Barbarian Remake - Off with their heads!

 
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It does look a little bit like a cheap porn movie...

I would like to dedicate the first entry of this blog to a game that belongs to one of my favorite genres and of which I have really fond memories. That game is Barbarian. Good old times... I still remember spending the whole afternoon on the weekends with my dad in front of our old Amstrad CPC 464 trying to chop each other's heads. Of course, that was after waiting first like 30 minutes for the game to load (and after fighting to see who was going to use the only joystick we had at the time.) Recently I discovered that a small developing team called TDB Soft had made a remake of my beloved Barbarian, updating the graphics while keeping the playing essence of the original, and I have to confess the result is pretty good. Here you can find the link to their website where you can download this remake of Barbarian FOR FREE together with other remakes they did of other classics from that time: http://www.tdbsoft.com/. I will now explain some of the main points of this classic.

Off with their heads!

Developed and published originally for the Commodore 64 back in 1987 (I´m getting old...) by former developer Palace Software, who also created the classic Cauldron of which I might talk about someday too, Barbarian is a versus fighting game in which sword wielding barbarians fight in deadly combats. Maybe in these modern times of 3D, 1080p and 60fps madness Barbarian looks quite outdated, but at its time Barbarian stood out thanks to its good graphics and even better and numerous animations, on top of using a really deep and dynamic combat system, which in my humble opinion (and in many others too) made it the best on its genre together with Konami´s Yie ar Kung-Fu and System 3´s International Karate classics till Capcom released the timeless classic Street Fighter 2 in 1991, taking by storm the arcades all over the world and setting the path to follow for any 2D fighting versus game till nowadays.

After face-lift (remake)

Before face-lift (original version)

As I was saying before, far from being just a simple game in which dudes with muscles even in their eyebrows chop everything they find on their way, the combat system of Barbarian was really deep, allowing to displaying really spectacular combats despite the technical limitations of those times. The game included only two game modes, one in which we had to defeat a series of barbarians controlled by the CPU before facing the evil warlock Drax in a magic ball spamming combat (think of Sagat and his Tiger Shots in Street Fighter 2, just that one hit results in instant death), and then a versus mode that allowed us to fight against our buddies. Following the style set by the above mentioned Yie Ar Kung-Fu and International Karate, in Barbarian´s combat system the direction keys or joystick were not just used to move the character around the screen, but also to perform the numerous attacks that the characters had available, so depending on which direction we were indicating with our joystick at the time of pressing the attack button, the type of attack would greatly vary, so for example, if when pressing the attack button you tilted the joystick upwards, the character would perform a high slash at the height of the neck, while if you tilted the joystick forward while pressing the attack button, the character would perform a slash at the height of the chest. This system allowed the character to boast a wide variety of movements for the time, on top of forcing the players to plan well their actions rather that just pressing the attack button in a brainless way. The most spectacular of all these attacks was without a doubt  the spinning slash that, when performed correctly, would behead the rival, making the head go flying across the screen to be later kicked by the gobbling/imp/whateverthehellitis when it “cleans” the screen. This movement, on top of making you feel like THE man when you did it (or like a real loser when you got it...), forced you to pay attention constantly to the combat, for as good as you could be doing during it, one simple mistake could make you literally “lose your head”, and thus the combat. The idea of a lethal attack was a very good idea that I don´t recall seeing again in any other versus fighting game, and that helped to represent better the dark, cruel and brutal world of the game.

As the violent game it was, specially for the 80s when games were normally seeing mainly as an entertainment for kids (and many still do), Barbarian was no stranger to controversy, specially thanks to it´s “infamous” beheading attack, although it was nothing compared to the controversy created by the cover of the game (you can find it at the beginning of this entry) where a sexy lady appeared “half naked.” All this, together with its playable quality, helped the game to become a commercial success at the moment. It also would be worth mentioning the resemblance between the game´s main theme and the main theme of the movie Conan The Barbarian, or even the similar looks of the main character of the game and Arnold Schwarzenegger a.k.a. the Governator, who played the role of Conan in the movie. In fact, due to the great success of the first game, Barbarian had a second entry called Barbarian 2: The Dungeon of Drax. This time the game was a 2D adventure rather than a VS fighting game, and we had to explore the dungeon of the warlock Drax and its surroundings while fighting all type of medieval fantasy creatures. This second installment was also a great success, receiving a lot of praising from the fans and the critics of the time, and helping Palace Software to set themselves as one of the best developers of the moment.

Anyway, that´s all folks, I hope you all enjoyed this first entry, and I really hope you will have a great time playing the remake of this classic. And remember: IT´S FREE!


GAMEPLAY VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50t2HcGzk8c