculator 8.0 (fairly obviously using Rollback) - playing time 34:17

"WOW! AMAZING ACTION! HACK THE EVIL ORC MEN! SMASH THE UNDEAD SKELETONS!" And so on, and so on, and so on. When I was about 10 or 11, I spent my pocket money on Death Stalker on the strength of its in-house reviews... possibly misled by these, I firmly believed Codemasters could do no wrong (an illusion that was finally smashed to smithereens when I picked up Brainache at a car boot sale). Rumour has it that the working title for this game was "Advanced Sword And Axe Simulator"; this and the aforementioned hyperbolic description will tell you most of what you need to know.

Back in the day, I found 128K games rather capricious. Auf Wiedersehen Monty would load first time, every time, with the 128K music; Treasure Island Dizzy never did, and most of the time I'd load games in 48K mode just to make sure they didn't crash - so it wasn't until I discovered the world of emulation that I found that both Treasure Island Dizzy and Death Stalker had a 128K soundtrack! So fairly obviously, I chose to record this in 128K mode.

The instructions in the inlay make no mention at all of the ghosts, which can be banished with Nethlin's Cross, that "special gift" obtained by releasing the first prisoner - neither does it mention the vultures that turn into spinning whirlwinds and seem to be just about impossible to deal with legitimately (short of jumping on top of them). There's also no mention of the plate of poisoned orc food at 13:32 which I very carefully leave aside, having only just discovered its nature while recording this RZX!

There are also not enough release spells to free all the prisoners in the game - but I made sure to release as many as possible, which explains the three minutes of rather tedious climbing up and down ladders from 26:00. And as for the corrupted release spell at 19:20, I have no idea what was supposed to happen there - whether it was a bug or whether it was intentional. (And if so... why?)

Extra cheers and hails to Ladderman for making the map for this game an entire decade ago - the items were all missing, but I made sure to scour the entire dungeons beforehand using the late Viktor Drozd's infinite energy POKE. Once I had my annotated map this RZX became fairly straightforward.

#ZXSpectrum #RetroGaming #Walkthrough