SPENT: Game Like You're Homeless

I heard about the SPENT web game on NPR's Marketplace Money program a while back -- it's a simulation of the monthly budgeting difficulties of the poor and the homeless.  It was created by Urban Ministries of Durham, and gives players an opportunity to experience the day-to-day challenges faced by our society's less fortunate.  The challenge is to make it through the month without running out of money, and it's a formidable task.  And as simple as it is, I think SPENT says some interesting things about the way we as human beings engage emotionally with games.

The player starts out in dire but not unrealistic straits -- without a job, having recently lost his or her home, as a single parent with a second mouth to feed and a scant $1000 left in the bank.  So finding employment is the first order of the day, and the career options available are limited -- restaurant server, warehouse worker, or temp.  To get a temp job, the player must take a brief typing test -- in this situation, that's the route I would take, so that's what I did here:

I passed the standard 55 wpm test (I'm a blogger after all) and was able to get temporary work paying $9 an hour.  The next order of survival business is lodging -- living a greater distance from work means lower rent, but higher transportation costs, so this is not necessarily an easy decision to make.

The income is very helpful, but as a temp I found that some days I would have work, sometimes I wouldn't.  And I had car trouble one day, generated by the game's random-event engine, so I lost a couple hours' pay after finally making it to work by bus.  In my real-life neck of the woods, there IS no good public transportation, so that was an eye opener for me personally.

One has to eat, so grocery shopping also comes into play -- I bought ramen and apples and tried to stretch my grocery budget as best I could.  I managed to get out the door with $53 spent, which is probably not realistic for two weeks, but the available items are limited; one can only eat so many peanut butter sandwiches.

I was doing okay around mid-month, but then some unfortunate events conspired against me.  I got a speeding ticket, which I successfully contested in court -- but that still cost me $50 in court costs, and I lost a day's pay in the process.  My child needed $15 for a school field trip to the natural history museum -- I paid it, because I believe education is important, but that pushed my bank balance below $50 temporarily, triggering a $5 bank fee.  And then I had a serious tooth-related issue -- while I was paying for health insurance, I had no dental coverage, and fixing the painful problem wiped me out on day 22 of the month.

That was on my second try, mind -- on the first go-round, I lost my job after being seen talking to a union organizer and was in trouble by day 15.  The game provides informational popups about these events -- in this case, it notes that firing workers for trying to organize is illegal, but that such retaliation does in fact happen.

Is SPENT a piece of interactive propaganda?  Sure, to a degree -- it's meant to raise awareness, and hopefully funds, to help the homeless, and so it occasionally lays it on a little thick.  The nitpicker in me wishes it would cite its sources when it presents facts and statistics about life in the poverty zone.


But it's not overplayed, and what I find interesting from a game design perspective is how successfully its matter-of-fact approach engenders deep sympathy in the player.  We've all had times when the cash was going out faster than the paychecks were coming in, and the game's random events are familiar emergencies in any socioeconomic circumstances.  The difference is that most of us reading this have spare time and resources -- enough to, let's face it, sit around and play video games -- and so are probably reasonably comfortable.  At least, we probably have a financial cushion and a semi-dependable income to smooth out the ride from month to month.  I almost wrote that that gives us the power to make decisions -- but that's not a fair statement, because low-income individuals can make good decisions too.  What SPENT does very effectively is point out how constrained those decisions sometimes are when you're living below the poverty line.

See, when I run into a bank fee in real life, it's because I was careless and didn't monitor my balance closely enough, or I made a risky assumption about transaction timing.  But in SPENT, the $5 hit felt like just another institutionalized penalty for being poor.  In my job, if I have to take a day off to take care of some errands, I can use vacation time -- it doesn't directly impact my next paycheck.  When you're working by the hour, it's much harder to do that.  Most of us can fix a broken window, or convince the landlord to do it, instead of taping plastic over the hole because the landlord refuses to bother.  Most of us don't have to deal with a hefty utility reactivation fee because we couldn't afford to pay the previous month's electric bill on time.  The working poor really are disproportionately hit with these kinds of costs, expenses that people in more stable circumstances rarely have to think about.

