Geoff Crammond‘s classic weird puzzle game, The Sentinel, was released by Firebird Software for PC MS-DOS in 1989.

The game is an almost perfect port of the original, with arguably better visuals due to the higher resolution and extra colours. When you start the game you can choose between EGA, CGA and VGA display modes, which is great, but even in VGA the game is bare-bones in terms of use of colour.

The Sentinel was designed to use very few colours and still play great, so the extra colours are moot to a degree (although I kinda wish that Mr. Crammond and the converting programmer had used the colours slightly differently in the VGA version of the game to make it look richer, maybe with proper shadows).

Playing The Sentinel now, it’s one of those games that can really suck you in if you manage to figure out a few tricks to outwit the rotating watchers. If you can’t be bothered to work out what to do, then you’re forever cursed to stumble across a board being absorbed…

More: The Sentinel on Wikipedia