Converted by John F. Cain, from an original Commodore 64 game by John Ferrari, Super Dragon Slayer is a platform shooter featuring an agile magician who must jump, climb and shoot his way – left to right – through four large, scrolling levels. It was first published for the ZX Spectrum by Codemasters in 1989.

Jumping is somewhat strange in this game. You can jump directly upwards, but you can’t jump left or right. To get across otherwise deadly impassable pits you have to climb a tree, or otherwise gain height some other way, and run off the platform in the right direction. The momentum should then take you over the pit, but only if you’re high enough. It’s not a very intuitive way of jumping in a video game, but it is what it is and you get used to it eventually.

Mythological monsters patrol the levels in cycles, and these follow pre-determined paths and don’t home in on or specifically target you. So the general idea is to avoid them as you make your way across the platforms. Contact with any monsters will reduce the magician’s health, and if it reaches zero he’ll lose a life. After completing a level the magician is promoted up a rank and his magic spells change, to better deal with new hazards. At the very end of the game is a battle with the evil Dragon Lord – if you ever manage to get that far…

The magician’s basic ‘zap’ shot doesn’t require magic power and is enough to kill most monsters, although some are not affected by it and must either be killed using a different spell or avoided at all costs. The magician can have up to six different – more powerful – spells at his disposal, which must first be acquired by raising his spell power. These spells, once gained, are activated by using the number keys one through six. Experimenting with the spells, to find out what they do, is vital to making progress and beating bosses.

Each monster you kill boosts the magician’s spell power, as does collecting spellbooks, and when it reaches maximum all available spells become ready to use. You can also pick up scrolls to re-fill his health meter.

Super Dragon Slayer can be played at two difficulty levels – Standard and Expert – both of which must be loaded separately. In the Expert version you return to the first level at the start of each game. In the Standard version you can continue from the last level you reached, but you can’t play past the third level. Completing a level means loading in the next, and you even have to do that in an emulator, so be prepared to deal with a multi-load game.

While the graphics are relatively attractive and colourful in Super Dragon Slayer, the game does have a lot of colour clash, which is a bit off-putting. The scrolling is also character-based and not pixel smooth, but it’s hardly noticeable when you’re playing.

The title music isn’t bad, although I did notice that the opening few bars are a direct lift from Fred Myrow‘s classic theme from the film Phantasm.

Overall, this is slightly less difficult than the C64 original, although it’s still not an easy game to play. Super Dragon Slayer is a reasonably good game, though, and is still worth playing today. Both the Spectrum and C64 versions are currently available on Antstream (at the time of writing).

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