Masters of the Universe in Terraquake Longplay (C64) [50 FPS]
18Developed by Adventuresoft and published by US Gold in 1987
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He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was an extremely popular action cartoon that I expect many readers growing up during the 1980's will remember. As you might expect, there was tons of merchandise available, including lunchboxes, action figures and, of course video games. I remember having this game on cassette back in the day and was really excited by the cover. This was a full-price game with a glossy sleeve and colour artwork depicting He-Man and his arche-nemesis, Skeletor engaging in a dramatic battle - the game HAS to be good, right?
As usual, Skeletor is up to no good and has set a plan in motion that has caused devastating earthquakes on Eternia, threatening the lives of the people that live there. Prince Adam and his alter-ego, He-Man, must find the source of the earthquakes and to put and end to Skeletor's nefarious plans.
The game itself is a text-based adventure where the player inputs a series of commands, which the built in parser interprets and the story advances if the correct action was entered; text-based adventures where the standard before point-and-click mouse controls were available. I think that I'd only ever played one text-based game before this and I was still very young when I received a copy of this game. I didn't really understand the rules around text parsers and could never understand why these games flat out refused to understand 90% of the instructions that you typed in. However, I DID know that that the developers managed to typo King Randor's name as 'Radnor' on the very first screen of the game and I was perplexed as to how they could have made this oversight. Things didn't improve as I simply couldn't work out how to progress more than a couple of screens. I think I worked out how to get into Castle Greyskull and managed to turn into He-Man, but that was as far as I got back then.
The basic fact is that the game is terrible. The majority of puzzles in the game are completely obtuse and there's no way that you would figure out what to do to solve them. If by some chance that you worked out a solution, you would also have to know what to type into the parser to get it to work. I'm guessing that part of the challenge of these games was working out what commands the parser does/does not understand, which I guess is reasonable enough (hey, if you DIDN'T have fun trying to make He-Man fart, pick his nose, eat random objects or work out which swear words the parser could understand then there's something wrong with you!). Without knowing all available actions then you'd be stuck for all eternity trying to beat the game, which just isn't fun in my book.
The game is completely devoid of any sound, apart from a 'blipping' sound when text is being entered, whilst describing the still background pictures as 'basic' would be an understatement; I actually laughed out loud at the terrible rendering of the Sorceress (7:23). I know that there were text adventures that featured no graphics at all, but this was 1987 and the bar had been well and truly raised by then.
Masters of The Universe: Terraquake is a dull adventure game that makes very little use of the source material and really is the wrong sort of game to base around an action-packed cartoon series in the first place.
#retrogaming