Forums > Submission Feedback > zigfried's Death Sword review

I can testify that this game, Barbarian as us Commodore 64/286 PC users called it was very popular in Europe. If anything then for that little troll/goblin like thing that always came on the field after you decapitated someone to drag the body of the opponent away, while at the same time punting it's head like a ball away.

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I always wondered how the name confusion came about between this game and the one where you control your character with the F keys through a maze of death traps discovered only by having run into them before. Regional name switch, is it?

"Deep in the earth I faced a fight that I could never win. The blameless and the base destroyed, and all that might have been. -- GK"

Barbarian absolutely rocked the C64. And with killer music. They also had Maria Whittaker on the box, a move which sparked the 'babes on boxes' boom in UK+Europe. Then came stuff like the cover for Defender of the Crown, where the swooning lady seemed to be dragged earthwards by the weight of her tits, and lots of commentary about such things in magazines.

We also got the vaguely Dark Castle-ish (and ultimately, crap I think) Amiga/PC 'Barbarian' here. The two titles just had to co-exist. They had the same name in this region.

Apple II Deathsword is extremely good. No music, but it was one of the handful of 8-bit Apple II games that used double hi-res mode in game, like Rampage or Airheart. In fact those are the only three I can think of that did it.

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The IBM version had no music. If I knew the C64 version had a great soundtrack, I probably would have mentioned the lack of ANY MUSIC AT ALL, but it was common for IBM games to have zero music back then. The days before Adlib and Soundblaster, yada yada.

//Zig

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It was mercy, I tell you, compared to the games that did have "music" blaring out of the internal speaker. Particularly non-optional music. But at least my XT had a physical volume slider on it - I never quite figured out why later computers no longer did.

"Deep in the earth I faced a fight that I could never win. The blameless and the base destroyed, and all that might have been. -- GK"

Here's the C64 soundtrack as an mp3. It's one big medley. You could play the game for 6 minutes+ before it loops back to the start (so I cut the mp3 off after that point). It has many phases and transitions, and is variously in 5 and 6 time signatures. Get it while it's hot! Or more specifically, til a few days have passed and I clear my webspace up.

http://aeriae.com/Barbarian.mp3.zip

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