Gameplay-wise, SPENT is just a series of push-button choices and drag-and-drop exercises, rendered in stark orange on a dull brown background.  But because the game evokes real-world decision-making processes that all adults are familiar with, it manages to establish an intellectual and emotional connection that puts its point across.  The world really does look different when you're on the bottom, and financial decisions are harder to make when you actually have to choose among necessities.  This game uses the power of interactive engagement to challenge stereotypes about the homeless and the working poor.  It's worth spending a little time with SPENT.

Adventure of the Week: Top Secret Adventure (1984)

This week, we're playing the second in a short-lived adventure series: Mega-Venture II: Top Secret Adventure, published by Big Orc Software.  The game bears a 1984 copyright, and there's no author credited onscreen, but in the binary code we find a credit to Jim Veneskey, author of the previous game in the series, Romulan Adventure.  Again, this game uses the Bruce Hansen engine, modeled after (and compatible with) the Scott Adams system.

Top Secret Adventure is a spy adventure, a bit of a James Bond parody with a humorous bent.  It opens on a busy city street, where a nearby telephone is ringing with great portent.  Our mission, we learn upon answering, is to defeat the villainous Dr. Yes, who intends to rule the world by means as yet undetermined.

This is a fairly difficult adventure, and I had to dig into the code to figure a few things out.  If you intend to play on your own, I advise you to go forth and do so now, as continuing here will likely cause you to find this tale of espionage and sabotage...

***** SPOILED, NOT STIRRED ******

The opening phone message tells us, "Dr. Yes is up to his tricks again on Dog Mess Island.  It's up to you to stop him - Permanetly[sic]!"  So this is definitely a James Bond parody, though the joke seems to have lost its way somewhere between the author's original idea and the final, perhaps bowdlerized, result; Dr. No was stationed on Crab Key island.

We can LOOK PEDESTRIANS on the city street, yielding, Hey! It's Rodney Dangerfield!   This seems like a simple 80's pop culture reference, but we will actually need to return here later, at which time we will show the American comedian an appropriate degree of no respect.

We have some Money in inventory at the start, but there seems to be no way to find out exactly how much we have.  But the in-game (and, one presumes, completely unauthorized) Sears Store sells camping supplies; we can RING BELL to summon the salesman, and BUY SUPPLIES to exchange our money in total for a small boat, a small tent, and a camp cot.

There's a dock down the way, and across the ocean we can make out a Far away island.  We can DROP BOAT and GO BOAT, discovering that the small vessel contains oars (though it's impossible to GET them.)  A little parser wrestling provides our next challenge --  GO ISLAND doesn't work, nor does ROW BOAT, but the response to this attempt provides a hint -- Row WHERE? -- and ROW ISLAND does the trick.  We can't, of course, simply row all the way there -- after one round, we're too tired to continue.  But we need to REST and then ROW some more; SLEEP is fatal due to a sudden bout of pneumonia.

The first puzzle we discover onshore is fairly complicated.  We have to drop all inventory items to climb the nearby palm tree and obtain a coconut.  But there's a Sleeping Puma a few locations to the south, and once visited, the animal wakes up and starts following us as the newly-christened Angry Puma.  And in this situation, it's not long before Puma Rips me apart! I'm dead.  If we manage to climb the palm tree again, the animal starts pawing at the tree, but we are unable to carry any useful weapons with us.  What we should have done, it turns out, is leave the tree alone until we have roused the puma; then we can DROP COCONUT from the tree to turn him into a Conked out Puma.   There's really no way to tell we need to do this when we first arrive on the island, and we can't get the coconut back up the tree once we've brought it down, so this puzzle tends to require a replay.  Fortunately, the program provides a competent SAVE GAME feature, with ten available slots for each player (using the first two letters of the player's name, given to the game at startup.)

The coconut's initial purpose is served, and we can use the shovel formerly guarded by the puma to open it up and find, oddly, an automatic Luger pistol concealed within.  Digging in the sand also yields a box of 8 9mm shells, so now we're properly armed and, as subsequent events will imply, licensed to kill.

