Barbarian (1988)

Barbarian aka Death Sword(1988), developed and published by Palace Software for Amstrad CPC 464

Back in the '80s Barbarian was somewhat of a controversial game. The first reason for it was, that it was, for the time, a relatively violent game, where two combatants match out to the death. The most brutal fashion of killing your opponent is to slice their head off and watch how the sideshow ogre waddles through the battlefield to kick the head off the screen and drag the corpse with him. The second was more about the game box.

Let's rephrase what I said previously, the controversy was almost all about the game box, featuring busty model Maria Whittaker in a skimpy outfit next to Michael Van Wijk doing his best Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian impression. The skimpily dressed duo was too much for some people during a time simple computer games were still seen mostly as entertainment for children. Some later releases omitted Maria Whittaker from the cover altogether and just used a picture of oiled up Van Wijk.

Now the cover is most likely either seen as a sleazy attempt at trying to sell the game with sex, there were posters of Maria Whittaker provided at places after all, or just a  bit tacky or even sexist '80s kitsch. Personally, I like the cover.

But how's the game itself? It's not, surprisingly enough, all that bad and plays well even for modern standards. It is one on one battle game, where two muscled barbarians fight to the death. The goal of the game is to beat up people until you finally meet the evil Drax, who has kidnapped princess Marina. If you have friends, you can play it as a two-player game, so that brings some longevity to it as well.

You have several different movies from kicks to head chops and the controls are precise and hit detection spot on. It also helps that the animation is very smooth, almost as good as in something like Prince of Persia. The graphics are pretty good for an Amstrad game as well and the music, the little there is of it, doesn't make you want to turn it off.

Graphically the best version of the game is probably for the Amiga, but that's mostly for the backgrounds. The animation seems to be mostly the same for all the versions of the game. I have no idea of the gameplay between the various versions, but for what it's worth, I like how the Amstrad version plays.

As far I know, there was sort of a remake released for Apple i-devices of Barbarian, but from what I've seen of it, it looks rather lacklustre and clunky. For my money, if you don't have the original hardware, the best option to play it would be to grab an emulator of your favourite system and play the game like that.  It's worth that at least.