Sword of the Samurai.
It's an excellently, excellently done title you can get off of Abandonia. It's set in feudal japan - you're a lord with a small fief, and your goal is to work your way up to hatamoto of your province and then up to shogun (demi-emperor, the guy litterally directly below the emperor) of Japan. Things will not be easy - Japan is essentially in the middle of a civil war, with every province out for itself.
You have a lot of options to get yourself to the top - you can go on missions to gain honor by rescuing folks, killing bandits or helping your fellow samurai. You can sneak into your rival's home and steal heirloom swords or kill dignitaries to sabotage his reputation, kidnap members of his family, or simply try to kill him in his sleep. You'll need to sneak through his home and kill any guard who sees you, while trying not to raise the alarm. If the alarm is raised, not only will all the guards come after you - your target will be awakened, and you'll be in for a swordfight when you finally do find him.
The swordfighting is one of the major components of the game and is very, very tense. It's difficult to get used to at first - you can move around the mat and swing center, off center or sideways at your opponent and parry in three directions, as well as pull your sword back hard for a massive blow that might leave you vulnerable. Four sword strokes and you're doomed, but so is your opponent. I would suggest reading the manual however as the swordfighting can be complex for a newbie. (Also, one of the major stumbling blocks for me was the fact that the sound effects don't seem to differ when you select the Roland MIDI board, which sounds the best, when you're swinging at air versus your opponent. Make sure you're right in front of your opponent or you'll just be slashing wildly at air.) In the end, the swordfighting component of the game is difficult but very, very rewarding. When you see your opponent fall, you just feel a rush of adrenaline and go "YEAAAAAAAH!!"
The next game component is the melee, where you're in a top down viewpoint fighting a large number of lesser samurai or bandits on your own - the classic samurai movie image of a great samurai cleaving through dozens of lesser opponents - fighting swordsmen, spearmen (who are a real bitch if you can't get close enough to them - they have a longer reach than your sword does, but if you get in past their defenses they'll need to keep backing up to hit you) and archers. Oh, and you, true to history, have a bow you can use to shoot them as they close, but seeing as you're a swordsman and not a bowman, you might just graze them instead of killing them. The enemies are quite smart, and get smarter as you go higher in difficulty, taking long and indirect paths to stay out of range of your bow and attack from different angles to you to try tooutwit you. One hit will wound you and slow you down - two, and you're history. Be swift, be aggressive, and above all, don't get killed.
The final one is battle, where you're controlling all of your samurai on a large open battlefield as a general. These are decisive affairs where you don't really have a huge stake in what happens - you can control where your troops are, but most of it is down to your troops to do the fighting. (Make sure you drill them lots at home so they won't break and flee easily and can fight better. Training makes all the difference.) Battles aren't that common, but you can attack a rival's lands if they have provoked you enough, go into another province to take some land from your province's enemies, or head to your lord's castle with your troops in tow to answer the call to arms when he has a mission available to capture a fortress/destroy an invasion force/kill a bunch of uppity monks. These missions can be difficult, especially if you don't have a lot of men, but if you win, you'll gain more valuable rice growing land, allowing you to get even more samurai under your control.
In the end: Sword of the Samurai is one of my most favorite dos games, EVER. It never gets old.
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Topic: Games for DOS thread!!! (Read 6046 times)