A nearby building features a front door and a basement window.  If we enter through the door, we can explore the house, collecting a few useful items discussed in greater detail below.  Entering through the window leads to a Musty Basement with a Washer & Dryer, and an unspecified number of Goons, who immediately gun us down.

Soon it starts Getting Dark!, and it develops that we can't just SLEEP in, say, the living room, as the building is apparently woefully under-insulated, and we still catch pneumonia and die.  To get a safe night's sleep, we have to DROP TENT, GO TENT, DROP COT, GO COT and SLEEP (which only uses one move, oddly enough.)  There's a note in the tent, in classic adventure tradition, that promotes the next game in the Mega-Venture series:  Gamma World Adventure, coming this Summer (circa 1984).

The house has a den, a dining room, and a kitchen with a Cupbard [sic].  Fortunately, the parser allows us to spell this one correctly, and LOOK CUPBOARD works to find a Battery.  There's a bookcase in the den, but we can't GET BOOK (I don't see it here) or LOOK BOOKCASE.  We have to LOOK CASE to find the book, and again to discover a lantern.  The book is titled "How to Rule the World Using Weather," and written by Dr. Yes, providing some details about his allegedly nefarious plan.

We can also enter the Warm basement from a staircase inside the main part of the house, and LOOK FURNACE to yield Strange, It does'nt [sic] seem to work...  We can now also enter the musty basement without running into the Goons, though there's nothing there we need.  We can INSERT BATTERY, which then allows us to LIGHT LANTERN.  We can UNLIGHT LANTERN as well, but due to a bug the battery continues to run down anyway, so there's not much motivation to do so.

I got stuck here for a bit -- on my first play, I somehow failed to notice Dr. Yes running down the stairs after I entered the house.  On my second try, I looked around downstairs to no avail, despite my best efforts to MOVE FURNACE, OPEN FURNACE, MOVE WASHER, MOVE DRYER, GO FURNACE or otherwise discover a secret passage.  I finally delved into the game data, raising the useful question of how I might create the opening in Furnace mentioned there.  And experimentation finally established that we can KICK FURNACE and GO OPENING, though we can't take the resultant scrap metal, which is too bad as such material always seems useful in adventure games.

While trying to figure that out, I did a little experimenting with the Luger.  We can go back to town and ROB RODNEY, showing him absolutely no deference, regard or respect whatsoever, replenishing our Money again, though at the time I had no apparent reason to do so.  Mr. Dangerfield runs off to summon the police, and will presumably need some time to get them to take him seriously, so we have time to make ourselves scarce and return to the island.  We can also SHOOT PUMA to turn the conked-out creature into a Dead Puma.  Both of these actions have value, but not until later in the game.

A panel in the room beyond the furnace features red, black, and green buttons.  I started out by trying to PUSH RED, and learned that CYANIDE Gas jets in! That was the wrong way! I'm dead.  PUSH BLACK appears to produce no effect, but this is a two-step process - we always have to push the black button before pushing either the red or green button.  PUSH GREEN yields Were moving! (are we not now? ... ah, that should read We're) and takes us down to a subterranean lake; PUSH BLACK, PUSH RED takes us back up from below.

We can now GO LAKE and SWIM DOWN, but we can only last five turns underwater without air, and even if we swim back up to the surface, the death index still counts down; it only resets if we actually go back to shore.  After many, many experiences of I CAN'T BREATH! [or spell!] I Drowned! Glub! Glub!, I dug into the data and discovered that there must be some way to get to the bottom of the lake.  The small boat is mysteriously non-functional in the lake -- we can carry it here, but GO BOAT yields Sorry / Not HERE.

I mapped out the lake, to the extent I could before drowning, but found no interesting new locations, so I went elsewhere and tried a number of other ideas.  SCORE yields Sorry, Not in this Adventure.  We can create paradoxes; if we DIG again on the island after we have removed the 9mm shells from the Box, we see that the Box and the  Empty Box can somehow coexist, as can the Lantern that's on and the Lantern.  We can't SEARCH, apparently, but the word SCUBA is recognized by the parser, and some scuba gear would certainly come in handy, if we can find it...  ah, yes!  We can BUY SCUBA in the Sears Store, if we have relieved Mr. Dangerfield of his cash, even though this available item is not advertised.  I doubt I would have guessed this without peeking at the dictionary.

