A while back now I got a MiSTer, and I’ve mostly been fiddling with its settings and
trying to modify the cores (one pull request accepted, one rejected but apparently I annoyed sorgelig enough that he’s gonna implement the feature I was going for himself even though he doesn’t want it). I decided to actually do some gaming on the thing, and I’ve settled on
Knight N Grail, a 2009 Commodore 64 release which does have a physical release (but I bought my ROM copy on
itch.io). 2009 is not exactly new, but it’s pretty recent for a C64 game.
I played a fair bit of C64 as a kid at my grandfather’s house, but not much since. The MiSTer goes so far as to replicate the loading times of old hardware (hooray), and seems pretty accurate to my dim memories. The joystick only has one button so you have to use it in conjunction with the keyboard, but I was able to map several keys to the other buttons on my controller and not have to go back and forwards between peripherals, which greatly improves playability. Duplicate mapping up to a button for jumping helps too.
It’s a metroidvania, seemingly a fairly simple one. You wander around a dark castle activating switches to open doors. There are also armour, sword, and max health upgrades, and signs with cryptic messages. The weapon upgrades change the arc of the sword - the default throws it straight forward and it comes back, but I’ve also found a couple that arc like a castlevania axe and one that flies off diagonally upwards. They’ve got elemental names and seem to do different damage to different enemies. The armour also has elemental names and seem to have different properties. I found one by a sign that said it would protect me from rain, though I haven’t seen any rain (come to think of it though, there is damaging water dripping from ceilings all over the place, I should see if it makes me immune to that). There was also a sign before the first boss saying I needed armour to protect me from dust to proceed. I already had the earth armour equipped at that point, so not sure what would have happened without it.
I recently got the double jump, so it’s definitely a proper metroidvania. There’s a sign by a locked door early in the game saying you can go faster once you get through it, which cannot come soon enough because the knight is s-l-o-w. One annoyance in the game is that when you open a door it doesn’t tell you where it is. Usually it’s pretty close to the switch, but in my session just now I triggered a switch and backtracked to the two nearest doors I knew of, neither of which was opened by it, and then died trying to get back to the save point. At which time I learned that death is handled differently once you have a save - when I died in the early game before finding a save point, I was booted to the castle entrance with my progress intact but my money gone. When I died after saving, the only option given was to reload. If I’d known that, I would have been more cautious about going back to the save point straight away instead of checking doors that might have opened. I’ll know for next time, at least.
As usual I’m finding it easier to complain than to praise the game, but I am enjoying it. The limits of the system that it’s on contribute to a sort of lonely aesthetic that works quite well and it’s got the usual loop of seeing something I can’t reach and then giving me the thing I need to get there, balanced by the need to remember where it was and how to get there. There is a map, but it’s very minimal - just the outlines of rooms and where they connect. I think the only type of room highlighted on the map so far is for the area transitions. I’d probably like it better if the doors and whether they were open or not were shown, and maybe the save point, but I think it’s a fairly small game and hopefully I’ll be able to keep that stuff in my head.
