Designed and programmed by John Ferrari, with music by Barry Leitch, Super Dragon Slayer is a platform shooter first published for the Commodore 64 by Codemasters in 1988. In many ways this game reminds me of the early days of C64 software, with unforgiving gameplay and instant death if you put a foot wrong. That said, this is still a pretty good game. Just a very difficult one.

In Super Dragon Slayer you play an unnamed magician who must make his way through a hostile castle in order to fight (and hopefully defeat) an evil Dragon Lord who lives underground. You do that by making your way, from left to right, through the horizontally-scrolling levels; shooting waves of enemies and avoiding falling into deadly pits.

The magician can jump and climb and also has a variety of magic spells at his disposal. His base weapon is a magic bolt that he can fire left and right and that will destroy most enemies with a single hit. Jumping in Super Dragon Slayer is not particularly intuitive because you cannot jump left or right – only directly upwards. To get across the otherwise impassable pits you have to climb up as high as you can and walk off a platform, so that you fall diagonally and (hopefully) to safety on the other side. This method of jumping does take some time to get used to, and it’s pretty weird.

The enemies you encounter follow pre-determined patterns and don’t attack you directly, so the idea is to learn their movements and to avoid them by positioning yourself carefully as you progress, which is not easy to do. Thankfully most of these monsters can be blasted to stop them touching you and sapping your health, but there are some enemies that cannot be zapped with your default weapon and require more powerful magic to destroy. To use your more powerful magic you must first acquire it by collecting spellbooks and shooting enemies (which increases your spell power). When you have a spell available to you it will show in the boxes to the right of the health bar and a number will appear above it. Pressing that number on the keyboard will activate that particular spell, and you have to experiment with them to find out what they do. In the first level, for example, spell number two acts like a ‘smart bomb’ that damages any enemies on-screen, which is useful for hurting enemies that you can’t shoot your regular bolts at, or for clearing large numbers of enemies swarming you.

If you complete a level you are promoted (after the first level, from magician to enchanter) and the spells available to you change. Mostly to help you deal with more dangerous hazards ahead. In the second level, for example, there’s a long gap which you might think would be impossible to cross, but if you invoke the spell with the bird icon then you’ll be able to fly over it*.

*= Note that getting the spell to work is tricky. You have to cast the spell, jump into the air, then press diagonally up/right to fly.

Super Dragon Slayer is an extremely difficult game overall, but it is quite interesting to play and is nicely presented. When you lose all your lives the screen burns away upwards, which is a neat effect. You’ll probably see this quite a lot, unless you cheat, which is what most people will do. I admit that I resorted to this, because the game is so hard and I was impatient to get screenshots of the later levels. But that’s okay. Time is short and there are so many other games to grab! 🙂

Super Dragon Slayer was also released for the ZX Spectrum in 1989. Both versions of the game are currently available on Antstream (at the time of writing).

More: Super Dragon Slayer on CSDb
More: Super Dragon Slayer on YouTube