A quick WEAR SCUBA suffices to equip us for a proper dive, and we can reach the bottom of the lake (it's an arduous seven-turn swim down), where we find an Airlock and a Great White Shark (hungry!) that immediately attacks and kills us.  This presents another interesting puzzle.  If we drop the conked out puma in the water, it awakens, kills us, and swims to shore.  But if we SHOOT PUMA, then drop its corpse in the water, the water ripples, a shark appears, eats the puma, and then kills us.  We actually have to return to shore immediately after dropping the puma, then we can SHOOT SHARK from a safe distance.  It's another one of those puzzles that has to be explored first, then solved after a restore; a priori knowledge of the shark's existence is required.

With these mighty foes killed off for good, we can swim back down and go through the airlock into an underground hallway.  A cave to the east contains Scared Bats; apparently our reputation for animal cruelty precedes us, but we need not harass these little fellows.  What we need to do is venture into the adjoining Deep Dark Pit.  But we don't yet have the proper equipment.

Nearby, we can enter Dr. Yes' Weather control chamber, and there's a massive storm brewing -- if we enter too hastily, the wind shoots us through a hole in the ceiling and smashes us to bits outside!  What we need to do, after another RESTORE, is WAIT outside the room until the storm moves on.  There's really nothing to do inside the weather chamber, however.

Now we can turn our attention back to the pit.  We need to return to town, and steal some rope from the ROPED OFF CRIME SCENE where we earlier robbed Rodney Dangerfield; fortunately, we can simply GET ROPE without attracting any further attention from the authorities.  No respect, indeed!  But back at the pit's edge, it turns out that we can't CLIMB ROPE or CLIMB PIT or CLIMB DOWN, and DROP ROPE just places it near the pit.  We can try to LOWER ROPE, but Whoops! Rope fell into the Pit!  Another dive into the code reveals that we need some wood to build a rope ladder, and it turns out that the palm tree on the shore has been smashed by the storm, bowing under the unstoppable force of our patience.

This next bit is random and aggravatingly so, so I strongly advise using the SAVE GAME early and often.  As we enter the aptly-named Goons Room, they kill us right away, again.  We have to let them go to sleep with a WAIT, then go in and kill them while they're asleep; this isn't entirely consistent, and it seems that sometimes we have to go to our own cot and SLEEP also before they will be suitably off-guard.  We also need to be careful to explicitly SHOOT GOONS -- SHOOT GOON leaves one alive long enough to take us down.

Beyond the Goons, the villainous Dr. Yes awaits in the Master Control Room, though he isn't nearly as much of a threat as I anticipated.  A blue lever in the adjacent reactor room turns the reactor off and on.  We can shoot the bad Doctor if he doesn't randomly shoot us first; actually, there seems to be a bug here, as sometimes he's able to fall to the floor dead, then shoot us.  But if we have survived that bit, Dr. Yes pulls a lever as he falls to the floor, which doesn't seem to do anything, really.  We can LOOK CONSOLE to find a Large Red Lever here, which turns off the Coolent [sic] Pump.

Once we have the coolant pump turned off and the reactor on, we only have 37 moves left before the reactor goes critical.  And though we have considerately killed off all the other living things on the island, it develops that simply getting off the island ourselves isn't enough.  We actually have to get back to the dock and safely inside the Sears Store, which has apparently armored itself extremely well against the holiday doorbuster crowds.  We can make it there, but there are only a few moves to spare, and we end up traversing most of the game's world in the process, so good mapping is very important.

As a suitably Hollywood finale, The Reactor Blows itself to hell!  And despite the radioactive fallout we have almost certainly unleashed upon the planet, victory is ours!

I am very much enjoying the Mega-Ventures, in part because I never knew they existed back in the day, and this one has some puzzles that are more complex and detailed than expected for a two-word parser adventure.  To save others from beating their heads against the puzzles that sent me scurrying into the code for cheating purposes, I will provide a full walkthrough below the fold; it's also available at the CASA Solution Archive.


