Cerise Magazine

September 2007 Issue

Features

• From the Editors
• Craft Check: Handkerchief Dice Bags
• Gaming in the Media: Reflections on Princess Peach...
• Market to Me: Feminine gamers

Interviews

• Blogger Interview: Regina Buenaobra [Acid for Blood]

Articles

• Gender & Live-Action Role Play: LARP and Social Darwinism
  Author: Samara Hayley Steele

Samara continues her series on gender and LARP.

• D&D for Girls?
  Author: John Kim

John discusses a recent incident involving gender and the official Dungeons & Dragons discussion forums, what went wrong and some ideas for making it right.

• Reclaiming Pink
  Author: Olivia Luna

Olivia takes a critical look at the some of the uses of the color pink in the world of handheld gaming.

• Sisterhood is powerful: women-oriented gaming communities
  Author: Andrea Rubenstein

Andrea brings up some of the positive aspects of women-oriented gaming communities.

• Is Gamerdom Really a Bastion of Masculinity?
  Author: Latoya Peterson

Latoya looks at the perceptions of gaming and gamers and what that means for the female gamers out there.

Gamer Stories

• The Dice of Evil
  by Robyn Fleming

Reviews

• Puzzle Quest
  by Olivia Luna
• Nocturne
  by Bonnie Moxnes
• Retro Review: Castle of Dragon
by Abby Wilson

Odds 'n Ends

• The Back Page

Want your article to appear in a future issue? Submit to Cerise today!

Castle of Dragon, SETA Games, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990

I riffled through the stack of old NES games gathering dust at my mother’s house last time I was there, reliving pleasant and not-so-pleasant memories of the early 90s. What I liked most about this stack of games, however, is that I remembered where each and every one came from: My brother bought Legend of Zelda at the local game store on Highway 99; we got Contra from that kid across the street at our old house; I was given Final Fantasy by a neighbor kid who claimed it didn’t work. (He’d never tried my Game Genie remedy!)

There was just one game in the stack whose memory eluded me, and that game was Castle of Dragon. Just let that name sit on your tongue for a minute: Castle of Dragon. Sounds delightfully generic, eh? I have no idea where we got this game. Birthday present, maybe? Garage sale? Who knows. And, honestly, after playing through this game, who cares?

The Story

So, you are a knight. I don’t know what your name is, because I couldn’t find the manual. (In my defense, however, that cupboard is pretty messy.) There is a princess in your Kingdom of Perpetual Night, shown in the opening scene being captured by a pretty big badass-looking dragon. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to find wherever they took this princess – probably to the giant castle all the way on the right side of the kingdom – and rescue her from the clutches of the Evil King Genericwizardman.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty simple, like most platform games for the NES. You get a sword and a set of nice reddish armor. Pressing B swings the sword, and pressing A launches your knight into the air. He has a pretty high vertical leap, I must say. You move to the right, defeating enemies and minibosses, and as you defeat more enemies you are eventually granted access to a blue set of armor and nifty weapons like the flame sword and the super powerful blue mace. This is where the bad news starts.

Enemies don’t seem to be running on any sort of pattern in this game. They just come at you and sometimes they hit back, sometimes they just run past you as if you’re in their way and they don’t really feel like stopping and asking you to move. Even the frogs in the forest outside the castle do damage to you, and there’s pretty much nothing you can do to dodge them. There are a couple jumping puzzles, but if you miss by more than a half pixel your character plummets to his untimely death in the abyss. Oh, and if you die? Game over, pal. Back to the beginning you go, with your red armor and crappy regular sword.

…Meh.

I hope you can forgive my sarcasm. As a reviewer, my job is to play these old video games and get a sense for what made them so special back in the day. And after the sixth, seventh, eighth time of dying on the first level, I decided that there is nothing special about this game. I don’t even like it enough to cheat and get to the end.