Dark Cavern (Mattel)
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Entry posted by DoctorSpuds
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This game has been on the docket ever since I started writing these reviews, but until know I couldn’t really put my feelings about it into words, I probably still can’t but I’m gonna try anyway. It is likely I avoided reviewing this game early on because I didn’t want to review two very similar games so close together, the first review I ever did was Wizard of Wor and I probably felt that Dark Cavern was just a bit too similar. But as my range of games has expanded I think it’s been more than enough time to review this game. An interesting factoid though, before we start the review, it is fairly common knowledge that Mattel, the makers of this game, also had their own semi-successful console the Intellivision. It was common for Mattel to port their more popular Intellivision titles over to the 2600, to perhaps entice gamers to come over to their console, many games like Astrosmash, Space and Sea Battle, Lock ‘n’ Chase, He-Man, Kool-aid Man, and Night Stalker (in the form of Dark Cavern) were ported over, and in an odd enough twist were sometimes better on the 2600 than on the Intellivision, what a twist of fate! Dark Cavern I feel is better to play and all around more fun than Night Stalker on the Intellivision, and while the games aren’t exact copies of each other, there are some substantial differences, Dark Cavern still comes out on top trouncing the superior console.
The graphics in Dark Cavern are fairly solid albeit very basic. All of the sprites are just simple single color designs; thankfully instead of having some static images sliding around the screen the programmers at least gave the enemies some frames of animation, and by some I mean two. Yeah… the game just looks very bland, there just isn’t anything to it, sure the maze is constructed competently and the programmers did a pretty good approximation of the Mattel Running Man but otherwise there is just a whole lot of nothing. I don’t even have anything to pad out paragraph with so I guess I’ll just move on to the sounds.
This game has very few sounds, but the sounds it does have are pretty darn good. The first and main sound you’ll be hearing is the grinding crunch of the killer robots’ treads echoing around the cavern, the second will be the echoing gunfire you exchange with your robotic foes, yes they actually found a way to make the shots sound like they’re echoing, very nice. There is a suitably alarming death sound whenever you are shot by one of the robots, and a suitably rewarding, chunky, and funky, death noise for the robots whenever you shoot them. The only other sounds I can think of are the sounds related to collecting your gun and ammo; there is a slow trilling noise that will get higher pitched and faster the longer you take to collect it, it injects a good amount of urgency into the situation. So all around the sounds may be few in number but they make up for it in quality.
In this game… you shoot shit, and get shit shot at you. Your job in this game is to frantically run around an underground maze and shoot the evil robots tasked with your destruction, accompanying them are spiders and bats the will stop you in your tracks if you make contact with them. As you accrue points more robots will be released at once, I think I managed to get four at once at one point, but you’ll start off with a manageable two. You start off with 20 bullets and trust me they’ll go fast; you can collect ten more by running to the flashing gun and picking it up. That’s pretty much all this game is, you running around the maze and shooting robots, the only things that keeps it from getting boring are the moving obstacles, the robots deceptively clever AI and the well scaling difficulty, this game will not let you get comfortable. More times than I would care to admit I was lead straight into a trap by the robots, the most efficient way to dispatch them is by taking them out from behind since they can’t shoot behind them and they can’t turn around, but the other robots always find a way to intercept you or get behind you and take you down.
This is a fun and challenging game, it may not be a graphical powerhouse, but it doesn’t need to be, it’s a good idea executed well. Copies of this game are relatively cheap as well going for as low as six bucks for a loose cart and 15-way too many$ for a boxed copy. Due to how incredibly flimsy M-Network boxes are it’s rather hard to find an uncrushed box for any Mattel game, so the lower the price the higher the likelihood of it being pancaked. All around I’d recommend you get this one, it is a very fun experience indeed.
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