**** WALKTHROUGH ****

The LoadDown - 03/14/2011

More instant-gratification gaming arrives...

WiiWare -- One new title, one free demo.  Liight is a musical puzzle game with elements of light and shadow; no word on whether it's to be pronounced like "lite" or "leet."  There's also a free version of the music composition tool, Mix Superstar.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing new here this week.

DSiWare -- Three new games arrive.  The big name is PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, a terrific tower-defense game that's been a hit on several platforms.  Another is Rabi Laby, a platform/puzzle game sending a girl and her rabbit through a series of challenges with a hint of the classic Solomon's Key about it.  DSi players can also pick up 5 in 1 Mahjong, a no-frills mahjong title.

XBox Live Arcade -- One new game, Torchlight, an action-RPG developed by some of the people behind Diablo.

PS3 on PSN -- One new title, TestYourself: Psychology, which sounds a bit like those Myers-Briggs "personality tests" that purport to classify everybody into a few narrow categories.  I don't hold much truck with these things -- we behave differently under different circumstances, and I think it trivializes the complexity of human behavior to try to pigeonhole people like this.  But the newspapers still print daily horoscopes, so I'm sure somebody out there will find this a useful tool for self-enlightenment, i.e., an excuse to avoid actually seeking it.

PSOne Classics -- Nothing new here this week either, this platform has been quiet for a little while.  Not as quiet as Microsoft's Game Room, though!

Cover to Cover: Acorn Software Fall 1981 (p. 5)

We continue our exploration of the Fall 1981 Acorn Software lineup with a look at page 5, where we find three more TRS-80 simulations of traditional games created by Basketball programmer John Allen:

I question the wisdom of promoting Astroball as superior to Pinball, still available for sale just below it.  And the pricing seems a little loopy, as the tape version of Pinball is cheaper than Astroball on the same medium, while the disk version of Astroball is cheaper than Pinball.  I was able to find all three of these games in the online archives -- apparently these were more successful than some of Acorn's other products.

Astroball is actually pretty good, although the ball physics are clunky and unconvincing, feeling more like a vertically-oriented pachinko game than a sloping pinball table, and the flippers are oddly mapped to the right-arrow and up-arrow keys.  And I never found the "table nudge" control, if one exists.  But the action moves along at a good clip, and there are enough items on the board with a few innovative moving obstacles to keep the ball from becoming too predictable.  The TRS-80's chunky pixels make it hard to tell where the ball actually is in still shots -- here, it's just to the upper right of the plus-shaped bumper on the left.

And yes, Pinball is worse.  It's almost the same program, actually -- just a bit slower and clunkier, more static and repetitive, with a couple of ball-swallowing side ramps that are hard to avoid.  The physics issues are different -- a good pull on the launch plunger can cause the ball to float merrily across the top of the playfield with no gravity effects coming into play at all, until it suddenly decides to drop like a stone.  It seems clear that Astroball might also have been called Pinball 2.0.

Tenpins (a.k.a. John's Ten Pin in-game) is a bowling game, obviously, and has 3-D Graphics in the sense that the ball appears as a larger or smaller roughly spherical block of pixels, in three chunky steps based on distance from the foreground.  I was able to get the game to boot up, but was not able to initially figure out the keyboard commands for aiming the ball -- all I could do was throw the ball back up the gutter.  I finally realized that hitting the right arrow moves the ball to the right, and hitting the up arrow moves the ball to the left, apparently reusing the awkward keyboard routine from Mr. Allen's pinball games.

If the program truly "automatically senses the skill of each player," as stated in the description, I wasn't able to recognize any such behavior.  Basically, we just position the ball, and when we throw it by hitting the space bar, it wipes out anything in its path, including the lane markers and the lines delineating the gutter boundaries.  The animation of the ball hitting the pins is unconvincing -- they do not get knocked out of the way, but instead get tipped over and appear to be trampled into undifferentiated mush, as though they were made out of papier mache weighted with oatmeal.

So far, I'm not too impressed with Acorn's offerings.  But hope springs eternal, as we move on to Page 6 in our next installment.

