FromSoftware‘s King’s Field II was initially released in Japan in 1995 and it is another first-person RPG with open world exploration, dodgy graphics and challenging combat. It was later published under the title “King’s Field” by ASCII Entertainment in North America and Sony in Europe in 1996, which does cause some confusion as the western titling ignores the actual first game in the series. For clarity: the official English language “King’s Field” is actually King’s Field II – the sequel.
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King’s Field, PlayStation
With Elden Ring currently wowing gamers I thought I’d take a look at the series that began FromSoftware‘s journey into the action RPG genre, and that would be King’s Field – released in Japan only in 1994 for the Sony PlayStation – and, to be honest, it couldn’t be any further removed from Elden Ring in terms of presentation…
I’ve played a lot of RPGs in my time, and I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite genre of video game, but King’s Field came as a bit of a shock to me. Yes, King’s Field was an early 3D RPG on the PlayStation, releasing the same year as the PS1 was launched, but it post-dates Ultima Underworld by two years and is archaic in comparison.
South Park: The Stick of Truth, PC
South Park: The Stick of Truth is a – gasp – turn-based RPG based on the popular South Park animated series. It was developed by Obsidian and published by Ubisoft in 2014. It was co-written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, co-creators of South Park, and is a hilarious level-grinder with tons of detail, loads of quests, graphics that are identical to the TV show, and all the voices that South Park fans have come to know and love (most provided by Stone and Parker).
Gauntlet, Apple II
Before playing this game I’d read that the Apple II conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game Gauntlet was a bit of a mess, but that didn’t quite prepare me for quite how bad it actually is…
Gauntlet, PC
The MS-DOS version of Gauntlet was published by Mindscape in 1988 and I’m not entirely sure who developed it, but it isn’t very good, the truth be told.
Gauntlet, Sega Master System
The Sega Master System conversion of Atari‘s classic arcade game Gauntlet is surprisingly good. For starters: it’s got the fastest fire rate of any of the home versions available, and it plays with a high intensity. This does, however, make the game especially challenging because the health of your heroes does tend to go down rather quickly.
Gauntlet, Atari ST
This 16-bit conversion of the classic arcade game Gauntlet was developed by Atari Games and was first published in October 1987 by Mindscape.
While, graphically, it’s not quite as lush as the original arcade game, it is very close to it and Atari obviously took care with how it looked and played when they translated it to the ST.
Gauntlet, MSX
Another fine 8-bit conversion of the classic arcade game Gauntlet, by Gremlin Graphics and published by US Gold in 1987. The MSX version was created by the same team who did the ZX Spectrum version and therefore is quite similar. Which is not a bad thing as the Speccy conversion is quite excellent.
Gauntlet, Amstrad CPC
The Amstrad CPC conversion of Atari‘s classic Gauntlet arcade game is another decent port by Gremlin Graphics, once again published by US Gold in 1987. The same team who created the C64, Spectrum, Atari 8-bit, and MSX versions also made this.
Gauntlet, ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum conversion of the classic arcade game Gauntlet is surprisingly good. It was developed by Gremlin Graphics and published by US Gold in 1987 and features all 100 levels from the original, only in multi-load chunks. This was because the game was initially released on cassette only and required loading after a certain number of levels were traversed.
The King of Grabs 