Let's Talk About Swashbuckler

This month we talk about a rogue like 1982 game Swashbuckler.
The next long game is Demon's Forge.
Our next short game is Raid Over Moscow.
Thank you all for watching!
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Watch some of our playthroughs here:
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[@prestonostra]

I love the banter and the non-review format. Keep it up! Great memories

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

Thanks, it's fun just to be with friends and talk about old games.

[@f1nut027]

Incidentally the pirates in Nox Archaist are an homage to the pirates in Swashbuckler. If you go to the ship merchant you can even see them sword fighting through the window behind the ship merchant.

[@marklemmert6840]

0:35 That guy clearly didn't understand that you guys dickin' around is some of the best parts of the show!

[@konasavage]

You always find games that I missed as a kid. Great discussion as always.

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

We'll keep at it. It's been rough for us to find time the last month or so, but should be picking up again soon.

[@Banzai431]

I would love to see you guys do Aztec. I never really finished that. From memory... It was an exceptionally difficult game!

[@kinglysandus]

You were talking about "Wizardry Plus" and how SirTech was unamused. I am grumpy about SirTech deciding that Wizardry II couldn't be played unless you made characters in Wizardry I and leveled them up!

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

See: Reason Chris has never finished Wizardry II. Yeah... there was a debate in the company if that was going to fly, and it obviously didn't, so they pulled it back. Just another way I think Bard's Tale is a better series, even if it only had 2 games in it. 3 and 4? Never heard of them? Another weird spin off game? Double never heard of that... even if I thought it was fun.

[@marklemmert6840]

2:40 - OMG, Chris, have you seen the light on the Apple II?? 🙂

[@davebeth2576]

Another quality discussion from Matt and Chris! Minus 2 points for not comparing this game to Autoduel, but plus 3 for a much needed They Might Be Giants reference!

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

Sorry about forgetting Autoduel, and will make up for it by trying to work more TMBG references in. Matt and I both really like their stuff.

[@davebeth2576]

@@ChrisFreeman_4Bit As well you should! TMBG were (are?) great! I will try to remember to catch the next live stream too. :)

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

@@davebeth2576 Definitely 'are'. Still doing live shows and put an album out last year. Though I've been a bit out of touch since Nanobots, which looking now is longer ago than I expected. Need to rectify that.

[@Phreno_Xeno]

Reminds me of those LCD handhelds visually. I think the gameplay would have translated well to that format. Zelda Game & Watch had somewhat similar swordfighting.

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

It feels a bit more fluid than those, but yeah... this could have been turned into that pretty easy.

[@f1nut027]

Believe it or not this was pretty ground breaking for it’s time. I always thought a forth level fighting a boss pirate up on the yardarm would have given S washbuckler more than just a high score to aim for. Interesting that the reviewer clocked the score meter. I don’t recall ever doing that but now I have that to aim for! IIRC the black bar where the game play takes place is actually a text window and the figures are constructed of arrays of custom text characters. Not sure if the programmer did some memory magic to move the Apple II’s text window up there or wrote a blitter to display the text on the hires screen. Another interesting affect of this is the flipping of the color detail as the figures move to alternating even/odd text columns. This is caused by the Apple II’s quirky graphics system. Anyway I see this game and Aztec as the granddaddy’s of games like Karateka and PoP. Thanks for doing this one. Can’t wait for you take on Aztec!

[@ZagnutBar]

Agreed- this was an incredibly entertaining game in 1982. Remember, this was not the era of boss battles; it was the era of the high score. I don't know when the first "boss battles" appeared, but I think of them as being more squarely situated in the Super Mario era, circa 1986. I also think of boss battles as squarely ending the narrative of the game. I wonder if Beyond Castle Wolfenstein was the first arcade type game with a final boss to defeat? If the kill counter does in fact loop to zero after 256, it's mildly hilarious that it counts out 5 digit places. Hope springs eternal on the Apple ][ The thing that kept me going in 1982 was the promise of new screens and enemies appearing. Even though it's quite obvious looking back from 2022, 40b years ago when I was 8 years old, you never knew what mysteries lurked inside the Apple. I always held out hope that I'd end up discovering some new scene or enemy that I had never seen before.

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

@@ZagnutBar It was a bug they fixed, but the first copies sent out did loop at 256. The upshot is it gave you a chance at more lives, but you'd have to keep track yourself of your score. As for secrets that we always hoped to find back then: I was just telling my wife about how all my friends and I would show secrets we found in games mixed with just enough lies to never be sure if they were telling the truth about some new thing (The egg in Adventure) or full of it (If you push up on the right vine in Pitfall, you go up in the trees and jump scorpions up there!)

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

I'd be interested in that. It does make sense with that clean black band through the middle. I'm really looking forward to Aztec. Not sure how far out it is, but I really want to try it.

[@ZagnutBar]

@@ChrisFreeman_4Bit I never knew Aztec was made by the same people. It makes sense because the main figure in Aztec has a similar weird all white/jumpily animated aesthetic. I never really got much into it because I remember it being very frustrating to play, and more complicated and hard to look at than my 8 year old brain was ready to take on. But I really look forward to watching your not-a-review

[@ShiceSquad]

I was never able to get very far with this when I was a kid. I never had the manual, though. But I found it kind of captivating somehow.

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

There's something old schoool arcadey zen about playing it. You just get in a groove and then an hour has passed.

[@Phreno_Xeno]

Also looks like the game Nidhogg, but with more detailed graphics.

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

I'm betting Nidhogg got some inspiration from this style of play.

[@Phreno_Xeno]

@@ChrisFreeman_4Bit You're probably right.

[@yurikendal4868]

I enjoyed this game.

[@yurikendal4868]

I figured Chris and Matt have leanings but they have managed to keep largely to them selves

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

We've mentioned our general leanings a couple times in the show. Matt brings it up just to irritate me because he knows I'm sick of the current state of politics in general and have to try hard not to go into some rant about something.

[@brad3009]

Ahoy!

[@yurikendal4868]

Uhmm Politics ARE in games. It's just a matter if you wanna do that deep dive or not

[@ChrisFreeman_4Bit]

That was my point. There's a uproar every time someone says "Modern games have gotten political" because they put a girl as the hero or something. The best games have always had a statement to make, even if accidentally.