Cover to Cover: Acorn Software Fall 1981 (p. 4)

If you're just joining in progress, we're making a detailed survey of the Acorn Software Products, Inc. catalog of TRS-80 releases circa Fall 1981.  We are currently perusing the entertainment section, and we pick up where we left off last time, with a set of traditional-style games on page 4:

Gammon Challenger 2.0 is apparently an enhanced version of a BASIC-language backgammon game called Gammon Challenger, originally published in type-in form in Personal Computing magazine.  There were a lot of backgammon games on early personal computers -- it didn't take a lot of horsepower to simulate the gameplay, and the TRS-80's limited graphics capabilities were capable of presenting the game credibly.  I think these were popular because AI computer opponent play wasn't too hard to implement -- the number of possible moves for consideration was much more constrained than in, say, a game of chess.

Basketball is a fairly typical example of the early approach to the sport on home computers -- there wasn't enough computing power to display an entire team or a scrolling playfield, especially in single-player-vs.-the-computer mode with AI eating up cycles, so one-on-one action on a static trapezoidal court was the order of the day.  I was able to track this one down in the online archives -- despite the squarish ball, blocky players, and irritating clicky dribbling and ear-piercing whistle sounds, it's still pretty bad.  These were the pre-joystick days, so two players had to gang up on the keyboard, with the "shoot" button placed infuriatingly in the center of the movement keys:

The players move very slowly, and the keyboard controls are largely unresponsive, making it almost impossible to maneuver around the computer opponent even on the lowest difficulty setting.  What makes the game hilarious is that the ball is clearly not inflated to regulation standards -- if we try to make a three-point shot from the far end of the court, it arcs clumsily through the air, thuds to the floor like a ball of cement, and just sits there without bouncing even once, as both players look on, dumbfounded:

Pigskin appears to be an attempt at football -- I found this one online as well, but could not get the image to boot up.  Given the limits of Basketball on this level of technology, it's hard to imagine a game of football faring well at all, and the designers wisely opted not to go the action route.  From the description, it sounds like a pigskin-themed game of rock/paper/scissors -- you choose an offensive play, your opponent chooses a defensive play, and the computer determines how it all turns out, updating the statistics and player/ball positions onscreen afterward.  77 possible play options in all! -- that is, 7 x 11 unique combinations of offensive/defensive plays -- sounds like a lot, but isn't really enough to provide a dynamic sports simulation.


We didn't find much to treasure from the Acorn archives on page 4, unfortunately.  Tomorrow, we'll move on to page 5!

Clueless Gaijin Gaming: Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi

This week, I'm sitting down with one of those odd PC Engine discs I picked up not in spite of, but because of, the fact I had no idea what to expect from it.  As it turns out, Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi stars the erstwhile Japanese idol Mami Inoue, and plays like a digital comic, with crude juxtaposition of cartoon artwork and digitized photos of the star.  The title screen is in Japanese, English and, for a change of pace, French (a language I can translate -- it says, "I will never forget my little girl Mami", an odd comment given the fleeting nature of Japanese idol fame):

Playing this Super CD-ROM release with little knowledge of Japanese or the questionable talents of Mami Inoue is a bit like traveling from the Horsehead Nebula in search of entertainment, only to find oneself trapped inside the headquarters of the Bay City Rollers Fan Club.  Ms. Inoue was 16 years old when this disc was put together, with the requisite Tiger Beat vibe, and the storyline casts her into a series of improbable adventures.  (There are apparently three different episodes on the disc, but I was satisfied to have made my way through one of them.)

We start by getting Mami onto the bus and off to school, where she mopes through class until she's allowed to go downtown to drink tea and shop for clothes, giving the lie to the fabled Japanese work ethic.

The storyline is occasionally interrupted by long stretches of fan service (the legitimate kind).  Here, we get to listen to Mami Inoue make enthusiastic (which I like to pretend are snide) comments about a bunch of funny and occasionally grotesque fan art submissions:

And then we get to hear her sing an absurdly country-western Japanese pop song illustrated with digitized still images:

And just in case we think she's too girly, she shows off her muscles with faux attitude and Pippi Longstocking hair:

After the cartoon storyline gets seriously underway, Mami gets to show off her abilities by imitating (badly) a variety of animals -- here, she summons a whale to dump some escaping men into the sea:

And she rides a dinosaur through feudal Japan, scaring the local authorities:

And she shows off a bunch of images from her childhood family album, including the obligatory gratuitous topless shot:

Then she comes home and we can finally shut the machine down after the credits roll:

I decided not to.

