I remember seeing this game after receiving a load of old disks from a company called Shareware Plus. This was one of the many previews I found hiding away, classed as PD/Shareware. Now the name has been suggested to be Babylon by one crew, but actually the game never had a proper name, so Babylon is kind of a working title, as was “Parallax game” which was given when Onslaught released it.
Anyway, this unnamed game is an awesome little preview of a game which owes a lot to the Mario games, Mayhem and maybe a bit of Castlevania?
This neat little platformer works in similar fashion to Mario, by busting blocks with your head and squashing some characters by jumping on them. Collecting a special treasure chest will allow you to throw fire torches at your enemies.
Starting with a cool Uridium style title screen, with large scrolling letters (Spelling “Demo”). Graphics are neat and impressive, with some cool parallax later in the preview, and some Mayhem-esq style lightning effects. Scrolling is very smooth horizontal scrolling, with an easy to control character.
There is no sound, and only one level in this preview, but it is likely that the game made it much further… The amount of detail in just this one level is brilliant, so surely Kopido got a bit more of it done before it was scrapped for whatever reason?
Well, it seems not… the game only really got to this stage in its life as you see here. The programmer gave up on the game due to asking for too much money, and no publisher wanting to touch it. Deekay/Crest wanted to resurrect the game in later years, but it was found that sadly all the work disks were lost. Xayne/Crest was to do the music in the new version.
Actually, back in 1996 time – Everlasting Style were also looking to pick up the game (with Deekay’s consent) and finish it off as the sequel to Misfortune. It was released on Commodore Fever Issue 3 listed as Misfortune 2, but is the same demo as which is here. The game sadly never got picked up even back then. It seems that this is probably all we’ll ever see!
Contributions: Christian Widmann, Jazzcat, Kevin Tilley
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Update history
30/06/14 – Credit fix thanks to Jazzcat