---

If you've read this post, you've seen most of what Mami Inoue Kono Hoshi ni Tatta Hitori no Kimi has to offer.  But just in case any of my readers are in the market for odd Japanese pop music collectibles, you might be able to find a copy for purchase here or here:

At Random: Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear

Acclaim's Wizards & Warriors series was a popular NES franchise developed by the famous UK developer Rare Ltd., and was infamous for featuring Fabio on the box of the second NES title.  The series featured the thrilling adventures of the brave knight Kuros and the evil wizard Malkil, but the line died out before the 16-bit era got underway, and following Acclaim's bankruptcy the ownership of the IP has been unclear.  But there was one additional title produced that is often forgotten today: Wizards & Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear, released for the original Nintendo Gameboy in 1989:

Once again, Kuros sets out to fight the evil wizard Malkil and rescue a princess.  I played this one on the GameBoy Advance to start with, which imposes a color scheme that unfortunately puts Kuros in pink armor; the screenshots here were generated using the Visual Boy Advance emulator (and its Game Genie feature, without the benefit of which I would likely never have defeated the wizard.)

The 64K Fortress of Fear cartridge is a bit simpler technically than its NES brethren -- the action scrolls only from left to right, without the vertical climbs seen in the larger console cartridges.  The bosses are smaller and simpler, and the animation is less subtle -- for example, Kuros' dangling foot is missing after he dies, and his positioning is sometimes a bit sloppy:

To keep the action visible on the original blurry Gameboy LCD screen, the level layouts are sparse, with lots of white space and uncomplicated patterns in the background.  There also aren't nearly as many special items to find as in the NES W&W titles -- most treasure chests contain extra gems or temporary shielding, useful but not critical.  Only the Boots of Jumping are truly necessary, to navigate some of the broader gaps in the landscape.

But Fortress of Fear is not a simple left-to-right scrolling action game either -- at the very start, for example, it pays to backtrack to the left a bit to find an extra life for Kuros and a key for one of the many treasure chests that lie ahead.  The levels are generally compact and short, but many have alternate pathways with hidden treasures and extra lives, so thorough exploration is well-advised.

Of course, the extra passageways can be ignored for the most part.  An impatient and skilled Kuros can traipse through the levels efficiently, taking on the bosses and progressing quickly through the map.  Some bosses are fought directly, like this largeish vampire bat that forces our hero to keep moving around the platforms, striking the enemy when possible:

While others summon minions to provide the knight's challenge:

At last, Kuros reaches Malkil's domain.  This final level is the only one with any degree of enforced complexity -- it's a bit of a maze, with multiple doorways to explore, some of which lead to loops, so simply marching from left to right will not ensure success.  Finding Malkil is a bit of a challenge, but taking the path of most resistance will generally lead the player to the final confrontation.  

Fighting Malkil is even more difficult -- he tends to hover near our hero, throwing short-range bolts of energy, or appearing right on top of Kuros, doing serious damage.  It's largely a matter of staying out of range of his lightning bolts and striking from behind as often as circumstances will allow.  But fortunately Kuros will immediately revive to continue the battle -- so the true challenge here involves finding the extra lives secreted throughout the levels, and keeping as many of them as possible in reserve before facing down Malkil.

With the evil wizard dispatched in an anticlimactic fizzle, our brave knight takes off his armor and embraces the lady fair, who doesn't exactly look delighted.  But we will presume she is amenable to this, or else she figures that Kuros' sleepy expression means the exhausted knight is pretty harmless:

Wizards & Warriors X is not an easy game -- it's much more difficult than I remember the original Wizards & Warriors on the NES being, perhaps to make up for its relatively brief length.  But it's definitely part of the series, and fans are advised to check it out.

---

You can find Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear for sale, very reasonably priced as long as you don't insist on a brand new copy, here: